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 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 the death of fiction

Alwyn Turner argues that we are in a “post-fiction world” in which the death of any form of common culture means that any remaining common points of reference (Sherlock Holmes, Daleks and so on) are from the past. Nothing new is coming along that we can assume everybody, or even a healthy majority, will know and understand. (Turner also reminds us that you don’t need to have read a line of Doyle, or even seen a film or TV adaptation, to know who Sherlock Holmes is.) And what stands in their place is the mundanity of fact:

The need for a shared culture remains, but in the absence of fiction we have the dominance of ‘reality’, a social agenda dominated by news stories and sport, not by Morecambe and Wise or who was on Top of the Pops last night. Strip away major events – the Royal Family, Brexit, Covid – and what have been the shared moments of the last ten years? The fortunes of the various national football teams, dissatisfaction with politicians and politics, and a handful of hashtags (#MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter) that emerged from the internet to dominate conversation around the dinner-tables and water-coolers of the nation. It’s all factual. 

Coincidentally, I’ve been reading Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines, which collects short news items from French publications in the early 20th century, any one of which might be the starting point for some convoluted epic by Flaubert or Hugo. Or, indeed, to monopolise a water-cooler for a few minutes.

“To die like Joan of Arc!” cried Terbaud from the top of a pyre made of his furniture. The fireman of Saint-Open stifled his ambition.  

At Troyes, M.M.C., a hide merchant, was run over by a train. One of his legs rolled into a ditch.  

Accountant Auguste Bailly, from Boulogne, fractured his skull when he fell from a flying trapeze. 

The gendarmes of Morlaix were sent to Plougar to substitute lay teachers for the nuns who had barricaded themselves in the school. 

Frogs, sucked up from Belgian ponds by the storm, rained down upon the streets of the red-light district of Dunkirk. 

Nurse Elise Bachmann, whose day off was yesterday, put on a public display of insanity. 

And a few lines later...

A certain madwoman arrested downtown falsely claimed to be nurse Elise Bachmann. The latter is perfectly sane.

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 bookshops and GBS

News from Clitheroe in Lancashire, where another bookshop closes and the owner complains not only of punitive rents and the more general decline of the high street but also our old friend dumbing-down. I’m not sure of Paul Hamer’s logic here, as he appears to blame the insidious intellectual hollowing-out of Western society on the prevalence of vape shops and nail bars, but I can certainly offer some sort of anecdotal evidence. I’ve been a London commuter on and off for over 30 years and when I first did it, I reckon at least half my fellow travellers would be reading something, even if it was a tabloid or lad mag. Now I’m very often the only person with any kind of print matter to hand and, yes, maybe some of the phone-gazers are getting to grips with a new translation of Dostoevsky or Derrida but when I do sneak a glance at their screens, they’re really not, are they?

And then to David Hare, who bewails the current tendency of the National Theatre to prioritise star vehicles with West End/Broadway potential over its old repertory policy. And for some reason, George Bernard Shaw gets in on the act:

Do the English people want a national theatre? Of course they do not. They never want anything. They got the British Museum, the National Gallery, and Westminster Abbey, but they never wanted them. But once these things stood as mysterious phenomena that had come to them, they were quite proud of them, and felt that the place would be incomplete without them.

Except that I’m not so sure they’re proud of them any more. Or even know they exist. 

About Chris Jefferies

Interesting article by Patrick McGuinness in the LRB, flashing back to the case of his former teacher Chris Jefferies, who was spuriously accused of murder and dragged through the tabloid mire, apparently because he had strange hair, didn’t own a TV, didn’t like sport and, most reprehensible of all, appeared to have been an excellent English teacher. “Did they really think showing a Jean-Luc Godard film or reading Browning indicated murderous potential?” asks McGuinness. Well, yes, of course they bloody did. As always, these staunch defenders of Western culture run away screaming when presented with anyone who knows or cares about Western culture at any level deeper than a commemorative tea-towel from the V&A.

McGuinness also recalls the activities that Jefferies ran for boys who didn’t want to join the school Cadet Force: 

It was like a version of the Foreign Legion for misfits: the asthmatics and the diabetics, the boys with the hearing aids and the boys on crutches, the epileptic, the attention-challenged, the marginal, the sad and the emotionally combustible. We loved it.

PS: Now I’m reminded of the 1997 election and the deeply weird Tory candidate Dr Adrian Rogers, who declared that his opponent Ben Bradshaw “is a homosexual, works for the BBC, rides a bicycle, speaks German: he’s everything about our country that is wrong.”

About Vivek Ramaswamy

I don’t go into politics so much these days, mostly because it makes me sad and angry. But I was interested by what Vivek Ramaswamy, soon to get a plum job in the Trump administration, had to say about American culture, and the response to it: 

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers. (Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates). More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”

And there’s much in there I might agree with. On the other hand, this is also the culture that venerates a semi-literate charlatan like Trump, so without all that intellectual mediocrity, Ramaswamy wouldn’t have his new job.

About pumpkins etc

Far from new, stolen from Facebook, but it belongs here, I think.

And while we’re here, this can come out to play as well.

And then...

(And all the time I’m simultaneously worrying about and luxuriating in the exclusivity of all of these. Are they funny in spite of the fact that a lot of people won’t get the gag, or because of the fact? And somehow this ties into the most depressing article I’ve read this week, Elle Griffin on how nobody buys books any more.)

About AI

In the New York Times, the neuroscientist Eric Hoel argues that the increased use of artificial intelligence is forcing any notion of intellectual or aesthetic quality into a death spiral, prompted as much as anything by human laziness. For example he refers to researchers at a conference on AI using AI to conduct peer reviews on AI-related papers, taking any human critical intervention out of the equation. Which is a problem, because one thing AI is very bad at detecting is bullshit, which is ultimately what peer review is for.

Of course, most of us don’t hang around at AI conferences, but Hoel suggests that the process is far more prevalent than that, eroding the fabric of culture itself, to the detriment even of people who reach for their weapons when they hear the word:

Isn’t it possible that human culture contains within it cognitive micronutrients — things like cohesive sentences, narrations and character continuity — that developing brains need? 

In other words, the processes by which people engage with all the gubbins of society is as significant as the content itself, and that’s what AI is stripping away. But it’s not as if the purveyors of AI are doing this deliberately, is it? They’re not consciously proposing policies that will make humanity that bit more stupid are they oh wait hang on...

PS: And even if you’re not that bothered about AI destroying the canon of Western literature, you might want to know what it’s doing to your fridge. 

PPS: And, following on from Musk’s tweet, I think this is supposed to be an April Fool’s gag but these days, who knows?

About the Sixties

An alternative reality, in which Swinging London was devised and documented not by Mary Quant and David Bailey and the Beatles, but by Samuel Beckett.

(Photo of Twiggy and Wilfrid Brambell by Burt Glinn.)

About classics and comics

Two more contributions to the canon discussion, here as placeholders if nothing else. First, Alexandra Wilson upends Bourdieu by arguing that it’s popular, not classical music than holds all the cultural capital:

Since the 1980s, the media has determinedly and relentlessly painted classical music as “elitist”, boring and old-fashioned. Even Arts Council England, hell-bent on a programme of radical “change” to the cultural landscape, can scarcely conceal its contempt for it. None of this is suggestive of a society in which classical music reigns supreme. It isn’t brave to say you hate classical music so much as bog-standard normal. State publicly that you don’t like classical music, and you’re cool, funny and “relatable”. State publicly that you don’t like popular music, and you’re a weirdo or a snob. 

And in the New Yorker, Stephanie Burt defends Penguin’s decision to define Marvel comics and their ilk as classics:

 Stories become classics when generations of readers sort through them, talk about them, imitate them, and recommend them. In this case, baby boomers read them when they débuted, Gen X-ers grew up with their sequels, and millennials encountered them through Marvel movies. Each generation of fans—initially fanboys, increasingly fangirls, and these days nonbinary fans, too—found new ways not just to read the comics but to use them. That’s how canons form. Amateurs and professionals, over decades, come to something like consensus about which books matter and why—or else they love to argue about it, and we get to follow the arguments. Canons rise and fall, gain works and lose others, when one generation of people with the power to publish, teach, and edit diverges from the one before. 

About the Noughties

In 2009, I wrote a book about the decade that was then stumbling towards its demise. Inevitably it was going to be imperfect; not only did I have little more than 200 pages to tell the story, but I needed to deliver the manuscript about six months before the story ended. And, just as importantly, I was a white, educated-ish, straight male (also cis but I‘m not sure that concept would have even resonated then) in his early 40s, who’d never been south of the equator. The narrative was necessarily partial, in both senses of the word.

That said, I don’t think the story I told about the period was too far off. I argued that we’d been so fixated on the symbolic turning-point of the millennium that we’d never bothered to decide what the decade was going to be called. (“Noughties” was a best guess and plenty of people didn’t get the memo.) And, despite the historian’s desire to package stretches of time into next units that corresponded with the calendar (what Ferdinand Mount called “decaditis”), real life rarely obliges. I suggested that the 1990s, the decade of Fukuyama’s liberal triumphalism when history supposedly ended, spilled over until September 2001; and the truncated decade came to an end when Lehman Brothers did, two collapses, just seven years and a few New York blocks apart. Fear and technology were the two themes that permeated the period and the meeting of the two created a characteristic sense of twitchy unease: should I be more worried about a terrorist attack, or about the CCTV camera that’s meant to prevent it? What was really lacking was a single image that encapsulated our (received) memory of what the decade was like, to compare with the dedicated followers going through the racks in Carnaby Street, punks striding across the King’s Road, a besuited yuppy on a slab-like mobile phone.

I knew my utter wrongness would become clear eventually. What I wasn’t expecting was that it would take so long to happen; and certainly not that the catalyst would be a nest-haired narcissist called Russell Brand. Because of the laws of libel (and possibly a worry about prejudicing any subsequent legal proceedings) all we can say openly about the man himself is that he wasn’t very nice and we never found him funny or, if you’re a devotee of his second career as a hawker of conspiracy theories and associated quackeries, that it’s the New World Order/Rothschilds/Mainstream Media/Giant Lizards trying to gag the gallant speaker of truths blah blah blah.

Instead, the finger pointed at... the Noughties themselves. Endeavouring to contextualise Brand, Sarah Ditum characterises the decade as: 

...a period of viciousness and excess, where cruelty was the norm and misogyny was celebrated... Lad culture, which had once seemed like a corrective to smothering Nineties niceness, flourished into a full backlash. Second-wave feminism had spent decades explaining why porn, objectification and rape jokes should be unacceptable. Now they came surging back, this time with a protective sheen of irony.

Others seem retrospectively baffled, even when they were right at the heart of the shenanigans, and presumably in a position to stamp out misbehavior; here’s Lorraine Heggessey, who was controller of BBC One at the time:

It's not actually that long ago. This was the 2000s, so let's not think it was the dim and distant past. It wasn't. I don't think it would be acceptable to say anything like that. I'm amazed that it was acceptable at that time frankly. 

Obviously I’d completely missed all this in the book but I can console myself that pretty much everyone else did at the time. It’s taken nearly 14 years for that decade-defining image to make itself known; it‘ll be a clip of Russell Brand getting away with it (“it” being, if nothing else, a sort of non-specific nastiness, enabled by his gender and celebrity status), and the rest of us letting him.

PS: And while we’re talking about partial memories of a decade, this morning the Absolute 80s radio station heralded a day celebrating one-hit wonders with a tweet (or whatever we call them this week – Xpectoration?) depicting ‘Come On Eileen’ by Dexys Midnight Runners, a band that enjoyed seven more Top 20 singles in the decade. The usual suspects jumped in to point and laugh at the cock-up, but one brave soul asserted that his own limited awareness of the Dexys oeuvre trumped any silly ideas about empirical reality:

Yeah they were. Might of had one other song no one can really name

— not_me (@stop_changing_7) September 25, 2023

About high culture

Martin Fautley discusses the fraught issue of cultural capital, with specific reference to music education but what he has to say applies to all aspects of the arts, including the balance between knowing about an art form and actually doing it. At one point he declares: “we need to be on our guard against the creeping causality of high culture as panacea” which is true enough but in practice the tendency seems to be the gradual eradication of “high culture” from state education. The question is whether this is because teachers believe students can’t cope with it (see this, from a few years back) or that some of the teachers themselves might struggle.

About Barbie

I enjoyed the Barbie movie, and was quietly impressed with how it sneaked references to Proust and Kubrick into a big-budget, candy-coloured Hollywood extravaganza. But I think Ian Leslie gets things right:

Rather than advancing intellectual ideas, it uses intellectual-sounding talk as a colour in its tonal palette, a striking and funny contrast to the vacuity of its characters. Barbie tickles the frontal cortex, site of Deep Thoughts, but its purpose is to raid the hypothalamus, source of endorphins.

About the middlebrow

 You know, I could get behind this...

On the one hand, a supercilious and increasingly anhedonic critical taste. On the other, people who can’t make sense of what they watch or read . Oh no I’m arguing for a return to the golden age of the middlebrow

— Kevin Power (@KevPow3) August 6, 2023

About Tár

Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books on the generational divide exposed by Todd Fields’s film Tár (which I really ought to have watched by now):

We of Tár’s generation can be quick to lambaste those we call (behind their backs) “the youngs,” but speaking for myself, I’m the one severely triggered by statements like “Chaucer is misogynistic” or “Virginia Woolf was a racist.” Not because I can’t see that both statements are partially true, but because I am of that generation whose only real shibboleth was: “Is it interesting?” Into which broad category both evils and flaws could easily be fit, not because you agreed with them personally but because they had the potential to be analyzed, just like anything else. Whereas if you grew up online, the negative attributes of individual humans are immediately disqualifying. The very phrase ad hominem has been rendered obsolete, almost incomprehensible. An argument that is directed against a person, rather than the position they are maintaining? Online a person is the position they’re maintaining and vice versa. Opinions are identities and identities are opinions. Unfollow!

About the BBC

The BBC, we are informed, will attempt to attract viewers from less affluent socio-economic groups by producing more sports documentaries, crime dramas and other “lighter” products. Except that nobody asks why such groups (allegedly) prefer such material. Furthermore, does an individual’s socio-economic status determine the media he or she consumes, or is it the other way round? Does the choice of media put them on the path to a specific rung on the socio-economic ladder? By giving the punters what they want (which is supposedly restricted to variations on what they already know), the BBC would be fulfilling its remit to reach out to all social groups, but at the same time reinforcing the inequalities that keep those groups apart – and pissing the Reithian mission to educate all over the walls of Broadcasting House. And then what’s the point of the BBC?

About Glastonbury

Laura Kuenssberg recycles an anonymous party hack’s definition of political conferences as “Glastonbury for weirdos” but I’ve just been watching Nicolas Roeg’s documentary about the 1971 festival and remember that for much of its existence, Glastonbury itself was Glastonbury for weirdos.

About classical music

An article in the Telegraph marking the 30th anniversary of Classic FM (inadvertently?) exposes an ideological divergence in the way modern conservatives deal with culture.

Ivan Hewitt takes what one might describe as the market-based approach, arguing that Classic FM gives the punters what they want – “delicious treats of an aural kind” – and by doing so attracts twice as many listeners as Radio 3. So that’s good, then. And there’s a passing dig at the BBC licence fee, always a dog whistle to Telegraph readers, even if radio listeners aren’t obliged to pay it. This is the Thatcherite model of culture, free of both state subsidy and a self-appointed elite telling you what’s good. And it has achieved its apotheosis in recent years with the appointment of the ludicrous Nadine Dorries as Secretary of State.

Simon Heffer, meanwhile, takes what to me is a more authentically conservative (as distinct from classical liberal) attitude, in the tradition of Arnold and Eliot: some things are just better than others, even if not many people like them. He grudgingly acknowledges the popularity of Classic FM but...

...it cheapens classical music by treating it as a commodity; worse, it patronises its audience, lulling them into a sort of cultural Stockholm syndrome where they mistake mediocrity for excellence, and where boundaries are seldom pushed out. 

The example he gives is the poll of listeners' favourite music, which places the Star Wars theme 250 places above Elgar’s First Symphony. But to define this preference as being objectively wrong, as Heffer does, takes him to dangerous ground. “As a measure of the taste of the most gullible element of the British public, it is invaluable,” he argues. But couldn’t that in turn be applied to the antics of the modern Conservative Party, including the way Liz Truss panders to the prejudices of the party members who are probably going to elect her in the next few days, and indeed to Brexit – which Heffer supported?

(Incidentally, the weight of opinion in the comments section seems to favour Hewitt and Classic FM — which, paradoxically, tends to prove Heffer’s point.)

PS: On a vaguely related theme, quiz show contestant turned researcher Lillian Crawford on what knowledge is for (and which knowledge needs to be known). “Competing on University Challenge made me realise that I quiz not to perform knowledge, but to acquire it.”

About Radio 4

Two more nuggets that would have fitted neatly into my dissertation but will have to hover here for the time being. Both popped up as I did my usual Sunday morning potter to the strains of Radio 4. First, on Broadcasting House (from about 37.40) both interviewer and interviewee explicitly assume that listeners to the station will be familiar with a particular poem by Philip Larkin, not to mention an Oscar-winning movie from more than four decades ago. Are such assumptions justified? Should they be? Or is such cosy familiarity with the canon off-putting to too many people, specifically the people who aren’t listening to Radio 4, however much the BBC wants them to?

And then on Kate Moss’s Desert Island Discs (1.15) Lauren Laverne mentions cultural capital but I’m not entirely sure it means what she thinks it does. Which is another cultural reference that you, the imaginary average reader, may or may not get, and so it goes on...

PS: And on the Today programme on Monday morning, Hadley Freeman compares Ms Moss to Thomas Pynchon...

PPS: Discussing the broadening of the canon, with particular reference to Brain of Britain.