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 Tyggers

Found this on BlueSky (Twitter for nice people) and it made me laugh but also made me think once again that so much humour depends on getting two separate references, a bit like my favourite joke, which demands a passing knowledge of both Star Wars and French baked goods. But we’ll get back to that some other time.

PS: And just as I post this, I remember my first term at university and my tutor, the lamented Chris Brooks explaining Blake’s concept of innocence and experience by reading the last couple of pages of The House at Pooh Corner.

About Jerusalem

Boris Johnson ruffled a few feathers today by laying claim to the concept of “a new Jerusalem” beloved of English radicals from Blake to the Attlee government and beyond. I was similarly annoyed with him until I saw this tweet by Dr Jennifer Cassidy, apparently a politics lecturer at Oxford University – Johnson’s alma mater of course – and now I just want to hide under the covers and whimper.

“In the depths of the Second World War...the government sketched out a vision of the post-war, new Jerusalem that they wanted to build”

Does the PM know how fractioned Jerusalem is? It is of the most divided cities on earth. pic.twitter.com/qBXBidIiGm

— Dr. Jennifer Cassidy (@OxfordDiplomat) October 6, 2020

In Hakone: part two

Part one here.

So after an extraordinary dinner (cherry-blossom sushi, anyone?) and a midnight dip in a sulphurous onsen we arise suitably refreshed to attend the Modigliani exhibition at the Pola Museum. It’s a good show, interspersing Modigliani’s own works with those of his friends and contemporaries (including Picasso, who seems to get bloody everywhere in Japan) and tells the tale of a short life that ended in pissed poverty at the age of 35. In fact, the bohemian destitution that informs Modigliani’s paintings casts an inevitable pall over proceedings and you wonder whether it might be better to look at them individually, stripped of the biographical barnacles and the inevitable sense of melancholy that they bring.

Someone at the museum must have been listening because within the permanent collection they have three paintings that are stripped of any identifying material. No artist, title, date or anything. The deal is that you just look at them and consider how they make you feel, almost like a child who’s never seen a painting before. It’s a superb idea which I completely ruin by spotting that the first two paintings are by Kandinsky and Delvaux. And I’m thrown back to my English S-level paper (or was it Oxford entrance?) which included an unseen, unattributed text to which we were expected to respond; I spotted immediately that it was by Ben Jonson and throughout the whole exam I was debating whether to drop that fact casually into the answer to show off what a clever bastard I am or not mention it because if I did that would suggest I’d prepared for something that was meant to be spontaneous. I can’t remember now what I did in the end. And I didn’t get into Oxford.

But not for the first time, I’m stuck in a paradox, wanting to learn more but wishing I knew less because to be honest it’s often more fun that way. The third mystery painting, incidentally, turned out to be by a Japanes surrealist called Koga Harue, of whom I’d never heard and whose stuff I’d like to investigate more — although I guess that means I’ll find out just that little bit too much and the fun will wear off again. I suppose we’re going back to the notion of innocence, an idea that’s fascinated me since a brilliant man, since departed, explained Blake to me by means of reference to the last chapter of The House at Pooh Corner:

Then, suddenly again, Christopher Robin, who was still looking at the world with his chin in his hands called out, “Pooh!”
“Yes?” said Pooh.
“When I’m — when — Pooh!”
“Yes, Christopher Robin?”
“I’m not going to do Nothing any more.”
“Never again?”
“Well, not so much. They don’t let you.”

Incidentally, one of my very earliest memories is of a family holiday in Devon and a visit to the bookshop that Christopher Robin Milne owned in Dartmouth. At one point a middle-aged man popped his head out from what must have been the store room and my father whispered that it was Christopher Robin himself. And I believed him, but a few years later I started thinking that it was just some random employee and Dad was humouring me; or that it may or may not have been Christopher Robin, but Dad just wanted to create a world for me in which it was. Only in the past few years have I come to the firm conviction that, yes, it really was Christopher Robin himself.

Of course, childhood and innocence aren’t one and the same. The Pola also contains a number of pictures by the European-based Japanese artist Léonard Foujita, a friend and contemporary of Modigliani who outlived him by nearly 50 years. Some of his most startling works involve children, who are depicted somewhere on the continuum between cute and evil, like possessed Kewpie dolls. Several of the pictures are downright disturbing, although not in the same way that the sexualised nymphets of Balthus disturb, in a show we visit when we get back to Tokyo. But that’s another story.

And I start wondering whether Foujita’s depictions of childhood – and indeed of France — might have a special resonance in Japan. But maybe that’s because I know where we’re going next.

Part three here.

The Olympic opening ceremony: being Boyled

(The following thoughts are pretty much a synthesis of about 14 different conversations I’ve been having on various online media over the past few hours. As such, they are probably neither original nor coherent. You have been warned.)

I was a bit torn a few weeks ago when the news came that the test for prospective UK citizens will contain more questions about history. On the one hand, this is something I can only applaud, because it’s impossible to understand what makes a country or culture tick without knowing how it came to be where it is. But when you get to the nitty-gritty of which bits of history should be included, things become more complex. Nelson and Wellington and Churchill, fair enough; but what about the Putney Debates, the Rebecca Riots and the Tolpuddle Martyrs? The Jarrow Crusade and the Battle of Cable Street? Too political you say? But Churchill wasn’t?

You see, even if you agree on the basic facts, there are always multiple histories, parallel, interweaving, depending on the emphasis you choose to place on those facts. And in that spirit I bloody loved Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the Olympic Games. His was a people’s history of the UK, Blake rather than Kipling, suffragettes rather than Beefeaters, Dizzee Rascal, not the Last Night of the bloody Proms. And the CND badge and the Brookside lesbians and, of course, the glorious in-your-face-Cameron salute to the NHS. Anything that provokes Telegraph readers into splenetic online rants about the evils of multiculturalism has to be good value.

But hang on a moment. Was it really as cheeky and subversive as it seemed? Boyle wanted to make a story about revolutions but rather than Hegelian dialectic we got phallic chimneys appearing from the ersatz countryside as the industrial revolution brought pollution and capitalism to the countryside, turning everything dark and satanic. And yet Brunel and his top-hatted, bewhiskered chums were still presented as the good guys, forging the modern age and beginning a continuum that leads inexorably to a benign Tim Berners-Lee at his desk. Take that, greens and lefties alike. And there was still Elgar and there was still James Bond, purveyor of thick ears to assorted dangerous foreign types. And yes, there was still the Queen, even if she didn’t appear to be enjoying it as much as she’d revelled in that strange boaty jamboree last month.

Baudrillard would have argued that we’re simply blinded by the razzmatazz and spectacle of the whole thing, that obscures and eventually supplants the reality, including historical reality. And sure, there were lots of fireworks. But there’s also a sense that the very real spirit of subversion and nonconformism and sheer bloody-mindedness in British history has been appropriated; what Debord and the Situationists called recuperation. Yes, there were bits of the Stones and Bowie and the Sex Pistols and Frankie Goes To Hollywood, music that shocked and disturbed when it came out. But punk rockers became a posse of outsized marionettes, far more funny than scary. It all came through the door marked HERITAGE.

This is the problem when a nation decides to build its post-imperial identity around irony and self-deprecation, where the worst sin is to take oneself too seriously. To be truly subversive, to truly shock, Boyle would have had to come up with something utterly po-faced and self-important. A bit like the Beijing gig four years ago, in fact.

Maybe that at least would have made the Queen crack a smile.

Capitalist piglet

A lasting memory from my days at university – one of the few actually connected with my studies – was a tutorial about William Blake which gradually turned into a discussion of the last chapter of The House at Pooh Corner. Our tutor, a man who died far too soon, elucidated Blake’s notions of Innocence and Experience in terms of Christopher Robin’s attempt to explain his own Going Away to his friend Pooh:

“I’m not going to do nothing anymore.”
“Never again?”
“Well, not so much. They don’t let you.”

Which had quite a resonance for a bunch of fresh-faced 18-year-olds, many grappling for the first time with overdrafts and washing machines, but not quite yet in the real world. At least we were still allowed to do nothing. We were studying English after all.

Many miles and years from the 100 Aker Wood, I happen upon a piece about the bloody iPad. The schtick is that the author, Peter Bregman, wants to give his back because “any free moment becomes a potential iPad moment.” And that’s the problem:

But something – more than just sleep, though that’s critical too – is lost in the busyness. Something too valuable to lose.
Boredom.
Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue. Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on. And that’s where creativity arises.

The funny thing is, Bregman isn’t some eternal student, a balding soixante-huitard who still deploys Christopher Robin and Blake and Alice and Syd Barrett and The Wind In The Willows and The Magic Roundabout in an effort to destabilise the military-industrial complex and justify the fact that he never irons his trousers. He’s writing for the Harvard Business Review, for crying out loud. This is work he’s talking about. So the next time your boss catches you staring into the middle distance when you’re meant to be doing something even less interesting, just tell her that you’re brainstorming with yourself, and she can run that one up the flagpole and see who plays Poohsticks with it.