About dead famous people

It’s all starting to feel a bit 2016 again, as on successive days we have to process the deaths of Dolly Parton, Tim Curry and Yayoi Kusama, three people who in their own very different ways, channelled their art as much into being themselves as into doing or making stuff. We still have the music, the movies, the art but not the blonde locks, the raised eyebrow, the fact of living in a psychiatric hospital. And of course we have the vexed question of how important each was, how much bandwidth the media should devote, why they get more or fewer column inches than, say, the Belgian lobber of custard pies Noël Godin or the Butcher of Bosnia Radko Mladic or the bodies now being pulled out of the Nepalese mud.

And in the midst of this (specifically, between Dolly and Tim), I go to a celebration of someone who pushed off a few years ago, Martin Amis. Well, some were celebrating him but there was a ghost at the feast, albeit one who‘d been invited. Will Self (for it was he), held court for about 40 minutes in a Soho bar, laying into what he claimed to be the inflation of Amis’s reputation, the various infelicities of his later career, his political right turn, even the fact that he couldn’t read French. And then Self, rendered even more haggard and baleful than before by his recent illness, acknowledged that, yes, Amis’s first five or six novels were actually bloody brilliant and it still felt like a stab wound.

Maybe he can do Dolly Parton next.

About bad TV

A very odd article in The Guardian, about TV shows that the writers can no longer bear to watch. Of the dramas and comedies under discussion, five (The Office, This Life, Entourage, Euphoria, Coupling) now fail to pass muster because the behaviours and attitudes they depict, mainly with regard to gender and/or sexuality, are bad. The other two (Good Omens, House of Cards) are dismissed because real people connected with them (Neil Gaiman, Kevin Spacey) are alleged to have done bad things. Not one of these show is rendered unwatchable because it’s, aesthetically speaking, a bad work of art, because the writing or acting or direction or special effects or choice of lame 90s indie music on the soundtrack is below par.

We seem to have slipped backwards a century or two, to a point where Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Tess of the d’Urbervilles or Wuthering Heights were castigated for their deviation from righteousness rather than their thin characters or predictable plotting. Criticism is dead. Long live the new moralism.

About Morrissey’s voice

From Michael Bracewell’s novella The Smiths, in which the narrator describes first hearing ‘Hand in Glove’:

And was there some stratum of attitude, somewhere in the lower register, that brought to mind the interior monologue of a drily cynical supply teacher?

About Anish Kapoor

I wrote a few months ago about my disappointment when viewing the Northern Lights, and becoming aware that no reality could match the psychedelic strangeness of the photos.

Anish Kapoor’s retrospective at the Hayward, on the other hand, offers the opposite. You are confronted with visual paradoxes, flat surfaces – especially those painted in his beloved Vantablack – that feel like tunnels into another dimension, breast-like bulges that dissolve into flatness when faced head-on. And none of this is reproducible in pixels. The larger installations, meanwhile, are crammed into the available space like prisoners who’ve outgrown their cells, defying the limits of an ordinary viewfinder. 

It’s a show that seems to set itself against Instagram culture. You can give an idea, a glimpse of it, but to experience it you really need to be there in there, confronting the physicality of the thing. It’s outmoded, it’s a bit elitist (the show costs over £20, and that’s assuming you can get to London) and it’s entirely correct.

About Pynchonian names

It’s been a while since I’ve celebrated the glory of real names that sound as if they were invented by Thomas Pynchon or Kurt Vonnegut, and then two come along at once. Please be upstanding for Manila-based crimebuster Winston Casio and the doyenne of indolent teachers everywhere, Tandy L’Enfant!

About The Goodies

In the wake of Bill Oddie’s death, there’s been much musing about how the show for which he’ll be best remembered, The Goodies, has generally been seen as less significant, less groundbreaking, less serious (if a comedy show can be serious) and above all less clever than Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

For what it’s worth, I was always in the Goodies camp but that’s probably a question of chronology as I was just that tiny bit too young to appreciate the Pythons when they first appeared. Ecky Thump, though, might well have been crafted for seven-year-old me.

Not that it was really a kids’ show. The Goodies came from the same Oxbridge smartarse stable as their Python rivals and were regularly breaking fourth walls and giving it a bit of the old metafiction. And not just on TV either. The above clip is from the Cor!! annual from 1974, where our heroes work out that they’re not going to die purely from the geography of the comic strip layout. Many, many years later I learned that this was called metafiction. Which does suggest that an English literature course is less about teaching you new things, more about finding labels for what you already know.

About Diana and Rachael and Caitlin

I’m really looking forward to reading Rachael Stirling’s book about her glorious, brilliant mum, but I’m not sure I understand why the name of The Woman Who Thinks The Book Is Really Great is approximately four times bigger than the name of The Woman Who Actually Wrote The Bloody Thing.

About The Odyssey

 

I’ve said before that the loudest voices in the room when it comes to the erosion of what might loosely be known as Western culture are those who never showed the slightest interest in celebrating it. The Daily Mail is a repeat offender, whining when universities cut Chaucer from the curriculum (how are those market forces looking now?) while offering a world view that holds the antics of Kim Kardashian to be far more significant than any kind of book.

And now we find that Elon Musk, in response to what he sees as casting infelicities in Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of the Odyssey, will be using AI to concoct another version that is, in his words, “historically accurate”. I await his Laestrygonians with interest.