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 the structural monotonists

Sometimes it’s hard to quantify what precisely got lost as the golden age of blogging was superseded by the implacable progress of social media. It’s the overall tone more than anything; maybe I’m being wilfully nostalgic, but I remember zingy one-liners, only occasionally interrupted by gruff thuggishness (for which there was usually an apology the following morning). In these grimly polarised days, it’s the other way round as we have to mudlark the gems from the black goop of the culture war.

So it’s nice to acknowledge a leading light of the old school, the artist formerly known as Patroclus, who was sighing the other day about a client’s complaint that AI is baffled by a paragraph that contains more than three sentences and spurns any ideas contained there. OK, so she said it on Facebook, but for a fleeting moment it didn’t feel like Facebook.

About whiteness and purity

Matt Chorley of the BBC has made a mistake. Referring to Nigel Farage’s response to the killing of Henry Nowak, Chorley said that the Reform leader used the phrase “white cold rage”. In fact, he’d said “pure cold rage”. The journalist subsequently apologised, explaining that he’d misremembered.

Well, any inaccuracy in reporting needs to be acknowledged but I’m not clear why this one in particular warrants an apology. For a start, the original phrase was clearly figurative. Rage is neither cold, nor pure. Neither, for that matter, is it white. I do understand that in the current febrile atmosphere, words that might have racial connotations should be treated with caution, but if “white” is a dangerous adjective then surely so is “pure”. Both might be used, together or separately, in the furtherance of racial hygiene and similarly bonkers eugenicist notions, for example. So Farage appears to be aggrieved not by the suggestion that he used a potentially inflammatory adjective, but that he used a different potentially inflammatory adjective from the potentially inflammatory adjective that he did use.

Of course, a few months ago accusations resurfaced that Farage might have used rather more robust language in his adolescence, although apparently that was “tongue-in-cheek schoolboy banter” so that’s OK then.

PS: In a deeply morbid way, I now really want to hear Farage’s Desert Island Discs. Although I doubt if they’d approach the, um, purity of his political idol’s selection.

About staples

A fun interview with the Pet Shop Boys, focusing on the visual aspects of their work, in which Neil Tennant is egged into saying “Gesamtkunstwerk” as if it’s a big, dirty swear. He also muses on which magazines have survived the protracted Death Of Print, and which have withered: 

The New Yorker. The Spectator. The Atlantic. The stapled magazine opens invitingly, whereas the instinct of a perfect bound magazine is to close.

I love the idea of a magazine having an instinct. But could it also be that a perfect bound magazine (essentially, one with a spine), more closely resembles that most toxic of things, a book?

About the Winter Olympics and the Northern Lights

Still recovering from the various disappointments of the Winter Olympics, above all that the American hockey player who I thought operated under the Zola-esque nom de glace “J’accuse” was in fact called Jack Hughes. Then I follow the all-conquering Norwegians back to their homeland, although I travel even further north, inside the Arctic Circle to see the Northern Lights.

And there I meet further disappointment. I’m well aware that the garish colours in the adverts were a photographic mirage but when I look to the skies I see the extraordinary, looping interactions of solar winds in strict monochrome. As others aah and ooh over a green one and a pink one, I start to wonder whether the whole thing is a practical joke. Is it down to me to suggest that this icon of meteorological spookiness is a naked fraud? But apparently it’s not unknown for some people to be unable to see the colours. It’s not you, Aurora Borealis, it’s me. And then, when I take a photo, it’s as pretty as, well, a picture. What I can’t capture is the black-and-white that I see. Do my eyes, not to mention technology, deceive me? Well, yes, of course they do.

And inevitably I turn to Baudrillard, who would no doubt have insisted that the image, the simulacrum (which most people see) has superseded the thing that is only seen by people who are daft enough to take a cable car up a mountain in Tromsø in sub-zero temperatures and which is only a different kind of mirage anyway. And I think back to the exertions of J’accuse and his fellow Olympians and remember that so many things (curling for example) just look better on a screen.

About Sheffield

The algorithms have directed me to a rather enticing box set of music created in Sheffield between the late 70s and late 80s. The track listing includes material from most of the major acts I remember from that time and place (The Human League, Heaven 17/BEF, ABC, Pulp – but no Def Leppard) as well as a few bands (Chakk, Clock DVA, Danse Society) that I probably wouldn’t be able to pick out in an identity parade but the names of which I vaguely recall from the NME or night-time Radio 1.

And there’s more. Much, much more. Names, glorious names, so glorious that I rather suspect the compilers have invented a few, just to keep us on our toes. So, here’s a conundrum. Below is a list containing the names of nine Sheffield bands from the period and one that I’ve invented. Your task is to spot the fake and there’s an imaginary bottle of Henderson’s relish for the first person to guess right.

Hobbies of Today
Repulsive Alien
The Naughtiest Girl Was A Monitor
Fish And Breadcake
Quite Unnerving
Defective Turtles
Acrobats Of Desire
Bongo Camisole Time
Peter Hope And The Jonathan S. Podmore Method
The Wacky Gardeners

Best of Yorkshire luck. And here’s one of the real bands, a few days ago.

About vibey

I grow old, I grow old and language is dribbling away from my control. Case in point: this article, which describes a mid-70s Joni Mitchell album as “vibey” without explaining what that might mean. To confuse matters, it does feature contributions from the vibraphone player Victor Feldman, but I don’t think that’s what seals it. A social media callout prompted some interesting possibilities, including “more atmospheric than formally tight” which fits but could also fit supermarket muzak. And then we find that Hoxton Square is similarly vibey and it looks as if it’s a word, like “cool” and “hip”, that served a very precise purpose until the estate agents got hold of it.

About online wrongness

The Oxford Word of the Year is “rage bait”, defined as: 

online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content.

But I’m trying to be less consumed with rage these days, even if recent events feel designed to provoke it: analogue rage bait, if you like. What I do notice instead, among all the AI capybaras is stuff that appears engineered to induce a bit of mild eye-rolling, a sigh, an outburst of pedantry; that time when an exasperated parent loses patience and says, “never mind, let me do it.” It’s a variant of Cunningham’s Law, which holds that “the best way to get the right answer is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer”. Except that nobody cares about getting the right answer as long as they get those eyeballs.

The whole issue is confused by the lurking presence of AI; are these cynical attempts to engage with wrongness, or just bots swallowing up online dumbness and spitting it out again? For example, this list of the best ever Test batters, which starts OK, then descends into increasingly hearty portions of word soup. It looks like AI slop, put out there to provoke – but then we recall the Japanese Nintendo game that was peopled with bizarrely-named baseball players, all without the assistance of AI. Might Gariel Btogby not be a distant cousin to Bobson Dugnutt?

And then we see posts like this, claiming to be a video of “Jingle Bells in Indian” which is nonsensical because there’s no such language as Indian, and in any case the song being massacred is ‘Sleigh Ride’. Pedant bait? Well, not really, because someone who points out the solecism is slagged off for being a killjoy Karen. This was a post born of slack-jawed ignorance, pure and simple, and it’s bad manners to mention it. To be honest, why do we need digitally-generated stupidity when we have the real thing?

About Stoppard

Reaching through the cigarette fug to rescue the best zingers among the tributes to Tom Stoppard, I find this, from a touching piece by Patrick Marber:

I like cliches! I use them often. With my work it helps for the audience to know where they are now and then.

PS: An earlier ponder from the great man on the accessibility or otherwise of his works; and less than a year ago, the critic who described one of his plays as intellectual masturbation, to which the only feasible response is, “you say that like it’s a bad thing.”

PPS: And just before I publish, I hear Marber describe Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as “showy-offy”, which misses the point even harder.

PPPS: And of course this letter, which has gone viral, or metastatic, or chaotic, or something:

About 1968

I was born in 1968, which really was one of those years, wasn’t it? The assassinations of MLK and RFK, the Tet offensive, the Prague Spring and its sudden end and of course the student revolts, most famously the Paris événements. Indeed, I made my entrance in the midst of the latter kerfuffle, albeit in bucolic Devon rather than at the Sorbonne. Indeed I’ve occasionally adopted the slogan above (“May 68, beginning of a prolonged struggle”) as a statement of biographical intent.

And then I discover, in Joan Didion’s The White Album (named, of course, after one of the best records released that year), a line that trumps it: 

By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.

PS: Further good stuff from the Didion: discussing the mansion being built for then-California-governor Ronald Reagan, she observes:

In the entire house there are only enough bookshelves for a set of the World Book and the Book of the Month, plus maybe three Royal Doulton figurines and a back file of Connoisseur...

And, yes, we used to sneer at the likes of Reagan and Dubya for their perceived intellectual shortcomings, but they now look like Socrates and Plato compared to what came after. Talking of which, the Trump presidential library is a thing.

PPS: And a further zinger:

The public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony.

I hadn’t read any Didion before. I think I need to catch up.

About The Wire (not the cop show)

I picked up a copy of The Wire for the first time in several years and, despite it being the 500th edition, it seems somehow diminished, as is often the case on the rare occasions I chance upon a print periodical and yes, I guess I’m part of the problem, aren’t I? An appeal for donations (as distinct from subscriptions) means it feels more like the journal of some Trotskyite splinter group being sold outside Brixton station in 1991 than a magazine covering strange music.

Maybe it’s not a coincidence that it’s more overtly political than I remember. An article by Mark Fisher’s biographer, arguing that hauntology was “concerned with the ways in which certain forms of fugitive music continue to resist recuperation by capitalism”; another in which Theodora Laird explains that “the solitude of my practice is a direct reaction to my experiences of racialised othering”. Moreover there appears to be an assumption that relatively new-fangled semantic orthodoxies need no further explanations. Two separate musicians are referred to as “they”, without the clarification that they (by which I mean the two of them, not either one individually using that pronoun and as I’ve said before the problem is not that non-binary people require a pronoun, it’s that they want one that’s already being used for something else) are (I assume) non-binary and this is their preferred pronoun; and a piece on using sign language to interpret music performances mentions “Deaf” (capital D) audiences, implicitly taking the side of those who refuse to acknowledge hearing loss as a disability. (For more on this see Ahmed Khalifa’s interesting post.)

There were some gems amidst the lectures, though. First, a quotation from the former Swedish PM Tage Erlander: “A politician’s job is to build the dancefloor, so that everyone can dance as they please.” Which is nice, even if I haven’t danced since about the same time I was buying Trotskyite journals in Brixton. And an article about the Chicago trio Bitchin Bajas, who are officially my new favourite band, even if I refuse to dance to them.

About war (a post for 9/11)

From Nicholson Baker’s A Box of Matches, regarding Marines’ predilection for short hair: “They want to look like penile tubes of warmongeriness.”

But it’s not just hair, is it? It’s Farage with a machine gun; it’s Milei’s chainsaw; it’s President Bonespurs renaming the Defense Department The Department of War. It’s elderly schoolboys indulging in performative idiocy and it’s at once dangerous and deeply, deeply boring. 

(And yes, the death of Charlie Kirk and all the platitudes and hypocrisies that follow in its wake come from the same place.)

About Beyond

I am grateful to my former teacher Professor Martin Eve for drawing attention to an extraordinary document from the University of Warwick, which endeavours to ensure all communications from said institution are at once Provocative, Curious and Optimistic. 

Nah, me neither. But, as an example, we are entreated not to say something as anodyne as “Scientists make breakthrough in development of fridge-free storage for vital medications”. Now, I would have thought that was rather a good thing for a university to announce, for any number of reasons. No, instead the headline should be: “Medication proteins so stable, you can pop them in the post.” You know, like sweeties. And, at all times we should operate under the banner of Beyond; indeed, “Using ‘Beyond’ as a subject noun makes ‘Beyond’ an entity that is actively driving change.” 

So, not only childish and inane, but consciously anti-literate as well. Warwick is the 74th-best university in the world, you know. God help the rubbish ones.

About Kant

I keep returning to the matter of Radio 4, pretty much the last remnant of Reithian values, and how in its desperation to remain relevant to Gens Y and Z, its presenters apparently feel the need to explain cultural references that their parents and grandparents would have taken in their stride.

And then this happens. In the lexicography-cum-comedy show Unspeakable, the comedian Russell Kane explains how he and his wife, when in the presence of their children, use the name “Immanuel” to describe someone who might in adult company attract a rather more robust epithet. What’s interesting is that the audience gets the gag with the barest of clues; all Kane tells us is that Immanuel is a philosopher who wrote the Critique of Pure Reason and the ribald chortles begin. I’m not suggesting that everybody who rocks up to a BBC comedy recording is totally conversant with what Kant has to say about metaphysics (I’m certainly not) but they have enough basic, possibly superficial understanding – what ED Hirsch would call cultural literacy – to ensure they laugh in the right place.

I wonder what it would take for producers and controllers to understand that listeners at home can cope with the same sort of thing.

PS: Vaguely related: investigating the war on so-called performative reading; and when AI destroys one’s ability to flirt, let alone write a college essay.

PPS: From the vaults: when I defended Paul Morley from the Philistines.

PPPS: An argument that men don’t read books any more; and an article on beach reads (Kinsella beats Tolstoy) that seems to take that contention for granted.

About blown minds

I’ve remarked in recent-ish posts about the extent to which online journalism has become the province of a sort of performative artlessness, where the banausic details of an event (in this case a Bob Dylan concert) take precedence over any kind of critical analysis; and also how an individual’s own ignorance (in this case about a word coined in 1960) is set up as default state for the rest of humanity, and anyone who knows more is an object of suspicion and loathing.

These two trends have met and had a big, ugly baby in the shape of a Buzzfeed article by one Caroline Bologna, who claims to find her mind blown by the information that “a.m.” and “p.m.” don’t stand for “after midnight” and “past midday” after all. I mean, that’s not a passing comment, that’s what the article’s about. It has as much weight and value as one of those videos where a Gen-Z influencer gasps and ultimately bursts into tears upon hearing a Kajagoogoo album for the first time. And I wonder what exactly you would need to blow a Buzzfeed’s journalist’s mind. On reflection, a damp drinking straw would do it.

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 “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 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 the New Civility Rule

The University of Sydney (alma mater of such awkward squad stalwarts as Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes and Clive James) has been grappling with the issue of how to reconcile people’s right to speak about stuff that annoys them, with the right of people not to be annoyed by that speaking. To this end, they have commissioned an external review that makes a number of recommendations, most of them eminently coherent and sensible, and this one: 

The University should amend its policies and procedures to make clear that each person utilising a word or phrase is responsible at the time the word or phrase is used to identify to the audience the context in which it is used. (New Civility Rule)

Um, er, OK, what? I mean, context is often useful to promote understanding, especially if a word or phrase is obscure or contentious. But does this mean every speaker has the responsibility to ensure every word s/he utters is perfectly clear to everyone present, utterly devoid of any trace of ambiguity or nuance? And then, what if the words used in the contextualisation require further contextualisation, and so on to infinity? If not, what the hell does it mean?

The end result of course will be that all public speech at the university will be reduced to the most banal, basic components, words that are incapable of offending, words that cannot be misunderstood (deliberately or otherwise), words that cannot challenge, cannot provoke and ultimately cannot educate. Which makes the continued existence of the University of Sydney look a bit bloody pointless, no?

Now, please excuse me, I need to write a companion post that identifies to the audience the context in which these words are used. I may be some time.

(Thanks to James Ley for alerting me to this.)

About bespoke

I got into a polite exchange of views a couple of days back over an otherwise unexceptional story about, of all things, expensive mince pies. Or, more specifically, over the language used by the good citizens of Orford, in Suffolk, where the Pump Street Bakery makes delicacies that are supposedly the priciest mince pies going. When one of the locals described them as “bespoke”, I was confused, because there had been nothing in the article to tell us this was the case. In fact, if they really were bespoke, or what I’d define as bespoke, created to the precise specifications of each customer, then the price (£25 for six) wouldn’t seem so exorbitant.

And it was only when a second person used the same adjective to describe the pies that I realised what was going on. “Bespoke” doesn’t have that specific meaning any more, the sense of having a suit made where every detail, the measurements, the cloth, the precise diameter of the buttons, is decided by the person paying the bill. It just means something luxurious, something posh. Something that costs £25 for six. 

I wrote about this a decade ago, discussing how I no longer use certain words (“iconic”, “surreal” and so on) because I can’t be sure whether they’ll be understood to have (what I regard as) the correct, precise meaning, or a more fuzzy definition (“famous”, “odd”). I’ve subsequently learned that there’s a linguistic term for this; semantic bleaching, a sort of meh-ification of our discourse, where the meaning of a word loses its intensity and, ultimately, its usefulness. “Curate” is another example. What once suggested a discriminating expertise employed to select pieces (pots, poems, plesiosaurs) for public consumption now means nothing more than choosing.

Does this matter? Well, if you think that it’s useful to have some words with a precise meaning, even if we don’t deploy them all that often, then yes, it does. But if it matters that much, what do we do about it? That’s where discussions on Friday tended towards the full and frank. I suggested that even though this use of “bespoke” was what the interviewees actually said, it was the duty of The Guardian to find some way of indicating that it wasn’t an accurate use of language. The pies aren’t bespoke, any more than they’re purple or three miles high or made in Burkina Faso. Maybe a discreet “[sic]” after the word? Or just replace it with what they really meant, which is “posh”. This does run the risk of insulting or demoralising people who may not have all the cultural capital of the average Guardian journalist, or editor, or reader but to be honest we do it all the time. If an interviewee commits a grammatical solecism (“you was”, for example) it will miraculously become “you were” by the time it’s published. Nobody’s yet died. 

And, yes, language moves on and the meaning of words changes. Which is great when the language is expanded, and we get neologisms like “skibidi” and “rizz” and “brat summer” and most of these will sound positively archaic in five years time but while they’re here they define a generation and baffle another generation and that’s what they’re for. But taking a useful word like “bespoke” and giving it a meaning that can be served by a dozen other words – essentially making the original word useless – doesn’t expand language. It makes it smaller.

And there’s a practical, mundane angle to this. I teach English to people who don’t have it as a first language. I always encourage them to aim first to be understood, and only then to worry about speaking “correctly”. But at some point they want and need to know what the correct version is, the right tense, the right conjunction, le mot juste, even if they don’t always hit the target. And if my students come across the word “bespoke” and ask me what it means, do I just tell them it means “posh”, so as not to upset two people in Suffolk?