About Pynchonian names

It’s been a while since I’ve celebrated the glory of real names that sound as if they were invented by Thomas Pynchon or Kurt Vonnegut, and then two come along at once. Please be upstanding for Manila-based crimebuster Winston Casio and the doyenne of indolent teachers everywhere, Tandy L’Enfant!

About Diana and Rachael and Caitlin

I’m really looking forward to reading Rachael Stirling’s book about her glorious, brilliant mum, but I’m not sure I understand why the name of The Woman Who Thinks The Book Is Really Great is approximately four times bigger than the name of The Woman Who Actually Wrote The Bloody Thing.

About Trump

I know the best thing would to be ignore him, but two recent items must be flagged up.

First, his deeply strange appearance on Usha Vance’s podcast, which is supposedly about encouraging literacy. He admits that he mainly reads about himself, misremembers the title of a book from his childhood, then goes off into a freeform stream of banalities about past POTUSes. I refer you back to Trump pretending to have read a Tom Wolfe book in 1987.

And a deeply weird video of a far-right group called Patriot Front arriving at the Trump-fronted Fourth of July events in Washington, DC on Friday, apparently to show off their mime skills.

PS: And while we’re trying not to think too hard about the most powerful man on the planet being functionally illiterate, here’s James Marriott on what the Labour MPs of 1906 tended to read (and an eye-roll at the thought of what they read now); and, in a rather more positive frame of mind, Naomi Alderman actually comes up with a practical plan to turn non-readers into readers.

About Shiloh

The problem with AI is not just the times it gets things wrong, it’s the times it gets them crass and banal. Although, since AI simply dredges its realities and priorities from the whole online world, I guess it’s no more crass or banal than the rest of us.

Here’s an example. Reading a book about William Blake, I come across a reference to the Biblical city of Shiloh, suggesting that the word was sometimes used as a personification of France, in the same way that, for example, “Erin” is a personification of Ireland. This surprises me a bit, so I google the word and as seems to be the way, the first thing that comes up is not Wikipedia or Britannica but an AI overview. Which tells me...

Well, that’s me (and Blake) told. So I go a bit deeper, searching for “Shiloh France”. And I get...

So there we are. Nepo babies and shoes. I wonder what old Bill might have made of it.

PS: Shiloh still unresolved, I check in Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Blake, which I read about 30 years ago. No joy, but he does make the rather bold claim that

...it can truly be said that he is the last great religious poet in England.

which I suspect would be news to Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins and TS Eliot, for a start. But it does prove that you don’t need AI to write nonsense.

PPS: Got it. It was Allen Ginsberg who made the French connection, apparently.

Not about Christopher Plummer but maybe about Stevie Wonder

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, in my opinion one of the greatest novels of the 20th or any other century, the narrator, the pianist Ryder, is unreliable but we never really find out why. Is he dreaming or hallucinating or maybe just dying? Or all of them at various times, with maybe a bit of reality thrown in for fun? Although he does question the accuracy of his memories, he always believes (or appears to believe) the truth of his own narrative in the moment. Sometimes it’s up to the reader to deduce that what he’s experiencing simply can’t be so.

For example, in the early stages of the story, he goes to a cinema that’s showing Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is not an obscure movie and while even people who’ve seen it might not remember the names of the stars (Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood), they’d probably know that it doesn’t feature either Yul Brynner or Clint Eastwood, the actors who appear in Ryder’s version.

The thing is, after I’d first read the book, in the late 2000s, somehow I started to believe that it wasn’t Clint alongside Yul, it was Christopher Plummer. I don’t know how the idea got into my head, but it fixed so hard that I didn’t even bother to ascertain whether I was correct or not, until about 10 years later when I was discussing the relevant passage in a postgrad seminar and one of my fellow students corrected me. I’d got the wrongness wrong. (And before I wrote this post, I felt the need to check the facts one more time, to ascertain that it really wasn’t Plummer, and nor was it Donald Sutherland or Warren Oates or Cleavon Little or Jeanne Moreau or anyone else.)

Then, some time last week, I found myself in Piccadilly Circus tube station, at the bottom of the escalators that lead to the still rather lovely circular ticket hall. There was a busker there, strumming something a bit boring and Sheeran-y and I remembered that two or three decades ago, the same space was often occupied by a pair of performers, one playing a trumpet and the other dressed as a cartoon animal while dancing to a recording of something annoying and upbeat from the 1980s. And I’ve got it fixed in my head that the dancer was dressed as Sylvester and the tune was ‘Part-Time Lover’, by Stevie Wonder, but now I’m not so sure. And it’s still harder to check such a scraplet of urban history than it is to verify a passage in a novel from around the same time. Maybe it was Wile E. Coyote and ‘Two Hearts’, by Phil Collins. Or possibly Dogtanian and ‘Walk of Life’, by Dire Straits. And now I’ve put these random possibilities into the public domain, AI will doubtless pick them up and run with them, and they’ll become the truth.

On the journey to Piccadilly, I was reading Dr. No, by my new favorite author, Percival Everett. Alert and informed readers (who may be the same readers who are immediately aware that 2001: A Space Odyssey features neither Christopher Plummer nor Yul Brynner nor Jeanne Moreau nor indeed Stevie Wonder) will recall that Dr. No  is also the title of a book by Ian Fleming. (Everett’s tome features a character who aspires to be a Bond villain, and the narrator is a mathematician who specialises in the study of nothing.) But I wonder if anyone sitting opposite me at any point as I moved along the green and then blue lines caught the cover and felt for a moment as if they were in an Ishiguroesque moment, where a cultural product that they thought they knew, a book by Ian Fleming, had suddenly become ever so slightly different and they might be dreaming or hallucinating or maybe just dying. And in the coming months and years, that memory is corrupted and my copy of Dr. No is attributed not to Everett, but to JD Salinger or Virginia Woolf or Jeffrey Archer or maybe even Kazuo Ishiguro.

PS: From Dr. No, not the Fleming one:

I hardly ever remembered my dreams, which seemed right and fair as I rarely recalled my waking life during sleep.

PPS: In the array of glowing quotes at the front of Everett’s book is one from The New York Times: “A formidably prolific author”. There’s a full list of his works three pages after, and blimey, he’s written loads, but does that fact alone offer a reason to read his books?

About the best novels

I am not in the least surprised that the Guardian’s ragebaity list of 100 best novels failed to include my own favourite, Vile Bodies. I am, however, a bit peeved that Waugh wasn’t even granted a seat alongside John Updike and Nancy Mitford and Martin Amis and Angela Carter and John le Carre in the roll call of omissions. Oh, and for the record, I bloody hate Middlemarch, which won.

Success in this world depends on knowing exactly how little effort each job is worth.

About SMiLE

Ian Penman reviews a new Brian Wilson biography and raises the vexed question of whether the Beach Boys’ Quixotic project known first as Dumb Angel, then SMiLE, should ever have seen the light of day: 

For some fans it should have remained a glorious dream, better left unrealised. A labyrinth without a centre. The Arcades Project of pop.

Penman’s writing in the London Review of Books so maybe he doesn’t feel it necessary to explain a reference to Walter Benjamin, because the readership would get it (or feel too embarrassed to admit they didn’t get it). That said, given his previous form, I suspect he’d have done the same thing when he was writing for the NME.

About staples

A fun interview with the Pet Shop Boys, focusing on the visual aspects of their work, in which Neil Tennant is egged into saying “Gesamtkunstwerk” as if it’s a big, dirty swear. He also muses on which magazines have survived the protracted Death Of Print, and which have withered: 

The New Yorker. The Spectator. The Atlantic. The stapled magazine opens invitingly, whereas the instinct of a perfect bound magazine is to close.

I love the idea of a magazine having an instinct. But could it also be that a perfect bound magazine (essentially, one with a spine), more closely resembles that most toxic of things, a book?

About the post-literate world

And I thought I was feeling a bit apocalyptic. By Will Self, via James Marriott: 

We began in a world with twice as much literacy as we have now. We’ve lost 50% of literacy in the last fifteen years. So, that epiphenomenon of writers like me being attacked and abandoned by our friends running scared of social media was part of the progression towards illiteracy and the fundamental inability to morally deliberate, which now characterises our society and which will propel us into authoritarianism, like America... Someone who can’t read a book cannot deliberate, cannot think and cannot conceptualise, and therefore is a threat – particularly humans who, instead of conceptualising in isolation and being able to think inside their own heads, only think through their engagement with others. That’s where fascism gets going, or social movements that depend on a kind of hysterical level of identification. What books and the ability to read books do is present a barrier that prevents you from being able to avoid moral deliberation at some point... We couldn’t have picked a worse time to become more stupid than when we needed more intelligence, which is when we were brokering the integration of different ethical systems into some kind of workable, decent country. Instead, we’ve abandoned reading books. We’ve abandoned deliberating.

About book bans

Nobody likes the idea of banning books, or restricting their circulation, but it’s never that straightforward, is it? I don’t think I’d be much perturbed if my local library chose not to make available volumes celebrating global jihad, or denying the Holocaust had ever happened; or if my nearest Waterstone’s refused to stock hagiographies of Stalin or Pol Pot or even Andrew Tate. And if the books in question are intended to be read by young people, it’s understandable that literary gatekeepers, well, keep those gates.

That said, there seems to be a tendency within school libraries in the UK in which, to put it charitably, the watchword is excess caution. See, for example, the case of a school in Greater Manchester, where the removal of a book about (not endorsing) incel culture spiralled into bans on, among others, The Da Vinci Code, The Time-Traveller’s Wife, White Teeth, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, The Girl Who Played With Fire, a graphic version of Nineteen Eighty-Four and works by Terry Pratchett, JK Rowling, Robert Ludlum, Margaret Atwood and, er, Britney Spears. What the hell was going on?

Well, two things. One, inevitably, was that the list of inappropriate texts was concocted with the help of AI. Effectively, whoever ultimately wielded the axe was too stupid and/or lazy to actually read the purportedly dangerous books. The other is that one of the criteria for removal was that a book was “not written for children”. Which (apart from the fact that it would exclude most texts on the GCSE syllabus) suggests that the school’s policy went beyond censorship to a form of infantilisation, protecting young minds from anything even remotely challenging to emotion or intellect. In an environment where only a third of people between 8 and 18 say they read for pleasure, that’s little short of cultural vandalism. Which does raise the question – what do these people think schools are ultimately for?

PS: In slightly more cheerful news, it seems that reading is cool again, even among the much-maligned Gen Z. Although, since this manifests in the form of £2,400 Dior tote bags emblazoned with the titles of French novels, I won’t pop the champagne just yet.

About unread books

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.”

About Charlotte Sometimes

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.

About Cosmic John

I found this in a forum on, of all things, a climbing site, where the conversation had for some reason turned to Radiohead, about which I once wrote a book. And it’s a fair question. Two of them, in fact.

(Tries singing said questions in Thom Yorke’s voice.)

About Murakami and resolutions

The title of this blog comes from a line in Haruki Murakami’s novel Dance Dance Dance and if you’d asked me in 2005, when I started this thing, I would probably have said that Murakami was my favourite living writer. He was certainly the only one whose books I’d automatically buy as soon as they appeared, in hardback, without reference to the reviews. I was a completist, hoovering up his hard-to-find early books, his non-fiction, the various critical works (at one point I considered a name change to Cultural Scentlessness) and then, and then... I’m not sure if I changed or he did, but I realised the hardback of Killing Commendatore had sat on my shelf unread all the way through lockdown and poor old Nobel bridesmaid Haruki-san became one of his own passive anti-heroes, dumped and left alone with his spaghetti and jazz records and cat.

But then, just before Christmas, I needed to buy a last-minute Secret Santa gift and the only useful shop in the vicinity was a branch of Waterstone’s and the gift I chose wasn’t a book and I always feel awkward if I go into a bookshop and buy only non-book things (and if you’re reading this, I suspect you’re the same) and I chanced upon a Murakami I hadn’t noticed before, his non-fiction anthology Novelist As A Vocation. So I bought it. And now I’ve read it.

Two takeaways. One is a quotation:

People who absolutely love school, and feel sad when they can’t go, probably won’t become novelists.

And the other is an anecdote from Murakami’s early writing life (and not that one about the revelation at the baseball game). When he was grappling with his first book, Hear The Wind Sing, he translated it into his decent but imperfect English, thus simplifying the style and sentence structure, and then put it back into Japanese.

Which ties nicely into my two resolutions for the coming year. First, to rationalise all the half-formed story ideas on my hard drive, and prompted by the fact that great many of my friends (here and here and here and here and here) have got their authorial arses in gear in recent months, I’m going to knuckle down and actually write another bloody book. (I mean, Julian Barnes has retired so I guess there’s a vacancy.) And because I’m frequently shamed by the hard grind that my students put in to perfect their English language skills, I need to get my own grasp of French back to some semblance of adequacy. So, let’s begin. From a novel that’s been simmering for the past few years:

La dernière chose que j’ai goûtée, c’était un pigeon.

Let’s see where that takes us. 

PS: Also from the book, the normally apolitical Murakami dips a toe into the murky waters of identity:

I might, at one time, become a twenty-year-old lesbian. Another time I’ll be a thirty-year-old unemployed househusband. I put my feet into the shoes I’m given then, and make my foot size fit those shoes, and then start to act... Basically I just go with the flow. And as long as I’m following that flow I can freely do all sorts of things that are hardly possible. This is indeed one of the main joys of writing novels.

And, possibly a touch of that cultural scentlessness:

...I get the sense that in Japan and Asian countries the “modern” that necessarily precedes the “postmodern” did not, in a precise sense, exist.

About Sally Mann

I’ve been grumbling for some time over the tendency of BBC Radio 4 presenters and guests to assume that listeners will need every cultural reference glossed and clarified before they can take it on. So it was a pleasant surprise to hear the photographer Sally Mann on Desert Island Discs this morning, blithely dropping into the conversation Proust (also her book choice) and Nabokov, Cy Twombly and Kandinsky, all so fast that Lauren Laverne didn’t have chance to explain, before selecting eight discs that bounced between Keith Jarrett, Vivaldi and Sylvester.

And then she almost ruined things by saying “the proof is in the pudding” but I forgive her.

PS: Not that anyone really cares, though. As the writer Joel Morris observed, also this morning:

About James

From James, by Percival Everett, which is a reworking of Huckleberry Finn, which I haven’t read, so I don’t know if something similar occurs in the original book, which is rather appropriate:

...I don’t think he ever read no books, but he acted like the sort of man what reads books. You know what I mean?

And later, when the central (black) character blacks up to join a minstrel show:

What would they have done to you if they had figured out that you were exactly what you were pretending to be?

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 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 (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 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.