About literalism

In the New Yorker, Namwali Serpell laments the excessive literalism that bedevils modern movies, exemplified by the Best Picture Oscar winner Anora, in which the viewer is not permitted to infer the narrative model for the story until a character actually bleats out the word “Cinderella”. Everything must be signposted, labelled, hammered home:

Artists and audiences sometimes defend this legibility as democratic, a way to reach everyone. It is, in fact, condescending. Forget the degradation of art into content. Content has been demoted to concept. And concept has become a banner ad.

No complaints from this end. Serpell is wary of endless perfect repetition (of themes, images, ideas) and calls on Freud to laud “the inexact reiteration of what came before”, the unpredictability of Nina Simone and Samuel Beckett, Andy Warhol and David Lynch, surprises, improvisations, imperfections. Again, all good. And Barthes and Baudrillard get invited to the party and I couldn’t be happier.

But... in castigating the generic, point-missing nature of fashion, she snipes: “we all wear Doc Martens but no one is actually goth.” Hang on? Are goths meant to wear Docs? Or more specifically, are Doc-wearers meant to be goths? Did I miss that e-mail? And then she says “da Vinci” when she means Leonardo. And you scroll to one of those deliciously deadpan New Yorker erratum notices that leaves you desperate to know exactly what horrible solecism has been excised:

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the ending of “A Complete Unknown.”

In normal circumstances, I’d sneer at this catalogue of sloppiness and congratulate myself for knowing better. But I wonder whether Serpell is just practising what she preaches, embodying her enthusiasm for imperfection by getting stuff wrong.

On a similar theme, I’ve long despaired at BBC Radio 4’s habit – doubtless encouraged by the laudable aim of inclusivity – to gloss every cultural reference that might smell even slightly of high art. In other words, it’s never enough to say “Hamlet”; it has to be “William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet” in case  someone somewhere thinks you’re talking about a cigar or a football team in Dulwich or an omelette. 

That said, in a recent edition of the lexicographical panel show Unspeakable (go to 04.45), Russell Kane explained that he uses “Immanuel” (the forename of the author of The Critique of Pure Reason) as a euphemism for, well, the surname. But if Kane had uttered the surname, this might have disturbed the guardians of pre-watershed taste, so the gag remained inexplicable to anyone not on at least nodding terms with 18th-century philosophy. Although only minutes before, Kane had felt the need to explain that Pride and Prejudice was written by Jane Austen.

PS: Bookmark time: in the New York Times, the career vicissitudes of Generation X; while Gen Z yearns for an internet-free past it never knew.

About book lists

Of course the news that an AI-generated summer reading list for the Chicago Sun-Times was weighted heavily in favour of books that, er, don’t actually exist has embattled meat-and-mucus critics crowing over another thing that our new digital overlords have royally arsed up.

But hang on a minute. We don’t need ones and zeroes to invent new works from the likes of Isabel Allende or Percival Everett. Remember Jim Crace’s Useless America, which owed its (non-) existence to a mangled phone conversation with someone at Penguin? Or indeed my own Lady Gaga biography, which never progressed beyond a few weeks of research, but still garnered five stars on GoodReads. 

In any case, even when the product is real, do you really think the (human) author of such thumbs-up compendia has made a series of informed decisions about what should or should not be included? I spent several years on a strange planet called Lifestyle Journalism and, trust me, very often you have little to go on bar a press release and an advertising exec suggesting forcefully that it would be very helpful if specific products from her client might be included, or else. So, yes, this book (or holiday or necklace or vodka or cardigan or chi-chi gluten-free bistro or invasive surgical procedure) is good and you should buy it, because we say so, even if we’ve never been in the same room as the bloody thing.

Ultimately, AI succeeds not by doing things better than humans, but by doing them equally badly.

PS: Another example from the archives: in defence of the Black Crowes review that was more like an educated guess.

About paparazzi

In a complicated world where we’ve lost the notion that we can assume everybody is aware of a core set of facts, it’s considered rude to point and laugh at someone’s ignorance. But does this apply when that person not only draws attention to that ignorance, but attempts to implicate the rest of us in it?

On Threads a couple of days back, one Melanie J Tait asked: “Remember how we didn’t know the word ‘paparazzi’ before August 1997?” To which there were many responses, most of them variants on “We did, actually.” Several pointed out that the word has its origins in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and was also the title of Jacques Rozier’s 1964 documentary short about the making of Godard’s Le Mépris; its use became ubiquitous during the heyday of tabloid journalism in the 70s and 80s. Very few were actively hostile or contemptuous of Tait’s lack of knowledge; they just said she was wrong. Some charitably pointed out that there was indeed a large spike in usage following the death of Princess Diana but nobody fully supported Tait’s statement because it was empirically untrue (unless the pronoun “we” here refers only to Tait and her immediate circle, in which case a more appropriate response would be, “so what?”)

Tait (who describes herself in her bio as a playwright and screenwriter) could have graciously accepted this as a learning moment. Or she could have ignored the responses, or just deleted her post. But no, she had to double down, with a hefty dose of sarcasm: 

I certainly don't remember it being the word used in conversation around photographers and media. But I'm obvs not a linguistic genius like you and several others who've loved remembering which words they knew thirty years ago.

So knowing and remembering are acts of hostility all of a sudden? It reminds me, inevitably, of Donald Trump, who claimed that nobody knew that Lincoln was a Republican, or had even heard of Lesotho. What he meant of course was that he didn’t know these things, or hadn’t until very recently; but he has to claim that nobody else knows it either, because this excuses his own lack of intellectual curiosity and general failure as a sentient member of the human race.

Tait isn’t this bad, obviously. And ignorance isn’t a sin. But ascribing ignorance to others as an act of self-preservation comes pretty close.

About freshness

Another reason I find it hard to get worked up about the creeping tentacles of social media is that its supposedly all-powerful algorithms, tasked with sending precisely targeted advertisements to my brain, seem to know less than bugger all about what might flip any of my consumer switches. Although to be fair, that also applies to legacy media. Increasingly, my reaction to a product is less that I don’t want it, more that I don’t even understand what it is.

For example, I’m noticing an increasing trend for things that offer “freshness”. Not cleanliness, mind. That seems to come in another bottle. No, this freshness, when applied to your bedsheets or jumper or socks, would seem to send everyone else into a state of juddering bliss, a cocktail of catnip and crack that hits one’s olfactory nerve and from there envelops the whole body in CGI florals.

Which is nice, but I’m still not sure what this freshness actually is. Is it a scent, a sort of Lynx for the laundry? In which case why don’t they tell us that, give us some kind of hint that if we use it, our fabrics will smell of lemons or honeysuckle or fresh bread or Guildford or the late Pope? In any case I’ll pass, because I want my laundry to smell of precisely nothing, thank you very much. The aromatic equivalent of a sleep mask or noise-cancelling headphones would do me just fine. But no, it’s this ineffable freshness that all these ecstatic thespians crave, like some article of faith that can only be communicated to true believers. And I, apparently, missed that memo. By Vectron.

About speaking English

For the past couple of years I have been teaching foreigners to speak English, a pursuit that’s far more rewarding and, frankly, easier than what I was doing previously, teaching English-speakers to speak English. 

So I was intrigued to see the news that anyone intending to migrate to Britain for work purposes will have to reach a standard equivalent to an English language A-level. Presumably this is one of the policies that Labour hopes will lure back from the bosom of Reform UK voters who become enraged at hearing the language of Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Piers Morgan elbowed out in favour of Urdu, Bulgarian, Farsi or Yoruba. Insisting that incomers can speak to local language to a high standard will encourage integration, harmony and all that lovely Coke commercial stuff, right?

Um, really? As I recall, getting native speakers to jump through the hoops required to pass English language GCSE (the qualification usually taken at 16) is a massive effort and many of them fall flat on their faces. Even to suggest they attempt an A-level (normally taken two years later) would provoke abject ridicule. Indeed, the combined entries for English language and English language/literature A-level last year came to just under 20,000. (In comparison, there were over 100,000 for the various flavours of maths.)

Of course, students could reasonably argue that they don’t need to take an English A-level, because they already speak English very well, thanks for asking. Five minutes on any UK-based news site that permits comments would disabuse you of that argument and, intriguingly, it’s the people who are most vehement about the horrible foreign types coming over here and talking funny who seem to have forgotten what spelling, grammar and punctuation (especially punctuation) they were ever taught. (One recent example: “Well don't Reform 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧you have given us hope at one stage it was like is it worth living but Nigel you are the man Thank you 👏👏👏👏❤️”)

So what will be the effect of importing thousands of migrants who can speak the local language more accurately and mellifluously than the natives? I just imagine them stepping out of immigration at Heathrow, their minds a jumble of cream teas, Harry Potter and the London Eye, asking in cut-glass tones of all the cabbies and bobbies and chirpy Cockney flower sellers they encounter, “Why don’t you speak ENGLISH????”

PS: Of course, George Voskovec got their first, in 12 Angry Men.