About “Harry Palmer”

The character of Harry Palmer, as played by Michael Caine in three movies in the 1960s, is rightly identified as anti-Bond, in that he is defiantly working-class, operating in a far grubbier milieu than the Etonian 007 knows, and has rather less success with women. There’s a crossover with his more famous fellow-agent in that he’s apparently something of a foodie (although the hand breaking the eggs in his first outing, The Ipcress File (1965), belongs to the character’s creator Len Deighton, who doubled as a food writer for The Observer).

The label of Harry Palmer was of course created for the movie; in Deighton’s novels he’s not even blessed with a name. (He’s also about a decade older than the film character, and comes from Burnley in Lancashire of all places.) And, re-reading The Ipcress File (1962), it becomes clear that the enigmatic spook has interests in far more than the sophisticated grub he buys in Soho delis and the vichyssoise he enjoys in the Officers’ Mess. He reads the New Statesman, and does the crossword; knows pre-Islamic mythology and Mozart symphonies and the dates of the Fourth Crusade. Bond, by comparison, is rarely seen even glancing at a book. When a supercilious colleague assumes Not-Palmer is unaware of the geography of northern Switzerland, our hero deadpans, “Forgive me if my lack of ignorance is an embarrassment to you.” He would have been bloody great on University Challenge.

About Zola (three things)

A couple of years ago I bought a cheap copy of Emile Zola’s The Masterpiece (L’Oeuvre), prompted by a Cezanne exhibition at Tate Modern. (Zola and Cezanne’s friendship ended because of what the latter perceived to be his negative depiction in the novel.)  And, inevitably, it slipped under a pile of other books and I’ve only just read it.

A few thoughts from the first couple of chapters:

1. Back in the days when Dan Brown was A Thing, I was far from the only one to point and laugh at his gauche telling-not-showing schtick, displayed most notoriously in the first bloody line of The Da Vinci Code when he told you that a character was a renowned curator by introducing him as “Renowned curator Jacques Saunière” (and then killing him). Does Zola do any better? Well, of course he does. After the first sentence introduces the central character, Claude, we get:

He was an artist and liked to ramble around Paris till the small hours, but wandering about the Halles on that hot July evening he had lost all sense of time.

(Il s'était oublié à rôder dans les Halles, par cette nuit brûlante de juillet, en artiste flâneur, amoureux du Paris nocturne...)

So you get the information, but there’s a reason, a context for your getting the information. Even if it relies on the stereotype of the artist wandering around the city at night, up to no good. Which may, in Claude’s case, be accurate...

2. Claude meets a distressed young woman and lets her stay the night in his studio. She is nervous about the situation, and he is annoyed by her nervousness, the fact that she thinks he might want to take advantage of her, but then:

In the hothouse heat of the sunlit room, the girl had thrown back the sheet and, exhausted after a night without sleep, was now slumbering peacefully, bathed in sunlight, and so lost to consciousness that not a sign of a tremor disturbed her naked innocence. During her sleepless tossing the shoulder-straps of her chemise had come unfastened and the one on her left shoulder had slipped off completely, leaving her bosom bare. Her flesh was faintly golden and silk-like in its texture, her firm little breasts, tipped with palest rose-colour, thrust upwards with all the freshness of spring. Her sleepy head lay back upon the pillow, her right arm folded under it, thus displaying her bosom in a line of trusting, delicious abandon, clothed only in the dark mantle of her loose black hair.

Good heavens, that’s pretty racy stuff for the 1880s. But what does Claude do? He begins to draw her still-sleeping form, and carries on after she wakes, gruffly overriding her objections. All sorts of modern concerns about consent and agency and surreptitious image-making come into play. But he doesn’t touch her little breasts, only draws them, so that’s OK (or at least Claude himself thinks that’s OK, but Zola stays out of it).

3. Claude and his chums are at the vanguard of something that may turn out to be Impressionism, but with the names changed, and he wants to present a sense of authenticity, as distinct from “the run-of-the-mill, made-to-measure École des Beaux-Arts stuff”. But, in his mind at least, the logical end of this is the triumph of the mundane, familiar image that Warhol might have envisaged:

The day was not far off when one solitary, original carrot might be pregnant with revolution!

And later, he comes close to precognition of Duchamp:

...a naked woman’s body with neither head nor shoulders, a mutilated trunk, a vague, corpselike shape, the dead flesh of the beauty of his dreams.

Tell you what, it’s better than Dan Brown, isn’t it?

About Kant

I keep returning to the matter of Radio 4, pretty much the last remnant of Reithian values, and how in its desperation to remain relevant to Gens Y and Z, its presenters apparently feel the need to explain cultural references that their parents and grandparents would have taken in their stride.

And then this happens. In the lexicography-cum-comedy show Unspeakable, the comedian Russell Kane explains how he and his wife, when in the presence of their children, use the name “Immanuel” to describe someone who might in adult company attract a rather more robust epithet. What’s interesting is that the audience gets the gag with the barest of clues; all Kane tells us is that Immanuel is a philosopher who wrote the Critique of Pure Reason and the ribald chortles begin. I’m not suggesting that everybody who rocks up to a BBC comedy recording is totally conversant with what Kant has to say about metaphysics (I’m certainly not) but they have enough basic, possibly superficial understanding – what ED Hirsch would call cultural literacy – to ensure they laugh in the right place.

I wonder what it would take for producers and controllers to understand that listeners at home can cope with the same sort of thing.

PS: Vaguely related: investigating the war on so-called performative reading; and when AI destroys one’s ability to flirt, let alone write a college essay.

PPS: From the vaults: when I defended Paul Morley from the Philistines.

PPPS: An argument that men don’t read books any more; and an article on beach reads (Kinsella beats Tolstoy) that seems to take that contention for granted.

About Kneecap

From what I’ve heard of Kneecap’s music, I don’t particularly care for it and wouldn’t want to go to one of their gigs. And their political stances on Ireland and Palestine carry the scent of the obnoxious self-confidence and certainty of the student activist, when both issues demand nuance.

That said, they have played the recent spate of controversies like Karajan drove the Berlin Philharmonic and frankly who can blame them? Consciously or not, they are following the tradition of the Sex Pistols (swearing at Bill Grundy) and John Lennon (bigger than Jesus) and whatever the rights or wrongs or realities of the situation, the politicians and journalists demanding they be banned will ultimately be seen as the fuddy-duddy bad guys. When so much contemporary music seems to consist of bland platitudes and whiny solecism, at least they’re saying something about something that matters. I’m glad they exist. 

PS: And, in case there’s any doubt, calls for Rod Stewart to be banned from Glastonbury should also be ignored, despite his support for the preposterous Farage and his acolytes. Basically, censorship in all but the most extreme cases is usually a bad thing and inevitably causes more harm to the censor than the censored. The fact that Stewart hasn’t made a decent record since about 1974 is probably more significant...

About blown minds

I’ve remarked in recent-ish posts about the extent to which online journalism has become the province of a sort of performative artlessness, where the banausic details of an event (in this case a Bob Dylan concert) take precedence over any kind of critical analysis; and also how an individual’s own ignorance (in this case about a word coined in 1960) is set up as default state for the rest of humanity, and anyone who knows more is an object of suspicion and loathing.

These two trends have met and had a big, ugly baby in the shape of a Buzzfeed article by one Caroline Bologna, who claims to find her mind blown by the information that “a.m.” and “p.m.” don’t stand for “after midnight” and “past midday” after all. I mean, that’s not a passing comment, that’s what the article’s about. It has as much weight and value as one of those videos where a Gen-Z influencer gasps and ultimately bursts into tears upon hearing a Kajagoogoo album for the first time. And I wonder what exactly you would need to blow a Buzzfeed’s journalist’s mind. On reflection, a damp drinking straw would do it.

About poems that don’t exist

I remain fascinated by literary and other creative works that acquire added superpowers by virtue of not existing and as such I’m delighted to offer a plug to this triumph of passive-aggressive sarcasm:

Release the Sausages! is an anthology of poems, with absolutely no poems in it. It is a celebration of the first twelve months of Starmer’s government – a monument to the towering contribution to socialist thought of Sir Keir Starmer KCB QC, and his decisive, principled and unifying part in the proud history of the British Labour Movement. And it is a moving tribute to his moral integrity and irresistible charisma, warmth and wit... It contains no poems at all, by over 50 poets who have nothing to say about a man who has nothing to say...

About Obama

In the light of the strangely half-assed military parade in Washington over the weekend, here’s something I wrote 17 years ago about how the American populist right perceives even a passing interest in anything foreign as weird and dangerous. The names have changed but very little else has.

Obama's weakness is not that he's black, or young, or left-wing, or that he used cocaine; it's that his background is dangerously cosmopolitan... Why would any sensible person go abroad, where they talk funny and you can't get Cap'n Crunch? What is he? Gay, or French, or something?... And this would explain the paradox by which the supposedly patriotic American right consistently attempts to undermine Vietnam veterans (John Kerry, Max Cleland, even John McCain), while lauding those who avoided serving (Bush, Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, the egregious Saxby Chambliss, et al). These guys weren't cowards, you see: unlike Obama, they just loved America too much to leave it...

About Brian Wilson (four fragments)

2017, Hammersmith Apollo, London. Billed as the last time Brian would play Pet Sounds in London. Brian looks baffled, barely touches his piano, more a protective shield than an instrument. His voice is croaky and hesitant, and Matt Jardine handles the high notes. But in some ways it doesn’t much matter. This is a fan gathering, a chance for us to say thank you, one last time. In the interval, I get chatting to a hardcore devotee, who’s been following the Beach Boys since 1963. He tests me, asking if I know the names of the dogs on Pet Sounds. I pass the test.

2012, Singapore Indoor Stadium. The Beach Boys 50th Anniversary, although most of the band is from Brian’s solo outings. Mike Love is as much smarmy MC as frontman, and even he must realise most of us aren’t here to see him. Bruce offers a luscious ‘Disney Girls’ but all eyes are on the chubby guy on the left of the stage. They’ve scheduled several short breaks in the set and Brian shuffles off in a hurry, as if he’s being chased. They encore with ‘Kokomo’ and I scowl. (Review here.)

A few months later, Mike fires Brian. Or does he?

2002, Royal Festival Hall, London. The greatest gig I’ve ever attended. Two memories stand out. In the second act, the band plays the songs from Pet Sounds in sequence but instead of ‘I Know There’s An Answer’ (side two, track two), he sings ‘Hang On To Your Ego’, the original lyrics that Mike Love nixed because they were too druggy, or too anti-Maharishi, or something. And the crowd roars its approval, because we all hate Mike Love.

And then, during the encores, we’re all dancing insanely to ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ and a small boy, no more than eight, seems even more possessed than us old farts and looks in serious danger of dancing over the balcony to his doom. But at least he’d die happy. No, ecstatic.

1990, Doonesbury. Andy Lippincott is the first openly gay character in an American syndicated comic strip, and the first to succumb to AIDS. In his last days, he is serenaded by the just-released CD version of Pet Sounds and after he dies, a pad is found in his hand, bearing his last, scribbled words:

“BRIAN WILSON IS GOD.”