About Obama

In the light of the strangely half-assed military parade in Washington over the weekend, here’s something I wrote 17 years ago about how the American populist right perceives even a passing interest in anything foreign as weird and dangerous. The names have changed but very little else has.

Obama's weakness is not that he's black, or young, or left-wing, or that he used cocaine; it's that his background is dangerously cosmopolitan... Why would any sensible person go abroad, where they talk funny and you can't get Cap'n Crunch? What is he? Gay, or French, or something?... And this would explain the paradox by which the supposedly patriotic American right consistently attempts to undermine Vietnam veterans (John Kerry, Max Cleland, even John McCain), while lauding those who avoided serving (Bush, Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, the egregious Saxby Chambliss, et al). These guys weren't cowards, you see: unlike Obama, they just loved America too much to leave it...

About Brian Wilson (four fragments)

2017, Hammersmith Apollo, London. Billed as the last time Brian would play Pet Sounds in London. Brian looks baffled, barely touches his piano, more a protective shield than an instrument. His voice is croaky and hesitant, and Matt Jardine handles the high notes. But in some ways it doesn’t much matter. This is a fan gathering, a chance for us to say thank you, one last time. In the interval, I get chatting to a hardcore devotee, who’s been following the Beach Boys since 1963. He tests me, asking if I know the names of the dogs on Pet Sounds. I pass the test.

2012, Singapore Indoor Stadium. The Beach Boys 50th Anniversary, although most of the band is from Brian’s solo outings. Mike Love is as much smarmy MC as frontman, and even he must realise most of us aren’t here to see him. Bruce offers a luscious ‘Disney Girls’ but all eyes are on the chubby guy on the left of the stage. They’ve scheduled several short breaks in the set and Brian shuffles off in a hurry, as if he’s being chased. They encore with ‘Kokomo’ and I scowl. (Review here.)

A few months later, Mike fires Brian. Or does he?

2002, Royal Festival Hall, London. The greatest gig I’ve ever attended. Two memories stand out. In the second act, the band plays the songs from Pet Sounds in sequence but instead of ‘I Know There’s An Answer’ (side two, track two), he sings ‘Hang On To Your Ego’, the original lyrics that Mike Love nixed because they were too druggy, or too anti-Maharishi, or something. And the crowd roars its approval, because we all hate Mike Love.

And then, during the encores, we’re all dancing insanely to ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ and a small boy, no more than eight, seems even more possessed than us old farts and looks in serious danger of dancing over the balcony to his doom. But at least he’d die happy. No, ecstatic.

1990, Doonesbury. Andy Lippincott is the first openly gay character in an American syndicated comic strip, and the first to succumb to AIDS. In his last days, he is serenaded by the just-released CD version of Pet Sounds and after he dies, a pad is found in his hand, bearing his last, scribbled words:

“BRIAN WILSON IS GOD.”

About not going to the cinema

Wes Anderson is one of the few remaining filmmakers whose work demands to be consumed on the big screen and a few days ago I was all prepared to sample his latest, The Phoenician Scheme, when the potential cost and the journey and the likelihood that half a dozen muppets or more would leave their phones on and the journey back home and the fact that his last couple of efforts have been a bit crap, frankly, conspired to keep me at home, waiting for it to reach the telly. Which wouldn’t be as good, obviously, or The Aesthetic Experience That Anderson Intended, but maybe, deep down, I’m not that bothered any more.

And I felt sad and a bit guilty and not a little middle-aged and tired. And then I turned to my current commute read, Paul Beatty’s Tuff, in which the eponymous 19-year-old, 320-pound cinéaste (he digs Truffaut) muses:

I go for the disappointment, I guess. I’m used to being disappointed, and I know I’ll find it in the movie theater.

About Rushdie and Stoppard and AI

Salman Rushdie has declared that writers are safe until AI learns how to tell jokes. At about the same time, I was asking Chat GPT to write my biography in the style of Tom Stoppard and, if not rip-roaringly hilarious, it’s whimsically droll, I guess. Uh-oh.

Title: “The Footnotes of Footman: A Play in One Side Note”
(Lights up on a room of half-written manuscripts, empty coffee cups, and a battered copy of OK Computer spinning silently on a turntable. The stage is crowded but static, like a mind in motion.)

CHARACTERS

• FOOTMAN: A man of letters with the ink still wet.

• RADIOHEAD: A spectral, five-headed muse.

• LEONARD (COHEN, presumably): Appears when quoted.

• GUINNESS: Not the drink, the book.

• A VOICE FROM MASTERMINDS PAST: An omnipresent trivia host.

---

ACT I: The Inventory of a Mind

FOOTMAN (monologuing to no one in particular):
"I was born in the year Orwell prophesied, yet it was not the boot but the beat that left the deepest imprint. 1968. A year of revolt. Convenient, perhaps, for one whose pen would later revolt against silence."

(A pause, as a record skips.)

FOOTMAN:
"I edited Guinness World Records—not the contents, mind you, but the tone. It had grown dull, a tax ledger of the extraordinary. I gave it wit. Gave it wink. Not just tallest and fastest, but silliest and strangest. We are not merely recorders of records, but narrators of the absurd."

(A newspaper floats down from the rafters. It reads TIME OUT. He snatches it midair.)

FOOTMAN (cont'd):
"Ah, the freelancer’s waltz: The Guardian, Mojo, Prospect, Time Out—a roundelay of voices in need of a ghost."

---

ACT II: Welcome to the Machine

(Enter RADIOHEAD, glowing faintly in minor chords.)

RADIOHEAD (in unison):
"You tried to decode us, Footman.
You wrote us down in linear form.
Did you think art could be alphabetized?"

FOOTMAN (smiling wryly):
"I tried only to document the elegy of the album. OK Computer was the requiem, and I its monkish scribe. You made postmodernism hum. I gave it subtitles."

---

ACT III: Hallelujah Anyway

(A desk lamp becomes a spotlight. Enter LEONARD.)

LEONARD:
"They said I was depressive. You said I was deep. You saw the difference."

FOOTMAN:
"Your hallelujahs were not triumphant, but truthful. That is the great lie of biography: to pretend lives resolve. They don’t. They echo."

---

EPILOGUE: The Quizmaster’s Lament

(A disembodied VOICE thunders.)

VOICE FROM MASTERMINDS PAST:
“Specialist subject: The absurdity of knowledge.”

FOOTMAN (chuckling):
"I’ve played Mastermind, University Challenge, The Weakest Link. I have been both question and answer. And what did I learn?"

(He turns to the audience, deadpan.)

FOOTMAN:
"That even trivia has meaning when given a microphone."

---

CURTAIN
(As it falls, the record finally finishes its loop and starts again. Because nothing is ever really over. Just reissued with bonus tracks.)

---

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.

About “they” and not speaking

I haven’t really got involved in the whole trans debate because the discourse appears to be dominated by unpleasantly shrill voices on both sides and any suggestion that there might be a mutually beneficial compromise just gets lost in the shouting. But as a writer and a pedant, there is one point on which I’m prepared to get huffy and that’s the use of “they” as a preferred pronoun for non-binary people. And, yes, I know “they” has long been to signify individuals whose gender is not ascertained (for example, “A plumber will visit you today; they will call when they are approaching your house.”) but I don’t much care for that either. And in any case, isn’t there a difference between someone who has a gender but we don’t yet know what it is (a sort of Schrödinger’s (wo?)man) and someone who has consciously broken free from the shackles of such an identity? Surely we can come up with a whole new non-gendered pronoun, and so avoid such deeply clunky constructions as, from a feature on the actor Bella Ramsey: 

When Ramsey got the first callback from Mazin and Druckmann, they joined the Zoom from their childhood bedroom.

And completely unrelated, except that it shows what words can do when you do them right, this, from Bret Easton Ellis’s Imperial Bedrooms:

”If you’re not speaking to me at least tell me why...”

About do not play lists

Interesting observation from a DJ about what he does and doesn’t play: 

My own moral approach has always been to remember that a DJ’s job is to spread joy to every single person in that room. Morrissey has made too many statements seen as hateful for many people to enjoy, I can report. Yet the fact that several 1970s rock stars slept with underage girls doesn’t seem to be an issue for older people’s morality on the dancefloor. I paused playing Lizzo when her former tour dancers accused her of sexual harassment and body shaming, and stopped playing Diplo after allegations of sexual misconduct arose. Their innocence or guilt is oddly immaterial: I just don’t want to even risk that someone on my dancefloor might feel bad, period.

So there is indeed an element of judging the artist rather than the art. But the person who actually plays the music passes the buck to his punters, determining that they would find Bowie’s indiscretions less heinous than Morrissey’s rants and leaving it at that. 

But the key line is that “innocence or guilt is oddly immaterial”. If the people who pay his wages think a performer is a wrong ’un, and think thus so forcibly that they won’t enjoy his music, he takes it off the list. It may be a sensible approach in our judgmental age, but I’m not sure I accept his assertion that it’s a moral one.

About tradition, etc

Recent stuff that doesn’t justify a post on its own, all sort of smooshed up together: an occasional series.

Alexei Sayle, from his current radio show: “Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people.” Which leads, in a way, to the food historian Alberto Grandi, who has declared that any number of Italian culinary traditions don’t really exist, or are American, whichever accrues the most media coverage.

And I suspect Dr Grandi would have got on well with Ashley Atkin, who was disciplined for turning up to her job in a Cheshire primary school having got outside a bottle of wine or more. Although, to be honest, I recall any number of teachers who could only function when rat-arsed....

About LibGen

Every time someone reveals a massive cache of copyrighted material that’s being used as raw material for AI training, without any thought of compensation to the authors, I join in with the performative outrage, while at the same time being slightly miffed that nothing from my oeuvre was thought worthy of ripping off. I suppose it’s like having a phone or a bike that’s just too old and/or crap to nick. But now I look through LibGen, the vast database of samizdat that Meta has used for its own murky ends, and three whole works of mine are there. At last I can meld my righteous indignation with the warm glow of smugness.

About literary fiction

Back in the olden days I started a blog about The Da Vinci Code, attempting to deconstruct exactly what Dan Brown was doing right/wrong, attracting millions of readers while at the same time breaking pretty much every rule of half-decent writing (including those followed by other writers of popular, non-literary fiction). I gave up, of course, but I was never dissuaded from my initial premise that the book is badly written. What might have shifted is whether, in a post-literate era, that matters any more.

And now, after all these years, in The Spectator of all places, one Sean Thomas reads the last rites to what may once have been identified as good books, the ones that dominated the cultural agenda in the 80s and 90s. Except, he’s quite glad to see the genre go, even though he (like me) was a bit of an Amis fanboy back in the day. And what was it turned his head around? Why, The Da Vinci Code, of course, because it privileged plot over navel-gazing. But what about the writing, the thing that made critics’ teeth hurt just from thinking about it? Thomas describes that as “all quite workmanlike”.

It’s not though, is it? It’s crap. Go back to my blog for myriad examples. I can only infer that Mr Thomas has had some unfortunate run-ins with workmen.

PS: Just before posting, I Googled Sean Thomas and discovered that he’s the son of DM Thomas, whose novel The White Hotel was pipped to the Booker Prize by Midnight’s Children. From which I won’t draw any conclusions. I’ll just leave it there.

About old films

Interesting/depressing article by Benjamin Svetkey in the Hollywood Reporter highlighting the fact that there are barely any films on Netflix that are more than 50 years old. As he points out, any number of budding cinéastes and auteurs honed their own aesthetics via the serendipity of late-night TV, a set of happy accidents that may be unavailable to the next generation. I had similar experiences, discovering Wilder, Hitchcock, Buñuel, Astaire/Rogers and 1930s Universal horror thanks to the eccentric generosity of BBC2 (and the absence of much useful competition). Svetkey laments:

Obviously, it’s decided that making and streaming its own content, rather than paying licensing fees for older films, is a more profitable business model. And that’s OK for Netflix. Nobody appointed the streamer guardian of the cinematic temple... But it’s worth noting what’s being lost in the process, as streaming and its cold algorithmic imperatives continue to take over the culture and turn us all into cinematic illiterates.

To be fair, other streaming services such as Amazon Prime offer a rather better selection of films that have the sheer bloody cheek to be old, or black-and-white, or even foreign. But it doesn’t make it that easy to find them, unless you know what you’re looking for, which rather defeats the object, doesn’t it?

PS: And now I realise that when I was watching all those glorious old movies for the first time, most of them were still under 50.

About Vonnegut and Herron

I’m back to my bad old habit of thinking I’m re-reading a book and then realising, often to my shame, that it’s actually my first time (did I just see the film?) and this time it’s Slaughterhouse-Five. And I see something on the first few pages that I’m sure I would have noticed it first time round, although when first time round happened (although, do please keep up, there wasn’t really a first time round) I wouldn’t have spotted the apparent prefiguring of Twitter and the like, because Twitter and the like didn’t exist. Anyway, the quote:

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

Also, prompted of course by the Gary Oldman-fronted TV series, I have been dipping a cautious toe in Mick Herron’s Slow Horses universe and in the first volume we encounters a downgraded spook reduced to tracking “the mutant hillbillies of the blogosphere” and then

To pass for real in the world of the web she’d had to forget everything she’d ever known about grammar, wit, spelling, manners and literary criticism.

and my mind goes back to the late Noughties, to what we felt at the time was The Golden Age Of Blogging, or maybe even of Meta-Blogging since much of what we typed about was the nature of blogging itself. What was it? What distinguished it from journalism, of old media? If a representative of old media launched a blog and it all went horribly wrong, were we supposed to point and laugh, or explain nicely how to do it better (hoping there might be a real live job at the end of it)? 

And then it all stopped. 

So it goes.

PS: And further into the Vonnegut, I find this:

The spit hit Roland Weary’s shoulder, gave Weary a fourragère of snot and blutwurst and tobacco juice and Schnapps.

And I wonder whether I should really have called this blog “A Fourragère of Snot” or “Snot and Blutwurst” or “Blutwurst and Tobacco Juice” and, for the time being at least, it’s got a subhead again. And yes, I did have to look up what “fourragère” means. And so will you.

About Gregg Jevin

Today is the 13th anniversary of the comedian Michael Legge creating and killing the enigma that wasn’t Gregg Jevin in a single tweet and as such a piquant reminder of when Twitter was good. And, yes, I only know this because Facebook reminded me. 

About fascination and muzzling

The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.

—Bertrand Russell, Freedom and Government, 1940

About writing and reading

Dipping into John Walsh’s memoir about the literary scene of the 1980s and two fragments of the introduction leap out. The first is a quote from The Mikado, which rather reinforces my journalistic instinct that when the precise language used is not the most important issue, some stylistic burnishing is acceptable, so long as the meaning survives. (See my previous rant about semantic bleaching and the hack’s duty to prevent it.)

Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

And then, as teenaged Walsh determines to avail himself of the books deemed to be classics (Austen, Dickens, Forster, etc) he has a moment of self-doubt, something that hangs over any consideration of the canon:

A certain specific worry nagged at me: what if I didn’t enjoy the books that the world had admired for centuries? What if I didn’t have the taste (or intelligence) to appreciate them?

To which of course we could offer Hirsch’s notion of cultural literacy and to suggest that in many ways, it’s enough to know, however approximately, what they’re about; or failing that, simply that they exist.

About bookshops and GBS

News from Clitheroe in Lancashire, where another bookshop closes and the owner complains not only of punitive rents and the more general decline of the high street but also our old friend dumbing-down. I’m not sure of Paul Hamer’s logic here, as he appears to blame the insidious intellectual hollowing-out of Western society on the prevalence of vape shops and nail bars, but I can certainly offer some sort of anecdotal evidence. I’ve been a London commuter on and off for over 30 years and when I first did it, I reckon at least half my fellow travellers would be reading something, even if it was a tabloid or lad mag. Now I’m very often the only person with any kind of print matter to hand and, yes, maybe some of the phone-gazers are getting to grips with a new translation of Dostoevsky or Derrida but when I do sneak a glance at their screens, they’re really not, are they?

And then to David Hare, who bewails the current tendency of the National Theatre to prioritise star vehicles with West End/Broadway potential over its old repertory policy. And for some reason, George Bernard Shaw gets in on the act:

Do the English people want a national theatre? Of course they do not. They never want anything. They got the British Museum, the National Gallery, and Westminster Abbey, but they never wanted them. But once these things stood as mysterious phenomena that had come to them, they were quite proud of them, and felt that the place would be incomplete without them.

Except that I’m not so sure they’re proud of them any more. Or even know they exist. 

About Chris Jefferies

Interesting article by Patrick McGuinness in the LRB, flashing back to the case of his former teacher Chris Jefferies, who was spuriously accused of murder and dragged through the tabloid mire, apparently because he had strange hair, didn’t own a TV, didn’t like sport and, most reprehensible of all, appeared to have been an excellent English teacher. “Did they really think showing a Jean-Luc Godard film or reading Browning indicated murderous potential?” asks McGuinness. Well, yes, of course they bloody did. As always, these staunch defenders of Western culture run away screaming when presented with anyone who knows or cares about Western culture at any level deeper than a commemorative tea-towel from the V&A.

McGuinness also recalls the activities that Jefferies ran for boys who didn’t want to join the school Cadet Force: 

It was like a version of the Foreign Legion for misfits: the asthmatics and the diabetics, the boys with the hearing aids and the boys on crutches, the epileptic, the attention-challenged, the marginal, the sad and the emotionally combustible. We loved it.

PS: Now I’m reminded of the 1997 election and the deeply weird Tory candidate Dr Adrian Rogers, who declared that his opponent Ben Bradshaw “is a homosexual, works for the BBC, rides a bicycle, speaks German: he’s everything about our country that is wrong.”

About the Louvre

On Radio 4 this evening, a newsreader helpfully glossed an item about the redesign of the Louvre with the information that the Louvre is a museum in Paris that houses Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

Now, I get that the BBC is desperate to broaden its reach to the younglings and as a result we might need to broaden our assumptions about canons of knowledge and what is or isn’t known, but if someone doesn’t know what or where the Louvre is, why might they care that President Macron is chucking some money about it. And why does this passion for inclusivity only apply to Radio 4? Does Radio 1 explain every few minutes who Chappell Roan or Sabrina Carpenter might be? No, because the people who listen to Radio 1 are expected to know. 

Why are expectations so low at R4?

About Orlando

I grabbed a random book for the work commute and it turned out to be Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which I’m pretty sure last read in the dying days of the Thatcher regime (yes, even before the film came out). Except that I must have skipped the preface that time, because surely I’d have remembered, in among the nods to pretty much everybody who was Bloomsbury or Bloomsbury-adjacent in 1928, the following salute to failure, which feels like Alan Bennett channelling Jane Austen, or maybe vice versa:

Miss M.K. Snowdon’s indefatigable researches in in the archives of Harrogate and Cheltenham were none the less arduous for being vain.

About Tony Slattery

Sad to hear that Tony Slattery has died, and it inevitably prompts a slew of posts, many incorporating clips from the TV show where most of us first encountered him, Whose Line Is It Anyway? This one, for example, which gives us a chance not only to mourn a mercurial talent, but also to gaze back at a time when a major channel would put out a show with the working assumption that a critical mass of the audience would know who William Burroughs and Anthony Burgess might be.

About lynx

I was mildly startled, during the coverage of the lynx being released in Scotland, to hear more than one broadcaster explain, often with an annoying mini-chuckle, that they meant a kind of big cat, not a brand of deodorant. But surely there’s a large constituency, especially among listeners to what’s now known as legacy media, who don’t have day-to-day contact with stinky, surly 14-year-olds, but do have a bit of an idea about the different species of wild cat. And as a result, for a decent number of listeners, the rather desperate attempt at clarification would surely have made things more confusing. 

About Listen

At the urging of expat@large, one of the faithful from the days when Blogging Was A Thing, I have been reading Michel Faber’s Listen: On Music, Sound and Us and immediately feel a wee bit seen.

Being exceptional is not a badge of honour, it’s just a divergence from the general standard. Intellectuals (or bookish types or deep thinkers or cultured souls or whatever label you choose) are a minority like any other. They find validation in their specialness while missing out on easy communion with the larger herd. They console each other, reassure each other that they’re not weird or poncy even though, statistically speaking, they are.