About Prince Philip

I will not be pointing and laughing at an old man who has just died, nor at a woman who has lost her husband of over 70 years. However, I hope I’ll be permitted to raise an eyebrow at the various media organisations that have seen fit to pad out what’s at best a 20-minute story (he’s dead; here’s some archive of when he was alive; here are some people saying nice things about him) into a rolling news juggernaut that’s swept all other programming before it. The BBC in particular is tugging its forelock across all channels, which is pretty impressive for an organisation that’s supposedly a quivering nest of Trotskyite wokeness.

Special mention though to Reuters which ran a live feed of an aerial view of Buckingham Palace, which would have been an odd thing to do even if Prince Philip had died there (he was at Windsor Castle) and then it turned out the footage was of the Tower of London anyway.

PS: A reminder of the wonderful Kastom people of Vanuatu, who worshipped the late Prince as a god.

PPS: And this.

PPPS:

PPPPS: The BBC. Eight hours. Across all channels. Now try to imagine what it’ll be like when *she* goes...

About Monster Fun

Pulling together a further tranche of Perec-lite memories, I seize upon thoughts of Monster Fun comic, and in particular the Badtime Bedtime Book supplements that were stapled inside. While I was never a comic fan in the classic sense (the Marvel Comic Universe mostly leaves me cold), I was besotted by the anarchic, gently spooky humour of Monster Fun for what felt like most of my childhood. Yet when I check the cold hard facts, I find that it ran as a standalone weekly for little more than a year, June 1975 to October 1976. Proof again that when you're seven or eight years old, time stretches way out beyond the horizon (in all directions) and usually in a good way. 

About Derrida

I remember (part one)

 (An explanation.) 

I remember watching the Marx Brothers’ movie A Day At The Races for the first time, on TV, when somebody repeated a reel by mistake; and I was so wrapped up in the lunacy, I just assumed it was part of the film. 

I remember Richard Nixon’s blood clot.

I remember Stanley Green the protein man and Lord Mustard the tap-dancing busker. 

I remember answering the phone with a number. 

I remember the London Planetarium. 

I remember when everybody had a poster of Béatrice Dalle.

I remember Hercules the Bear and Victor the Giraffe. 

I remember the death of General Franco. I didn't know who Franco was or why it was important; but my mother said it meant her friend Carmen could go home now. 

I remember polo necks under shirts. 

I remember “Nicholas Parsons is the Neo-Opiate of the People”.

About Shelley

As a proud geek and devotee of quizzing, who was inevitably the last to be picked for any sporting team, one might have thought that I’d have approved of the Hackney New School, which claims to have all but eliminated bullying by replacing playground football games with poetry, chess and quizzes.

Pupils have memorised poems Ozymandias and Charge of Light Brigade [sic] off by heart and recite them as they line up for lessons or when they are eating lunch, [headteacher] Ms Whelan said... “Just yesterday a group of year 9 students beat me in a name the capital cities quiz, this would have been unthinkable two years ago.”

Well, um, yes, but. Knowing about poetry is, as Sellar and Yeatman had it, A Good Thing. But there’s something about learning it by rote and chanting it over lunch that feels almost cult-like. I do wonder what the radical Shelley, who was booted out of Oxford for his heterodox views on religion and much else, might have made of this; and ultimately what it means for education. 

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away... 

(I’ve got an uncomfortable feeling that Tennyson might have approved, though.)

About remembering

I’ve been supping again from the well of Georges Perec, specifically his Je me souviens/I Remember. Inspired by the work of the American Joe Brainard (and in turn an inspiration for the Scot Gilbert Adair), it’s a list of memories, each prefaced with the words “I remember...” The point to the project is that although each memory is essentially banal (“I remember candy-floss at fairgrounds”), when read together they create something approaching a life, a personality. That said, if Perec didn’t have the imprimatur of literary quality bestowed by his role in the Oulipo group, would his book be any more profound than one of those interminable talking head shows in which fading celebrities pretend to recall Alvin Stardust or 9/11 or ra-ra skirts or the music for The A-Team?

I’m tempted to have a go, though. Watch this space...

About symbolism and the like

I’ve long admired Samuel Beckett’s exasperated response to overreaching critics, that if he’d really meant his play to be about God he would have called it Waiting for God. Haruki Murakami (who, as I usually point out at moments like this, bequeathed the title of this blog) is inevitably more polite, but he comes from pretty much the same place:

I’ve had a number of opportunities to discuss my work with college students in their classes, and the students always seem to end up confused, because they can’t find the theme or the point of my stories. But that doesn’t bother me at all.

About Norton Juster

Norton Juster, who died a few days ago, is obviously best known for having written The Phantom Tollbooth, but was also an architect and, for many years, a university teacher. Not that he appears to have had much enthusiasm for education as it’s practised.

“Everyone’s worried about education, but it's really the appearance of education and the credentials of education they're worried about. I think at birth we should give every child a Ph.D.”

I picked up a few credentials along the way, but I’m pretty sure I learned more from The Phantom Tollbooth.