The customer is always irrelevant

Among the many writers (of varying degrees of up-their-own-arse-ness) discussing their craft in The Guardian a few days back, it’s the late, glorious Beryl Bainbridge who says the most by analysing the least:

I don’t write for readers; I don’t think many writers do – I don’t think any. They say they do, don't they? But... well, I only write for myself, and when somebody says: “Oh, your book has given me so much pleasure,” I just think, “How peculiar”. I don't know what to say. Of course I don't say that; I smile and say “How nice” – but I think I’d have written books whether they were published or not. I just liked writing.

So presumably the whole concept of vanity publishing left her entirely befuddled.

Art is dead, don’t print its corpse

On the evidence of this selection, the output of Camden’s Poster Workshop in the 60s and 70s rather lacked the insouciant humour that distinguished the images that Parisian designers were coming up with at the same time. This Anglo-Saxon dourness could perhaps be forgiven if they’d actually managed to foment a successful revolution, but their efforts were as doomed as those of their French contemporaries. If you’re going to fail, people, fail with style.

Melonfarmer

Two recent responses to the increasing levels of rudery in our public discourse: the Daily Telegraph’s Neil Midgely informs us of the contextually justified “fuck”s that will pepper a forthcoming Radio 3 adaptation of Wuthering Heights, inevitably prompting (profanity-free) outrage across the breakfast tables of middle England; and in the New York Times, Jon Pareles notes that three songs in the Billboard Top 10 (by Cee-Lo Green, Enrique Iglesias and Pink) are similarly blessed, although the precise volume of soy latte being spat out in Manhattan is not recorded.

The problem in both cases is that the journalists in question find themselves unable to spell out the word that provoked the articles in the first place: presumably this is down to the policies of the papers that employ them. Midgely opts for the tedious “f-word”, and then resorts to “[blank]” when discussing Emily Brontë’s own self-censorship, although it’s not clear which words these blanks are replacing. Pareles is more eloquent, referring to “variations on a familiar, emphatic, percussive four-letter word.”

Of course, in writing around such unmentionables, both writers are faced with a paradox: readers who aren’t familiar with the word in question will be utterly baffled by the article; those who know it and aren’t bothered by it would have been relaxed if the veil of good taste had been lifted; and those who do know the word but don’t like it being used will have been reminded of its existence even if they haven’t read it. Pareles for one is aware of the ridiculousness of the situation:

Even if the original lyrics are off-limits to old media, it’s clear to everyone that the profane versions of the songs are going to be heard. The enforced innocence of broadcasting is no longer a cultural firewall; it’s barely an inconvenience. 

There’s a debate to be had about whether old media should give in to the barbarians, or instead maintain their decorum and thus demonstrate why in a multi-channel universe, the Times and the Telegraph and Top 40 radio are still special. As Pareles suggests, this is part of a wider question, of what newspapers and other mainstream providers are really for these days; does it still matter that they’re maintaining standards if nobody else gives a fuck? Not to address this is just f–––ing while Rome burns.

Reflections in a golden handshake

Not only did Elizabeth Taylor outlive her own obituarist, she was also – at her own insistence – late for her own funeral. Slightly less classy is the owner of a Warhol portrait of the late Mrs Fortensky, who has decided that now might be a good time to sell it. He’s a hedge fund manager, you know.

Boxing day

To remind us why we care so much about Japan.

Haunted all my dreams

If I enjoy a book or a film or a piece of music, I often find that I want to sample more product by the same creator. I’m sure this is quite normal behaviour, but more often than not, it results in crushing disappointment. This has been happening quite a lot lately. The most recent works by Jonathan Coe and David Mitchell fell flat, the former because of the clumsy addition of a bit of metafictional self-reference in the closing stages; the latter, conversely, because the book was entirely lacking in the structural cleverness which made Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas so compelling, and ended up like a cross between a textbook on economic history and Shogun. I also finally got round to watching ‘What Did You Do In the War, Daddy?’, the final, un-broadcast episode of Secret Army, and soon realised that the reason it was never broadcast was not because of its virulent anti-Communism, but because it was crap. And then there was The Illusionist, which wasn’t crap, but because it was directed by Sylvain Chomet (director of  The Triplets of Belleville), and based on a script by Jacques Tati, whose Les vacances de M Hulot is still one of my top 10 movies of all time, it should have been astounding, a combination of deadpan surrealism and existential melancholy and a bit of slapstick, Gilliam meets Bergman meets Keaton. And it was quite good, which really isn’t good enough.

OK, let’s throw this out to the people formerly known as the audience. Is there an author or film-maker or musician or tennis player or pastry chef or masseur who has never, ever disappointed you? Or is there someone you keep going back to, despite the fact that his or her mojo clearly stopped working years ago, and you know it’ll never come back, and you’ve no idea why you still bother but, hey, it’s Woody Allen or Jeanette Winterson or The Wurzels and for the sake of the old times you just can’t let go?

Big big honey blues

Something I wrote for CNNGo, that might upset members of the ghastly misogynist failure community.

To shake the tattered arras

The charms of a Somerset village may be extinguished by the proposed building of a vast housing development, we are told. This would really only be a story of local interest – albeit one that exemplifies all sorts of deliciously English conundra about the competing claims of class and aspiration and ‘heritage’ and cold, hard cash – except that the village under threat is East Coker, which shares its name with a poem by TS Eliot. He first visited the place in 1937, when he discovered his ancestors had lived there in the 17th century, before emigrating to New England; his ashes are interred in the village church.

This connection is strong enough to have provoked the concern of the TS Eliot Society of America, which has added its voice to the usual hubbub of opponents to such change, from devotees of architectural history to people worried about the value of their own houses. (Only in Britain is the phrase ‘affordable housing’ a pejorative.) Now, I could understand the Elioteers’ concern if their man had actually lived and worked in East Coker, if its skies and fields and stone and timber had seeped into his poetic soul. But it was only really the idea of East Coker that prompted him to write the poem, its small role in his own heritage and identity, its place in the continuum of life. Had his family come from Nempnett Thrubwell or Huish Champflower or Wellington Without, who can say that the piece would have been radically different?

It’s interesting to consider what Eliot’s own reaction might have been. No doubt he was a frightful snob: apparently, when the first edition of ‘East Coker’ sold 12,000 copies, he declared that this proved what a bad poem it was. And I’m sure he would have been baffled by the success of Cats, and found the notion of Andrew Lloyd Webber getting a peerage as utterly wrong. But despite his High Tory, High Anglican instincts, he was also deeply impressed by the Vedic notion of impermanence: as he says in the poem, “Houses live and die.” Although, as if to admonish anyone who wants to read too much into his own lines, later on he also says “The poetry does not matter.”

And here he is in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture:

Neither a classless society, nor a society of strict and impenetrable social barriers is good; each class should have constant additions and defections; the classes, while remaining distinct, should be able to mix freely; and they should have a community of culture with each other which will give them something in common, more fundamental than the community which each class has with its counterpart in another society.

Eliot may have liked East Coker as it was in 1937, but he would have been aware that it had changed enormously since his forebears left it in the 1660’s; and that it would inevitably change again and keep changing. Also from the poem:

Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces...

Or, since I stopped writing poetry years ago: Shit Happens.