a fourragère of snot and blutwurst
I wrote a few months ago about my disappointment when viewing the Northern Lights , and becoming aware that no reality could match the psychedelic strangeness of the photos. Anish Kapoor ’s retrospective at the Hayward, on the other hand, offers the opposite. You are confronted with visual paradoxes, flat surfaces – especially those painted in his beloved Vantablack – that feel like tunnels into…
It’s been a while since I’ve celebrated the glory of real names that sound as if they were invented by Thomas Pynchon or Kurt Vonnegut , and then two come along at once. Please be upstanding for Manila-based crimebuster Winston Casio and the doyenne of indolent teachers everywhere, Tandy L’Enfant !
In the wake of Bill Oddie ’s death, there’s been much musing about how the show for which he’ll be best remembered, The Goodies , has generally been seen as less significant, less groundbreaking, less serious (if a comedy show can be serious) and above all less clever than Monty Python’s Flying Circus. For what it’s worth, I was always in the Goodies camp but that’s probably a question of…
I’m really looking forward to reading Rachael Stirling’s book about her glorious, brilliant mum, but I’m not sure I understand why the name of The Woman Who Thinks The Book Is Really Great is approximately four times bigger than the name of The Woman Who Actually Wrote The Bloody Thing.
I’ve said before that the loudest voices in the room when it comes to the erosion of what might loosely be known as Western culture are those who never showed the slightest interest in celebrating it. The Daily Mail is a repeat offender, whining when universities cut Chaucer from the curriculum (how are those market forces looking now?) while offering a world view that holds the antics of Kim…
There has been some talk, even from those unsympathetic to Nigel Farage, that the candidacy of Count Binface , the highest-profile opponent to the Reform leader in the upcoming Clacton by-election, is somehow unserious and indicates something flawed in the very soul of our society. Well, yes. Which is why he’s exactly the right person to take on the Poundland Spode . Farage himself is the most…
I am slightly baffled by the objections raised by Southwark Council to Steven Thorpe’s decision to place a chunk of the Berlin Wall in his garden, not least the observation that it presents an “oppressive sense of enclosure and stark industrial appearance” . Which is surely a bit like complaining that the Sagrada Familia has too many curly bits.
I know the best thing would to be ignore him, but two recent items must be flagged up. First, his deeply strange appearance on Usha Vance’s podcast , which is supposedly about encouraging literacy. He admits that he mainly reads about himself, misremembers the title of a book from his childhood, then goes off into a freeform stream of banalities about past POTUSes. I refer you back to Trump…
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…
Brexit was the inevitability that nobody (including a number of its high-profile supporters , apparently) saw coming. I was out of the country for most of the run-up so maybe my excuse for missing the surge of contrarian fuck-you that propelled the Leave vote over the line is more plausible than that of those who were supposedly leading the campaign to stay. But I was in London on polling day…
I was recently wittering about how our (my?) concerns regarding authenticity have shifted from the analogue to the digital and accidentally came up with the notion of a ones-and-zeroes semiotician called Roland Bothes . Well, I couldn’t let that lie so I turned to ChatGPT (which would have given Barthes endless pleasure since in French it sounds like “Chat, j’ai pété” , or “Cat, I farted” ) in an…
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…
It’s funny to think that in the early years of this blog, when I discussed authenticity, it was usually in strictly analogue terms, about fake Asias and fake Europes , fake beaches , Ernie Wise’s fake hair (which was in fact a fake of a fake). It’s almost as if Barthes and Baudrillard had been sent as decoys, so we wouldn’t notice that the real fakery was creeping up on us in the forms of ones and…
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…
In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled , in my opinion one of the greatest novels of the 20th or any other century, the narrator, the pianist Ryder, is unreliable but we never really find out why. Is he dreaming or hallucinating or maybe just dying? Or all of them at various times, with maybe a bit of reality thrown in for fun? Although he does question the accuracy of his memories, he always believes…
I’ve been very lucky with teachers. Chris Brooks, who taught me about Blake and Dickens. Campbell MacKay, who taught me about Beckett and Stoppard. John O’Brien, who taught me that bizarre song, ‘ The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling ’. (He also taught me about the Congress of Vienna and the Spanish Civil War, but it’s the song that stuck.) All long gone, of course. And a few days ago, another…
Yesterday I had a spare half-hour in class after prepositions and obligations and stuff and asked the students whether we are entering a post-literate age and, if so, who or what is to blame and a charming 18-year-old Slovakian suggested that the whole thing started not with smartphones and ChatGPT but with Dada because that’s when all the typographical rules fell apart and I didn’t buy it for a…
I am not in the least surprised that the Guardian’s ragebaity list of 100 best novels failed to include my own favourite, Vile Bodies . I am, however, a bit peeved that Waugh wasn’t even granted a seat alongside John Updike and Nancy Mitford and Martin Amis and Angela Carter and John le Carre in the roll call of omissions . Oh, and for the record, I bloody hate Middlemarch , which won. Success in…
I just unearthed an article I wrote for Prospect in 2009 , in which I argued that we were living through an age of fleeting plausibility, where cool gimmicks like CGI offered us things that might just possibly be real, and we enjoyed them on that basis, until we quickly realised they were bollocks. But that initial moment was the important bit: Yet this was also the decade in which we allowed…
1957: 2026:
The director Kevin MacDonald on Hollywood’s penchant for glossing over the murkier corners of dead celebrities’ lives, and punters’ happy acquiescence to the phenomenon: Audiences don’t seem to care... Many of these films are pure fan service. Which is fine as far as it goes. Maybe we were all naive for believing that popular artists were worth looking at seriously, critically? Not only are we…
In case it still needs explaining, the whole point of René Magritte’s 1929 painting La Trahison des images is that the apparently inaccurate caption in fact tells the truth. It is not a pipe. It is merely a picture of a pipe. Unfortunately, like most jokes, it loses its effectiveness when repeated. I haven’t yet seen the newish Belgian TV show This is Not a Murder Mystery (which includes Magritte…
After the initial shock (for those of my cohort) of Bowie falling off his perch , 2016 settled down to be just another year. There was going to be a referendum on Brexit (but the only question was how big Remain’s majority would be) and in November the Americans would catch up with the rest of the world and elect their first female president. In retrospect, it wasn’t until April that 2016 really…
Ian Penman reviews a new Brian Wilson biography and raises the vexed question of whether the Beach Boys’ Quixotic project known first as Dumb Angel, then SMiLE, should ever have seen the light of day: For some fans it should have remained a glorious dream, better left unrealised. A labyrinth without a centre. The Arcades Project of pop. Penman’s writing in the London Review of Books so maybe he…
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…