About Orlando

I grabbed a random book for the work commute and it turned out to be Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which I’m pretty sure last read in the dying days of the Thatcher regime (yes, even before the film came out). Except that I must have skipped the preface that time, because surely I’d have remembered, in among the nods to pretty much everybody who was Bloomsbury or Bloomsbury-adjacent in 1928, the following salute to failure, which feels like Alan Bennett channelling Jane Austen, or maybe vice versa:

Miss M.K. Snowdon’s indefatigable researches in in the archives of Harrogate and Cheltenham were none the less arduous for being vain.

About Tony Slattery

Sad to hear that Tony Slattery has died, and it inevitably prompts a slew of posts, many incorporating clips from the TV show where most of us first encountered him, Whose Line Is It Anyway? This one, for example, which gives us a chance not only to mourn a mercurial talent, but also to gaze back at a time when a major channel would put out a show with the working assumption that a critical mass of the audience would know who William Burroughs and Anthony Burgess might be.

About Listen

At the urging of expat@large, one of the faithful from the days when Blogging Was A Thing, I have been reading Michel Faber’s Listen: On Music, Sound and Us and immediately feel a wee bit seen.

Being exceptional is not a badge of honour, it’s just a divergence from the general standard. Intellectuals (or bookish types or deep thinkers or cultured souls or whatever label you choose) are a minority like any other. They find validation in their specialness while missing out on easy communion with the larger herd. They console each other, reassure each other that they’re not weird or poncy even though, statistically speaking, they are. 

About footnotes

I ruddy love footnotes, I do, and have been told off by more than one editor for using too many of them. Apparently their presence disturbs readers, presumably because it reminds them that for every book they do read, there are several hundred more waiting round the corner to ambush them. Which to me would be a lovely feeling, but what do I know?

That said, I do share the frustration of absolutely knowing something’s true and yet not being able to find a reference to validate it. Which is why I love this passage:

I have in my head an assertion that a friend once told me was written by Whitney Balliett, the jazz critic and exemplary listener-describer. The assertion was that there were only two absolute virtuoso figures in jazz: Sarah Vaughan and Art Tatum. When did Balliett write it? I can’t say. Neither can I be sure that he did write it. Once you get inside a writer’s voice, you can imagine things he didn’t actually write. Once I troubled Whitney, in his old age, about a phrase of his I swore I had read — something about Lester Young playing “wheaty” notes. He said it sounded possible, and went to look it up. He searched for a couple days and came up-handed. I might have dreamed it.

Ben Ratliff, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen to Music Now (London: Allen Lane, 2016), p. 81.

About Amazon reviews

Not having published much in recent years, I’ve got out of the habit of scouring Amazon and similar sites for what people have deigned to say about my offerings. Which is why I’ve only just noticed that, three and a half years ago, a user known only as “magic” declared that my book about the Noughties was

Fun, and easy to read

which I’m sure was meant kindly but feels like a variant on “Mostly Harmless”.

About long books

Jonathan Bate’s worries about undergraduates’ declining ability to cope with long, complex books are taken up by the Daily Mail, which confidently pins the blame on social media. By which, inevitably, it means TikTok rather than inane globules of micro-celeb gossip emanating from certain tabloid... ah, right, that would be it...

PS: The Mail, obviously, has previous.

About Warhol

Tracey Emin, quoted in Dylan Jones’s newish oral history of the Velvet Underground:

When I was at school, I used to imagine that I would go to New York by boat and when I walked down the gangplank Andy Warhol would be there waiting for me.

The thing is, I still believe that...

PS: From the same book, and in a similar vein, Jones himself gets in on the act:

...I even went through a phase of rolling up my drainpipe jeans – skinhead style – worn with pink socks and black Dr. Marten shoes, in the vain hope of trying to advertise the fact that I owned records by people who lived in New York.

About class and things

Was with a mixed (teens and 20s, Italian, Brazilian, Turkish) group of students yesterday and the sometimes awkward subject of social class was discussed, and how it manifests itself in our various homelands. And we got on to cultural capital and cultural literacy and finally pieced together the phrase that defines us: The People Who Still Read Books.

About riots (2024 version)

The current urban unrest in the UK prompted me to look back the similar (but at the same time very different) outbreaks that took place in 2011. This time round, I haven’t seen a repeat of the observation that looters were consciously avoiding bookshops but maybe that’s because there are hardly any bookshops left to ignore...

About not reading Baudrillard

As ever behind the curve, I’m only now reading Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface and I’m not going to feed some kind of global metanarrative by presuming to comment on its themes of cultural/ethnic appropriation and attendant rights/wrongs. Instead, I’ll pluck out one sentence and leave it hanging, like an image in search of an absence to conceal:

Back then it was still cool to quote Baudrillard as if you’d read him in full.

About biography

Claire Dederer:

The problem is, we don’t get to control how much we know about someone’s life. It’s something that happens to us... There is no longer any escaping biography. Even within my own lifetime, I’ve seen a massive shift. Biography used to be something you sought out, yearned for, actively pursued. Now it falls on your head all day long.

Germaine Greer: 

I fucking hate biography. If you want to know about Charles Dickens, read his fucking books.

PS: Also from Dederer’s book Monsters, a zinger by Vladimir Nabokov: 

The best part of a writer‘s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.

PPS: And in the spirit of her enquiry as to whether we are allowed to enjoy good art by blackguards and rapscallions:

About indie reading

Anna Doble on being an indie music fan in the mostly-analogue 90s:

London Fields by Martin Amis sat on my shelf for at least a year in about 1997. Why? Because one of Blur once mentioned it in an interview. My copy wasn’t even mine – it was taken out on loan from my home-town library which led me to racking up a fine so insurmountable (£8-ish) that I eventually returned it under cover of darkness in a covert mission to the marketplace whereupon I shoved the book through the library’s awkward letterbox and ran panting for the hills. Other books on the curriculum in the School of Indie were Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (which we all actually read).

Do musicians tell people what to read these days? I know the likes of Dolly Parton encourage kids to read, but where’s the equivalent of Graham (I bet it was Graham, he wore glasses) begging up Martin Amis? And the Manics doing the same for Mishima and many others, Radiohead for Chomsky and Naomi Klein, Paul Weller for Colin MacInnes, Edwyn Collins for Salinger, Morrissey for Wilde and Capote (less so Keats and Yeats). Is literary prescriptivism not A Thing any more?

About Kafka and crockery

Yet more musing on what we’re expected to know. This morning, in a discussion on Radio 4 about the overused adjectives “Orwellian” and “Kafkaesque” Evan Lian (who drew the cartoon above) says, “I’m not the most well-read person, which is sort of embarrassing to admit on a BBC radio programme” which does rather play into the idea of the BBC (and, by extension, Britain) as being the repository of everything and everyone erudite. Which is nice.

And then on the same station’s Electioncast, broadcast immediately afterwards, BBC's own chief political correspondent, who read PPE at Oxford, says that he thinks he once read an essay by Orwell and then admits he doesn’t actually know what a Ming vase is.

PS: And a few hours later, I heard another BBC journalist refer to a calvacade.

About pumpkins etc

Far from new, stolen from Facebook, but it belongs here, I think.

And while we’re here, this can come out to play as well.

And then...

(And all the time I’m simultaneously worrying about and luxuriating in the exclusivity of all of these. Are they funny in spite of the fact that a lot of people won’t get the gag, or because of the fact? And somehow this ties into the most depressing article I’ve read this week, Elle Griffin on how nobody buys books any more.)

About Kindles

When Kindles and other e-readers first appeared, with the promise for travellers in particular that a whole library would occupy less space and weight in your luggage than a slim paperback, I did wonder whether the new form might have missed a significant consideration when it comes to reading in public: specifically, the act of letting other people see what you’re reading. Like the music you listen to, or the clothes you wear, or the flavour of crisps you eat, it’s part of the persona you present to the world. The latest Murakami, or a Richard Osman rip-off? Unfair as it is, people will make assumptions.

And then I saw this:

About pretension

When my Radiohead book was published, there were a few rumbles that bringing the likes of Baudrillard into the conversation were a bit – perish the thought – pretentious. I’ve never been particularly stung by such a label (standing proudly alongside Ian Penman on the subject) but I was amused when I recently revisited my old copy of Will Pop Eat Itself? by Jeremy J. Beadle (no, not that one) and noticed that by the second page he was comparing This is the Day... This is the Hour... This is This! by grebo titans PWEI to The Waste Land. And now I wonder whether the modest sales of my book were down to it not being pretentious enough.

About AI

In the New York Times, the neuroscientist Eric Hoel argues that the increased use of artificial intelligence is forcing any notion of intellectual or aesthetic quality into a death spiral, prompted as much as anything by human laziness. For example he refers to researchers at a conference on AI using AI to conduct peer reviews on AI-related papers, taking any human critical intervention out of the equation. Which is a problem, because one thing AI is very bad at detecting is bullshit, which is ultimately what peer review is for.

Of course, most of us don’t hang around at AI conferences, but Hoel suggests that the process is far more prevalent than that, eroding the fabric of culture itself, to the detriment even of people who reach for their weapons when they hear the word:

Isn’t it possible that human culture contains within it cognitive micronutrients — things like cohesive sentences, narrations and character continuity — that developing brains need? 

In other words, the processes by which people engage with all the gubbins of society is as significant as the content itself, and that’s what AI is stripping away. But it’s not as if the purveyors of AI are doing this deliberately, is it? They’re not consciously proposing policies that will make humanity that bit more stupid are they oh wait hang on...

PS: And even if you’re not that bothered about AI destroying the canon of Western literature, you might want to know what it’s doing to your fridge. 

PPS: And, following on from Musk’s tweet, I think this is supposed to be an April Fool’s gag but these days, who knows?

About a classical education

An interesting piece by Emma Green in The New Yorker about a resurgence in what’s known as liberal arts and/or classical education. Whatever you want to call it, it stands in opposition to the modern mainstream of pedagogy, favouring the canonical Great Books (and implicitly Dead White Males), which makes it popular with right-wing politicians, although as Green makes clear, that’s by no means the whole story. And if I look at a Trump rally, I wonder how many present, including the main speaker, would understand this gag: 

And then there’s literature: one New York City public-high-school reading list includes graphic novels, Michelle Obama’s memoir, and a coming-of-age book about identity featuring characters named Aristotle and Dante. In classical schools, high-school students read Aristotle and Dante.

And before I’m accused of snobbery, I’m well aware that there are vast gaps in my own cultural knowledge; opera, for example is little more than a blur. That said, I do know that Richard Strauss wasn’t Johann’s son, unlike the poor sap writing on the ENO website... 

PS: And while we’re there, the Arts Council of England is condemning opera critics for, among other sins, “almost exclusively writing from a classical music perspective”.

About ‘Hallelujah’

A while back, I wrote a book about Leonard Cohen, with a focus on That Song, which had become ubiquitous two decades or more after it had first been released (and mostly ignored). And today, in the midst of an online discussion about the incongruous uses to which it’s been put (see also ‘My Heart Will Go On’ and ‘I Will Always Love You’) I finally realise that I should have called the book SAD JEWS FUCKING.

About Brontez Purnell

I can’t claim to know much about the work of Brontez Purnell but it does seem to me that if you’re the subject of the New York Times’s By The Book feature, affecting not to read very much is an, um, interesting look.