About tradition, etc

Recent stuff that doesn’t justify a post on its own, all sort of smooshed up together: an occasional series.

Alexei Sayle, from his current radio show: “Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people.” Which leads, in a way, to the food historian Alberto Grandi, who has declared that any number of Italian culinary traditions don’t really exist, or are American, whichever accrues the most media coverage.

And I suspect Dr Grandi would have got on well with Ashley Atkin, who was disciplined for turning up to her job in a Cheshire primary school having got outside a bottle of wine or more. Although, to be honest, I recall any number of teachers who could only function when rat-arsed....

About LibGen

Every time someone reveals a massive cache of copyrighted material that’s being used as raw material for AI training, without any thought of compensation to the authors, I join in with the performative outrage, while at the same time being slightly miffed that nothing from my oeuvre was thought worthy of ripping off. I suppose it’s like having a phone or a bike that’s just too old and/or crap to nick. But now I look through LibGen, the vast database of samizdat that Meta has used for its own murky ends, and three whole works of mine are there. At last I can meld my righteous indignation with the warm glow of smugness.

About literary fiction

Back in the olden days I started a blog about The Da Vinci Code, attempting to deconstruct exactly what Dan Brown was doing right/wrong, attracting millions of readers while at the same time breaking pretty much every rule of half-decent writing (including those followed by other writers of popular, non-literary fiction). I gave up, of course, but I was never dissuaded from my initial premise that the book is badly written. What might have shifted is whether, in a post-literate era, that matters any more.

And now, after all these years, in The Spectator of all places, one Sean Thomas reads the last rites to what may once have been identified as good books, the ones that dominated the cultural agenda in the 80s and 90s. Except, he’s quite glad to see the genre go, even though he (like me) was a bit of an Amis fanboy back in the day. And what was it turned his head around? Why, The Da Vinci Code, of course, because it privileged plot over navel-gazing. But what about the writing, the thing that made critics’ teeth hurt just from thinking about it? Thomas describes that as “all quite workmanlike”.

It’s not though, is it? It’s crap. Go back to my blog for myriad examples. I can only infer that Mr Thomas has had some unfortunate run-ins with workmen.

PS: Just before posting, I Googled Sean Thomas and discovered that he’s the son of DM Thomas, whose novel The White Hotel was pipped to the Booker Prize by Midnight’s Children. From which I won’t draw any conclusions. I’ll just leave it there.

About old films

Interesting/depressing article by Benjamin Svetkey in the Hollywood Reporter highlighting the fact that there are barely any films on Netflix that are more than 50 years old. As he points out, any number of budding cinéastes and auteurs honed their own aesthetics via the serendipity of late-night TV, a set of happy accidents that may be unavailable to the next generation. I had similar experiences, discovering Wilder, Hitchcock, Buñuel, Astaire/Rogers and 1930s Universal horror thanks to the eccentric generosity of BBC2 (and the absence of much useful competition). Svetkey laments:

Obviously, it’s decided that making and streaming its own content, rather than paying licensing fees for older films, is a more profitable business model. And that’s OK for Netflix. Nobody appointed the streamer guardian of the cinematic temple... But it’s worth noting what’s being lost in the process, as streaming and its cold algorithmic imperatives continue to take over the culture and turn us all into cinematic illiterates.

To be fair, other streaming services such as Amazon Prime offer a rather better selection of films that have the sheer bloody cheek to be old, or black-and-white, or even foreign. But it doesn’t make it that easy to find them, unless you know what you’re looking for, which rather defeats the object, doesn’t it?

PS: And now I realise that when I was watching all those glorious old movies for the first time, most of them were still under 50.

About Vonnegut and Herron

I’m back to my bad old habit of thinking I’m re-reading a book and then realising, often to my shame, that it’s actually my first time (did I just see the film?) and this time it’s Slaughterhouse-Five. And I see something on the first few pages that I’m sure I would have noticed it first time round, although when first time round happened (although, do please keep up, there wasn’t really a first time round) I wouldn’t have spotted the apparent prefiguring of Twitter and the like, because Twitter and the like didn’t exist. Anyway, the quote:

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

Also, prompted of course by the Gary Oldman-fronted TV series, I have been dipping a cautious toe in Mick Herron’s Slow Horses universe and in the first volume we encounters a downgraded spook reduced to tracking “the mutant hillbillies of the blogosphere” and then

To pass for real in the world of the web she’d had to forget everything she’d ever known about grammar, wit, spelling, manners and literary criticism.

and my mind goes back to the late Noughties, to what we felt at the time was The Golden Age Of Blogging, or maybe even of Meta-Blogging since much of what we typed about was the nature of blogging itself. What was it? What distinguished it from journalism, of old media? If a representative of old media launched a blog and it all went horribly wrong, were we supposed to point and laugh, or explain nicely how to do it better (hoping there might be a real live job at the end of it)? 

And then it all stopped. 

So it goes.

PS: And further into the Vonnegut, I find this:

The spit hit Roland Weary’s shoulder, gave Weary a fourragère of snot and blutwurst and tobacco juice and Schnapps.

And I wonder whether I should really have called this blog “A Fourragère of Snot” or “Snot and Blutwurst” or “Blutwurst and Tobacco Juice” and, for the time being at least, it’s got a subhead again. And yes, I did have to look up what “fourragère” means. And so will you.

About Gregg Jevin

Today is the 13th anniversary of the comedian Michael Legge creating and killing the enigma that wasn’t Gregg Jevin in a single tweet and as such a piquant reminder of when Twitter was good. And, yes, I only know this because Facebook reminded me. 

About fascination and muzzling

The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.

—Bertrand Russell, Freedom and Government, 1940

About writing and reading

Dipping into John Walsh’s memoir about the literary scene of the 1980s and two fragments of the introduction leap out. The first is a quote from The Mikado, which rather reinforces my journalistic instinct that when the precise language used is not the most important issue, some stylistic burnishing is acceptable, so long as the meaning survives. (See my previous rant about semantic bleaching and the hack’s duty to prevent it.)

Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

And then, as teenaged Walsh determines to avail himself of the books deemed to be classics (Austen, Dickens, Forster, etc) he has a moment of self-doubt, something that hangs over any consideration of the canon:

A certain specific worry nagged at me: what if I didn’t enjoy the books that the world had admired for centuries? What if I didn’t have the taste (or intelligence) to appreciate them?

To which of course we could offer Hirsch’s notion of cultural literacy and to suggest that in many ways, it’s enough to know, however approximately, what they’re about; or failing that, simply that they exist.