About The Odyssey

 

I’ve said before that the loudest voices in the room when it comes to the erosion of what might loosely be known as Western culture are those who never showed the slightest interest in celebrating it. The Daily Mail is a repeat offender, whining when universities cut Chaucer from the curriculum (how are those market forces looking now?) while offering a world view that holds the antics of Kim Kardashian to be far more significant than any kind of book.

And now we find that Elon Musk, in response to what he sees as casting infelicities in Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of the Odyssey, will be using AI to concoct another version that is, in his words, “historically accurate”. I await his Laestrygonians with interest.

About the Berlin Wall

I am slightly baffled by the objections raised by Southwark Council to Steven Thorpe’s decision to place a chunk of the Berlin Wall in his garden, not least the observation that it presents an “oppressive sense of enclosure and stark industrial appearance”. Which is surely a bit like complaining that the Sagrada Familia has too many curly bits.

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 Nero

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.

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 The Holiday

(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”.

About things

Back in the glory days of blogging, sometimes I be so overstocked with ideas that I’d regularly put up portmanteau posts, of unrelated stuff that I didn’t have time to discuss at length, but I just wanted to nail down before they were gone. I don’t remember doing it for years and I’m not sure whether that’s because I’m just getting more jaded and/or less curious, or simply because there’s less interesting stuff going on.

But everything seems to be happening today (or maybe I’ve just roused myself from a long creative slumber). First, David Shrigley creates a new, very expensive edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four from pulped copies of The Da Vinci Code (which reminds me of the time I tried and failed to do a chapter-by-chapter blog about the bloody thing.) On the Today programme (go to 2:53 or so), Amol Rajan attempted to shoehorn in TS Eliot and the idea of placing an artist within a tradition, to which Shrigley offered the deadpan response, “I wouldn’t know, I went to art school.” 

Then what looks to be a very poorly thought-out survey that claims to reveal that half of Britons can’t name a black British historical figure but neither offers any criteria for a “right” answer (Who is black? Who is historically significant? Does Stormzy count?) nor provides any context as to the respondents’ knowledge of history in general. Awkward.

This is followed by the news that the Beatles are finally releasing ‘Now and Then’ and touting it as their last song, despite the fact that it’s just another Lennon demo that’s been played around with by the others over the past few decades, as distinct from ‘Carnival of Light’, a genuine Beatles work from 1967 that remains under lock and key and will probably get the retrospective nod as their last last song to mark, I don’t know, Ringo’s 100th birthday.

And finally this, an interview with Ken Russell, apparently in an Oxford student magazine in 1966, and now I’m wondering why someone can’t just take this treatment and make the bloody film...

PS: And a response to the news that shadow chancellor (a job title that sounds like something out of Star Wars) Rachel Reeves may or may not have plagiarised chunks of her new book:

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 Lyly and Dickens and Fielding

I’m not that familiar with the work of the Elizabethan writer John Lyly so I’m not going to judge whether those behind a new production of his play Galatea are justified in calling it “explicitly queer, explicitly feminist, explicitly trans.” I’m rather more interested in their thinking once they’d incorporated British Sign Language into the mix: 

Once they had made translations for deaf actors, they extended the idea. “Why not translate the text to fit better in the mouth of someone using spoken English, too?” Frankland asks. And so Lyly’s text stretched to fit the new hosts of its words.

Which sounds good, until you realise that what they’re really doing is erasing Lyly’s own text because it’s too old and difficult and they don’t expect the audience or even the actors to understand it. 

See also the just-concluded BBC adaptation of Great Expectations, with its utterly baffling amendments to the plot (no Dolge Orlick; no trip to Cairo; Miss Havisham doesn’t die in the fire, but does shoot Compeyson; Estella doesn’t marry Drummle; Pip ends up marrying Biddy). And while we’re at it, pray for the soul of ITV’s incoming Tom Jones, the star of which thought  at first it was a biography of the Welsh singer and only managed to read the first 10 pages of the novel, complaining, “It’s so beautiful but so dense.”

About the Bayeux Tapestry

I am intrigued by the tale of Mia Hansson, who has since 2016 occupied herself with creating a life-size replica of the Bayeux Tapestry, but can’t help but think of Borges’s Pierre Menard, who became the author of Don Quixote by writing it out. (And I wonder what sort of journalist could cover this story without once asking: “Why?”)

About April 18

91 years ago today, on April 18, 1930, the BBC evening news bulletin consisted of the words “there is no news”, with piano music filling the rest of the 15 minutes. Cursory Googling suggests that this wasn’t a bad call, and that very little of historical importance occurred on that day; beyond, of course, the announcement that there was news, which became the only thing that anyone knows about that day, certainly raising its significance above that of the 17th or 19th. Once again, absence becomes a presence.

About sea shanties

Sea shanties are suddenly in the news, apparently because somebody started performing them on TikTok. But it’s telling that many of those detailing the phenomenon in the news media feel the most pressing need is not to explain what TikTok is, but what sea shanties are...

About The Album

I argued in my book about Radiohead that OK Computer, for all its manifold innovations, represents the last entry in the canon of rock albums. This isn’t because people aren’t making good music any more, but because in the post-Napster universe the notion of a fixed, finite selection of tunes in a predetermined (by someone other than the listener) order now feels unnecessarily restrictive – and I was writing this in the mid-Noughties, way before Spotify. I might have been a little premature in my analysis but in the New York Times Jon Caramanica seems belatedly to have come over to my way of thinking. (He also suggests the future might be TikTok, which has infuriated a whole load of rock purists on Twitter and elsewhere but that’s what music journalists are for these days, right?) Anyway, he says:

As awful as it sounds, an album is simply a data dump now. That doesn’t mean that some artists won’t continue to aim to be auteurs of the form — say, Taylor Swift or Adele — but the minute albums hit streaming services, they are sliced and diced and the songs are relegated to playlist slots, and everything after that is a crap shoot. The truth is that albums worked as a medium only because everyone was a captive. When you look back at your favorite older albums now, I’m sure you see the weak spots that you’d happily have programmed out if you had the technology then. Now you do. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next generation of pop stars finds ways to never release an “album” again — they’ll just drip music out, one automated-brain-chip-download at a time.

I’ll put a fiver on One Automated-Brain-Chip-Download At A Time (Sweet Jesus) being the title of the next Radiohead album. Not that anyone will care, obviously. 

About The Crown

The Crown has been one of the most successful TV products of recent years, and it’s not difficult to see why. It’s the story of the most famous family in the world, whose loves, losses and fashion choices are hung upon with a devotion that must have even the Kardashians seething with envy.

But, according to some – including Oliver Dowden, the Culture Secretary – fans of the show need to be reminded that The Crown is not a scrupulously accurate documentary and some of the stuff has been, you know, made up. Aside from the fact that this could apply to pretty much any nominally historical drama, it rather misses the point of how the British monarchy works its spell.

In his 1867 text The English Constitution, Walter Bagehot identifies the success of the political system as a seamless meshing between the mundane efficiencies of good governance and a more ethereal, ornate institution, the presence of which is to entrance those who are to be governed, and a good many onlookers as well:

In fact, the mass of the English people yield a deference rather to something else than to their rulers. They defer to what we may call the theatrical show of society. A certain state passes before them; a certain pomp of great men; a certain spectacle of beautiful women; a wonderful scene of wealth and enjoyment is displayed, and they are coerced by it. Their imagination is bowed down; they feel they are not equal to the life which is revealed to them.

Bagehot argued that for this part of the system to work, an air of mystery must be maintained: “We must not let daylight in upon magic.” Obviously the modern Royals have had to tolerate a level of intrusion that Victoria would never have countenanced, but there is still a sense that they are somehow beyond the mundane realities that afflict our tiny lives. Of course, only a minority, the sort of diehard monarchists who camp out for three days to catch a glimpse of a passing coach, accept this as an empirical fact; and another minority reject the whole institution altogether. There’s a third section, though – larger than the other two combined, I reckon — that knows what’s on offer is a “theatrical show” — but is prepared to go along for the ride, just as they go along with soap operas and structured reality TV. They know what they are being presented with isn’t the full-blown meat-and-mucus reality, that these are people performing a role, acting out a script, but they’ll suspend disbelief because, well, life feels a bit nicer if they do. Few adults believe in Father Christmas either, as a literal entity, but they believe in the power of the story and woe betide if you ruin that magic with nasty, Grinchy, Scroogey daylight.

Dowden’s complaint, surely, is not that The Crown is fiction; it is that it’s the wrong, unofficial, unsanctioned fiction, a type of theatrical show to which we are less likely to defer. One that succeeds as art but fails as politics. Or at least the type of politics that he wants to prevail.

PS: I was on LBC just now, reiterating the above in a more garbled manner.

About Jerusalem

Boris Johnson ruffled a few feathers today by laying claim to the concept of “a new Jerusalem” beloved of English radicals from Blake to the Attlee government and beyond. I was similarly annoyed with him until I saw this tweet by Dr Jennifer Cassidy, apparently a politics lecturer at Oxford University – Johnson’s alma mater of course – and now I just want to hide under the covers and whimper.

“In the depths of the Second World War...the government sketched out a vision of the post-war, new Jerusalem that they wanted to build”

Does the PM know how fractioned Jerusalem is? It is of the most divided cities on earth. pic.twitter.com/qBXBidIiGm

— Dr. Jennifer Cassidy (@OxfordDiplomat) October 6, 2020

About You're Dead To Me

On the face of it, the Radio 4 show/podcast You’re Dead To Me meets all those cosy Reithian criteria about informing, educating and entertaining. It’s essentially a history lesson for people who think they don’t like history, fronted by Greg Jenner, who has acted as a consultant for the Horrible Histories TV series. The format, however, is closer to the long-running In Our Time; a historical subject (the Mughal Empire, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Victorian Christmas, etc) is on the agenda, with Jenner taking the Melvyn Bragg role of an informed host, asking questions of an expert. (IOT usually offers more than one expert, which sometimes provokes a bit of friction, but the dynamic is similar.)

All good so far, but YDTM introduces a new worm into the apple, in the form of a comic voice. And this, as far as I can work out, illustrates the key difference between the two shows; its assumptions about the listener. With IOT, Bragg is the representative of the audience, someone who may know a bit about the subject matter, or has at least taken the time to glance at the relevant Wikipedia page to acquire a rudimentary foundation upon which the experts can build. In YDTM, although Jenner is fine as a host and the academics are all well-chosen, the voice of the listener is the comic, who may just as well have been pulled in from the street at random.

One egregious example of this is the show about the American emigré performer Josephine Baker; a wise don, Michell Chresfield from the University of Birmingham, is regularly interrupted by the comedian Desiree Burch, whose contribution is essentially half an hour of not knowing, and letting us know it. And she’s not even terribly funny while she’s doing it.

The closest analogy is those unaccountably popular YouTube clips of people listening to a classic song for the first time; we are encouraged to be consumers of their performative ignorance, pretty much the antithesis of Reith. And I’m increasingly worried that You’re Dead To Me is being set up not simply as a variation on In Our Time, but as its replacement.

Oh well, we’ll always have Josephine.

About bad people

Adam Rutherford, regarding the murky legacy of eugenicists such as Francis Galton and their ghostly presence in modern academia, expresses an attitude that could equally be applied in the arts and elsewhere:

I think Galton’s a shit, but he’s also a shit who’s a genius, whose legacy we absolutely rely on... We’ve got to be mature enough at a university to recognise that people can be both brilliant and awful at the same time.

About Dampier and Casablanca

Stuff I learned today when truffling around the interwebs in search of something else.

1. The explorer, naturalist and privateer William Dampier (who I first encountered around the age of seven in L du Garde Peach’s masterpiece A Ladybird Book About Pirates) is cited in the OED for the earliest recorded uses of 80 words, including “barbecue”, “sub-species” and “chopsticks”; he also gave us the first recorded recipes in English for guacamole and mango chutney; and crew members on his voyages were the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

2. Casablanca was banned in Ireland until the end of World War II because its negative depiction of Nazis and Vichy collaborators contravened the country’s policy of neutrality; as late as 1974 it could only be shown on Irish television if Ilse’s lines about loving Rick (despite being married to Victor) were removed. Meanwhile, when it was released in Germany in 1952, all the scenes containing Nazis were removed, and the uncut version was not shown until 1975.

About statues

The simple action of pulling down a statue is, in and of itself, morally neutral; it’s the context that matters. Most of us would have regarded the destruction by the Taliban of the Buddhas of Bamiyan as a bad thing; the toppling of Saddam’s likeness in Firdaus Square as welcome. So the damp demise of Edward Colston in Bristol yesterday should be viewed in the same context. Ultimately, if we believe that Colston’s egregious sins as a trafficker in live human flesh outweigh his endowment of a few entertainment venues, he should have been toppled many years ago.

Interestingly, a compromise had long been available; for the statue to remain, but a plaque putting Colston’s deeds in context to be affixed. This option was foolishly rejected by the good citizens of Bristol but an ad hoc variant was yesterday applied to Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square with the helpful addition of the words “WAS A RACIST” to the plinth.

Well, yes, he was, by modern standards at least (although it shouldn’t be forgotten that his greatest achievement was to save his country and the world from someone who made him look pretty woke by comparison). It could of course be argued that “Churchill was a racist” should be added to the pervasive “#AllLivesMatter” in a list of comments that are empirically true but not particularly helpful in the current circumstances; and the same could apply to the misdeeds of Nelson, Wellington, Cromwell and plenty of others who are still celebrated in bronze.

Not just Dead White Males either. Gandhi expressed some pretty nasty views about Africans; and many of the leaders of the American civil rights movement were less keen about extending said rights to gay people. And doubtless if we dig deep enough into the lives of recently commemorated figures such as Millicent Fawcett or Mary Seacole we’d find something that would at least spark a bit of a Twitterspat if it were said or done today. Doubtless one day there will be a JK Rowling statue in Edinburgh, accompanied by strident demands for it to be tossed unceremoniously into the Firth of Forth.

PS:

All Lives Matter isn't even true. I know loads of people I'd happily push off a cliff if I could get away with it.

— ❓🦎 (@curiousiguana) June 8, 2020

About Shakespeare and Company

A confession. When, several years ago, I ambled into the bookshop Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank and was growled at by the owner George Whitman (I think I interrupted his lunch), I thought I was following in the footsteps of Hemingway, Joyce, Pound and all the other expats who decorated Paris between the wars. Only now do I discover that there were two completely different shops, and that Whitman renamed his own in 1964 as a tribute to Sylvia Beach’s place on the rue de l’Odéon: she closed it in 1941, having refused to sell her last copy of Finnegans Wake to a Nazi officer, which is a story in itself, surely.

Which is only a preamble to the news that you can now find out who made use of (the first) Shakespeare and Co’s lending library, and what they borrowed, on this fun site. And, connected only by being around at the same time, you can wander through Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas from the safety of your own lockdown.