About exceedingly wide paintings

I recently returned from Madrid, which is full of excellent food and splendid dogs and pedestrian crossings that make pee-yooooo noises like Ring My Bell by Anita Ward.

There is also, of course, art. Since 1992, Picasso’s Guernica has resided at the Reina Sofia museum, its monochrome depiction of man-made hell as powerful as ever. At least, I think it is; it’s difficult to tell, under the scrum of selfie-takers, even though its proportions (more than twice as wide as it’s tall) don’t easily fit the iPhone lens. I guess as long as you’ve got a screaming woman or a melting horse sprouting from your ear or shoulder, you don’t need the whole thing. Your proximity to great art has been recorded and that’s what matters.

Over at the more staid Prado, cameras are still forbidden, which is possibly why my two favourite paintings there (like Anish Kapoor’s works), define themselves by their dimensional awkwardness. I give you Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath, from the Black Paintings

and The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist and Herod’s Banquet by Bartholomeus Strobel

neither of which would look great on Instagram and to be honest they look pretty rubbish on Blogger as well. Which is a good thing, obviously.

PS: And I’ve just returned from seeing something even wider. And again, photos were verboten. Not, I think, something that was even considered when I first clapped eyes on it (gulp) 45 years ago.

About literacy (the end of)

From James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages, reminding us that the current state of illiteracy may just be a norm to which we are reverting:

A world in which everyone can read seems obvious to us now but it is an astonishingly recent phenomenon. Much of the history of reading might be characterised less as a story of social and cultural change and more as the progress of an esoteric secret passed down by elites.

It’s an eagerly anticipated book and everyone seems to be talking about it, by which I mean that people who are worried about the decline in reading (as evidenced by the latest PISA statistics) are talking about it by which I mean very few people at all give a toss. And as John Harris has suggested, the fact that it runs to little more than 200 pages might be an acknowledgement that some battles have already been lost. 

Much of the narrative focuses on the distractions offered by TikTok and doomscrolling, and some governments are actively attempting to encourage their citizens back to books. Singapore is even paying its people (a very small sum) to read. My own experience as a teacher is that AI is an even bigger threat, leaching critical intelligence and the need for creativity from young minds. It’s a happy coincidence for Marriott that his book appears at the same time that AI bosses themselves are urging a coordinated application of brakes to the process, although the fact that the most bibliophobic US president in history is telling them they don’t know what they’re talking about makes its own point. I mean, what sort of political leader would want a population lacking in critical intelligence? Oh, right.

PS: That time when Trump talked about his favourite books.

PPS: Two more from Marriott. First, via Gurwinder Bhogal, the notion that our bingeing on junk info has created an “intellectual obesity crisis”. And then, less happily, his contention that

...no actor on earth can show with his or her face what Jane Austen can show us about the human heart in half a paragraph.

to which I ask, “really?”

About getting 9/11 wrong

Donald Trump has been getting all in a tizzy about journalists suggesting that his memories of 9/11 and what he was doing that day are a wee bit confused. The strange thing is, I am uncharacteristically sympathetic to his plight, because it seems that I’ve been getting things wrong for 25 years as well.

A colleague asked me today where I was and what I was doing on that weird, ghastly day and I trotted out my usual story. That I’d been for a job interview that morning, then met a friend for lunch in Bloomsbury and, since neither of had anything more useful to do, we ambled over to the British Museum. There was an exhibition of projects by the architect Richard Rogers, including a proposed tower in Tokyo Bay that, had it been built, would have become the tallest in the world. To give a sense of scale, the model was presented alongside all the other buildings that had held that honour since the late 19th century. So when my wife phoned me to tell me that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center, I was looking at a model of the World Trade Center, which had suddenly become more real than the thing in represented.

Except that belatedly, I just checked to see if I could find a photo of the models in question, only to discover the whole thing was a Norman Foster project and Richard Rogers had nothing to do with it. 

I apologise to all those I have unwittingly deceived.

Your turn, Donnie.

About yet another name

Another name that could have found a place in the works of Pynchon or Vonnegut – the journalist Garrison Lovely.

PS: The actor playing Draco Malfoy in HBO’s Harry Potter reboot is apparently called Lox Pratt.

About Shakespeare and Winterson

Not a little consternation a few days ago when contestants on BBC1’s evergreen quiz show Pointless were tasked with identifying a Shakespeare play with ‘W’ or ‘S’ in the titles and half of them couldn’t manage it. (Guesses included ‘The Inspectors’, ‘The Story of the Witches’ and my favourite, ‘King Richards’.) 

Colour me distinctly unsurprised. The oft-trumpeted policy that “every British child learns Shakespeare” really means that every British child spends a year being fed enough pre-chewed gobbets of either Romeo and Juliet or The Merchant of Venice (neither of which has ‘W’ or ‘S’ in the title) to enable them to pass a GCSE, after which they don’t need to read another Shakespeare play again, ever.

Not everyone is relaxed about these gaping holes in our cultural knowledge, hence the so-called Illiterate Boyfriend trend, in which women test their beaux on the pronunciation of difficult words. It’s meant to highlight widening education gaps between the genders (and let’s just say that it’s not women who come out worse) but it should be noted that of the three failures in the Pointless debacle, only one was male.

But I do wonder what normal people (if such creatures exist) really think about readers or, more specifically male readers. I don’t think we’re yet at the point Gary Shteyngart predicted, where people can confidently express nausea at the very notion of books, but I am sometimes conscious when reading in public of what might best be described as sideways glances, and not the nice kind. Today I found myself on a train, opposite a woman even older than me, who seemed to be scowling at the tome I was carrying. To be fair, I’m not sure whether it was the fact that I was reading that annoyed her, or the specific book, which happened to be Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, once notorious for its depiction of sapphic naughtiness. So, just to irritate her even more, here’s a bit that made me laugh.

Somehow I made it to the altar. The priest was very fat and kept getting fatter, like bubble gum you blow. Finally we came to the moment, ‘You may kiss the bride.’ My new husband turned to me, and here were a number of possibilities. Sometimes he was blind, sometimes a pig, sometimes my mother, sometimes the man from the post office, and once, just a suit of clothes with nothing inside. I told my mother about it, and she said it was because I ate sardines for supper. The next night I ate sausages, but I still had the dream.

About killing books

The news that Russia has started targeting attacks on Ukraine’s printing presses and publishing companies – just as the school year is about to begin – should surprise nobody. Meanwhile, we have a US President who finds it easier to communicate his aspirations in AI gibberish than anything we might identify as language. And amidst all this, the news comes in that a woman who devoted her later years to encouraging children to read has been laid to rest. It’s a post-literate world, from the top down.

About dead famous people

It’s all starting to feel a bit 2016 again, as on successive days we have to process the deaths of Dolly Parton, Tim Curry and Yayoi Kusama, three people who in their own very different ways, channelled their art as much into being themselves as into doing or making stuff. We still have the music, the movies, the art but not the blonde locks, the raised eyebrow, the fact of living in a psychiatric hospital. And of course we have the vexed question of how important each was, how much bandwidth the media should devote, why they get more or fewer column inches than, say, the Belgian lobber of custard pies Noël Godin or the Butcher of Bosnia Radko Mladic or the bodies now being pulled out of the Nepalese mud.

And in the midst of this (specifically, between Dolly and Tim), I go to a celebration of someone who pushed off a few years ago, Martin Amis. Well, some were celebrating him but there was a ghost at the feast, albeit one who‘d been invited. Will Self (for it was he), held court for about 40 minutes in a Soho bar, laying into what he claimed to be the inflation of Amis’s reputation, the various infelicities of his later career, his political right turn, even the fact that he couldn’t read French. And then Self, rendered even more haggard and baleful than before by his recent illness, acknowledged that, yes, Amis’s first five or six novels were actually bloody brilliant and it still felt like a stab wound.

Maybe he can do Dolly Parton next.

About bad TV

A very odd article in The Guardian, about TV shows that the writers can no longer bear to watch. Of the dramas and comedies under discussion, five (The Office, This Life, Entourage, Euphoria, Coupling) now fail to pass muster because the behaviours and attitudes they depict, mainly with regard to gender and/or sexuality, are bad. The other two (Good Omens, House of Cards) are dismissed because real people connected with them (Neil Gaiman, Kevin Spacey) are alleged to have done bad things. Not one of these show is rendered unwatchable because it’s, aesthetically speaking, a bad work of art, because the writing or acting or direction or special effects or choice of lame 90s indie music on the soundtrack is below par.

We seem to have slipped backwards a century or two, to a point where Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Tess of the d’Urbervilles or Wuthering Heights were castigated for their deviation from righteousness rather than their thin characters or predictable plotting. Criticism is dead. Long live the new moralism.

About Morrissey’s voice

From Michael Bracewell’s novella The Smiths, in which the narrator describes first hearing ‘Hand in Glove’:

And was there some stratum of attitude, somewhere in the lower register, that brought to mind the interior monologue of a drily cynical supply teacher?

About Anish Kapoor

I wrote a few months ago about my disappointment when viewing the Northern Lights, and becoming aware that no reality could match the psychedelic strangeness of the photos.

Anish Kapoor’s retrospective at the Hayward, on the other hand, offers the opposite. You are confronted with visual paradoxes, flat surfaces – especially those painted in his beloved Vantablack – that feel like tunnels into another dimension, breast-like bulges that dissolve into flatness when faced head-on. And none of this is reproducible in pixels. The larger installations, meanwhile, are crammed into the available space like prisoners who’ve outgrown their cells, defying the limits of an ordinary viewfinder. 

It’s a show that seems to set itself against Instagram culture. You can give an idea, a glimpse of it, but to experience it you really need to be there in there, confronting the physicality of the thing. It’s outmoded, it’s a bit elitist (the show costs over £20, and that’s assuming you can get to London) and it’s entirely correct.

About Pynchonian names

It’s been a while since I’ve celebrated the glory of real names that sound as if they were invented by Thomas Pynchon or Kurt Vonnegut, and then two come along at once. Please be upstanding for Manila-based crimebuster Winston Casio and the doyenne of indolent teachers everywhere, Tandy L’Enfant!

About The Goodies

In the wake of Bill Oddie’s death, there’s been much musing about how the show for which he’ll be best remembered, The Goodies, has generally been seen as less significant, less groundbreaking, less serious (if a comedy show can be serious) and above all less clever than Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

For what it’s worth, I was always in the Goodies camp but that’s probably a question of chronology as I was just that tiny bit too young to appreciate the Pythons when they first appeared. Ecky Thump, though, might well have been crafted for seven-year-old me.

Not that it was really a kids’ show. The Goodies came from the same Oxbridge smartarse stable as their Python rivals and were regularly breaking fourth walls and giving it a bit of the old metafiction. And not just on TV either. The above clip is from the Cor!! annual from 1974, where our heroes work out that they’re not going to die purely from the geography of the comic strip layout. Many, many years later I learned that this was called metafiction. Which does suggest that an English literature course is less about teaching you new things, more about finding labels for what you already know.

About Diana and Rachael and Caitlin

I’m really looking forward to reading Rachael Stirling’s book about her glorious, brilliant mum, but I’m not sure I understand why the name of The Woman Who Thinks The Book Is Really Great is approximately four times bigger than the name of The Woman Who Actually Wrote The Bloody Thing.

About The Odyssey

 

I’ve said before that the loudest voices in the room when it comes to the erosion of what might loosely be known as Western culture are those who never showed the slightest interest in celebrating it. The Daily Mail is a repeat offender, whining when universities cut Chaucer from the curriculum (how are those market forces looking now?) while offering a world view that holds the antics of Kim Kardashian to be far more significant than any kind of book.

And now we find that Elon Musk, in response to what he sees as casting infelicities in Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of the Odyssey, will be using AI to concoct another version that is, in his words, “historically accurate”. I await his Laestrygonians with interest.

About Binface

 

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

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

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

About the Berlin Wall

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

About Trump

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

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

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

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

About Shiloh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About June 2016: And then Brexit

Brexit was the inevitability that nobody (including a number of its high-profile supporters, apparently) saw coming. I was out of the country for most of the run-up so maybe my excuse for missing the surge of contrarian fuck-you that propelled the Leave vote over the line is more plausible than that of those who were supposedly leading the campaign to stay. But I was in London on polling day itself and awoke to the news the following morning that, as I put it at the time: 

...my country, the land of Shakespeare and Churchill and Bez out of the Happy Mondays, is regressing into a 1950s-style suburban dystopia where people run away in terror at the sight of subtitled movies, and are turned to feral rage by the merest sniff of balsamic vinegar. 

I was sad, but not yet angry. What changed that was the contribution of someone who hadn’t voted to leave but clearly thought leaving was a very good idea (even if “clearly”, “thought” and “idea” are concepts that don’t exactly settle easily on him.)

Donald Trump, at that time best known for cosplaying a successful businessman on a reality TV show, arrived in Scotland and tweeted that everyone was delighted after they “took their country back” despite the fact that those north of the border had voted two-to-one to remain. For many people, not just Scots, this explosion of idiocy (mild compared to his later episodes, granted, but we had no idea) just added to the sense of hurt. And we took to Twitter, because in those days that’s what Twitter was for. And I called him a “witless fucking cocksplat”.

And then it all kicked off, to be honest. I was lumped in with something apparently called Scottish Twitter, which was nice because they were even ruder, calling him among other things a “knuckle-brained fart lozenge”, a “degenerate corned beef face syrup wearing wankstain” and a “hamster heedit bampot”. And, for the first and only time in my life I went properly viral and David Tennant read out my tweet on American telly and it was all lovely and Brexit was still a thing but, hey, at at least Trump wasn’t going to become President, was he? I mean, the world couldn’t go *that* mad.

PS: AI airbrushes me from history once again...

About Roland Bothes

I was recently wittering about how our (my?) concerns regarding authenticity have shifted from the analogue to the digital and accidentally came up with the notion of a ones-and-zeroes semiotician called Roland Bothes. Well, I couldn’t let that lie so I turned to ChatGPT (which would have given Barthes endless pleasure since in French it sounds like “Chat, j’ai pété”, or “Cat, I farted”) in an attempt to find out how it would deal with the sort of questions upon which Barthes himself chewed. (For the uninitiated, in Barthes’ most celebrated book, Mythologies, he considered to be familiar aspects of French culture and attempted to deduce not what they were but what they represented, what they meant.) 

Thus, in his chapter on steak-frites, Barthes declares that: 

...steak is in France a basic element, nationalized even more than socialized. It figures in all the surroundings of alimentary life: flat, edged with yellow, like the sole of a shoe, in cheap restaurants; thick and juicy in the bistros which specialize in it; cubic, with the core all moist throughout beneath a light charred crust, in haute cuisine. It is a part of all the rhythms, that of the comfortable bourgeois meal and that of the bachelor's bohemian snack. It is a food at once expeditious and dense, it effects the best possible ratio between economy and efficacy, between mythology and its multifarious ways of being consumed. 

Whereas. when I asked the farting cat what steak-frites represents, the best it could manage was:

French and Belgian bistro culture: It's a staple of traditional cafés, brasseries, and bistros, especially in France and Belgium.

Simplicity and quality: The dish is built from only a few components, so the quality of the meat, cooking technique, and fries are emphasized.

Comfort food with elegance: Steak-frites is considered both approachable and refined—suitable for a casual meal but also common in more upscale restaurants.

A culinary classic: It has become one of the most recognizable dishes associated with French-speaking European cuisine, much as fish and chips are associated with Britain.

All well and good, but ultimately it’s a French bistro dish that represents French bistro dishes. Hardly incisive. Hey, I guess most people asking questions about food will want to know about food, what it tastes like rather than its role in a universe of signification. So I suppose if I went for an area where semiotics was intrinsically bound up with the subject I might find something more interesting. OK, then, flatulent feline:

What does “Roland Barthes” represent? 

And this is what it came up with:

Roland Barthes refers to Roland Barthes, a French literary theorist, philosopher, and critic who had a major influence on literary studies, cultural studies, semiotics (the study of signs and symbols), and post-structuralist thought.

If you're asking what Roland Barthes "represents" in intellectual history, he is most closely associated with:

1. Semiotics (the study of signs and meaning) — Barthes analyzed how everyday objects, images, advertisements, fashion, and media communicate cultural meanings beyond their literal function.
2. The idea of "myth" in modern culture — In his book Mythologies, he argued that societies turn cultural values and ideologies into things that appear "natural" or self-evident. For example, an advertisement may sell not just a product but ideas about success, beauty, or patriotism.
3. Structuralism and post-structuralism — Barthes helped develop structuralist approaches to literature and culture, then later moved toward ideas that influenced post-structuralist thought.
4. "The Death of the Author" — In one of his most famous essays, Barthes argued that the meaning of a text should not be determined solely by what its author intended. Instead, meaning is created through the reader's interpretation and the cultural context of reading.

In a single sentence, Barthes represents the idea that culture is a system of signs and meanings that can be decoded, revealing the hidden assumptions and power structures behind everyday life.

Well, that’s a pretty efficient summary of the ideas expressed in Barthes’ major works, but in his own terms it misses the whole bloody point, doesn’t it? Just as steak-frites is about far more than an embodiment of French bistro cuisine, let alone meat and potatoes, Barthes is bigger than his semiotics. He represents Paris, the postmodern, cigarettes, being more fun than Adorno, Gilbert Adair, tequila-fuelled arguments in student flats at 3 in the morning, that Eng Lit undergraduate with kohl-rimmed eyes you were trying and failing to impress, being a bloody smartarse, doing a masters in cultural studies, still grinding on with this blog after two decades. AI knows all about Barthes and utterly fails to understand him. “Roland Barthes refers to Roland Barthes” indeed. Shades of Gradgrind.

Facts notwithstanding, ChatGPT also leaves out the best reality nugget of all, that Barthes died after being run over by a laundry van, following a long lunch with François Mitterand. (What does Mitterand represent? Best not to ask, I suspect.) And that of course wasn’t even Mitterand’s most memorable meal.