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.
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.
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:
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?
Here we are again. The core audience for Mastermind is apparently viewers who know that People Just Do Nothing is a TV comedy show, but not that Nero was a Roman emperor.
The Swedes have got themselves into all sorts of bother by attempting to identify their country’s cultural heritage by means of a definitive canon, a list of what matters. The stricture that insists on only material from before 1975 being included allows for the presence of Pippi Longstocking, Ingmar Bergman and IKEA, but means that much of the cultural output prompted by recent migration – not to mention ABBA – has been excluded. Inevitably, there are rumblings that certain right-wing interests will be more than happy with this.
Even without the arbitrary (or not) cut-off date, the whole thing is misconceived. For a start, Swedish culture – any culture – is shaped as much by outside forces as by what is created within its borders and this was the case even before our hyperconnected age. A reasonably well-educated Swede has always known about Plato and Shakespeare, Beethoven and Kurosawa as much as Strindberg or the Nobel Prize.
Ultimately, though, as ED Hirsch’s quixotic efforts have consistently proved, while a cultural canon may well exist, attempting to define it as an objective reality, including X but leaving out Y, is ultimately pointless. Any such document is at best a starting point for a conversation, at worst a crass act of gatekeeping. And any half-decent artist left outside should count that as a badge of honour, pleading the Groucho clause in his or her defence. Hit it, Benny.
A tiny snippet in my ongoing effort to determine that which we are expected to know. On ITV’s The Chase this afternoon, a contestant was asked, “Who is the patron saint of surfers?” Now, I didn’t know the answer. Given the options (Valentine, Peter, Christopher), I would have guessed Christopher, because of the myth of him carrying Jesus across the water, but it would have been a guess.
The contestant didn’t know either, which is fair enough. But more than that, she didn’t understand the question. I’m not inferring that from her look of bafflement: she actually said as much. She didn’t understand what a patron saint was. Maybe she didn’t understand what a saint was. In the end she picked Valentine, because maybe he surfed.
Any author or editor will understand the tension that exists between telling the reader what needs to be told, and insulting said reader’s intelligence. And it’s a tension that will likely never be resolved. When my Leonard Cohen books was published, a reviewer on Amazon complained that I blithely chucked around words like “solipsistic” while feeling the need to explain that sake is Japanese rice wine. Which is, amusingly enough, a rather solipsistic argument, because it’s only valid when the critic shares the same grab bag of knowns and unknowns.
In the same vein, while reading the Wordsworth Classics edition of Dracula, I’m quite grateful that the editor, David Rogers, is helpful enough to gloss archaic Whitby dialect (“crammle aboon the grees”) and the minutiae of central European history (Honofoglalas) and at the same time wonder why I’m being told about Thor and Medusa, the Danube, the British Museum and the Battle of Waterloo. I mean, we all know what they are. Don’t we?
Yet another thing that really should have gone into my dissertation, I suppose.
PS: Two fragments from the text:
It was not alone that it was composed of all the ills of mortality and with the pungent, acrid smell of blood, but it seemed as though corruption had become itself corrupt.
And a line from Van Helsing, who regularly drifts into comedy-foreigner-speak:
It is a new experience to me to find a lunatic who talk philosophy, and reason so sound.
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.
In a complicated world where we’ve lost the notion that we can assume everybody is aware of a core set of facts, it’s considered rude to point and laugh at someone’s ignorance. But does this apply when that person not only draws attention to that ignorance, but attempts to implicate the rest of us in it?
On Threads a couple of days back, one Melanie J Tait asked: “Remember how we didn’t know the word ‘paparazzi’ before August 1997?” To which there were many responses, most of them variants on “We did, actually.” Several pointed out that the word has its origins in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and was also the title of Jacques Rozier’s 1964 documentary short about the making of Godard’s Le Mépris; its use became ubiquitous during the heyday of tabloid journalism in the 70s and 80s. Very few were actively hostile or contemptuous of Tait’s lack of knowledge; they just said she was wrong. Some charitably pointed out that there was indeed a large spike in usage following the death of Princess Diana but nobody fully supported Tait’s statement because it was empirically untrue (unless the pronoun “we” here refers only to Tait and her immediate circle, in which case a more appropriate response would be, “so what?”)
Tait (who describes herself in her bio as a playwright and screenwriter) could have graciously accepted this as a learning moment. Or she could have ignored the responses, or just deleted her post. But no, she had to double down, with a hefty dose of sarcasm:
I certainly don't remember it being the word used in conversation around photographers and media. But I'm obvs not a linguistic genius like you and several others who've loved remembering which words they knew thirty years ago.
So knowing and remembering are acts of hostility all of a sudden? It reminds me, inevitably, of Donald Trump, who claimed that nobody knew that Lincoln was a Republican, or had even heard of Lesotho. What he meant of course was that he didn’t know these things, or hadn’t until very recently; but he has to claim that nobody else knows it either, because this excuses his own lack of intellectual curiosity and general failure as a sentient member of the human race.
Tait isn’t this bad, obviously. And ignorance isn’t a sin. But ascribing ignorance to others as an act of self-preservation comes pretty close.
Back in the olden days I started a blog about The Da Vinci Code, attempting to deconstruct exactly what Dan Brown was doing right/wrong, attracting millions of readers while at the same time breaking pretty much every rule of half-decent writing (including those followed by other writers of popular, non-literary fiction). I gave up, of course, but I was never dissuaded from my initial premise that the book is badly written. What might have shifted is whether, in a post-literate era, that matters any more.
And now, after all these years, in The Spectator of all places, one Sean Thomas reads the last rites to what may once have been identified as good books, the ones that dominated the cultural agenda in the 80s and 90s. Except, he’s quite glad to see the genre go, even though he (like me) was a bit of an Amis fanboy back in the day. And what was it turned his head around? Why, The Da Vinci Code, of course, because it privileged plot over navel-gazing. But what about the writing, the thing that made critics’ teeth hurt just from thinking about it? Thomas describes that as “all quite workmanlike”.
It’s not though, is it? It’s crap. Go back to my blog for myriad examples. I can only infer that Mr Thomas has had some unfortunate run-ins with workmen.
PS: Just before posting, I Googled Sean Thomas and discovered that he’s the son of DM Thomas, whose novel The White Hotel was pipped to the Booker Prize by Midnight’s Children. From which I won’t draw any conclusions. I’ll just leave it there.
Interesting/depressing article by Benjamin Svetkey in the Hollywood Reporter highlighting the fact that there are barely any films on Netflix that are more than 50 years old. As he points out, any number of budding cinéastes and auteurs honed their own aesthetics via the serendipity of late-night TV, a set of happy accidents that may be unavailable to the next generation. I had similar experiences, discovering Wilder, Hitchcock, Buñuel, Astaire/Rogers and 1930s Universal horror thanks to the eccentric generosity of BBC2 (and the absence of much useful competition). Svetkey laments:
Obviously, it’s decided that making and streaming its own content, rather than paying licensing fees for older films, is a more profitable business model. And that’s OK for Netflix. Nobody appointed the streamer guardian of the cinematic temple... But it’s worth noting what’s being lost in the process, as streaming and its cold algorithmic imperatives continue to take over the culture and turn us all into cinematic illiterates.
To be fair, other streaming services such as Amazon Prime offer a rather better selection of films that have the sheer bloody cheek to be old, or black-and-white, or even foreign. But it doesn’t make it that easy to find them, unless you know what you’re looking for, which rather defeats the object, doesn’t it?
PS: And now I realise that when I was watching all those glorious old movies for the first time, most of them were still under 50.
Dipping into John Walsh’s memoir about the literary scene of the 1980s and two fragments of the introduction leap out. The first is a quote from The Mikado, which rather reinforces my journalistic instinct that when the precise language used is not the most important issue, some stylistic burnishing is acceptable, so long as the meaning survives. (See my previous rant about semantic bleaching and the hack’s duty to prevent it.)
Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.
And then, as teenaged Walsh determines to avail himself of the books deemed to be classics (Austen, Dickens, Forster, etc) he has a moment of self-doubt, something that hangs over any consideration of the canon:
A certain specific worry nagged at me: what if I didn’t enjoy the books that the world had admired for centuries? What if I didn’t have the taste (or intelligence) to appreciate them?
To which of course we could offer Hirsch’s notion of cultural literacy and to suggest that in many ways, it’s enough to know, however approximately, what they’re about; or failing that, simply that they exist.
On Radio 4 this evening, a newsreader helpfully glossed an item about the redesign of the Louvre with the information that the Louvre is a museum in Paris that houses Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
Now, I get that the BBC is desperate to broaden its reach to the younglings and as a result we might need to broaden our assumptions about canons of knowledge and what is or isn’t known, but if someone doesn’t know what or where the Louvre is, why might they care that President Macron is chucking some money about it. And why does this passion for inclusivity only apply to Radio 4? Does Radio 1 explain every few minutes who Chappell Roan or Sabrina Carpenter might be? No, because the people who listen to Radio 1 are expected to know.
Why are expectations so low at R4?
Sad to hear that Tony Slattery has died, and it inevitably prompts a slew of posts, many incorporating clips from the TV show where most of us first encountered him, Whose Line Is It Anyway? This one, for example, which gives us a chance not only to mourn a mercurial talent, but also to gaze back at a time when a major channel would put out a show with the working assumption that a critical mass of the audience would know who William Burroughs and Anthony Burgess might be.
I wrote a while back about someone who gave a disobliging review to a play because it was stuffed with obscure references; not that he, the reviewer, found them obscure, but he assumed that younger theatre-goers would be baffled by TS Eliot and the Marx brothers.
And now Fiona Mountford goes one better, delivering a kicking to a revival of Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love because it’s “three hours of often indistinguishable men exchanging achingly arch lines about the minutiae of classical grammar and quoting screeds and screeds of Latin at each other”. And of course Ms Mountford gets the minutiae, the screeds, even, because she read classics at Oxford; but she thinks the other punters probably wouldn’t. The fact that the play’s author is a refugee speaker of English as a second language who never went to university at all doesn’t seem to figure in her calculations. “Far too often,” she sighs, “it feels less like drama and more like intellectual masturbation and that, surely, is not why we go to the theatre.” Quite right too. It’s why we write theatre reviews though, or should be.
PS: To be fair, Stoppard himself has worried about leaving the audience behind.
(Slowly realising that if I do ever write my book about What We Do And Don’t Need To Know And Why, it’ll be for the most part anecdotal and solipsistic, something akin to Perec’s Je me souviens, and what’s wrong with that?)
Jude Law was being interviewed on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House yesterday, plugging his latest, rather grim-sounding movie, which is clearly yet another attempt to break away from his pretty-boy image. Unfortunately, Paddy O’Connell chose that moment to bring up the seasonal romcom The Holiday, which he loves and, according to the bantery exchange they had to plug the lunchtime news, so does his BBC colleague Johnny Dymond.
Which gave me a slightly odd feeling as I sipped my Sunday morning coffee, as I realised I’d never even heard of the movie, let alone seen it. And as Paddy and Jonny oohed and aahed about the doubtless hilarious and/or heartwarming goings-on, and Jude just sounded embarrassed, I wondered whether the whole thing was some sort of arch postmodern joke, “quick, let’s invent a movie and make Tim wonder how he missed it” but no, I Googled it, it’s real, it’s packed with people I recognise, whose work I’ve enjoyed elsewhere but... no. Nothing. No bells rung. Except that the casual way they discussed it, with no scaffolding, no context, implied that I really should know and that I’m somehow culturally deficient by not knowing, like someone who appears on a quiz show and gets castigated on social media for not having heard of Hamlet or Buenos Aires or nitrogen or artichokes.
Normal service was resumed later in the day, during an amiable TV show involving the unlikely duo of Bill Bailey and Shaun Ryder ambling through the Somerset countryside, when a pub landlord mentioned that Henry VIII was rumoured to have stayed at his establishment, “during the disillusionment of the monasteries” and I laughed and then wondered how many other people I know might get the (inadvertent?) joke. Indeed, how many people reading this?
PS: In news that may or may not be relevant, the Oxford word of the year is “brain rot”.
Lists of the best of things are dead and gone, kids, but what should replace them? The Independent offers us the most overrated albums, a stance that may have made sense 20-odd years ago, when Rolling Stone touted a canon ludicrously top-heavy with white male rockers from the 60s and 70s (Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Springsteen, et al). Now, however, there is no such consensus, no icons against which we can be clastic. Sgt Pepper and Astral Weeks are still in place, but who ever thought Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor or A Brief Enquiry into Online Relationships by The 1975 had risen to any sort of cultural prominence from which they deserved to be knocked down? Even the authors of the list lack the courage of their pitchfork-wielding convictions; the greatness of PJ Harvey's Let England Shake is acknowledged, it just isn’t necessarily as good as some of her earlier stuff.
Rather more coherent, in methodology at least, is a poll organised by the blog They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? This time there’s a defined canon against which rage (the 2022 Sight & Sound poll) but it’s not just the resulting list of 100 films in the crosshairs; it’s any of the 4,336 films that received even a single vote, and are excluded from consideration in this selection. So, in theory at least, this should be a list of overlooked, forgotten gems, the ones that established critics and filmmakers either hadn’t seen or didn’t want to admit they liked. And there are such nuggets; but it also reveals that the great and good asked to contribute to the S&S poll had managed to miss such copper-bottomed classics as Grand Hotel, Mr Deeds Goes to Town, Angels With Dirty Faces, Goodbye Mr Chips, Heaven Can Wait, Dead of Night, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Brighton Rock, Jour de Fête, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Bad Day at Black Rock, Bob le Flambeur, Spartacus, A Fistful of Dollars, The Ipcress File, Wait Until Dark, Claire’s Knee, Little Big Man, Vanishing Point, Marathon Man, The Long Good Friday, Diva, Mephisto, A Zed and Two Noughts, City on Fire, Radio Days, Midnight Run, Man Bites Dog, Reservoir Dogs, Fallen Angels, City of Lost Children, Shall We Dance?, Pi, Audition, Tears of the Black Tiger, Lagaan, Downfall, Gomorra...
Which inevitably sets up another list, another canon, against which another band of discontents can vent their fury. A process that can continue over and over again, until we get to the point when someone complains that Sgt Pepper or Citizen Kane or War and Peace or the Mona Lisa doesn’t get the critical love it deserves in these polls and we start all over again.
Yet more musing on what we’re expected to know. This morning, in a discussion on Radio 4 about the overused adjectives “Orwellian” and “Kafkaesque” Evan Lian (who drew the cartoon above) says, “I’m not the most well-read person, which is sort of embarrassing to admit on a BBC radio programme” which does rather play into the idea of the BBC (and, by extension, Britain) as being the repository of everything and everyone erudite. Which is nice.
And then on the same station’s Electioncast, broadcast immediately afterwards, BBC's own chief political correspondent, who read PPE at Oxford, says that he thinks he once read an essay by Orwell and then admits he doesn’t actually know what a Ming vase is.
