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.

About Binface

 

There has been some talk, even from those unsympathetic to Nigel Farage, that the candidacy of Count Binface, the highest-profile opponent to the Reform leader in the upcoming Clacton by-election, is somehow unserious and indicates something flawed in the very soul of our society. Well, yes. Which is why he’s exactly the right person to take on the Poundland Spode.

Farage himself is the most prominent manifestation, in Britain at least, of the wave of populism that has taken hold following the financial crash. People, it seems, want content-free politics, and are less interested (or maybe they just lack the patience to read) sober, costed policies. They want politicians who appear to get how they feel, politicians with whom they can have a pint, politicians who are good for a laugh. Brexit was the most obvious example of this: people voted for it on instinct, not really knowing or caring what it might mean, a great many of them apparently not really thinking it would happen. So nobody thought through how it could be implemented, which is why the country’s extraction from the EU became such a bloody, painful mess.

And Binface is just the logical extension of this. He’s funny, he’s an underdog, he’s a bit of a wally, he doesn’t act like a politician, nobody really expects him to win, which gets people thinking that he might just. His policies are paper-thin, but nobody cares. He is Farage’s worst nightmare. He is also almost entirely Farage’s own creation and Farage’s own bloody fault.

About the Berlin Wall

I am slightly baffled by the objections raised by Southwark Council to Steven Thorpe’s decision to place a chunk of the Berlin Wall in his garden, not least the observation that it presents an “oppressive sense of enclosure and stark industrial appearance”. Which is surely a bit like complaining that the Sagrada Familia has too many curly bits.

About Trump

I know the best thing would to be ignore him, but two recent items must be flagged up.

First, his deeply strange appearance on Usha Vance’s podcast, which is supposedly about encouraging literacy. He admits that he mainly reads about himself, misremembers the title of a book from his childhood, then goes off into a freeform stream of banalities about past POTUSes. I refer you back to Trump pretending to have read a Tom Wolfe book in 1987.

And a deeply weird video of a far-right group called Patriot Front arriving at the Trump-fronted Fourth of July events in Washington, DC on Friday, apparently to show off their mime skills.

PS: And while we’re trying not to think too hard about the most powerful man on the planet being functionally illiterate, here’s James Marriott on what the Labour MPs of 1906 tended to read (and an eye-roll at the thought of what they read now); and, in a rather more positive frame of mind, Naomi Alderman actually comes up with a practical plan to turn non-readers into readers.

About Shiloh

The problem with AI is not just the times it gets things wrong, it’s the times it gets them crass and banal. Although, since AI simply dredges its realities and priorities from the whole online world, I guess it’s no more crass or banal than the rest of us.

Here’s an example. Reading a book about William Blake, I come across a reference to the Biblical city of Shiloh, suggesting that the word was sometimes used as a personification of France, in the same way that, for example, “Erin” is a personification of Ireland. This surprises me a bit, so I google the word and as seems to be the way, the first thing that comes up is not Wikipedia or Britannica but an AI overview. Which tells me...

Well, that’s me (and Blake) told. So I go a bit deeper, searching for “Shiloh France”. And I get...

So there we are. Nepo babies and shoes. I wonder what old Bill might have made of it.

PS: Shiloh still unresolved, I check in Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Blake, which I read about 30 years ago. No joy, but he does make the rather bold claim that

...it can truly be said that he is the last great religious poet in England.

which I suspect would be news to Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins and TS Eliot, for a start. But it does prove that you don’t need AI to write nonsense.

PPS: Got it. It was Allen Ginsberg who made the French connection, apparently.