About unread books

A number of celebrated authors have offered their support, if not their creative juices, to a book called Don’t Steal This Book, intended to highlight the way AI technology rips off the work of published authors with nary a by your leave. Beyond the names of the not-writers, the pages are blank, so I assume anyone who buys it will immediately ignore it, just as I did with the empty poetry book Release the Sausages, a passive-aggressive squib targeting the timidity of Keir Starmer.

That said, books that sit passively on the shelf aren’t that unusual. The same trawl that offered up Charlotte Sometimes also netted me a copy of Ben Judah’s This is London. It was published in 2016, 10 years ago, but showed no evidence of ever being opened, let alone read, during that decade. In fact, the only interruption to its boxfresh perfection was a receipt, suggesting that its previous owner had picked it up in a different charity shop in 2018. So two separate owners had bought it and then callously ignored it. And now I’m looking warily at my own shelves and wondering what I’ll discover.

About Charlotte Sometimes

Another World Book Day passes, which means – apart from the inevitable sprawl of kids going to school dressed as characters from books their parents pretend to have read – much soul-searching about the decline of literacy. There is much fretting on Radio 4, where the few remaining readers are assumed to lurk, as they repeat December’s podcast on the crisis, in turn based on James Marriott’s Substacked Jeremiad from a few months before that (and the irony that the participants are expressing their qualms via media that is at least in part to blame for the situation is not lost on anyone).

Elsewhere, though, Auntie is gung-ho in demonstrating that books are just as much fun as TikTok, kids, and not boring at all, appending a couple of Gladiators to the 500 Words writing competition and allowing the comedian Russell Kane to explain his adoration for Evelyn Waugh (which I share, of course) by reference to 90s raves and 21st-century social media, rather than just letting the old git be funny in his own right, in his own time, in his own very un-sweet way.

This sense of inclusivity is new on the block, it seems. At the weekend I picked up a 1970s Puffin edition of Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte Sometimes, one of those childhood classics I know only by reputation (and then mainly thanks to The Cure). And inside I find the stark, defiantly exclusive announcement: “You need an alert and imaginative mind to read and enjoy this book.” And if you aren’t blessed with one of those, I guess you should just stick to watching Gladiators.

About Cosmic John

I found this in a forum on, of all things, a climbing site, where the conversation had for some reason turned to Radiohead, about which I once wrote a book. And it’s a fair question. Two of them, in fact.

(Tries singing said questions in Thom Yorke’s voice.)

About the Winter Olympics and the Northern Lights

Still recovering from the various disappointments of the Winter Olympics, above all that the American hockey player who I thought operated under the Zola-esque nom de glace “J’accuse” was in fact called Jack Hughes. Then I follow the all-conquering Norwegians back to their homeland, although I travel even further north, inside the Arctic Circle to see the Northern Lights.

And there I meet further disappointment. I’m well aware that the garish colours in the adverts were a photographic mirage but when I look to the skies I see the extraordinary, looping interactions of solar winds in strict monochrome. As others aah and ooh over a green one and a pink one, I start to wonder whether the whole thing is a practical joke. Is it down to me to suggest that this icon of meteorological spookiness is a naked fraud? But apparently it’s not unknown for some people to be unable to see the colours. It’s not you, Aurora Borealis, it’s me. And then, when I take a photo, it’s as pretty as, well, a picture. What I can’t capture is the black-and-white that I see. Do my eyes, not to mention technology, deceive me? Well, yes, of course they do.

And inevitably I turn to Baudrillard, who would no doubt have insisted that the image, the simulacrum (which most people see) has superseded the thing that is only seen by people who are daft enough to take a cable car up a mountain in Tromsø in sub-zero temperatures and which is only a different kind of mirage anyway. And I think back to the exertions of J’accuse and his fellow Olympians and remember that so many things (curling for example) just look better on a screen.

About Tyggers

Found this on BlueSky (Twitter for nice people) and it made me laugh but also made me think once again that so much humour depends on getting two separate references, a bit like my favourite joke, which demands a passing knowledge of both Star Wars and French baked goods. But we’ll get back to that some other time.

PS: And just as I post this, I remember my first term at university and my tutor, the lamented Chris Brooks explaining Blake’s concept of innocence and experience by reading the last couple of pages of The House at Pooh Corner.

About Sheffield

The algorithms have directed me to a rather enticing box set of music created in Sheffield between the late 70s and late 80s. The track listing includes material from most of the major acts I remember from that time and place (The Human League, Heaven 17/BEF, ABC, Pulp – but no Def Leppard) as well as a few bands (Chakk, Clock DVA, Danse Society) that I probably wouldn’t be able to pick out in an identity parade but the names of which I vaguely recall from the NME or night-time Radio 1.

And there’s more. Much, much more. Names, glorious names, so glorious that I rather suspect the compilers have invented a few, just to keep us on our toes. So, here’s a conundrum. Below is a list containing the names of nine Sheffield bands from the period and one that I’ve invented. Your task is to spot the fake and there’s an imaginary bottle of Henderson’s relish for the first person to guess right.

Hobbies of Today
Repulsive Alien
The Naughtiest Girl Was A Monitor
Fish And Breadcake
Quite Unnerving
Defective Turtles
Acrobats Of Desire
Bongo Camisole Time
Peter Hope And The Jonathan S. Podmore Method
The Wacky Gardeners

Best of Yorkshire luck. And here’s one of the real bands, a few days ago.

About restaurants

Following on from last week’s celebration of musical meh-ness, here’s Marina O’Loughlin in the FT explaining why it’s OK for reviewers to say that a rubbish restaurant is rubbish.

The job of newspaper critics — film, TV, restaurant, whatever — is to sell newspapers, not proselytise for what they’re employed to critique. Opinions are just that, so we find voices we trust and follow accordingly. If not, if personality and preferences, tendencies and turns of phrase don’t matter, then bring on our AI overlords. There are some restaurant critics I find almost unreadable, but then I don’t have to read them, do I? But nor do I feel the need to announce their obsolescence from a standpoint that celebrates the vanilla.

About Pie Jesu

In terms of the various problems the BBC’s gone through over the last few years, this is fairly mild, but it does raise a few questions about what and who it’s for, as well as my old favourite, what exactly we should expect people to know, especially when it comes to high (or indeed low) culture.

Yesterday, the astronomer Michele Dougherty was the guest on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. As was common in the past, not so much these days, her selection was weighted towards classical music, albeit the sort of classical that doesn’t frighten the horses (Nessun Dorma, Elgar’s Cello, Tchaikovsky’s Violin and so on).

And in that vein, her last selection was the Pie Jesu from Fauré’s Requiem. All perfectly normal, except that the excerpt they played was the Pie Jesu from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Requiem, a completely different piece of music. And then Lauren Laverne back-announced it as Fauré. Now, I don’t know how they actually put the show together, whether someone else slots in the pieces of music during the edit, so it’s entirely possible that neither Laverne nor Professor Dougherty was aware that they we’d not been listening to the piece they were discussing. But someone somewhere in the process (several people, I’d guess) would have heard the transition between speech and music and speech and not been aware of the disconnect. And those people would all have been working on what still purports to be a music programme. 

Now, it’s easy to say that this sort of cock-up wouldn’t have happened in Roy Plomley’s day, but just because it’s easy, doesn’t mean it’s not true. The sad thing is that, compared with Plomley’s era, people working on the show today have access to far more tools (Google, Shazam, etc) with which they could have checked what happened and avoided embarrassment. The problem is not necessarily that people don’t know, it’s that they don’t seem to care.

PS: They’ve now edited out all references to Fauré. Auditory gaslighting.