Crikey. I just came across something I posted 18 years ago, when I’d just joined Twitter, which was so new I had to explain what it was. I called it
one of those sites that balances precariously on that narrow rail between “Zeitgeist-defining” and “stupid”. The deal is that users simply key what they are doing righthererightnow into a box, and then see what everyone else is doing at the same time.
and then compared it to an episode of Torchwood. Ah, such happy, innocent days.
Several points arising from the tale of Rev Dr Paul Chamberlain, who apparently brought a group of schoolchildren to tears when he told them that Santa’s not real and their parents eat the biscuits supposedly left for him. The first and most obvious is how easy it is for devotees of one myth to brusquely dismiss another. How would the reverend gentleman react if someone else told the children that Santa is real, but Jesus is just a fairy story to make people behave themselves?
Also, when I saw the headlines, I assumed the traumatised kids were five at most. In fact, they were all in Year 6, which makes them 10 or 11 years old. And they’re still shocked by the revelation that Santa is a fraud? Isn’t that a bit weird?
I ruddy love footnotes, I do, and have been told off by more than one editor for using too many of them. Apparently their presence disturbs readers, presumably because it reminds them that for every book they do read, there are several hundred more waiting round the corner to ambush them. Which to me would be a lovely feeling, but what do I know?
That said, I do share the frustration of absolutely knowing something’s true and yet not being able to find a reference to validate it. Which is why I love this passage:
I have in my head an assertion that a friend once told me was written by Whitney Balliett, the jazz critic and exemplary listener-describer. The assertion was that there were only two absolute virtuoso figures in jazz: Sarah Vaughan and Art Tatum. When did Balliett write it? I can’t say. Neither can I be sure that he did write it. Once you get inside a writer’s voice, you can imagine things he didn’t actually write. Once I troubled Whitney, in his old age, about a phrase of his I swore I had read — something about Lester Young playing “wheaty” notes. He said it sounded possible, and went to look it up. He searched for a couple days and came up-handed. I might have dreamed it.
Ben Ratliff, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen to Music Now (London: Allen Lane, 2016), p. 81.
The sanctity or otherwise of an author’s intentions always offers something to chew over. I do sympathise with Beckett’s exasperation over the critical tendency to see theology at work in his most popular play: “If I had meant it to be about God,” he’s said to have snapped, “I’d have called it Waiting for God.” But at the same time I lean towards Barthes’ assertion that the Author (himself included) is dead the moment he types the final full-stop, and it’s down to the mere civilians who are his readers to write and rewrite and bestow meaning. If I think it’s about God then, in my head at least, it is about God, whatever Beckett thinks.
How then do we respond to Victor Willis’s announcement that the song ‘YMCA’, for which he provided the lyrics, is not gay at all, oh no, it certainly isn’t, despite the fact that it was all I could do to stop myself from referring not to “the song ‘YMCA’” but to “the gay anthem ‘YMCA’” mainly because for decades it’s been a gay anthem, for gays, about gay stuff? But Mr Willis, who, and I ought to make this very clear indeed, IS NOT IN THE SLIGHTEST BIT GAY IN ANY SENSE OF THE WORD, has announced that in fact the song isn’t gay either, and the bit about hanging out with all the boys is about black straight male bonding and not gays doing gay things, at the YMCA or anywhere else. And in fact, from next month, if anyone says that ‘YMCA’ is even the slightest bit gay, Willis’s wife, who is a female lady, with proper lady bosoms and stuff, because Victor’s NOT GAY, will sue them with all the heterolegal fury she can bring to bear and with the blessing of her exceedingly not-gay husband.
But he’s OK with Donald Trump (also not gay – have you seen him dance?) using the song at his own not-gay rallies and ensuring lots of similarly straight dollars entering Willis’s lady-snogging bank account. Because neither of them is gay, nor is the song, nor are any of the Village People, including the one with the big moustache, nor is or was anything ever gay. Got that? NOT. GAY.
PS: The Streisand effect.
PPS: Hamlet, Act III, scene ii, line 221.
PPPS: Some other songs that have been misinterpreted, albeit not by their authors.
(Slowly realising that if I do ever write my book about What We Do And Don’t Need To Know And Why, it’ll be for the most part anecdotal and solipsistic, something akin to Perec’s Je me souviens, and what’s wrong with that?)
Jude Law was being interviewed on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House yesterday, plugging his latest, rather grim-sounding movie, which is clearly yet another attempt to break away from his pretty-boy image. Unfortunately, Paddy O’Connell chose that moment to bring up the seasonal romcom The Holiday, which he loves and, according to the bantery exchange they had to plug the lunchtime news, so does his BBC colleague Johnny Dymond.
Which gave me a slightly odd feeling as I sipped my Sunday morning coffee, as I realised I’d never even heard of the movie, let alone seen it. And as Paddy and Jonny oohed and aahed about the doubtless hilarious and/or heartwarming goings-on, and Jude just sounded embarrassed, I wondered whether the whole thing was some sort of arch postmodern joke, “quick, let’s invent a movie and make Tim wonder how he missed it” but no, I Googled it, it’s real, it’s packed with people I recognise, whose work I’ve enjoyed elsewhere but... no. Nothing. No bells rung. Except that the casual way they discussed it, with no scaffolding, no context, implied that I really should know and that I’m somehow culturally deficient by not knowing, like someone who appears on a quiz show and gets castigated on social media for not having heard of Hamlet or Buenos Aires or nitrogen or artichokes.
Normal service was resumed later in the day, during an amiable TV show involving the unlikely duo of Bill Bailey and Shaun Ryder ambling through the Somerset countryside, when a pub landlord mentioned that Henry VIII was rumoured to have stayed at his establishment, “during the disillusionment of the monasteries” and I laughed and then wondered how many other people I know might get the (inadvertent?) joke. Indeed, how many people reading this?
PS: In news that may or may not be relevant, the Oxford word of the year is “brain rot”.
The University of Sydney (alma mater of such awkward squad stalwarts as Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes and Clive James) has been grappling with the issue of how to reconcile people’s right to speak about stuff that annoys them, with the right of people not to be annoyed by that speaking. To this end, they have commissioned an external review that makes a number of recommendations, most of them eminently coherent and sensible, and this one:
The University should amend its policies and procedures to make clear that each person utilising a word or phrase is responsible at the time the word or phrase is used to identify to the audience the context in which it is used. (New Civility Rule)
Um, er, OK, what? I mean, context is often useful to promote understanding, especially if a word or phrase is obscure or contentious. But does this mean every speaker has the responsibility to ensure every word s/he utters is perfectly clear to everyone present, utterly devoid of any trace of ambiguity or nuance? And then, what if the words used in the contextualisation require further contextualisation, and so on to infinity? If not, what the hell does it mean?
The end result of course will be that all public speech at the university will be reduced to the most banal, basic components, words that are incapable of offending, words that cannot be misunderstood (deliberately or otherwise), words that cannot challenge, cannot provoke and ultimately cannot educate. Which makes the continued existence of the University of Sydney look a bit bloody pointless, no?
Now, please excuse me, I need to write a companion post that identifies to the audience the context in which these words are used. I may be some time.
(Thanks to James Ley for alerting me to this.)
I got into a polite exchange of views a couple of days back over an otherwise unexceptional story about, of all things, expensive mince pies. Or, more specifically, over the language used by the good citizens of Orford, in Suffolk, where the Pump Street Bakery makes delicacies that are supposedly the priciest mince pies going. When one of the locals described them as “bespoke”, I was confused, because there had been nothing in the article to tell us this was the case. In fact, if they really were bespoke, or what I’d define as bespoke, created to the precise specifications of each customer, then the price (£25 for six) wouldn’t seem so exorbitant.
And it was only when a second person used the same adjective to describe the pies that I realised what was going on. “Bespoke” doesn’t have that specific meaning any more, the sense of having a suit made where every detail, the measurements, the cloth, the precise diameter of the buttons, is decided by the person paying the bill. It just means something luxurious, something posh. Something that costs £25 for six.
I wrote about this a decade ago, discussing how I no longer use certain words (“iconic”, “surreal” and so on) because I can’t be sure whether they’ll be understood to have (what I regard as) the correct, precise meaning, or a more fuzzy definition (“famous”, “odd”). I’ve subsequently learned that there’s a linguistic term for this; semantic bleaching, a sort of meh-ification of our discourse, where the meaning of a word loses its intensity and, ultimately, its usefulness. “Curate” is another example. What once suggested a discriminating expertise employed to select pieces (pots, poems, plesiosaurs) for public consumption now means nothing more than choosing.
Does this matter? Well, if you think that it’s useful to have some words with a precise meaning, even if we don’t deploy them all that often, then yes, it does. But if it matters that much, what do we do about it? That’s where discussions on Friday tended towards the full and frank. I suggested that even though this use of “bespoke” was what the interviewees actually said, it was the duty of The Guardian to find some way of indicating that it wasn’t an accurate use of language. The pies aren’t bespoke, any more than they’re purple or three miles high or made in Burkina Faso. Maybe a discreet “[sic]” after the word? Or just replace it with what they really meant, which is “posh”. This does run the risk of insulting or demoralising people who may not have all the cultural capital of the average Guardian journalist, or editor, or reader but to be honest we do it all the time. If an interviewee commits a grammatical solecism (“you was”, for example) it will miraculously become “you were” by the time it’s published. Nobody’s yet died.
And, yes, language moves on and the meaning of words changes. Which is great when the language is expanded, and we get neologisms like “skibidi” and “rizz” and “brat summer” and most of these will sound positively archaic in five years time but while they’re here they define a generation and baffle another generation and that’s what they’re for. But taking a useful word like “bespoke” and giving it a meaning that can be served by a dozen other words – essentially making the original word useless – doesn’t expand language. It makes it smaller.
And there’s a practical, mundane angle to this. I teach English to people who don’t have it as a first language. I always encourage them to aim first to be understood, and only then to worry about speaking “correctly”. But at some point they want and need to know what the correct version is, the right tense, the right conjunction, le mot juste, even if they don’t always hit the target. And if my students come across the word “bespoke” and ask me what it means, do I just tell them it means “posh”, so as not to upset two people in Suffolk?
Thinking about the scene early in the movie Tár, where the ghastly Juilliard student Max announces that because he’s a pansexual BIPOC with an overactive leg (I paraphrase), he doesn’t feel able to love Bach because he had 20 children and maybe didn’t do his share of the housework (I paraphrase further) and I wonder how many people who watch the scene think, yeah, fair point, awful Juilliard bloke.
And then I encounter this poem, which reminds us that it’s all about the art, you utter clowns.
Romantic Poet, by Diane Seuss
You would not have loved him,
My friend the scholar
decried. He brushed his teeth,
if at all, with salt. He lied,
and rarely washed
his hair. Wiped his ass
with leaves or with his hand.
The top of his head would have barely
reached your tits. His pits
reeked, as did his deathbed.
But the nightingale, I said.
I was an early adopter of Twitter and loved its rambunctious vibe for many years. It even brought me a brief moment of notoriety.
I was relaxed about the change of ownership but gradually sensed a coarsening of the texture, hearty debate being replaced by shrill chanting, like a digital Millwall match. So I used it incrementally less and then, about a year ago, I stopped using it entirely. Few people noticed, I’m sure, but reports from those still in the trenches suggested I’d made the right move. I’m now on Bluesky which, for the time being at least, is more to my taste. And, since the recent US election, and Elon Musk’s prominent role in that unfortunate occurrence, a lot more ex-Tweeters have come on board.
But that’s just my take. Brian Klaas puts things into historical context (did you know about the lunar bat people of 1835?) and explains exactly how Musk weaponised his acquisition and why we should worry whether we use it or not:
Our attention is finite, and the more we divert it to sensationalist lies, the more that we aid and abet actual conspiracies and corruption that warrant harsh public scrutiny. If we aren’t careful, we’ll meme ourselves straight into dystopia. Unfortunately, amid those embers of a dysfunctional society burning itself down, it’s clear that those who lit the match on the internet will inevitably become rich, now with the help of Musk.
A currently popular model for online content is what I call “I went” journalism, in which a cultural product (a stage play, a theme park, a restaurant, you name it) is covered in the form of a narrative, in which the writer’s own personal experience takes precedence over any explicit critical engagement. So the banausic details of the evening (how easy it is to park, the variety of ice creams available in the interval, whether there was someone unusually tall in front of the writer) get equal billing with such trifles as acting or direction or the provenance of the hispi cabbage.
Consider, for example, Kayleigh Cantrell’s piece about Bob Dylan’s recent gig in Liverpool. Yes, she gives some idea what it was like. The band “performed elegantly”, assisted by “stage lamps, which simply added to the classiness”. And, fear not, Bob “played his signature harmonica”. Kayleigh does namecheck several songs, and observes that Dylan played them differently from the way he did them on his records, but doesn’t explain how, nor does she ever venture an opinion as to why.
Because if she did that, she wouldn’t have had time to reflect on her excitement at going to her first phone-free gig. (“It added so much more to the experience” – OK, but what exactly did it add?). Or indeed for an extended coda about a busker playing Dylan tunes outside the arena, who appears to have made lots of money from the punters and Kayleigh’s wondering how much he made. (So why didn’t she ask him? Like a journalist might?)
Let’s not heap any opprobrium upon Kayleigh, though. She’s just giving readers what they want, a bare description of what happened, alongside how it made her feel. Nothing to frighten the horses. No analysis, no inference, no theory. After all, more people watch Gogglebox than read what’s left of the music press, let alone anything with “CULTURAL” in the title. And what she’s doing is far from new, of course. Think back to 2012 and Marilyn Hagerty’s legendary appreciation of a new branch of Olive Garden. Keep it up, Kayleigh. Never mind what might be going on inside the head of the Nobel-winning harmonica-blower. Just remember the breadsticks.
PS: If you’re one of the half-dozen people who still give a toss what old-style critics think, here’s David Thomson interviewing Greil Marcus.
PPS: I suppose this week I should have been musing about what’s happened on the other side of the Atlantic. I’ve got form, haven’t I? But then, all the success of the populist right appears to be based on surface observation and gut reaction rather than anything deeper or more intellectually testing, so maybe Kayleigh in Dylanland and four more years of Trump are just two manifestations of the same thing.
PPPS: Ah, another one of those old-fashioned music hacks – in this instance Richard Williams, formerly of Melody Maker and Time Out, and the original presenter of Whistle Test – also reviews a Dylan gig, this time putting the experience in some sort of context, and even going so far as to suggest that he wasn’t all that great, actually. And he doesn’t mention a busker, or what happened to his phone. Or, indeed, breadsticks. That said, Williams, his own track record notwithstanding, is reduced to putting the review up on his own blog. One-nil to Kayleigh, I reckon.
PPPPS: Yet another oldie weighs in, this time Toby Litt. And he actually mentions history. The very nerve...
This morning I discussed Craig Raine’s A Martian Sends a Postcard Home with a group of bright, polite and (above all) curious Russian teenagers. The gist of the poem is that an alien is describing commonplace objects and phenomena to his friends and that once we decode the things – from books to toilets to dreams – that he’s writing about, we see them anew, as if through fresh eyes, or whatever sensory organs Martians have.
There were extra layers of decoding that the students had to do though. First, the purely linguistic, which I’d expected – what is impatience? But then I realised they were being tasked with identifying things which which they have only a very fuzzy acquaintance. Home phones. Wristwatches. Postcards, of course. And pretty soon we can add books and cars you drive yourself to the list.
I wonder how long before they’re baffled by the very idea of dreams.
From the Instagram account (of all things) of The Face magazine (ditto), a piece that affects to investigate the phenomenon of Gen Z and younger millennials going on cruises. And among the factors they apparently appreciate is the fact that a cruise offers “a way to have everything from your day-to-day life replicated”.
So what the younglings really want from these cruises is a simulacrum of normality, but on a big boat. Damn, I’m so old, I remember when the whole point of a holiday to leave everything from your day-to-day life at home.
PS: They’ve deleted it now.
Not having published much in recent years, I’ve got out of the habit of scouring Amazon and similar sites for what people have deigned to say about my offerings. Which is why I’ve only just noticed that, three and a half years ago, a user known only as “magic” declared that my book about the Noughties was
Fun, and easy to read
which I’m sure was meant kindly but feels like a variant on “Mostly Harmless”.
I’m teaching a group in their late teens/early 20s (Brazilian, Korean, Swiss) and the increasingly preposterous textbook entreats me to throw out the following gem as a prompt to discussion:
Do you think the internet / smart phones have affected how you read?
Except that, given their age, this is a bit like asking whether their reading habits have been affected in any way by breathing.
Over to Germany, where – in a cute inversion of the tiresome refrain, “if it weren’t for Churchill/America/Wonder Woman you’d all be speaking German” – language purists complain that allowing possessive apostrophes represents acquiescence to the cultural steamroller that is global English. The irony is of course that native English speakers are, for the most part, utterly clueless about how apostrophes work. If the Germans do deign to use them, they’ll at least learn to do it properly and then tut loudly about the mistakes when they come over here.
Jonathan Bate’s worries about undergraduates’ declining ability to cope with long, complex books are taken up by the Daily Mail, which confidently pins the blame on social media. By which, inevitably, it means TikTok rather than inane globules of micro-celeb gossip emanating from certain tabloid... ah, right, that would be it...
PS: The Mail, obviously, has previous.
Tracey Emin, quoted in Dylan Jones’s newish oral history of the Velvet Underground:
When I was at school, I used to imagine that I would go to New York by boat and when I walked down the gangplank Andy Warhol would be there waiting for me.
The thing is, I still believe that...
PS: From the same book, and in a similar vein, Jones himself gets in on the act:
...I even went through a phase of rolling up my drainpipe jeans – skinhead style – worn with pink socks and black Dr. Marten shoes, in the vain hope of trying to advertise the fact that I owned records by people who lived in New York.
Was with a mixed (teens and 20s, Italian, Brazilian, Turkish) group of students yesterday and the sometimes awkward subject of social class was discussed, and how it manifests itself in our various homelands. And we got on to cultural capital and cultural literacy and finally pieced together the phrase that defines us: The People Who Still Read Books.
The news that Oasis may or may not be reforming fills me, as Peter Cook put it, with inertia. That said, the varying responses from those who were around in the 1990s does rather reinforce my belief that Britpop was in fact two parallel movements, one populated by people whose first musical memory was Bowie, the other by pre-pubescent Slade fans. (And as Lester Bangs said of Slade, when they were trying to crack America, “Sure they’re the new Beatles – they’re all Ringo.”)
PS: Lifted from the Threads (I joined this week) account of a vicar (you meet the strangest people):
The great thing about their songs is you'd learn the lyrics after hearing them once. That is a gift Noel Gallagher has.
But is it, though? A great thing, a gift, whatever?
PPS: There’s been acres (or however we measure it now) of coverage given over to the news, but this takedown by Simon Price is probably the best thing to appear:
...nothing but a sludgy, trudgy, brontosaurus-bottomed waddle, perfect for that adult nappy gait so beloved of their singer and fans.
Lists of the best of things are dead and gone, kids, but what should replace them? The Independent offers us the most overrated albums, a stance that may have made sense 20-odd years ago, when Rolling Stone touted a canon ludicrously top-heavy with white male rockers from the 60s and 70s (Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Springsteen, et al). Now, however, there is no such consensus, no icons against which we can be clastic. Sgt Pepper and Astral Weeks are still in place, but who ever thought Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor or A Brief Enquiry into Online Relationships by The 1975 had risen to any sort of cultural prominence from which they deserved to be knocked down? Even the authors of the list lack the courage of their pitchfork-wielding convictions; the greatness of PJ Harvey's Let England Shake is acknowledged, it just isn’t necessarily as good as some of her earlier stuff.
Rather more coherent, in methodology at least, is a poll organised by the blog They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? This time there’s a defined canon against which rage (the 2022 Sight & Sound poll) but it’s not just the resulting list of 100 films in the crosshairs; it’s any of the 4,336 films that received even a single vote, and are excluded from consideration in this selection. So, in theory at least, this should be a list of overlooked, forgotten gems, the ones that established critics and filmmakers either hadn’t seen or didn’t want to admit they liked. And there are such nuggets; but it also reveals that the great and good asked to contribute to the S&S poll had managed to miss such copper-bottomed classics as Grand Hotel, Mr Deeds Goes to Town, Angels With Dirty Faces, Goodbye Mr Chips, Heaven Can Wait, Dead of Night, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Brighton Rock, Jour de Fête, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Bad Day at Black Rock, Bob le Flambeur, Spartacus, A Fistful of Dollars, The Ipcress File, Wait Until Dark, Claire’s Knee, Little Big Man, Vanishing Point, Marathon Man, The Long Good Friday, Diva, Mephisto, A Zed and Two Noughts, City on Fire, Radio Days, Midnight Run, Man Bites Dog, Reservoir Dogs, Fallen Angels, City of Lost Children, Shall We Dance?, Pi, Audition, Tears of the Black Tiger, Lagaan, Downfall, Gomorra...
Which inevitably sets up another list, another canon, against which another band of discontents can vent their fury. A process that can continue over and over again, until we get to the point when someone complains that Sgt Pepper or Citizen Kane or War and Peace or the Mona Lisa doesn’t get the critical love it deserves in these polls and we start all over again.
The current urban unrest in the UK prompted me to look back the similar (but at the same time very different) outbreaks that took place in 2011. This time round, I haven’t seen a repeat of the observation that looters were consciously avoiding bookshops but maybe that’s because there are hardly any bookshops left to ignore...
The BBC has run a story about some racist trousers. No, that’s not quite accurate. The trousers themselves are blameless but some of the marketing copy used to describe them accidentally included a racist phrase. No, wait, even that doesn’t quite cover it. The copy juxtaposed two entirely banal and innocent words that some racists have also juxtaposed because when combined they sound like a word that isn’t regarded as acceptable any more.
And already I face a dilemma. If I mention those two words (either of which in isolation is still acceptable in polite society) I’ll be implicated in the normalisation of racist discourse, albeit racist discourse of a particularly sniggering, juvenile kind. And if I don’t I’ll just be falling into the same trap as the BBC, and running a story that, for most readers, makes absolutely no sense. So I’ll take the cowardly middle path and link to a page that explains the phrase, ringfencing that link with all the necessary warnings about offence and triggers and maybe a few phone numbers in case it gets too much.
Because we are in a time of Voldemort words, when some language is seen as so dangerous and despicable that it can’t be mentioned even in situations where the language – as distinct from the thing the language describes – is the whole point of the story. In the case of the trousers, this is despite the fact that the verboten phrase was consciously invented to bypass such censorship, standing as it does for another word that’s even worse. The forces of moral purity are inevitably playing a game of ethical Whac-a-Mole, chasing down each iteration of evolving ideological impurity in turn, always a few steps behind. This despite the fact that the bad word – not the phrase used in the trousers copy, but the word that that phrase replaced – was until a few decades ago entirely unremarkable and happily deployed by the same people that it is now used to demonise. And, in some contexts, still is.
And as always with taboo language, this is only apparent if you are already aware of the bad syllables and if this is the case presumably you’ve already been subject to the harm they might present. Unless, of course you are part of some enlightened elect that can come into contact with the words and emerge unscathed. I’m reminded of the tendency of translators of Boccaccio in the 19th and early-20th centuries to leave the sauciest bit of the story in the original language, as if those bright enough to understand medieval Italian would be less corruptible than the rest of us.
The tale of Earl Butz is also relevant; he was fired as Nixon’s agriculture secretary for making a joke that was at the same time racist, scatological and entirely unfunny, but the primness of contemporary media meant that it was difficult for the casual observer to deduce what it was he’d said to provoke his ejection. (In our own time, the all-encompassing label of “inappropriate” would be applied.)
And finally, Conrad’s book that I suppose we should now call “The N-word of the Narcissus” or something similar. Except that when it was first published in the United States, it was called The Children of the Sea. Not because the language in the original title might be thought offensive to the ethnic group that it described (few in 1897 cared about that) but because white people might be dissuaded from buying a book about that ethnic group.
Back then it was still cool to quote Baudrillard as if you’d read him in full.
(For some reason I suddenly find myself unable to post pictures here. It may be a signal from the digital deities that I need to upgrade my computer, or migrate from Blogger or knock the whole archaic blogging thing on the head just as I’m staggering towards my 20th anniversary but for the moment at least I’ll take as a cue to rely on text alone, an OuLiPo-like constraint that may or may not enhance my creativity. And just to demonstrate how constrained that creativity is, the post is almost certainly going to be shorter than this mundane preamble.)
Performative outrage aplenty at the images of a female tourist simulating coitus with Giambologna’s statue of Bacchus. Except that I can’t help but think that if you’re going to dry-hump a deity, who better to do it with than the god of fertility and madness?
[IMAGINE SUITABLY DIONYSIAN PIC HERE]
PS: Previous collisions of fleshy and carved naughtiness, but in Cambodia.
PPS: And in Olympic news, apparently it’s wrong to mock Christian images but it turns out to have been nothing more than a bunch of Greek gods after all, so that’s OK.
Was teaching a group of Hong Kong teens last week. They’d just visited the National Gallery and I asked them to identify the picture they enjoyed the most and explain why.
One girl picked Van Gogh’s Two Crabs. She described it well enough, with emphasis on the colours. But why did you like this one in particular, I asked.
She beamed. “They’re delicious!”
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To an extent, Sunak’s failure was seeded in the unstable electoral coalition that Johnson assembled in 2019 with the promise to “get Brexit done”. Implementing an agenda in government that might satisfy the divergent interests of a culturally and geographically incoherent voting bloc – the ex-Labour working-class north and the traditional Tory southern shires – was an impossible feat of political alchemy.
Claire Dederer:
The problem is, we don’t get to control how much we know about someone’s life. It’s something that happens to us... There is no longer any escaping biography. Even within my own lifetime, I’ve seen a massive shift. Biography used to be something you sought out, yearned for, actively pursued. Now it falls on your head all day long.
Germaine Greer:
I fucking hate biography. If you want to know about Charles Dickens, read his fucking books.
The best part of a writer‘s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.
Anna Doble on being an indie music fan in the mostly-analogue 90s:
London Fields by Martin Amis sat on my shelf for at least a year in about 1997. Why? Because one of Blur once mentioned it in an interview. My copy wasn’t even mine – it was taken out on loan from my home-town library which led me to racking up a fine so insurmountable (£8-ish) that I eventually returned it under cover of darkness in a covert mission to the marketplace whereupon I shoved the book through the library’s awkward letterbox and ran panting for the hills. Other books on the curriculum in the School of Indie were Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (which we all actually read).
Do musicians tell people what to read these days? I know the likes of Dolly Parton encourage kids to read, but where’s the equivalent of Graham (I bet it was Graham, he wore glasses) begging up Martin Amis? And the Manics doing the same for Mishima and many others, Radiohead for Chomsky and Naomi Klein, Paul Weller for Colin MacInnes, Edwyn Collins for Salinger, Morrissey for Wilde and Capote (less so Keats and Yeats). Is literary prescriptivism not A Thing any more?
Yet more musing on what we’re expected to know. This morning, in a discussion on Radio 4 about the overused adjectives “Orwellian” and “Kafkaesque” Evan Lian (who drew the cartoon above) says, “I’m not the most well-read person, which is sort of embarrassing to admit on a BBC radio programme” which does rather play into the idea of the BBC (and, by extension, Britain) as being the repository of everything and everyone erudite. Which is nice.
And then on the same station’s Electioncast, broadcast immediately afterwards, BBC's own chief political correspondent, who read PPE at Oxford, says that he thinks he once read an essay by Orwell and then admits he doesn’t actually know what a Ming vase is.
Far from new, stolen from Facebook, but it belongs here, I think.
And while we’re here, this can come out to play as well.
When Kindles and other e-readers first appeared, with the promise for travellers in particular that a whole library would occupy less space and weight in your luggage than a slim paperback, I did wonder whether the new form might have missed a significant consideration when it comes to reading in public: specifically, the act of letting other people see what you’re reading. Like the music you listen to, or the clothes you wear, or the flavour of crisps you eat, it’s part of the persona you present to the world. The latest Murakami, or a Richard Osman rip-off? Unfair as it is, people will make assumptions.
And then I saw this:
Two examples of people who appear to be in the wrong job. A pub landlord who offers discounts to customers who order by app from their tables, thus discouraging the horrific prospect of bar staff actually having to engage with punters:
I’ve found that not having to be constantly serving people is way better for my mental health. Bar work can be really mentally tiring. This takes the stress away rather than having to constantly interact with different people for eight hours straight.
And Adrian Chiles who, last time I looked, was still purporting to be someone who writes for a living, complaining about apostrophes and then
But, oh Lord, the agonising, circuitous routes around words you’d have to find to construct a bloody sentence.
Roger Corman, who died a few days ago, batting back accusations that his work was mere exploitation: “Show me a film which isn’t an exploitation film.”
Possibly a little trite, but when you give it even a moment’s thought, it applies to pretty much all art, doesn’t it?
In an otherwise tedious and banal article about, of all things, Virgin’s cruise line, the CEO comes up with this inadvertently fascinating nugget: “People like to be reminded of nostalgia.”
It sounds daft, of course it does; surely it’s nostalgia that does the reminding. But then I realise that when watching the old episodes of Top of the Pops that BBC Four is running on Friday nights, some of my favourite moments come from Darts, a band that achieved success in the late 1970s by providing kooky versions of songs that were even then already 15 or 20 years old. And then when I was at university, when mainstream pop was wallowing in post-Live Aid earnestness, my friends and I constructed a world that resounded to soul and funk from past decades (and an aesthetic that merged 40s zoot suits and 50s Soho and 60s Left Bank blankness). So, sorry Mr Saverimuttu, I guess I do like to be reminded of nostalgia. Just not the crappy nostalgia you’re peddling.
And now I find out that Britpop, another trend that had more than one eye on an imagined past, has apparently been revived (although it appears that translates as “wears a Fred Perry and has a St George’s flag in the back of the video” but maybe that’s enough).
And so we come back to Courbet’s 1866 picture The Origin of the World (see here) and more specifically the passions it arouses in Luxembourg’s finest provocateuse Deborah de Robertis (see here) who has adorned the painting (or more specifically the glass protecting it) with a #MeToo tag “because women are the origin of the world”. Which is a bit like complaining about Van Gogh’s Sunflowers because it’s called Sunflowers but, hey, it all adds to the sum of human joy, doesn’t it?
Except that then the French culture minister Rachida Dati weighs in with an intriguing contribution: “An artwork is not a poster to colour in with the day’s message.” Which may or may not be true but at least it suggests that Ms Dati has thought about the subject. And I remember that not so long ago my own country’s government gave the equivalent role to the ludicrous Nadine Dorries and not for the first time a bit of me wishes I were French.
Zadie Smith on teaching creative writing in New York (spotted by Padraig Reidy):
They said workshop, so I took a story of mine that I’d written when I was young and was bad, and marked it up in front of the class. And I took a story of theirs and did it on a lightbox. And the student started crying. NYU explained to me that that is not what they meant. So I went down several gears.
But Simon Duke of Chronicle Live wasn’t going to follow the herd, was he? Faced with these weird, almost dreamlike images, at once beautiful and terrifying, surreal in the true sense of the world, Simon knew instinctively that what his readers would want to know was how Ben Shephard and his colleagues were covering the story on ITV’s This Morning. No analysis, no context, no insight, none of that poncey stuff. Just the fact that Cat Deeley said “Wow”.
Inevitably we can paint this in Baudrillardian terms, where the reality (terrified, blood-streaked horses weaving between bemused Londoners) is eradicated by the image (Vanessa Feltz’s reaction); or just see it as the death of useful journalism, where one set of media hacks cannibalise the responses of another set, the whole circus consuming itself like a massive digital ouroboros. And, to be honest, I’m just catching scraps from the table as well, aren’t I?
PS: Another urban tale that surely symbolises something even if we can’t agree what: the sails fall off the Moulin Rouge.
(Both images stolen from Andy Miller on BlueSky)
When my Radiohead book was published, there were a few rumbles that bringing the likes of Baudrillard into the conversation were a bit – perish the thought – pretentious. I’ve never been particularly stung by such a label (standing proudly alongside Ian Penman on the subject) but I was amused when I recently revisited my old copy of Will Pop Eat Itself? by Jeremy J. Beadle (no, not that one) and noticed that by the second page he was comparing This is the Day... This is the Hour... This is This! by grebo titans PWEI to The Waste Land. And now I wonder whether the modest sales of my book were down to it not being pretentious enough.
In the New York Times, the neuroscientist Eric Hoel argues that the increased use of artificial intelligence is forcing any notion of intellectual or aesthetic quality into a death spiral, prompted as much as anything by human laziness. For example he refers to researchers at a conference on AI using AI to conduct peer reviews on AI-related papers, taking any human critical intervention out of the equation. Which is a problem, because one thing AI is very bad at detecting is bullshit, which is ultimately what peer review is for.
Of course, most of us don’t hang around at AI conferences, but Hoel suggests that the process is far more prevalent than that, eroding the fabric of culture itself, to the detriment even of people who reach for their weapons when they hear the word:
Isn’t it possible that human culture contains within it cognitive micronutrients — things like cohesive sentences, narrations and character continuity — that developing brains need?
And then there’s literature: one New York City public-high-school reading list includes graphic novels, Michelle Obama’s memoir, and a coming-of-age book about identity featuring characters named Aristotle and Dante. In classical schools, high-school students read Aristotle and Dante.
And before I’m accused of snobbery, I’m well aware that there are vast gaps in my own cultural knowledge; opera, for example is little more than a blur. That said, I do know that Richard Strauss wasn’t Johann’s son, unlike the poor sap writing on the ENO website...
PS: And while we’re there, the Arts Council of England is condemning opera critics for, among other sins, “almost exclusively writing from a classical music perspective”.
A while back, I wrote a book about Leonard Cohen, with a focus on That Song, which had become ubiquitous two decades or more after it had first been released (and mostly ignored). And today, in the midst of an online discussion about the incongruous uses to which it’s been put (see also ‘My Heart Will Go On’ and ‘I Will Always Love You’) I finally realise that I should have called the book SAD JEWS FUCKING.
Just came across something I wrote for The Guardian in 2008, offering a sort of “OK, boomer” sigh avant la lettre, suggesting that old people should stop appropriating pop music. Which in turn prompted this delightful response:
Presumably by ‘old’ the author means himself; he’s bald and looks very boring. Probably not intelligent enough for classical though; Andy Williams fan? Nana Mouskouri?
I can’t claim to know much about the work of Brontez Purnell but it does seem to me that if you’re the subject of the New York Times’s By The Book feature, affecting not to read very much is an, um, interesting look.
In, of all places, a news item about the death of Stuart Organ, who for many years played the headmaster of Grange Hill school, I see Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead described as “a spin-off of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet”. And the phrase strikes me as totally wrong-headed but the more I think of it, it feels about right. After all, R&G isn’t a sequel, nor yet a prequel. It takes place in the same fictional universe as Hamlet, the action of which is progressing at the same time, and occasionally intersects. It exists in relation to Hamlet in the same way that Torchwood and The Sarah-Jane Adventures exist in relation to Doctor Who, sharing characters and narratives, but with a different emphasis.
But then I still wonder whether the author of the piece actually knows that, or just threw the sentence together after a brief Wikipedia check. And do you know what makes me doubt her? It’s the fact that she refers not to “Hamlet”, but to “William Shakespeare’s Hamlet”. Someone who knew about theatre would instinctively offer the title alone, assuming that everyone knows what Hamlet is, who wrote it, approximately what it’s about, even if they aren’t able to quote it by the yard. Which feels a bit harsh, because her definition of Stoppard’s play is ultimately correct. But it’s accidentally correct and I wonder whether that’s good enough.
I know as much as they do, so here’s my guess. They wanted to get away from the Biblical reference (“Out of the strong came forth sweetness,” Judges, chapter 14) not because it might offend anybody’s sensibilities, religious or otherwise, not because they’ve finally realised a rotting cat isn’t the most appetising way to sell sweet goop, but because nobody understands it. Nobody knows who Samson (who supposedly said it) is, and nobody really cares. Why would you buy something that confronts you with your own ignorance every day? The semi-abstract lion’s face that replaces it doesn’t particularly refer to anything, doesn't challenge or provoke anything, especially not curiosity.
Of course, being a pedant above all things, my main objection to the logo is that the quote’s about honey, rather than syrup, which is a different product. But who cares about that?
PS: This may or may not be relevant. But I’m pretty sure it’s true.
Sean Thomas in The Spectator claims to have found empirical evidence that music is getting worse. I agree with his conclusion, but don’t recognise his claim to objectivity; music is getting worse because I’m getting old and so, presumably, is Mr Thomas. If I were young, it would all be great, but I’m not, which is why I only get excited by the Top of the Pops re-runs on Saturday nights if they date from 1978 to 1983. Incidentally, Thomas’s characterisation of a modern lyric as “the desire of the singer to ‘kill his mofo bitches’ and celebrate his expensive car, hat and Rolex watch” suggests that he last listened to a rap record in about 1991, and then only fleetingly.
Moreover, it needs to be noted that this year sees the 100th anniversary of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and the 200th of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, two groundbreaking works whose influence is still being felt. But I bet that in 1924 and 1824, there were plenty of people who could come up with an algorithm to prove that they were rubbish.
There is great music being produced now that will still be heard and loved in 2124 and beyond. We just don’t know what it is yet.
I mentioned a few years ago that the two best ever instalments of the Sunday Times magazine’s venerable A Life in the Day feature were both by actors called Tom. What I hadn’t realised, because like so many others, I’ve lost the habit of burrowing into the weekend papers, is that the Telegraph has for some time been running its own pallid simulacrum of ALitD and, unsurprisingly, it’s not as good.
Well, until the gurning greengrocer Gregg Wallace took his turn and, well, it still wasn’t good but at least it was funny.
As always, these arguments throw up further arguments; now we’ve dug up Richard’s body, we know the nature of his disability (scoliosis), so does this mean that only actors with this specific condition should play him? And if actors with other disabilities (Arthur Hughes, Mat Fraser, Peter Dinklage) are allowed to take the role, would that not throw up the rather reductive and insulting implication that all disabilities are much the same? I’m also a little confused by Fraser’s response to Terry’s casting: “I will be personally boycotting the production if it goes ahead with this casting,” he says. “I’m done with the pretenders.” Isn’t pretending what actors do?
But wait – since Richard embodies that horrid old trope about the disabled villain, should the role even be played at all? Or, if it is, shouldn’t we excise all the references to his disability – “rudely stamped” and so on – to fit 21st-century sensibilities? I mean, that would seem to be the stance taken by Russell T Davies, who has declared that the evil genius Davros should from now on have legs. Which does mean that nobody can complain if Michelle Terry plays him.
PS: While we’re here, can we stop saying that art that doesn’t quite gel with those modern sensibilities (Friends is a apparently a main offender) is “problematic”? Art, especially drama, that doesn’t present us with problems is all but pointless.
(Photo of Twiggy and Wilfrid Brambell by Burt Glinn.)
For the record, I enjoyed the movie, especially its design (definitely one that has to be seen on the big screen) although it probably wouldn’t be in any of my best-of lists. Gerwig and Robbie are talented people but they’ve each done better things (Lady Bird and I, Tonya). That’s not what this is about, though, is it? Barbie, beneath the pink gleam, is a satire of sexism and patriarchy and masculinist assumptions and, so the logic goes, to deprive it of recognition is to condone all those bad things.
Except that it really isn’t, is it? Films that are on the side of the angels aren’t inherently great films and yet the Oscar voters have long had a tendency to reward movies on the basis of their social values alone. The nadir of this came at the 78th awards, when the Best Picture gong went to Crash, a movie at once incoherent and simplistic, the script of which is pretty much the song ‘Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist’ stretched over two hours. To add to the fun, it edged out Brokeback Mountain, so even as the Academy patted itself on the back for acknowledging that Racism Is A Bad Thing, it was panicking in case anyone might think it considered homophobia not to be equally reprehensible. Barbie’s relatively slim pickings may be a sign that Hollywood is finally shaking its way out of such ethical quandaries.
Society as a whole isn’t there yet. Maybe the problem is that at the same time as we have become more confident, even to the point of sanctimony, in our moral and political opinions, we feel less able to make aesthetic judgements, to declare that one film (book, song, play, etc) better than another by virtue of imagination, craft and skill rather than just, well, virtue. To argue on purely artistic grounds that X is a better actor or director or composer or balloon sculptor than Y takes us too close to assumptions about class and education that feel too uncomfortable to express. (Incidentally, we are in similar territory when it comes to language. We are encouraged seize on instances of misgendering or outdated racial epithets, but suggesting that the phrase “would of” is in some way incorrect looks plain rude.)
It almost feels as if we’ve slipped back to the Victorian era, when finger-wagging critics dismissed the likes of Wuthering Heights and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, not for any inherent literary faults but because they were morally suspect. The specific criteria have changed (racism and misogyny and homophobia rather than fornication) but the priorities would be familiar to Hardy or the Brontës. We know what’s good, but not what’s good.
PS: My old mucker Clair, who used to hang around these parts as the Urban Woo, deals with the matter in characteristically brisk, no-nonsense fashion in The Independent.
PPS: Reductress, as it tends to, also gets it right:
