About exceedingly wide paintings

I recently returned from Madrid, which is full of excellent food and splendid dogs and pedestrian crossings that make pee-yooooo noises like Ring My Bell by Anita Ward.

There is also, of course, art. Since 1992, Picasso’s Guernica has resided at the Reina Sofia museum, its monochrome depiction of man-made hell as powerful as ever. At least, I think it is; it’s difficult to tell, under the scrum of selfie-takers, even though its proportions (more than twice as wide as it’s tall) don’t easily fit the iPhone lens. I guess as long as you’ve got a screaming woman or a melting horse sprouting from your ear or shoulder, you don’t need the whole thing. Your proximity to great art has been recorded and that’s what matters.

Over at the more staid Prado, cameras are still forbidden, which is possibly why my two favourite paintings there (like Anish Kapoor’s works), define themselves by their dimensional awkwardness. I give you Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath, from the Black Paintings

and The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist and Herod’s Banquet by Bartholomeus Strobel

neither of which would look great on Instagram and to be honest they look pretty rubbish on Blogger as well. Which is a good thing, obviously.

About literacy (the end of)

From James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages, reminding us that the current state of illiteracy may just be a norm to which we are reverting:

A world in which everyone can read seems obvious to us now but it is an astonishingly recent phenomenon. Much of the history of reading might be characterised less as a story of social and cultural change and more as the progress of an esoteric secret passed down by elites.

It’s an eagerly anticipated book and everyone seems to be talking about it, by which I mean that people who are worried about the decline in reading (as evidenced by the latest PISA statistics) are talking about it by which I mean very few people at all give a toss. And as John Harris has suggested, the fact that it runs to little more than 200 pages might be an acknowledgement that some battles have already been lost. 

Much of the narrative focuses on the distractions offered by TikTok and doomscrolling, and some governments are actively attempting to encourage their citizens back to books. Singapore is even paying its people (a very small sum) to read. My own experience as a teacher is that AI is an even bigger threat, leaching critical intelligence and the need for creativity from young minds. It’s a happy coincidence for Marriott that his book appears at the same time that AI bosses themselves are urging a coordinated application of brakes to the process, although the fact that the most bibliophobic US president in history is telling them they don’t know what they’re talking about makes its own point. I mean, what sort of political leader would want a population lacking in critical intelligence? Oh, right.

PS: That time when Trump talked about his favourite books.

PPS: Two more from Marriott. First, via Gurwinder Bhogal, the notion that our bingeing on junk info has created an “intellectual obesity crisis”. And then, less happily, his contention that

...no actor on earth can show with his or her face what Jane Austen can show us about the human heart in half a paragraph.

to which I ask, “really?”

About getting 9/11 wrong

Donald Trump has been getting all in a tizzy about journalists suggesting that his memories of 9/11 and what he was doing that day are a wee bit confused. The strange thing is, I am uncharacteristically sympathetic to his plight, because it seems that I’ve been getting things wrong for 25 years as well.

A colleague asked me today where I was and what I was doing on that weird, ghastly day and I trotted out my usual story. That I’d been for a job interview that morning, then met a friend for lunch in Bloomsbury and, since neither of had anything more useful to do, we ambled over to the British Museum. There was an exhibition of projects by the architect Richard Rogers, including a proposed tower in Tokyo Bay that, had it been built, would have become the tallest in the world. To give a sense of scale, the model was presented alongside all the other buildings that had held that honour since the late 19th century. So when my wife phoned me to tell me that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center, I was looking at a model of the World Trade Center, which had suddenly become more real than the thing in represented.

Except that belatedly, I just checked to see if I could find a photo of the models in question, only to discover the whole thing was a Norman Foster project and Richard Rogers had nothing to do with it. 

I apologise to all those I have unwittingly deceived.

Your turn, Donnie.

About yet another name

Another name that could have found a place in the works of Pynchon or Vonnegut – the journalist Garrison Lovely.

PS: The actor playing Draco Malfoy in HBO’s Harry Potter reboot is apparently called Lox Pratt.

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.