All the news that's fit to remember

Further book pluggery in the guise of cultural chinnery-strokery: the dénouement of the BBC’s sort-of-interactive review of the decade.

...also

I’ll be on Radio 5Live tomorrow morning, talking about death in the Noughties. I may get out of bed to do it, but probably not.

By the licking of my thumbs

If you Google the word ‘book’, the first result that comes up is Facebook. Which got me thinking...

Unless they’re related to work, my reading habits seldom follow a particular plan. The selection of a book from the teetering piles of unread matter is down to chance, mood, sleep patterns, energy levels, travel plans, even the weather (or more specifically the shape and size of the pockets of the outer garments I might be wearing at the time).

Sometimes there’s a happy congruence between two successive books: if you pick out a Martin Amis, does this raise the chances of your next selection being an Ian McEwan? But it’s rarer that coincidence brings together two books that appear to contradict each other directly. Even if, after deeper analysis, they turn out not to.

On the face of it at least, Pierre Bayard’s How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read does what it says on the cover. Bayard not only acknowledges the guilty secret that many who inhabit academic and literary circles haven’t actually read Ulysses/A Brief History of Time/anything; he even identifies such a state not as an omission, but as a commission, and a positive one at that:

If many cultivated individuals are non-readers, and if, conversely, many non-readers are cultivated individuals, it is because non-reading is not just the absence of reading. It is a genuine activity, one that consists of adopting a stance in relation to the immense tide of books that protects you from drowning. On that basis, it deserves to be protected and even taught.

Bayard’s thesis is based on the fact that any text is inextricably linked to the cultural context in which it exists; in this sense, his notion of non-reading can be seen as the logical end of Barthes’s Death of the Author (apologies to long-standing readers who’ve been subjected to this several times before). Just as the writer gives up any special authority over a text the moment it is read, so the reader gives up any claim to authority once the text becomes part of a broader culture. We need neither to write nor to read a book in order to own it; which must allow Katie Price to sleep more easily.

There does remain the question of whether Bayard is entirely serious. An air of mischievous irony hangs over the slim volume; and the breadth of references (Balzac; Proust; Musil; Wilde; Soseki; David Lodge; The Third Man; Groundhog Day) suggests that the author’s been reading a little more deeply than he affects to let on. Which in turn discourages the casual (non-?) reader, by framing a whimsical jape in the forbidding context of proper literary criticism.

Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, by contrast, couches a serious point in the context of whimsy. It’s a brief story about the Queen, who becomes an avid reader late in life; this change disturbs her advisors at Court and in government, who find the monarch becoming less malleable and reliable as a result of her literary explorations, and also begin to feel insecure about their own cultural aridity. Almost in passing, she expresses the point of reading a book, as distinct from being aware of its contents:

“Of course,” said the Queen, “but briefing is not reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.”

Which in turn makes me think of Cliffs Notes and similar products that claim to offer us the benefit of reading without actually, y’know reading. I’m not sure whether there’s an equivalent of Cliffs in Bayard’s native France, but I was half expecting a passing reference to them in his book. That said, raising the existence of such non-reading guides might have alerted us to the fact that he’s taking the piss, by implicitly acknowledging the point made by Bennett’s Queen: that it’s not the content of a book that’s important, but the process by which the reader engages with that content.

Not that you need to read this post to know that, of course.

New York state of mind

Tied in with the Noughties tome, I ponder the news stories of the past decade for the BBC. The temptation to ignore 9/11 entirely, and plump for the return of Davros was immense.

Too much too young

I am becoming increasingly fond of The Word magazine, and not just because they’ve mentioned my Noughties book for the third time in two issues. I suppose it’s because their prejudices gel with mine, not least in their overview of the bests and worsts of the past decade: The Wire, Twitter, winning the Ashes, BBC4, Heston Blumenthal, Brian Blessed on HIGNFY in the first camp; reality TV, The Da Vinci Code and Ugg boots in the latter.

But then we reach their Top 10 books of the last 10 years (I like to console myself with the notion that my tome was hovering somewhere around 11 or 12), and Christopher Bray’s take on Austerity Britain: 1945-1951, by David Kynaston, which is lauded as a “gloriously open-armed account of the era in which Word readers’ parents were setting up home.”

Except that my parents got married in 1966. Does this mean I’m 15 years too young to read The Word?

Package deal

I’ve never really liked Christmas. Even its few redeeming features are dying out; the Salvation Army band that used to play at Victoria seems to be have replaced by an ad hoc, plain-clothes combo that barely gets through a single verse of ‘David’s City’ before grinding to an embarrassed halt.

So I was delighted to read the thoughts of Joel Waldfogel, who has offered sound economic analysis to support my instinctive distaste for that cornerstone of the modern Yuletide, the giving and receiving of gifts. The transaction, he argues, represents a deadweight loss; the value placed on a present by the giver inevitably exceeds that which the receiver calculates. In any case, in a developed economy, if people want something, they’ll probably buy it for themselves. ‘Gift shops’, almost by definition, sell things that nobody really wants to own.

But then you read down the article, and discover that Waldfogel has a book out, with the Zeitgeisty title Scroogenomics. I can’t help but think that, for all the author’s protestations, more than a few copies will be purchased as Christmas presents; probably for grumpy gits who profess to loathe Christmas. And of course I have a book or two out at the moment, and despite my anti-festive feelings, I’m not going to forbid anyone from buying copies as gifts.

Maybe Waldfogel and I should enjoy Christmas together, scowling across a bowl of lukewarm sprouts, pulling crackers with royalty statements inside and then spending the rest of the day feeling guilty.

The spirit of Hornby

I think the first time I ever posted a comment online came about 10 years ago, when The Guardian tried to compile a list of the 100 ‘greatest’ albums that never showed up in lists of 100 ‘greatest’ albums. What they eventually produced, as I pointed out, was the bottom half of a list of the 200 ‘greatest’ albums. In the same admirable if slightly quixotic spirit, that obsessive cinematic taxonomist Iain Stott has come up with another list, this time of the ‘greatest’ films that have somehow evaded the consensual canon of ‘greatestness’. Here’s Iain’s roll-call of second-bestness; here’s, I dunno, the Conference North; and here’s my own humble contribution to the project. Great.

(And there’s more on lists at my Noughties blog.)

This is pop

A quick piece I wrote about the pop/celeb culture of the past decade for the Australian women’s magazine Madison. You need to scroll down before you get to my bit. Incidentally, they removed my stuff about The Truman Show and replaced it with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Their gaff, their rules, I suppose.

And talking of films, when I think of Madison, this is what comes to mind: