About the Bayeux Tapestry

I am intrigued by the tale of Mia Hansson, who has since 2016 occupied herself with creating a life-size replica of the Bayeux Tapestry, but can’t help but think of Borges’s Pierre Menard, who became the author of Don Quixote by writing it out. (And I wonder what sort of journalist could cover this story without once asking: “Why?”)

About billboards

And a tip of the hat to Jennifer Bolande, who populates billboards with images of the landscapes they’re blocking. (Via Toby Amies.) A practical manifestation of Baudrillard’s simulacra and Borges’ 1:1 map, I reckon.

Bentleys, Borges, Bros and the fine art of disingenuous damage

From a letter to the Guardian about the late Jocelyn Stevens:

He was so wealthy that, when his car was written off in an accident, he instantly bought another Bentley (or whatever) and told his garage to make on it the same scratches and marks as were on the original so that his wife wouldn't know about the crash. 

Whether the tale is true or not (the correspondent believes it is but can’t be certain) there’s something deliciously Borgesian—via Baudrillard, naturally—about this, with the new car as a simulacrum to disguise the reality of the old one, and the crash. But the new car can’t just be a replica of a thing; it also has to replicate a history, events, time. Or maybe it’s just like the late 1980s, when people (OK, we) deliberately ripped holes in their Levis while insisting they’d occurred naturally.

Paris match

A highlight of my last visit to Paris was Seconde Main, an exhibition of forgeries and pastiches at the Museum of Modern Art. And now we discover that, towards the end of the First World War, the French began building a massive replica of Paris, to confuse the Germans. This can be contrasted with the Americans, who now build massive replicas of Paris and other cities, mainly to confuse Americans; and then in Macao they replicate the replicas, as if anyone cares. But that’s just cheesy postmodernism, and you get quite enough of that here already. If the practical purpose of the decoy Paris was to protect the real city, and to do so the French wanted to create a simulacrum that was identical in all respects, surely there must have come a point at which the builders would have decided the decoy was so beautiful and romantic that it needed protection as well, and so another decoy would need to be built – a replica of the replica – and so on...

Which in turn reminds me of Borges’ story On Exactitude in Science,  in which he discussed the notion of a map that was exactly the same size as the territory it depicted; the question being the extent to which a representation of an object becomes that object. Which almost certainly sounds better in Spanish:

Sous les pavés, le plagiat

British universities are riddled with plagiarism and cheating, it seems, although the poor, anonymous grunts using iPods as crib sheets could argue that they’re only taking tips from German aristocrats and the spawn of Arab tyrants.

At least in academia there are clear rules as to what constitutes plagiarism – the only problem is catching the buggers doing it. In what purports to be the real world, definitions are rather more blurred. Michel Houellebecq admitted to lifting big chunks of his most recent novel from Wikipedia, but invoked Perec and Borges as precedents, so that’s OK; the young German author Helene Hegemann said that her book Axolotl Roadkill did contain substantial elements from another text, but in any case, “there’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.” It wasn’t plagiarism, it was mixing, it was sampling; rather than calling on Borges, she was just taking tips from Berlin DJ culture. And everyone decided to let her off as well, because they wanted to be down wiv ver kids, like.

Journalism is stuck somewhere in the middle. Hacks aren’t expected to annotate every reference – indeed, they’re specifically permitted to remain tight-lipped about the identity of their sources – but at the same time they’re not really supposed to lift whole paragraphs from elsewhere and pass the action off as some sort of postmodern affectation. What is depressing is that it’s often done so badly, so artlessly, with no attempt to disguise the crime. Plagiarising journalists are often bad writers, so the stuff they’ve nicked is usually better written than their own work; and because they can’t write, they’re completely unaware of how easy it is to spot the lurch between styles.

But the real forehead/keyboard interface happens when they scoop something up from an online source – few are quite dumb enough to choose Wikipedia, but it does happen – and can’t be bothered to change the formatting, or remove the hyperlinks. I think we’ve reached a point where we can’t expect writers to have written the stuff they pass off as their work; but is it too much to ask that they might have read it?

PS: The title is a crap pun that’s been done several times before, but it’s in French, so that’s OK.

The garden of forking streams

Chilean author Eduardo Labarca has declared that pissing on the grave of Jorge Luis Borges (or at least pretending to) is “an artistic act”. Although it turns out that the act was motivated not by any disapproval of Borges’ writing, but as a response to his support for General Pinochet and other reactionary leaders in South America, which surely makes it a political act. Now, is that better, or worse, or at least less messy? And would I be able to justify vomiting on the mausoleum of Martin Amis (who isn’t dead, as far as I’m aware, but he hasn’t  written anything this century that particularly excited me) on one or other or both grounds?

Feel free to add your own author-death-bodily function combo in the space below. Bloody hell, is this a new meme?

It’s the same old song

Phil Collins, the grimacing Yoda of 80s git-rock, is to release a new album next month. Roll up your jacket sleeves, people, because if that isn’t exciting enough, it’s full of soul and Motown covers. “I want the songs to sound exactly like the originals,” he declares, and surely an album that sounds exactly like a bunch of old soul and Motown songs is a more enticing prospect than an album that sounds exactly like Phil Collins singing a bunch of old soul and Motown songs. Apart from all those received ideas about authenticity and credibility and the sanctity of ‘the original’, Phil’s statement opens up plenty of exciting philosophical rat-runs: will his new album be a Baudrillardian simulacrum of the originals, concealing and perverting their essence, their reality; or perhaps a Borgesian map, on a 1:1 scale to the musical territory it depicts?

Or will it sound like Phil Collins singing a bunch of old soul and Motown songs?

The bigot in the woodpile

I've written before about the difficulty of reconciling an artist's work and politics, and how it's sometimes necessary to draw a veil over some writers' more rabid asides.

For example, here's that old rogue Jorge Luis Borges, describing the return of the Gods in the parable 'Ragnarök':

It all began with a suspicion (perhaps exaggerated) that the Gods did not know how to talk. Centuries of fell and fugitive life had atrophied the human element in them; the moon of Islam and the cross of Rome had been implacable with these outlaws. Very low foreheads, yellow teeth, stringy mulatto or Chinese moustaches and thick bestial lips showed the degeneracy of the Olympian lineage.

...which isn't exactly an extract from Der Stürmer, but still, it's not really the sort of thing we like to hear nowadays, is it? There's a number of possible responses to this sort of thing. You can excuse it through context: it's a dream sequence; maybe it was translated badly; it's postmodern irony, stupid. Or you can treat it with polite, strained embarrassment, as if JLB were a glum uncle who's had one too many gins and starts mumbling about the blacks and the poofs and how they ought to bring back flogging.

In any case, within the space of a few lines, Borges offers up a sentence of pure, audacious magnificence:

We took out our heavy revolvers (all of a sudden there were revolvers in the dream) and joyfully killed the Gods.

Which is so glorious that it makes everything feel OK again. Doesn't it?

It's life, Jim...

In which I create a fictional detective who blurs the distinction between reality and fiction while covering the Haut de la Garenne case, but resist the temptation to call him Borgerac.

And while we're in the area, that Wire final episode effusion will be with you very soon, and I mean it this time. Oh, and Wyndham's pissed off again.

Chocoslovakia

So there was this e-mail from Amazon, single-breasted slayer of high street bookshops, informing me that "...customers who have purchased or rated books by Haruki Murakami have also purchased A Boy from Nowhere: v. 1 by David Mitchell."

That's fast work by the boy Mitchell, I thought. It doesn't seem so long ago that I was reviewing his last tome, Black Swan Green.

So, what's this one about?

"This is my story - an account of my life which began in the backstreets of the east end docklands and took me eventually through all kinds of experiences and adventures and raised me to a level that many years ago I thought would be impossible. It is a book that should be read by every young man or girl who comes from a disadvantaged background, as i did, but who still maintains a burning ambition to get on in this world of ours. There is little you cannot achieve provided you have the will and the determination to see things through to the very end."

Ah. I think they've mixed up this chap with the other, Booker-nominated and very definitely Murakami-influenced fellow. Although...

And this is where that whole postmodern, metafictional, let's-play-with-the-notion-of-authorship, every-writer's-entitled-to-a-Pierre-Menard-moment, bloody-Nabokov-got-away-with-it thing tips over into absurdity with a smidgeon of paranoia. Because I couldn't shake off the notion that this memoir might actually be an arch, literary jape by the other David Mitchell. There was something about the blurb on the publisher's website that just seemed too authory to be real:

"Leaving school at 14, as most working class lads did then, and without any educational qualifications the story plots his fight to gain success against all odds and tells how he rose to become UK Director responsible for the sale and distribution of all Czechoslovak confectionery products; this brought him into close contact with the communist world, with spies, and explains how and why he assisted MI6."

I think it's the reference to Czechoslovak confectionery products that does it for me. That's just too good to be real. And the problem with feelings like this is, even if I were to read A Boy from Nowhere, even if I were to meet its author, Mr Mitchell, even if I were to see the MI6 files that detailed the microfilms he secreted among the shipment of Curly-Wurlys from Bratislava (I'm guessing that bit), I'd still have the nagging instinct that the book was fiction, that this was all some benevolent con-trick, and that David Mitchell would whip off his latex mask and be replaced by, uh, the other David Mitchell. Or even the other other David Mitchell, the "...and Webb" one. Or maybe Murakami or Borges or Nabokov, or even Patrick McGoohan.

Poor Mr Mitchell (the confectionery one, that is). He's found himself embroiled in a web of intrigue and confusion that will make his dealings with MI6 seem positively humdrum.