About Larkin

When an ad for this poster (the work of the Bristol company Standard Designs) popped up, I laughed at first, because it’s funny; then my inner pedant grumbled because Larkin was wary of any jazz that happened after about 1940 so the Blue Note designs being pastiched here wouldn’t have figured that much in his collection. (I once complained to the BBC because a Radio 4 play about the poet suggested that he was a fan of Cannonball Adderley.) But then I wondered whether that was the whole point – anything to annoy the King of Curmudgeons. If only he were around to write a mordant poem about it.

Or maybe he did anyway...

She kept her songs, they kept so little space,

The covers pleased her...

About a mask

I’ve always been fairly relaxed about the notion that scary advertising bots know far more about my needs and wants than I’d like; if only because the ads that pop up when I use social media seem to involve only the things I actively wouldn’t want. As an example, this, in an advertisement for Boots, was the first image to assail my eyes when I went onto Facebook this morning. 

Pretty disturbing before the first coffee and not at all the sort of thing I’d consider purchasing... unless of course I aspired to create a low-budget remake of one of my favourite films in the back garden...

Come to think of it, maybe these bots do a better job than I gave them credit for.

About dictators

For the second time in as many weeks, Facebook has decreed that something I posted goes against its community standards. The odd thing is that this time it's taken them the best part of three years to get all Mary Whitehouse on me. And whereas before I could see the potential for offence being taken in the depiction of Mr Firework-Up-The-Bum, I’m not entirely sure what the problem is now. The fact that I was displaying pictures of dictators; or the fact that I was implicitly mocking the wonky orthography of funny foreigners? We shall never know.

About the Olympics

Something I wrote in 2012: 

In 20 years’ time, will athletes be fencing and diving and underclad-volleyballing in near-empty stadia, accompanied only by the tap-tap-tap of a few accredited live tweeters?

(And that was only nine years ago.)

About Robert Hughes

It’s the academic equivalent of l’esprit d’escalier, I suppose. I delivered my MA dissertation nearly two years ago, and still I keep coming across bits and bobs that could have gone in there. The latest is from the Australian critic Robert Hughes, who in his 1993 book The Culture of Complaint attempted to carve out some middle ground between the relativists who said that the canon was as dead as the white males who (over)populated it, and the conservatives who insisted on its perfect immutability. What’s even more annoying is that I read Hughes’s book when it came out, and then entirely forgot about it, which probably says something about my own personal canon.

Anyway, the passage that would have fitted, and will undoubtedly be resurrected for the 20th anniversary box set, including previously unheard demos, live tracks and astonishingly banal studio chatter, is as follows:

The quarrel over the Canon reflects the sturdy assumption that works of art are or ought to be therapeutic. Imbibe the Republic or Phaedo at nineteen, and you will be one kind of person; study Jane Eyre or Mrs Dalloway or the poetry of Aphra Behn, and you will be another; read Amiri Baraka or The Color Purple or the writings of Wole Soyinka, and you will be a third... For in the literary zero-sum game of Canon talk, if you read X it means that you don’t read Y.

About the weather

This weekend, I visited a Hindu temple. I don’t think I’m likely to be persuaded as to the divine attributes of Shiva and Ganesh but the cool marble interiors did provide a welcome respite from the brutal heat, not to mention the Ballardian grimness of the nearby North Circular.

And if shelter from the swelter is a way to lead us to God, why not to art as well?

A friendly reminder that even if you hate art, we do have air conditioning

— Royal Academy (@royalacademy) July 19, 2021

About Amazon reviews

I wonder if there’d be mileage in an analysis of the content and meaning of Amazon reviews. Many of them are indeed, reviews in the conventional sense, telling you what the purchaser thought of the book or shoes or artisan gin or garden hose under discussion. Did it live up to expectations? Was it good value for money? Five stars, or only three?

But many others are reviews not of the product, but of the transaction, of the vendor. Variants on “arrived on time, as described” abound, often garnished with the full five stars, as if this basic fulfilment of the contract is somehow something to be celebrated with fireworks and hosannas. 

But my favourite reviews are the ones that offer a flicker of insight into the purchaser’s life, like a fragment of overheard conversation, something that, deprived of context, becomes so banal it achieves a kind of Zen profundity; the sort of comment that makes you wonder why they went to all the effort of posting it, but you’re delighted they did. This, for example:

And only the three stars as well.

About staycation

An example, if any were needed, of how fast language changes, and with it our attitudes. When I first heard the word “staycation”, meaning spending one’s holiday in and around one’s own home, I probably grimaced more than a little. But now I find myself wanting to protect the clunky, ugly neologism from a new meaning being applied by tabloid sub-editors, which is simply a holiday in one’s own country. Although I suppose I’m old enough to remember when the word for this was simply “holiday”.