About patron saints

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.

About Kafka and crockery

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.

PS: And a few hours later, I heard another BBC journalist refer to a calvacade.

About Half Man Half Biscuit

I’m afraid I’ve rather lost track of the career of those fine Birkenhead troubadors Half Man Half Biscuit, so I wasn't aware that while I was working on my dissertation (see posts passim) they released a song that would have fitted in quite nicely: 

Born too late for the First World War
Siege of Troy was long before my time
Naseby, Jutland, Agincourt
Characters perhaps from pantomime...
I don’t watch films in black and white
The trees and flowers and birds have passed me by
I’ll just guess and hope I’m right
The first man into space was Captain Bligh...

About Dumb Britain

I’ve written before about Private Eye’s Dumb Britain and the issues it raises regarding my pet subject, the question of what we are expected and what we expect others to know. Norma Postin, in the letter above, appears pretty certain that 19th century philosophers and their ilk are among the subjects where we shouldn’t assume knowledge, which may be a fair call. Where I do take exception is the implication that these subjects only enter your canon of knowledge if you’ve attended a certain type of school or university, and if you haven’t you’re condemned to eternal ignorance on the subject. Surely, if all your school taught you was to read, you’d have a chance to find out.

PS: Nothing to do with the above, but I’d normally assume that an article with the subhead “Barbie and Oppenheimer show us how in the heart of the darkest realities we stumble upon fantasies” was a spoof originating in The Onion or McSweeney’s or similar but since Slavoj Žižek is the author, who can tell?

About assumptions

Following on from the theatre reviewer who wondered why someone might write a play about TS Eliot and/or the Marx Brothers, because only old people have heard of them and might understand the jokes; first, from an article about Evelyn Waugh, which assumes in the reader’s favour. 

It’s the “of course”, of course, that confirms this could only appear in the TLS, or something of that calibre. But then there’s another kind of assumption, from Albion’s Secret History by Guy Mankowski

which (apart from the fact that I know where Bromley is, thanks) I’m calling performative ignorance because even if he doesn’t know where Bromley is, Mankowski could look it up in a matter of seconds.

(And, on vaguely related lines, the people who tore chunks out of a quotation from The Masque of Anarchy because they thought it was by Jeremy Corbyn, rather than Shelley; or “Shelley, whoever that is”, as one Twitter sage put it.)

About not reading and not knowing

Yet again, life throws up a nugget that could have found a home in my dissertation. From Mark Bauerlein:

In my limited experience as a teacher, I’ve noticed in the last 10 years that students are no less intelligent and no less ambitious but there are two big differences: reading habits have slipped, along with general knowledge. You can quote me on this: you guys don't know anything.

PS: From a deliriously depressing series about the decline of civility in modern Britain, a view from the further education sector: “Anything unfamiliar prompts either deep anxiety or aggression.”

About facts

I vaguely remember a sachet of this stuff coming through the door but not this promotion. Gazing with wonder at a time (early 70s) when facts were collectable assets, the NFTs of the moment, Panini football stickers for the nerd community.

About Billy Wilder

Only now have I got round to reading Jonathan Coe’s Mr Wilder & Me, about Calista, an awkward 20-something who finds herself working with Billy Wilder on his not-great 70s movie Fedora. Much is made of the protagonist’s ignorance (when she first meets Wilder she has no idea who he is) and how difficult it was in those analogue days to remedy such ignorance.

Except that she remedies it:

...and I went to Foyle’s on the Charing Cross Road hunting for film books. I bought two, one called Halliwell’s Film Guide and one called Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion, and for the next few months, back in Greece, I pored over them night and day, memorising not just the facts they contained but also the opinions... by the summer of 1977, my knowledge of film had gone from being non-existent to being literally encyclopaedic.

The point being that in those pre-VHS days, her encyclopaedic knowledge doesn’t extend to watching any films that she hasn’t encountered by chance on TV, so she’s reduced to regurgitating Leslie Halliwell’s (rather reactionary) opinions, even when she’s talking to the people who made the films in the first place. I got into films a few years later, also with Halliwell as my grumpy gatekeeper, and although video was slowly making things easier, I can identify with Calista’s situation, of knowing about the films, years before ever really knowing them.

Which feels like a pretty reductive kind of knowledge (knowledge without experience, without true understanding). Except that, in today’s world, where the films themselves, and all the facts about them, and Halliwell’s and everybody else’s thoughts on them, are all available at the touch of a button, people apparently feel less of a need to know (in whatever sense you like) than Calista or I did.

About being in the know

In the wake of a properly exciting Mastermind final, a thought-provoking article by a former contestant suggests that, when dealing with nature, facts should trump feelings; although...

There are fair reasons to mistrust knowledge and those who have it. It can be (and is) used to gatekeep, to exclude those who lack it – that is, those who lack the background, education or life circumstances necessary to have acquired it. More fundamentally, there are problems with competitive hierarchies of knowledge in which certain knowledge forms or learning traditions are privileged or elbowed out, with concomitant impacts on justice and representation across a host of sociopolitical variables (class, ethnicity, sex and culture among them). It can also be hard not to track the obvious connections – historical, cultural, though perhaps not inevitable – between identification, collection, colonialism and plunder.

...which is yet another nugget that might have slotted neatly into my dissertation. That said, is the fact that some people don’t know stuff a valid reason for nobody to know it? Or to know it, but keep quiet about the fact?

About Shelley

As a proud geek and devotee of quizzing, who was inevitably the last to be picked for any sporting team, one might have thought that I’d have approved of the Hackney New School, which claims to have all but eliminated bullying by replacing playground football games with poetry, chess and quizzes.

Pupils have memorised poems Ozymandias and Charge of Light Brigade [sic] off by heart and recite them as they line up for lessons or when they are eating lunch, [headteacher] Ms Whelan said... “Just yesterday a group of year 9 students beat me in a name the capital cities quiz, this would have been unthinkable two years ago.”

Well, um, yes, but. Knowing about poetry is, as Sellar and Yeatman had it, A Good Thing. But there’s something about learning it by rote and chanting it over lunch that feels almost cult-like. I do wonder what the radical Shelley, who was booted out of Oxford for his heterodox views on religion and much else, might have made of this; and ultimately what it means for education. 

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away... 

(I’ve got an uncomfortable feeling that Tennyson might have approved, though.)

About Nemo

Once again, we confront the thorny question of what, in 2021, one can reasonably be expected to know or understand. And, according to viewers of last night’s Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, it’s not Shakespeare’s tragedies or flags of the world or the periodic table...

About Dumb Britain

For a while I’ve been pondering the meaning of the long-running Private Eye feature Dumb Britain, which exists to point and laugh at the less clever responses contestants give to questions on TV and radio quiz shows. It’s all about extent and limits of cultural literacy, essentially the assumptions we make about what people should be expected to know. I referred to Dumb Britain in my dissertation, if you can be bothered to pretend to be interested; the issue was whether anyone under 50 could be expected to know the name of the Long Ranger’s horse.

I would appear that the editors have become sensitive to accusations of elitism, because they’ve started to include the correct answers. Although, if the readers need to be told what the answers are, doesn’t that suggest the hapless contestants may not be that dumb after all?

About the Daily Mail

 

It feels as if a pattern is forming. Following on from recent posts (here and here) about Radio 4 programmes in which a state of not-knowing appears to be a desirable quality in presenters and/or guests, here’s yesterday’s Daily Mail. Rather than seeking to elucidate or evaluate complex restrictions for the benefit of its readers, the newspaper’s role now seems to be to share in their confusion, their ignorance, and even to make a virtue of it. And in this case, it’s about something rather more important than knowing a particular bit of violin music.

PS: Earlier thoughts about agnotology etc here and here.

About The Lark Ascending

Tonight’s edition of BBC Radio 4’s arts/culture show Front Row was presented by Liv Little, who is black, female and 20-something and whose presence, one assumes, is intended at least partially to address the Corporation’s concerns about its own lack of diversity and increasing irrelevance to young people. Little managed the first segment, on the new Wonder Woman movie, perfectly well, and seemed equally confident moving on to discuss the 100th anniversary of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending with violinist Jennifer Pike. 

But then she did something rather unusual; she admitted that until she’d started to prepare for the show, she’d never listened to The Lark Ascending. Let’s be clear, this is not some obscure nugget by Hildegard of Bingen or Iannis Xenakis, unrecognisable and incomprehensible to anyone not steeped in the theory and lore of classical music. It’s the piece that’s regularly voted the nation’s favourite by listeners to the avowedly populist Classic FM. It’s a Favourite, a Standard, a Classical Greatest Hit.

In many ways, Little’s admission was refreshingly honest. I remember when Ned Sherrin presented Loose Ends on the same station, regularly flubbing his lines as he gave scripted introductions to bands of whom he’d clearly never heard, mispronouncing the names of genres of which he was equally ignorant, and giving the impression that he didn’t really care. I’m sure Little does care but, as she acknowledged, this lacuna in her own personal canon probably puts her in a minority among Radio 4 listeners. (That’s the ones who do currently listen, rather than the ones the BBC wants to listen.) And inevitably, if she didn’t know The Lark Ascending until a few days ago, those listeners might wonder what other gaps there could be in her portfolio of cultural capital.

I argued recently that presenters on Radio 4 shows such as In Our Time and You’re Dead To Me operate as spokespeople for the moderately informed listener, knowing enough about the subject to ask sensible questions, but happily deferring to the experts when things get serious. Little’s honesty raises a question, though; what’s the rationale for a presenter who knows less than the audience?

PS: Also from the BBC: Neil Brand’s delightful programme about TV music shows what can be done when presenter and interviewees alike actually know what they’re talking about; and then there’s Idris Elba interviewing Paul McCartney and the less said about that...

About Whose Line Is It Anyway?

If anyone asks what my degree is in, I suppose I can say, “Wondering what assumptions we can make about what other people should know”. On that note, based on a recent Twitter discussion, I think we can plot the death of Western civilisation as occurring at some point between the first series of the comedy improvisation TV show Whose Line Is It Anyway? in 1988, which involved John Sessions describing a day at the beach in the style of James Joyce and the later shows up to 1999 which, if memory serves right mostly involved Josie Lawrence rapping about parking meters.

And on similar lines, should I find it distressing that, on a recent edition of Richard Osman’s House of Games, Denise van Outen thought that Isaac Newton died in 1952; or that someone at the Telegraph thinks Thelonious Monk a) didn’t die in 1982 and b) played the trumpet?

PS: In a similar vein from the past few days, I think it was probably a reasonable call (whether by Sarah Churchwell or the Guardian subs), in this excellent article about the legacy of Trump, to explain what “epistemological crisis” means, even if some might infer that that in itself is evidence of an epistemological crisis.

About a dissertation

I finished my MA course last year, and submitted my dissertation in September. It’s been prodded and poked and evaluated and checked for plagiarism and moral turpitude and probably verrucas, but I was waiting until I’d officially graduated to spread the picture on a wider screen. The current pandemic, of which you may have heard, has rather put paid to that, so sod it, here it is.



There are a couple of typos in there, and a few things I wish I’d expressed a little more cogently, but there we are. It’s about 15,000 words, so you should be able to get through it more quickly than you did The Irishman. Take care now.

About a joke

OK, it’s not the best joke in the world, and probably not the newest, but it made me laugh on a grey, wet morning. Anyway...

Q: Darth Vader goes into a boulangerie. What does he order?
A: PAIN, PAIN, PAIN, TARTE TATIN, TARTE TATIN...

I did warn you. But it’s an interesting joke to me because it ties in with my interest in the cultural canon, the idea of the knowledge you’re expected to have, the references you’re supposed to get. Like a lot of gags, it works as a sort of cultural Venn diagram, the intersection between People Who Know Star Wars and People Who Speak A Bit Of French And/Or Enjoy French Baked Goods. And I’m really not sure how many people occupy that space.

About getting it right/wrong

I’ve just come across an article I wrote for the BBC website in 2009, as part of a retrospective of the decade that was drawing to a close. Pretty uncontroversially, I picked the 9/11 attacks and the collapse of Lehman Brothers as the two events that would be emblematic of the Noughties, but also pointed out that they took place within a few minutes’ walk of each other, and people who live thousands of miles from Manhattan might have a different perspective on what’s important.

And then I took a bit of a punt and wondered if, in years to come, the most important development of that decade might turn out to be the launch of Wikipedia, because of its potential to disrupt the hierarchy and control of knowledge itself:

Along with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, blogs and the other manifestation [sic] of Web 2.0, it meant that the final judgement as to what was significant would never again be left to a self-appointed elite of media professionals.

Yay! One in the eye for the so-called experts, the big media tycoons, the smug commentators in their ivory towers! The only difference is, in 2009 I thought that might turn out to be a good thing...

PS: The book I wrote about the Noughties is still available, packed with observations I got horribly but justifiably wrong.

About Shakespeare

The new Kenneth Branagh movie All is True is described in its IMDB entry as “A look at the final days in the life of renowned playwright William Shakespeare.” Now, leaving aside for a second my own longstanding-to-the-point-of-tiresomeness advice to writers to steer clear of words such as “renowned” or “famous” (because if they’re true they’re not necessary and if they’re necessary they’re not true), I have to ask why anyone who didn’t know who William Shakespeare was or what he did for a living would want to go and see a film about William Shakespeare.

About Maxwell Perkins

I keep coming back to the little dance that all writers and other purveyors of fact must dance, between going over the heads of their intended audience and insulting their intelligence. As I suggested in relation to Barthes, it’s ultimately subjective: OK, maybe I know who Isaac Newton is, but not Bachelard or Hjemslev, but that doesn’t apply universally. Except... seriously? I mean, I’m sure there are plenty of Pointless contestants who don’t know who wrote the Principia, but what proportion of those are on top of French epistemology and/or Danish linguistics in the mid-20th century? (And, yes, I had to Google those.)

And here’s another example. In the New Yorker, Jordan Orlando offers yet another bloody article about The White Album in which he introduces George Martin as “the Beatles’ Maxwell Perkins”. To be honest, I think Orlando’s choice is a little less preposterous than that of Barthes; there will be very few people who know the editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but not the Beatles’ producer, but I suspect there are more than those who know Hjemslev but not Newton. And, because this is all about knowing your audience, I reckon all of them read the New Yorker.

And that just gives me the perfect opportunity to remind you of the work of Rutherford Chang.


PS: And this is interesting too: she even has a stab at Revolution #9.