About Shakespeare and Winterson

Not a little consternation a few days ago when contestants on BBC1’s evergreen quiz show Pointless were tasked with identifying a Shakespeare play with ‘W’ or ‘S’ in the titles and half of them couldn’t manage it. (Guesses included ‘The Inspectors’, ‘The Story of the Witches’ and my favourite, ‘King Richards’.) 

Colour me distinctly unsurprised. The oft-trumpeted policy that “every British child learns Shakespeare” really means that every British child spends a year being fed enough pre-chewed gobbets of either Romeo and Juliet or The Merchant of Venice (neither of which has ‘W’ or ‘S’ in the title) to enable them to pass a GCSE, after which they don’t need to read another Shakespeare play again, ever.

Not everyone is relaxed about these gaping holes in our cultural knowledge, hence the so-called Illiterate Boyfriend trend, in which women test their beaux on the pronunciation of difficult words. It’s meant to highlight widening education gaps between the genders (and let’s just say that it’s not women who come out worse) but it should be noted that of the three failures in the Pointless debacle, only one was male.

But I do wonder what normal people (if such creatures exist) really think about readers or, more specifically male readers. I don’t think we’re yet at the point Gary Shteyngart predicted, where people can confidently express nausea at the very notion of books, but I am sometimes conscious when reading in public of what might best be described as sideways glances, and not the nice kind. Today I found myself on a train, opposite a woman even older than me, who seemed to be scowling at the tome I was carrying. To be fair, I’m not sure whether it was the fact that I was reading that annoyed her, or the specific book, which happened to be Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, once notorious for its depiction of sapphic naughtiness. So, just to irritate her even more, here’s a bit that made me laugh.

Somehow I made it to the altar. The priest was very fat and kept getting fatter, like bubble gum you blow. Finally we came to the moment, ‘You may kiss the bride.’ My new husband turned to me, and here were a number of possibilities. Sometimes he was blind, sometimes a pig, sometimes my mother, sometimes the man from the post office, and once, just a suit of clothes with nothing inside. I told my mother about it, and she said it was because I ate sardines for supper. The next night I ate sausages, but I still had the dream.

About killing books

The news that Russia has started targeting attacks on Ukraine’s printing presses and publishing companies – just as the school year is about to begin – should surprise nobody. Meanwhile, we have a US President who finds it easier to communicate his aspirations in AI gibberish than anything we might identify as language. And amidst all this, the news comes in that a woman who devoted her later years to encouraging children to read has been laid to rest. It’s a post-literate world, from the top down.

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.