About Philip Purser

Two gems from the Telegraph obituary of the writer Philip Purser. First, that the first choice for the job of TV critic at the newly-launched Sunday Telegraph in 1961, was the blind journalist TE Utley, because he wouldn’t be distracted by the pictures.

And the conclusion to the obituary he wrote for a colleague: “He is the author, I believe, of my obituary held on file at The Telegraph. I wonder what it says.”

About Detta O’Cathain

Susannah Herbert, quoted in the Telegraph obituary of Detta O’Cathain, the former Barbican boss:

The tragedy of Baroness O’Cathain stems from her passionate self-belief and her inability to persuade others to share it.

About Norman Stone

The Telegraph has for many years boasted the finest obituaries in British newspapers, with its emphasis on interesting people who led interesting lives, rather than those who were merely famous or useful or even pleasant. But every now and then the DT’s competitors come good, as in Richard J Evans’s piece for The Guardian on the truly ghastly historian Norman Stone. Evans is scrupulous in pointing out Stone’s gifts as a writer and scholar, but is clear that they were seriously outweighed by his flaws. A small selection...

On one occasion he collapsed in front of [Margaret Thatcher], drunk; but she was well known for her indulgence towards alcoholics so long as they supported her politically.

Knowing that he did little research, never bothered to check his facts and relied on his literary flair to mask his mistakes, the publishers got serious historians to go through the text: one of them sent in a 20-page list of errors, but it was impossible to spot them all and so it was left to reviewers to point out the many further inaccuracies.

And, for dessert:

Journalists often described him as “one of Britain’s leading historians”, but in truth he was nothing of the kind, as any serious member of the profession will tell you. The former prime minister, Heath, was wrong about many things, but he was surely right when he said of Stone during his time in Oxford: “Many parents of Oxford students must be both horrified and disgusted that the higher education of our children should rest in the hands of such a man.”

PS: And, just to be fair, the heir to Stone’s throne as monarch of the right-wing rentagobs pays tribute.

PPS: And here’s Stone’s own hatchet job on another historian, EH Carr.

Last rites

So Gil Scott-Heron dies, and although it’s sad, it’s also pretty remarkable that he lasted so long. Less remarkable are the more odious responses to his Telegraph obituary, although they may have been excised by the time you read this.

I did think of posting a vaguely relevant bit of Scott-Heron’s music, but most of the good ones had been taken. And so the rhizomatic (il?)logic that underpins YouTube’s algorithms leads to Hubert Laws, who in the same year that he played on GS-H’s Pieces of a Man album, released a collection of jazz/classical fusion pieces. It’s normally the sort of thing from which I’d run five miles, but this take on Stravinsky works pretty well, I reckon.

Oliver

I had hoped that the thousandth post on this blog might have been a happier one, but not so. Farewell, you magnificent beast.

Decline and #fail

From the Time obituary of Evelyn Waugh, April 22, 1966:

...and he depicts the society they dominate as a moral chaos, a twittering world in which bored women leave their husbands for men they do not even like, mothers regret the death of children only because mourning limits social life, and convicts given tools to stimulate their creativity employ them to decapitate the chaplain.

If only the modern twittering world were so thrilling.

PS: Actually, to be fair, it can be quite lively, as both Doctor Gillian McKeith and Jemima Khan discovered recently.

Worse than being talked about

Well, that was fun. Contributing an article to an established site is often a bit like dangling your tender parts over a piranha tank, especially when the commenters on said site have a reputation for being a bit handy with their digital fists. But I was pleasantly surprised by the response when my article about the various flavours of criticism appeared on Drowned in Sound. “This is good,” they said. “This is a great piece.” “Yay!” Which is lovely, obviously, and much appreciated. And much nicer than the frightful things they were saying about John Robb’s piece. But hang on: I got 10 responses; Robb got 92.

Well, no real surprises there. People are always quicker to complain and criticise than to praise, especially in an online environment. But at the same time, part of me was bitterly jealous that nearly 10 times as many people wanted to eviscerate Robb than to tickle me under the chin.

But then I looked closer. Most of the comments under Robb’s article weren’t really about what he’d said. They started off that way, but then went down a meandering path of mutual antipathy, with straw men and sock puppets aplenty. And it got me thinking about all sorts of things: about why we measure our online successes in terms of the number of responses; whether it’s better to be hated or ignored; and also about how in Web 2.0, the important thing isn’t the discrete packets of information, but the connections between them.

Which of course got me thinking about Patroclus and her retirement from the blogosphere. I don’t thing she was the first person to comment on this blog, but she was an early adopter. She was the one who introduced me to the idea of the blog as conversation, and to the dialectics and rhizomatics that make it annoy old media hacks so much. Her graceful exit is a bit like Flintoff’s decision to abdicate from Test cricket; a little bit of sunshine has gone out.

PS: The hoo-ha over the Robb article might have obscured the fact that the best article of the whole onslaught was this one, by Chris Roberts – and he’s got the same number of responses as I did.

PPS: Another cracker from the Telegraph obituary barrel: “‘I'm just going for a haircut’, he would declare ostentatiously, before returning with the shorter of his two perouques.”

The revenge of the Belle & Sebastian fans

Ruminating about death and Wikipedia and Swells and the various levels of famousness, at Prospect.

From despair to somewhere

Richey Edwards, lyricist, ideologue, stylist and half-assed guitarist for the Manic Street Preachers has finally been declared dead, nearly 14 years after his disappearance; as such, he warrants an obituary in the Daily Telegraph. I can't help but think that, had his body been found in 1995, he wouldn't have earned such a niche among the war heroes and Tory MPs. So essentially he's being honoured for his post mortem achievements, and the hotly debated Cult of Richey; we are encouraged to remember the myth and the mystery rather than the man.

RIP Norman Whitfield

PS: And from the sublime to the egregious (from about 2:29). I've just worked out where Jonathan Ive got the idea for the iMac colour scheme.

Pretty polymath

From the Telegraph obituary of the extraordinary, irreplaceable, probably-quite-difficult-to-live-with Ken Campbell:


Ken Campbell kept three dogs and was devoted to an African grey parrot which he had bought when his daughter gave him some money to buy a computer. There had been a pet shop next door to the computer showroom. He was, for a time, professor of ventriloquism at Rada.

(And as for the recent local difficulties, all appears to be peaceful this end, although I will update you if anything occurs. Meanwhile, I'm watching a squirrel eat a pomegranate.)

Bo Deadly

I owe a small debt of gratitude to Bo Diddley, who died yesterday. I saw him play the Clapham Grand in about 1995, and was so taken by his three-chord charisma, I sent off a fevered gig review to Mojo. They liked it, but didn't have room, but would I like to write about a compilation of Pet Shop Boys b-sides instead? Thus was I introduced to the bizarre mindset of music journalism. No Bo, probably no earnest tomes about Radiohead and all that malarkey. I thank you, Mr Diddley, even if nobody else does. In fact, if it's all the same by you, I might even relax that pesky self-imposed YouTube prohibition.



PS: Musical genius from the polar opposite end of the spectrum; Radio 4's Lost Albums strand goes all alt. hist. on us, and forces us to wonder how modern culture might have mapped out had Stephen Duffy never left Duran Duran. (Repeated on Saturday, or online here for the next week.)

PPS: "Polar opposite end of the spectrum"??? A scrambled metaphor with a side order of cliché. Apologies.

Alone again or

Yet more proof, if any were needed, that the Daily Telegraph does the most fabulous obituaries on the planet. This time it's the theatre director Frith Banbury, who went to Stowe School:

"He ploughs a lonely furrow," observed his headmaster, JF Roxburgh. "You know what this means?" thundered Rear-Admiral Banbury [Frith's father]. "It means the other boys don't like you."

"But father," replied the young Banbury, "I thought it meant that I didn't like the other boys."

Farewell, Chairman Humph

It's very sad that Humphrey Lyttelton has died, but I'm sure he would have relished the absurdity of having his obituary credited to someone who predeceased him.

And I know I'm not supposed to be posting YouTube clips, but everything about this seems so appropriate, right down to the horrible sweater.

A last walk into the wind

Marcel Marceau died yesterday. I was lucky enough to see him at Sadler's Wells when I was about 12, and I'll never forget his 'maskmaker' routine. He played a craftsman who put on a smiling mask of his own design, and then couldn't take it off; his despair was communicated by his body alone, as his face maintained a serene grin.

He served in the French Resistance during World War II, as did Samuel Beckett. I like to imagine the two of them being sent to blow up a railway line together.

Bakunin would have loved it

Anthony H Wilson, 1950-2007.

Tambourine players of the world unite

I've always been fascinated by the people on the margins of big events, the observers, the sidemen. Maybe it's because the first proper, grown-up play I saw was Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, well before I ever read Hamlet. My favourite poem is The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock; my favourite novel is Vile Bodies. All are about people who look on as big stuff happens, beyond their influence, and almost - but not quite - beyond their comprehension.

Sheridan Morley, who died last week, was a man who spent most of his life writing about the theatre. Even when he created his own shows, they were made up of bits of other people's stuff. I'm sure his was a full and satisfying life, but I couldn't help noticing that the bulk of his Telegraph obituary was taken up with his own recollections about other people's (Coward, Olivier, Gielgud, et al) witticisms. Patiently waiting in the wings, Dictaphone at hand, Morley seems to fade into the shadows, even in what should be his big send-off. Boswell to a hundred Johnsons, he lives on only as a medium for everyone else's one-liners.

"Once, crossing Leicester Square, Morley and Coward saw a poster for an adventure movie starring Michael Redgrave and Dirk Bogarde entitled The Sea Shall Not Have Them. 'I fail to see why not,' Coward remarked. 'Everybody else has.'"

Wonder if he'd collected any amusing aperçus about Iraq...

Of books and Bert

As I suggested a few days ago, the Web has given us unlimited new ways to waste our time. I found a new one the other day; the annoyingly compulsive LibraryThing. If you haven't discovered it yet, it's an online catalogue for your book collection. It sounds like the ultimate solipsist's daydream, where you can sit at your keyboard imagining yourself as some sort of tweedy don, bowtie and half-moon specs askew, sitting among your slightly foxed first editions and heavily-notated editions of Ovid and Wittgenstein (pencilled marginalia: "true - so true!").

But it's not like that, of course. On LibraryThing, your own list of books isn't in a vacuum. You're not just putting up things that you happen to own; you're putting up components of your cultural identity. Just as when you're appearing on a TV show, or writing a blog, you're creating an on-line simulacrum of yourself. And this is where things get fun. How honest are you? Do you simply stick up all the printed matter on your shelves, from Proust to pizza flyers? Or do you rationalise, consciously or unconsciously filtering out the dross to buff up your on-line identity, making your 'self' seem cleverer or cooler or sexier. As I've mentioned before, my shelves bear two copies of The Da Vinci Code. But, um, well, yeah, neither of them are actually mine - they were left behind by visitors. And they don't really sit very well next to the Austers and Murakamis, do they?

Your bibliodigital identity is constantly up there for admiration or derision, and above all, comparison. Alongside your user profile is a list of "Users with your books", which lists, in descending order, the users whose catalogues have most matches with your own; in a way, it's a much more sophisticated variation of those favourite books/films/music fields on the Blogger profile. And, inevitably, once I'd stuck in 300 titles, the member at third place on my list (matching a quarter of my entries) was a bloke I knew from university. Simulacrum and reality collide like Zidane and Materazzi.

More doodles in the margin of the last few days: apartheid gets the reality TV treatment; Bob Dylan declares that "I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past twenty years, really" (this from a man who lost his spark when he fell off his bike in '66, and don't give me Blood on the Tracks - one and a half great tracks do not a great album make); and I'm sure the intentions are good, but Ruth Kelly's Commission on Integration and Cohesion sounds disturbingly similar to the Taleban's Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice - and both sound like discarded song titles by Heaven 17.

And the obits seem to be piling up. The sad duty falls on me to record the passing of Bertie Bucket, aged about 12-ish, part Jack Russell, part Norfolk, part bundle of damp straw. He'd been ill for years, but rejoiced in disproving the pessimism of successive vets. They gave him three months, seven years ago. The end, when it came, was mercifully swift and apparently painless.

Bert brought love and laughter to all who encountered him, and was particularly popular with local urchins, who would follow him, chortling and pointing at his stumpy tail. His hobbies included eating things he wasn't supposed to, chasing crows, sunbathing, having his chest scratched, and wearing his smart blue jumper. Thanks to Small Boo's mum and sister, who had shared the exasperating but often highly comical task of tending to his peculiar needs since we moved abroad. It is apparently modish at times like these to suggest that pet and owner will meet "at the rainbow bridge" but Bert would have treated such hippy nonsense with a resonant fart. I'll miss the little bugger more than I can say.

PS: Small Boo would like to register her disgust that I am transforming a personal tragedy into a media event.

RCM RIP

Leeds United chairman Ken Bates has been accused of racism for describing his successors at Chelsea as shysters. As far as I'm aware, the word has no anti-Semitic connotations; in fact, "shyster" is a Yiddish word and, oddly enough, people who speak Yiddish aren't all that prone to using anti-Semitic epithets. Is Bates being accused of racism simply for appropriating the language of his opponents? And, to be frank, if I were an anti-Semite, Leeds would be the last place I'd move to. It all sounds completely meshugge.

Also... following on from the Old/New Media musings I posted yesterday, a fun piece from the Graun about how Hollywood is bypassing print critics in favour of internet-driven word of mouth. But interestingly, they only seem to do this for popcorn schlock; films aimed at people who can read without moving their lips still get the old media treatment. Maybe with print critics, you know the opinion is coming from someone who has seen at least one film that is either a) free of CGI; b) black and white; or c) foreign.

And, in the skateboarding duck slot, the story of the Filipino judge and the three imaginary mystic dwarves reaches its conclusion. For further details, read his blog.

As I said in the last post, I usually blog about stuff, rather than about myself. Not that I have any problem with old-school, diary-type blogging, or confessionals, or reminiscences, or those that give intimate details of one's own sexual exploits. (Is there a word for those? Blogjobs?) It's just that I'd rather write about Belle and Sebastian, or Kandinsky. Or even Ken Bates.

But, for a change, two bits of moderately personal importance. One is to note that the guy who's being held in connection with the JonBenet Ramsey case was arrested about 50 metres from my front door.

The other is rather less lurid and, to me at least, far sadder; the death of Campbell MacKay. Campbell was one of my English teachers at Appleby College in Ontario, 20 years ago. He directed me in his never-to-be-forgotten, Mafia-themed production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; he got me reading Joyce and Beckett and Burgess and Larkin. When people talk about inspirational teachers, you get the image of Robin Williams doing John Wayne impressions, and kids standing on desks. Campbell wasn't like that. He was a grey-bearded, chainsmoking, clarinet-playing Glaswegian, with the lugubrious demeanour of a slightly hungover bloodhound. He was one of the best teachers I've ever had, and I've been lucky with teachers. He was also a kind, funny, clever, gentle gentleman. Tonight, a glass will be raised.

"But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could."
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The Piper

I'm filled with self-loathing. I have no sense of proportion, no sense of the meaning of grief. At least 100 people have been murdered in a series of bomb attacks in Mumbai. And what's really upsetting me is that bloody Syd Barrett's died.


"It's awfully considerate of you to think of me here
And I'm most obliged to you for making it clear
That I'm not here."

'Jugband Blues' (1968)