dawdle up country

Thought to Kick the Year Off

2010-01-01T14:45:00.004Z

The 'fool' is an innocent, a simpleton, but truths issue from his mouth that are not simply tolerated but adopted, by virtue of the fact that this 'fool' is sometimes clothed in the insignia of the jester. And in my view it is a similar happy shadow, a similar fundamental 'foolery', that accounts for the importance of the left-wing intellectual.
And I contrast with this designation for that which the same tradfition furnishes a strictly contemporary term, a term that is used in conjunction with the former, namely 'knave'...He's not a cynic with the element of heroism implied by that attitude. He is, to be precise, what Stendhal called an 'unmitigated scoundrel'. That is to say, no more than your Mr. Everyman, but your Mr. Everyman with a greater strength of character.
Everyone knows that a certain way of presenting himself, which constitutes part of the ideology of the right-wing intellectual, is precisely to play the role of what he is in fact, namely, a 'knave'. In other words, he doesn't retreat from the consequences of what is called realism; that is, when required, he admits he's a crook.

Jacques Lacan, Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

2009 was...

2010-01-01T14:38:00.002Z

Le bruit des cabarets, la fange des trottoirs,
Les platanes déchus s'effeuillant dans l'air noir,
L'omnibus, ouragan de ferraille et de boues,
Qui grince, mal assis entre ses quatres roues,
Et roule ses yeux verts et rouges lentement,
Les ouvriers allant au club, tout en fumant,
Leur brûle-gueule au nex des agents de police,
Toits qui dégouttent, murs suintants, pavé qui glisse,
Bitume défoncé, ruisseaux comblant l'égout,
Voilá ma route - avec le paradis au bout.

That's how Paul Verlaine would have described it, anyway.

Applied Departure/ 1

2009-08-26T11:06:00.008+01:00

Ödön Márffy, Last Portrait of Csinszka, c.1934

There was no music in the Imperial Panorama - in contrast to films, where music makes traveling so soporific. But there was a small, genuinely disturbing effect which seemed to me superior. This was the ringing of a little bell which sounded a few seconds before each picture moved off with a jolt, in order to make way first for an empty space and then for the next image. And every time it rang, the mountains with their humble foothills, the cities with their mirror-bright windows, the railroad stations with their clouds of dirty yellow smoke, the vineyards down to the smallest leaf, were suffused with the ache of departure. I formed the conviction that it was impossible to exhaust the splendours of the scene at just one sitting . Hence my intention (which I never realised) of coming by again the following day. Before I could make up my mind, however, the entire apparatus, from which I was separated by a wooden railing, would begin to tremble, the picture would sway within its little frame and then immediately trundle off to the left, as I looked on.

Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900

I always stop - always stopped, let's face it - in front of Csinszka in the Hungarian National Gallery on Castle Hill. Something in the picture declines the solicitations of its viewer, which has at points seemed to me to offer a sturdy metaphor about the repetitively-mythologised inscrutability of Hungary to foreigners. As I've maintained throughout my stay here, however, isn't that inscrutability itself a kind of representation or wishful thinking? Is it perhaps convenient for the European imagination to have at the very heart of the continent a country and people elusive to the systematising narratives about culture which we use to make sense of ourselves, with political and linguistic geography figurating the big story about identity - the one in which we are never entirely coincidental with ourselves - that Freud gradually cultivated from folk tales and the recollected dreams of the bored bourgeois in nearby Vienna?

Last Portrait of Csinszka itself accomodates multiple epistemological blocs. With disconcerting forthrightness, the painting is segregated into differing, not necessarily antagonistic, planes of mimetic assurance. Although her own attention is plainly directed into the ether, Csinszka is the most worldly point in the composition; the childishly careless window around her the second (the painting is thus framed as liminal); the looming, Kafkan lover the third. He is styled allegorically, as the gatecrasher of idle thoughts, perhaps, or the history that ushers you away - much too quickly - when you're not looking. If he offers protection, he doesn't supplement it with comfort, and the awkward affection of his gesture is certainly not reciprocated. He might be a ghost, the trace of the past in the present, were it not for his oddly futuristic, and indeed oddly Futurist, appearance, which reminds me for some reason of the cyborgs in Rex Warner's 1941 novel The Aerodrome, an outstanding British depiction of the co-option of ultramodern technologies by the Nazis. Extrapolating a little, it's possible to make the observation that the man who drapes his misshapen arm over Csinszka synthesises the awful realities of the 1930s with the completely inconceivable character of history in that period, and that the titular figure synthesises the awful plausibility of wishful thought. In times of crisis, what we long for acquires a specious density, while what we experience is 'like a bad dream'.

Throughout the 1930s, Elizabeth Bowen was writing novels overrun with characters who conspire against historicity only to be ground down by its very relentlessness, so it's strange that her dustjackets are often decorated with pictures of women who flawlessly resemble, both in attire and dysphoric posture, the one Márffy depicts here. Last Portrait of Csinszka is a characteristically Thirties performance of an inversion of mimetic order, by which the least 'realistic' elements of the composition are precisely those which invite the real world into it, that Bowen's novels hint at in the implausible swastika-shaped house in The Heat of the Day or the demonic, unearthly Markie in To the North. Perhaps the best point of comparison here, though, is Antal Szerb's novel Journey by Moonlight, one of the great finds of my spell in Budapest, which maintains an absolute, unstratified simultaneity of register by fusing a massively subjectivised fugue time with intimations of a broader history giddy with its own velocity.

De-Stalinisation, Broadsheet Style

2009-08-26T09:32:00.004+01:00

There's a longer post on this topic coming soon - it may well be my first after my permanent return to the UK on Sunday - but here's a teaser of the subject matter. I hope I'm not the only one who feels suspicious of the broadsheet columns, representative of a whole subgenre of revisionist history (examples here and here of works which mask a political agenda behind the supposed urgency and objectivity of their message), which labour the 'Stalin as bad as/ worse than Hitler' point, as if anyone who has ever felt the slightest of leftish inclinations stands in need of reminding about what took place in the Soviet Union between 1922 and 1953.

Two quick points. First: are such arguments ever anything other than sententious point-scoring? Amis's Koba the Dread seemed to mark the beginning of his diversion into conservative truculence, which reached its apotheosis with the (quite literally) execrable 'The Last Days of Mohammed Atta' and the stunningly ill-advised essay 'The Age of Horrorism'. Since Koba, he's been wagging his finger, most probably at CW students at Manchester University, and making claims that are either so obvious that they can only represent the need of an increasingly intellectually bereft novelist for straw targets or wrong in a manner that is so outré as to be almost avant-garde. The 'Stalin = worst' argument brings to mind Patrick Hamilton's brilliant caricature Mr. Thwaites, the aging blimp in Slaves of Solitude who believes that it is the iconoclastic verve of his rants, rather than their bullying predictability, which sends the likable protagonist Miss Roach up the wall. For young writers, it's frustrating to see well-paid public intellectuals filling column inches/ broadcast schedules with opinions which, while inching ever closer to earning the epithet 'received', are presented as the product of someone daring to say the unsayable. It would be interesting to see a contemporary columnist discussing the historical conditions that drove the Soviet Union towards Stalin in the first place; after all, there's been plenty of attempts to historicise Nazism.

Second: Russophobia seems to be a sanctioned form of racism. I don't know what the majority of the mainstream media think the 'colour' revolutions in post-Soviet states are, but I'm fairly certain that they're anything but triumphs of social democracy. Furthermore, when Russians aren't being represented as the oppressors of 'Plucky Little Georgia' or the conquistadores of Baltic hyperspace, they're painted as barely-civilised invaders disguised in Gucci and Prada. Remember this?

Yes, but your 'pastiche design' is worse!!

2009-08-18T08:12:00.005+01:00

Art and its forms and techniques live in history and certainly do change. I sympathize with a remark attributed to Saul Bellow, that to be technically up to date is the least important attribute of being a writer, though I would have to add that this least important attribute may be nevertheless essential. In any case, to be technically out of date is likely to be a genuine defect: Beethoven's Sixth Symphonyn or the Chartres Cathedral if executed today would be simply embarassing.

John Barth, 'The Literature of Exhaustion'

Prince Charles threatens to quit the National Trust because they don't subscribe to his unreconstructed-if-they-hadn't-been-reconstructed-from-something-over-2000-years-old opinions about architecture. Funnily enough, I probably feel as hostile as Charles does towards the sort of Postmodernism he's attacking, but he's completely unaware that his set of beliefs belong to exactly the same intellectual current. Go, for example, to your nearest Sainsburys: it will be a bland, brick building decorated with twee nods to some never-real agrarian idyll: Poundbury on the cheap, in other words. As per usual, Charles is being allowed to speak on behalf of all the people in the UK who a) have day-to-day, functional contact with both his despised postwar modernism and with the idealess randomisations of the Postmodernism which neo-Neo Palladianism and, er, pseudo-yeomanesque actually sustain, and b) are inevitably a lot closer to the sharp end of the sustainability issue than a man with a Civil List airmiles allowance ever will be.

Isn't it odd how sustainability, an immediate concern of modernist architecture and planning, should become a stick with which the material effects of premodernist ideologies should make a comeback? As much as I believe that there has never been a time in which sustainability should be more of an issue - with two weeks still to live amidst the wreckage caused by post-1989 economic deregulation, I feel more strongly about this than ever - it often seems that it has become synonymous with expensive, slightly off-grid libertarianism; which is to say that it implicated in an argument against any sort of planning whatsoever, and the devolution of the independently wealthy from social answerability. One needs only look at contemporary Tory policy: apparently, our current predicament arose out of unsustainable public spending on the likes of the NHS. I find the cut of the jib of current Tory spin absolutely jaw-dropping, not least because it is a known fact that Thatcher purposefully withered (some might say crippled) the state in her time in office, absolving the likes of David Cameron from any loyalties to Britain as a community, but not from their 'responsibilities' to the Poundbury/ Totnes pre-industrial theme park which is supposed to constitute a viable future for the 60, 000, 000 inhabitants of the UK.

2009-08-08T01:37:00.004+01:00

Hmmmm.

So this (understandably) 'minor' academic's account of Britain's supposed ills (the 'scourges...of modern Tory demonology', according to a disappointingly passive John Harris) are based around three points. These are:

1 - The 'postwar expansion of the state'.

During the 1930s, two camps existed within the UK. One - incorporating a sizable proportion on the left, prior to some of the British Communist Party mucking up severely in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and quite a few Conservatives as well - wanted to intervene in the incipient European crisis before it, and I'm sorry if this sounds an understatement, got too late. The other - incorporating quite a lot of Conservatives, aristos, and the editorship of the Daily Mail - wanted to chum up to Hitler. We won't go into the question of intervention in Spain here, although it might have saved a few headaches somewhere down the line (rubbish song, but the Manic Street Preachers knew the deal here.) The non-interventionists won the day. Britain consequently fought a paralysing pan-global war which decimated half of its major cities and lefy it in crippling debt. Angered by the arrogance of a Conservative Party who acted as if election was their divine right, and still mindful of the facetious 'return to normal' enacted by the governing classes in the aftermath of World War I, the British public voted in Clement Attlee's government of democratic socialists, who instituted a programme of reforms designed to make sure the people of the nation could, you know, eat every day and go to a hospital when they needed to and stuff like that. Millions benefit: in spite of the fact that Britain was absolutely bereft of cash, its people were - in general - better looked after than ever before. Within twenty years, people who would, ten years previously, have associated the word 'university' with the man they saw to pick up a prescription are enjoying their graduation ceremonies. Notwithstanding the fact that the 'expansion of state' began as a bloody neccessary measure during WWII, under a non-more-Conservative PM, this is disingenuous Thatcherism at its worst.

2 - 'Next came the left's embrace of what was supposedly all the rage in the 1960s - hedonism, moral relativism, 'the politics of desire' - which Blond thinks trickled down to the most vulnerable layers of society and spread chaos.'

There's a lot of unpicking to be done there, isn't there? This is the old 'John Lennon wrote "Revolution" while voting Conservative as a protest against excessive taxation' argument, in a strange kind of way. If the left embraced the hedonism of the Sixties - and this is a rather worn cliché, I think - then the right were no less guilty. Where some of 'the left' might have dumbly taken Laingian and Reichian 'theory' as an invitation to screw everything that moved whilst imbibing anything chemical they could lay their hands on, the right were embracing radical individualism no less wholeheartedly. The fundamental difference is that the left's 'politics of desire' were tempered by an ethics which demanded a critique of this individualism, which found its popular manifestation in punk (I don't believe its key slogans need repeating here) at more or less the same time as the mainstream right was abandoning the last vestiges of paternalism to participate in a Damascene conversion to Thatcherism. There are three kinds of Conservative: 'disappointed of Tunbridge Wells', who believes in all forms of legality until he's caught speeding, the typically more sociable libertarian Tory with whom you can have a pint and an argument until he's carted off for attempting to punch a police officer, and the one who wants to have it both ways. Lest we forget, the last Conservative government was brought down in part by a preponderance of the latter, who seemed unable to keep their own cocks in their pants while telling the rest of us to behave as if we were extras from The Vicar of Dibley. A Cameron government will mix all three, resulting in unmitigated disaster for everyone who isn't George Osborne.

3 - 'Finally, Thatcherism unleashed the free market...'

Well, if you can't do the time, don't do the crime.

'A dirty, hoggish people'

2009-08-05T11:17:00.005+01:00

How one, admittedly crazy-sounding, Latvian politician saw the British after witnessing planeload after planeload of stag parties puking, pissing, and shagging their way around Riga, behaviour which has prompted the city's mayor to issue a public warning asking all-male groups from the UK to up their game a bit.

I have rather mixed feelings about this. Stag parties are not my thing, and the only one I ever went on involved a bunch of us playing pool in a cottage in Blakeney, having a kick-around, rescuing two small children from the salt marshes (long story), eating some lasagne, then heading back to Norwich full of bracing sea air. I could, I think, manage the 'rugged outdoor activities followed by one big night out in a UK city'-type affair, but the decidedly 2000s practice of decamping en masse to Central Europe, drinking Dreher or Krusovice until it comes out of one's eyeballs, then visiting extremely expensive strip & clip joints leaves me cold. Spending ten months in Budapest's District Seven, effectively the hub of the city's nightlife, has allowed me to witness a lot of these parties at first hand, and they're pretty grim. On our street there's a well-patronised, well-regarded romkert (typically, a squat-like bar set up in a disused building, decorated with furniture collected in the biannual district chuck-out) called Szimplákert. Now, Szimplákert has become, to a degree, a victim of it's own success, and even makes it onto the pages of the typically unadventurous Lonely Planet bar listings, with the result that big groups of Brits - or those smart enough to realise that they're being massively overcharged in the shiny, Square Mile-type bars on Liszt Tér - wind up there. Cue parades of middle managers in polo shirts decorated with 'hilarious', often borderline homophobic slogans ('Budapest 2009 - Gay-vin's Stag Do!' was a recent favourite), yelling at the barmaids in English, and competing with the local winos to see who can leave the biggest patch of vomit on my doorstep for me to step in come Saturday morning.

The thing is, though, that I can't help but feel that the British are scapegoated somewhat. I've seen plenty of Germans, Scandinavians, and Russians behaving identically in District Seven, the difference being that the British only seem to act up when under the influence. When sober, most English people at least demonstrate a degree of embarrassment about their unwillingness to take the plunge with Hungarian, whereas I frequently see Germans snap at shop or café workers (in English or German) then descend into fits of mirth at their addressee's inability to respond. What price a guy from Szeged or Miskolc walking into a bar in Hamburg, rattling off an order in Hungarian, and expressing complete incredulity at his failure to be understood?

I've often asked my students, and people I meet around and about, what their stereotype of an English (or Scottish - they don't often differentiate) person is. Sample answers: 'a snob'; 'an alcoholic'; 'a football hooligan'. The latter I find intriguing - I would have gone along to see Újpest or Fradi by now were their stadiums not more or less given over to Drehered-up ultra groups (witness the behaviour of Újpest's 'boys' as they host cross-border rivals Steaua Bucharest in the Europa League a few weeks back): by way of comparison, I've very rarely felt intimidated either within or en route to any English ground. I do feel that the British, and in particular the English, are frequently asked to take the rap for forms of behaviour which are endemic throughout the whole of Europe. I admit that I feel safer walking around downtown Budapest at three in the morning than I do walking through Norwich's leafy suburbs anytime after eight, but I hardly think antisocial behaviour is a problem exclusive to the UK.

'Far stronger than the British would ever have tolerated'

2009-08-02T15:34:00.012+01:00

Neil Ascherson in today's Observer, bucking the trend of 'twenty years later' style articles to act as if post-Soviet democracy is a uniformly good thing:

What most ordinary people wanted, at the end of 1989, seemed to be something like social democracy. In other words, freedom, a regulated market economy, and a strong welfare state - the "European" model. Not unreasonably, the public thought that they could combine the freedom and prosperity of capitalism with the social benefits they had learned to expect under communism.
They were wrong. The countries in transition imported an undiluted version of Thatcherism, far stronger than the British would ever have tolerated. Price controls were abolished, subsidies cancelled, currencies left to find their own level. Many state industries and services were privatised, often bought over by western multinationals. Huge gaps appeared between rich and poor: a new, predatory super-rich class on one hand, near-destitution for pensioners and the redundant on the other. Social services withered or vanished, like the elaborate network of free day nurseries for working mothers in East Germany.
Transition soon carried away the revolutionaries themselves. In Germany, Bärbel Bohley and Jens Reich of Neues Forum went back to teaching and painting. In Poland, a new tribe of "professional" politicians, including reformed communists, had replaced the Solidarity veterans by 1993. Even Lech Walesa, the first freely elected president, was out of office by 1995, replaced by an ex-communist. In Czechoslovakia, which broke into two states in 1993, most of the Charter 77 heroes were out of government by the time of the split. Isolated, Vaclav Havel stayed on as Czech president until 2003.
The shape of politics had changed. The poor - the losers in the shift to capitalism - were now championed by right-wing nationalists, not socialists. Against them stood the new urban middle class and the sanitised post-communists, committed to neoliberal economics and European integration. The old revolutionaries now retreated into academia, journalism or seats in the European Parliament.
This is not the world they hoped for, back then when they stood exhausted among vast crowds who kissed them and cheered them and waved national flags. Adam Szostkiewicz, who had been jailed in 1982 as a Solidarity organiser, remembers how his hopeful fellow prisoners were disillusioned by the new Poland. "They expected a revised version of an open, free people's democracy, which was not to be. The new Polish democracy was too liberal and not 'social' enough ... for me, with my middle-class background, it was all right, livable, promising. It may sound rather minimalistic. But in the light of the historical experience of our parents' generation and our own, we may be forgiven, I suppose."
A Czech friend, who didn't want to be quoted by name, was much harsher. "Nothing remains of our old spirit. The Czechs have become a nation of little white mice, jostling for money and biting each other. Nobody sane could want to go back to the communist days. Yet what freedom have we really gained? Back then, the Russians made our foreign policy; now the Americans do. Back then, we lived in a culture of communist lies and false promises. But isn't the capitalist media and entertainment culture just as false and manipulative?"
Miklos Haraszti, the best-known figure in the Hungarian opposition 20 years ago, now lives in Vienna as representative on freedom of the media for OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe). He insists that he and his generation never had "perfect society" illusions. "I wrote a sober forecast then, saying we knew our democracy would be noisy, dirty, corrupted." His main regret is that Hungarian politics after 1989 became so partisan. "Our round table led to an idea of perfect liberal-democrat constitutionalism -almost too advanced. Reality pushed that over. We didn't want majoritarian, British-style politics, but something based on consensus, on a common denominator of our democracy. But populist instincts pushed towards a majoritarian style. This lack of the common denominator, the partisanship especially in the media, is creating something like the Weimar Republic. And that inevitably leads to totalitarianism unless we can find a substitute.

Until a few weeks ago, I went, every Wednesday morning, to the MÁV (Hungarian State Railways) building, a little beyond Vörösmarty utca metro station on Andrássy ut, to teach a man who deals with the logistical headaches of driver allocation across the network's six regions. When he left school, he worked as a locomotive driver on a Pannonian branch line in the years imminently preceding 'System Change'. Simultaneously, he studied for a degree in HR (or whatever János Kádár's laissez-faire communists chose to term this none-more-Blairish field), and this allowed him to enter into the post-Habsburgian labyrinth of MÁV's managerial pyramid. Recently, he completed a second degree, for which he submitted a thesis advocating a rethinking of the organisation's command structure: occasionally, he makes wistful references to Britain's 1990s rail privatisation, which he seems to me to have conflated with some mythical age of rain and steam. Given that senior MÁV employees receive a pan-EU fare waiver valid for roughly one week of every year, and an additional discount for family, he perhaps failed to notice the various atrocious consequences of privatisation in the UK when he visited.

As in many Hungarian businesses, and state institutions, there's a certain valorisation (or fetishisation) of the Thatcher-Blair 'achievement' which follows on from the 'undiluted' transfer of Thatcherism into Central and Eastern Europe that Ascherson discusses. MÁV's running of what would seem, to the average Briton, to be a relatively cheap, punctual, and well-used service, albeit one which is run at a net loss to the heavily indebted state, is regarded with something oddly resembling guilt rather than with the pride that success in the face of the severe limitations brought about by Hungary's first dust-up with the Invisible Hand should legitimate. It's almost as if the linguistic and material veneers of success and competence that impinge upon every bloody second of every bloody day in Britain (as a wag on a message board I read noted recently, it's virtually impossible to drive past any business HQ in the north-east now without seeing the words 'passionate about [insert name of product - crisps; hair gel; worming tablets - here]' emblazoned on a thirty foot long laminated banner on the outside) represent something to aspire to; something which would constitute a final act of supplication in the direction of Brussels and Washington. Boosted with seemingly unlimited finance from 'rich Central Europe' in the late 90s, there was a flash of the fur of a Magyar Tiger at the start of this decade: now, it seems that they're being asked to buy into the whole package precisely when it's the last thing they can afford to do in practical terms. Whether or not one accepts the notion that the subsidisation of public services is one of the main things that taxes exist for, it is hard not be struck by the uneasiness in the 'new democracies' as regards the absence of the superficial signifiers of prosperity - Pret a Manger, say, or a new set of sub-Fosterian offices for PWC - and the manifestation of this anxiety in a form of insistent, maddeningly limp corporatese flaunted throughout the glitzed-up bits of downtown Pest. Their own language honed in subtlety of expression (there are more than eight ways to express the basic information 'Eva likes flowers', each of which shifts the emphasis slightly to gesture towards something beautifully unvoiced), Hungarians labour awkwardly within the no-man's-land of Business English, where the quicksilver idioms and turns of phrase which characterise the parent tongue ossify as inflexible, de-ironised dictums, encumbered with grotesquely insincere conviviality. (Business English: a language invented, in an act of revenge, by the kids whose stories always came back covered in red ink: 'not a proper sentence, Richard.')

MÁV has now moved from its base of more than 100 years in the Terézváros to a purpose-built, sub-Fosterian HQ at Népliget, the vast park on the frontier between the Eight and Ninth Districts which is also the home of the similarly under-reinvention Ferencváros TC's Albertstadion. Andrássy ut, with its frighteningly steampunk paternoster and tatty, endless, dimly-lit corridors, is to be sold: one imagines that it will become a scmaltzily 'authentic' hotel or an apartment block for the well-heeled.

The top of the page shows a projected vision of the 'Corvin Strand', an act of regeneration that has so far consisted of packing the (largely Roma) inhabitants of this impoverished section of District Eight off to the distant suburbs and putting up a bunch of office blocks and flats that are, due to the economic crisis, too expensive to complete.

FINALLY!!!

2009-06-19T22:41:00.002+01:00

My PhD thesis, bound.

'If you crash a helicopter, you probably die'

2009-06-18T20:46:00.004+01:00

Or so claims a good friend of mine, who took time out from his own documentary film to go and see Terminator Salvation last week, returning with the above assessment of the film's mimetic shortcomings. But I'm feeling all conspiratorial about this, and I'm really not sure that the prevailing hostility towards the fourth film in the Terminator sequence is at all justified.

First things first, TS falls some way short of T1 and T2, and it would be unfair not to point this out. However, judging the new movie solely on such grounds seems to be an act grounded in an urge to be proved right, a not-so-latent wish on the part of the 'mainstream arthouse' devotees who staff broadsheet culture sections to strike a blow against an extremely abstract notion of 'Hollywood'. I'm not in the business of backing up my intuitions with any kind of factitious data, but I'm willing to guess that the reviewers in the 25-40 bracket who came down like a ton of London (Farringdon?) Bricks on TS, and did their best to murder The Dark Knight, and have almost certainly already written their reviews for the Robocop remake, would happily sit through repeat viewings of piss-poor whimsical bollocks like Juno, Broken Flowers, The Virgin Suicides, Before Sunset or any one of the ceaselessly proliferating Amerindie flicks that deal with bugger all in a style which signifies Incredible Meaningfulness. (By the way, that's two digs in three days at Richard Linklater, which isn't entirely fair because he made Dazed and Confused, a beautiful movie, and A Scanner Darkly, which, while not quite Blade Runner, did a passable job of making me feel as interestingly discombobulated as the work of Phillip K. Dick, from which it was adapted.)

Of course, it sounds like what I'm doing here is making a populist swipe against 'pretentious' films, but I think I'm actually pursuing the opposite. Perhaps the fact is that TS wasn't really very good at all, but my frustration at the perseverance of the 'oh, aren't we all so relaxed and unconcerned and emotionally literate' media to thrust the empty vessel of the abstractly 'arty' movie - not to be confused with the abstract art movie - in our direction led me to enjoy it more than it deserved. But, if I'm being perfectly honest, ninety minutes of Christian Bale and Sam Worthington machine gunning robots and crashing helicopters just has, to any sane person, be preferable to two hours of Bill Murray knocking on doors and wearing a tracksuit. McG's taking on of the Connor v. Skynet mythos might lean towards a rather reductive, underexamined philosophy - apparently, humans will always have the advantage of a vaguely defined 'humanity', AKA soul, which Skynet's otherwise unimpeachable AI cannot cow or acquire for itself - but at least it makes a less myopic engagement with a Big Question than any of the wan feasts of self-congratulation that I've listed above.

Maybe the question isn't so much 'is TS any good' - I enjoyed the cinema experience regardless of the film's eventual quality - but 'whither the arthouse film'. Two points here. One: since around 2001/2002 'artiness' has been the dominant ingredient of the perfume that marks one out as 'not in favour of illegal wars'. From the rather desperate attempts to conceive of an American 'lit rock' musical scene last year, which seemed to be engendered by little more than the fact that one of Vampire Weekend had read some Thomas Pynchon, to the pleasing on the ear but nonetheless essentially cosmetic rants of Charlie Brooker (one of the good guys, but effectively trapped within his own overly imitable sentential rhythms...), to weirdly Lacanian blog posts like this one, an unwillingness to tow the 'scent of art' line has you marked down as, oh, I don't know what, Toby Keith or Littlejohn or someone, and when you've just spent four years going half-mad trying to produce serious arguments about art and culture it's rather frustrating. Two: is there room for a revitalisation of the auteur? Common consensus seems to treat Jim Jarmusch and Linklater and even Sophia sodding Coppola as if they're the natural heirs to Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, Godard, Rivette et al but they just aren't. Because you're all attentive readers you'll have read the article by David Thomson I linked to a week back in which he (rather painstakingly, for a comparatively short article) demonstrates how Hitchcock's films are held together by force of style rather than by any Aristotelian commitments. In the case of Jarmusch in particular, I'd argue that the modern pseudo-auteur film retains aesthetic unity through the force of the image of the force of style, by a laboured framing of the directorial tic and a carefully-planned strategy of homage to one or two of the masters. Of course, America has had its own genuine auteurs, but too many overlook the seventies directors - and hell, why not James Cameron and Ridley Scott as well - because of a poor gold-shit ratio. But there is surely much more to be gained by watching King of Comedy, or The Conversation, or Blade Runner, than by wasting one's time with a dressed-up undergraduate fantasy like Linklater's Before... films.

You know, I really want to stop writing gnarly stuff and tell some stories about Hungary, but this comes so much more naturally to me....

'They complained of "high maintenance" students who sought constant advice'

2009-06-17T10:14:00.002+01:00

Although I'm surprised that anybody needed to be paid to produce a report bearing such strikingly obvious conclusions, I'm pleased that the disastrous consequences of rote-learning at A-Level have been properly recognised. The point about needy students sticks out, though: the demand for spoonfed information that arises shortly ahead of essay deadlines and exam periods is - if your experiential point of comparison is as recent as the beginning of this decade - really quite shocking. Whenever I prep undergraduates for an exam (usually the unweighted Year 1 test, which is effectively the HE equivalent of a SAT), I tell them how I went about making the step to sophomore. That process entailed sitting in the library for a few hours a day, reading and making notes on books which weren't on the course reading lists, but sounded interesting and relevant. Unsurprisingly, by dint of their not being on the lists, the books were always available, so I saved myself the three or four hours a day the usual panicking undergraduate expends running around the Short Loan room and the recent returns area looking for, I don't know, John Lukacs' Hitler and Stalin or Jane Eyre or Elementary Plant Biology 101. Of course, the approach worked because reading the new books with reference to the soon-to-be-completed course provoked a reactivation of my previous reading, so I could sit with my lecture notes on the desk, constantly reframing them according to my latest theoretical whim (I was discovering Propp, Shklovsky, and Jakobson at the time). I suppose this method is closer to the one applied by students who don't attend universities which use the (Scottish, if you like) modular system, in which case I might be seen to have been going several extra miles, but it more than paid off.

Anyway, I always explain to students how and why this attitude is better, and emphasise that it's completely pointless to sit there combing lecture notes if there is no critical subjectivity motivating what has been copied out over the course of a term. Generally, the response is a muted 'suppose so' mixed with a few people who come out and say more or less honestly that they'd been hoping that I would tell them how to pass the exam. It doesn't take a genius to see which system has been responsible for incubating such infantilism; it doesn't take a huge leap of faith to see that A-Levels have been subjected to the general and overwhelming pressure of Blairite glibocracy. The cultural logic of late, late capitalism - as manifested in, say, The Guardian's culture section or even by a platform as critically well-meaning and superficially corruscating as Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe/ Newswipe series (having finally seen them, I'll tentatively add the first two parts of the Red Riding adaptations in here) - has it that intellectual labour bears no reward, and that the ultimate object of a participation in any strand of cultural thought is a patina of 'artiness' which brings with it a lifelong obligation to attend the opening of (for example) each new film by Richard Linklater or Michael Winterbottom. One studies an arts subject at university because it's a passport to 'alternative', rather than due to any intrinsic interest in what being 'alternative' might possibly mean.

This is where the A-Level approach to EngLit both arises and is instrumentalised. According to a number of the theoreticians of literature's pedagogic value, 16-18 year olds must be taught the subject as a kind of hormonal complement. Anyone who has been, or known, a sixth former, will be aware of the absolutely paramount role of a loosely-defined individualism within their schema of ideas, hence the world of acoustic guitars, lifts to gigs, and self-consciously tasteless humour that they nearly all inhabit. For a text to have an impact, therefore, it needs to mirror the indignation of the teen, which is to perform the act of interpellating the 'rebellious' individual. There is no medium, only a Holden Caulfield-like message, and the message is - give or take a few lightly grazed political 'issues' - 'your individualism is sacrosanct'. The entire Western corpus becomes a drawn-out bildungsroman leading, with apparent inevitability, to the sanctioning of one individual in their easily-maintained, and thus unimaginable, historical moment. If 'high maintenance' and 'neediness' are terms drawn from the lexicon of romantic insecurity, their application to a pedagogic situation in which the student is reliant upon pseudo-plausible and easily digestible responses to the egotistical questions 'how did this text bequeath me' and 'how does this text sustain me' is entirely apt. There is far too little intellectual uncertainty in the experience of the arts undergraduate, and the suggestion that they be asked to cope with a little more is a welcome one.

2009-06-12T10:48:00.002+01:00

Right, I'm planning to pull my finger out over the next few weeks and put a few things up here. As a precursor, a few links:

An absolutely magnificent article by David Thomson on Hitchcock - you could remove the specifically cinematic vocabulary and use it to make a case for abstraction in any medium. I love the stuff about the marriage of order and disorder in Hitch's frames: I've always meant to accommodate the 'plane scene' in NbNW into my 'terror and flat landscapes' paper for precisely this reason.

Bradford is the first UNESCO city of film!

And something previously unknown to me: Paul McCartney's 'Temporary Secretary'. It might induce queasiness.

Liking this a lot #4

2009-05-12T23:21:00.001+01:00

Oh, one more. The excellent twohundredpercent's take on the ongoing catastrophe that is Darlington FC.

Liking this a lot #3

2009-05-12T23:12:00.005+01:00

And, of course, Jenny's recent posts, particularly the excellent skewering of the noughties 'angel cult'. And the picture of me.

One point, Mrs, regarding the most recent post: you may think that a pan-European devotion to Yellow Magic Orchestra is a lie born of a sinister conspiracy dreamed up by the writers of modern languages textbooks, but I was fortunate enough to catch almost all of Laid Back's absolutely genius anti-drugs-message-that-was-surely-made-under-the-influence-of-drugs 'White Horse' in the 24-hour supermarket on Kertész utca today. Life on the continent really is like living inside an eternal Mantronix set.

Anyway, why would anyone not like Yellow Magic Orchestra?

Liking this a lot #2

2009-05-12T23:00:00.002+01:00

Lorc's return with a post which is, even by his own high standards (this list of sarcastic essay comments from 2005 is a longstanding favourite of mine), seriously good.

Liking this a lot #1

2009-05-12T22:57:00.001+01:00

Karl's interview with music writer Nick Kent for 3AM Magazine.

The relevance of vicars

2009-05-12T12:48:00.001+01:00

As an aside to the Duffy stuff, a great quote from one of the best pieces of literary polemic I encountered last year:

Conservatism is the dominant voice of the age, which is one of steadily rising property prices and ostentation. In poetry, the great fear of radicalism (a kind of taxpayers’ revolt against the destruction of chartered intellectual property) found an outlet in a mixture of infantile regression and stylistic regression, in which inane and artificially irresponsible tones were mixed with a conscious and discreet return to outdated forms fragrant of ‘old money’, to Auden, Betjeman, and Larkin… poetry seemed stuck in a Christian youth club of 1955, with teenagers sneaking puffs on fags and a guitar-playing ‘relevant’ vicar.

Andrew Duncan, The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry

'Limits', you say?

2009-05-01T10:11:00.003+01:00

Apparently, Carol Ann Duffy's poetry 'consistently pushes the limits of form and language'.

I'm not bothered about who becomes the laureate: it's a crap job for crap poets to write crap poems to crap spec. If Duffy wants the job, I'm pleased for her, and it seems some mark of progress that a writer whose sexuality 'would not play well with Middle England' a decade ago is not thought of in the same terms now (this is not to say that we don't have a long way to go.) Beyond identity politics, though, the likely appointment is reflective not only of Establishment (whatever that means) tastes, but - as the mood of vindication in the broadsheets suggests - those of people often entrusted with providing the nation with a cultural mirror.

Duffy's visual equivalent would be someone like Beryl Cook - cheeky, even scathing, but not the kind of artist who could be honestly said to be even glimpsing the limits, let alone 'pushing' them. And yet when you dare to point this kind of thing out to people, you're all too often met with a vague and yet pissed-off charge of 'elitism': you're a 'critic' who wants to spoil the 'fun' for everybody else. The consensus seems to be that British people should not be allowed to admire artwork more complex than L.S. Lowry; the argument which points out that the potential enjoyment of modernist and abstract art, poetics, and music by the general population is hampered by a covert (and not so covert) ideology of say-what-you-see realism which is instrumental to Britain's real elitism is generally given short shrift.

So it's not the appointment of Duffy that is the problem here: it's the media's celebration of her simultaneous 'difficulty' and 'accessibility'. The former is a fantasy, and one which is applied to far too much British poetry which has not earned the tag. The latter is still more problematic: 'accessibility' seems to be one of those business-speak buzzwords, implying that most people are too stupid to make their own decisions about everything else out there.

2009-04-22T11:56:00.002+01:00

Anyone who feels America or Britain is moving nearer to an Islamist caliphate because of a suicide bomber is a wimp who has no belief in the robustness of democracy.

- Simon Jenkins on the CIA's use of torture as a method of interrogation in today's Guardian. Probably about time that someone set that idea out in terms as clear as this...

RIP J.G. Ballard

2009-04-20T12:34:00.003+01:00

There's really not much to say here, is there?

I read Miracles of Life, JGB's recent autobiography, less than a month ago. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone to whom the word 'brave' could be applied with such a vast array of meaning: Ballard seems to have never taken the easy option, either intellectually or in the course of everyday life (in as much as we might use a phrase like that to apply to someone so exhaustingly extraordinary.)

Anyway, RIP.

'Selfindulgent' links

2009-04-20T11:56:00.004+01:00

Having recovered from the traumatising words of the muscularly anonymous 'Anon' (see comments on previous post), I thought it might be about time to make a tentative appearance on here to see if said uncompromising dispenser of electronic critique has gone away yet...

Firstly, a poem by John Tranter in the edition of Jacket which is currently being put together. It's called 'Craig Raine's Arsehole', and it's really very funny.

Secondly, Basil Bunting reading his own Briggflatts, the 'northern Waste Land', at an American poetry conference in the 1960s. You'll need to set aside an hour or so.

Pranked

2009-04-01T08:09:00.002+01:00

The Guardian's April Fools Day joke this year took me approximately 0.000005 seconds to spot. It's pathetic. Unless that's actually true (I almost, almost, wouldn't put it past them) and 'Iran Offers to Help US in Afghanistan' is the real trick article...

Happy Warriors

2009-03-30T09:26:00.003+01:00

Evan Thomas, my ex-flatmate and longtime partner in the 'Mr Weinstein' pitching game, has been making a documentary film-poem about the wartime activities of the USAAF's 8th Air Force in Norfolk during the Second World War. He's been as far away as Florida collecting footage and testimony, but a lot of the work involves wandering about eerie Breckland airbases filming disused Nissen Huts. You can visit the film's website here (and pick apart my constructions in the introductory text).

March 2009: edited highlights

2009-03-29T22:33:00.003+01:00

In lieu of an interesting new post (I've written 2,000 words of fiction, 500 words for a friend's website, and a long-ish lesson plan today), here's a rustle through the baggage of the Ides:

- The Spirit (n.) Film we saw and were enormously underwhelmed by. Samuel L. Jackson needs to sort it out, but not as much as Frank Miller does. I'm not sure the premise 'ghost flirts with women and Scarlett Johansson dresses up as Eva Braun' should have passed the 'Mr. Weinstein' pitching test.

- Walking (v.) Less of this in March, largely due to increased work commitments. The seasonally-affected Magyars have chinned up in the last week or two, according to my ambulatory researches, but I'm not covering five miles a day any more.

- Bankruptcy (n., abstract) Darlington FC have a month to find a buyer or they will cease to exist. Internet chat suggests that we'll have to pull together and reform as a 'Fans' Club' in the murky depths, where I would be - in all honesty - perfectly content.

- Politics (n.) Ferenc G. is gone but nobody seems to want his job. Corrupt, naive, and arrogant as Gyurcsány might have been, I feel rather sorry for him. When I saw him, he had stopped with his wife and daughter to buy some pre-cinema pic 'n' mix. Sights like this tend to humanise politics. In other 'humanising of politics' news, the godawful Jacqui Smith is all hot and bothered because her Guy Fawkes-a-like husband decided to get, well, hot and bothered on ministerial expenses. My inner schoolboy wants to use the phrase 'wank bank' here, and just has.

- Dream (n.) And a political one, at that. Last night I dreamt that I was crossing a big Budapesti boulevard with Gordon and Sarah Brown, and David and Samantha Cameron were crossing in the other direction.

- Clock change (n.) - 'Time-wasting bastard', more like.

- Badly-written (adj.) - I'm reading sci-fi novelist Brian Aldiss' autobiography at the moment. It's absolutely fascinating if you're interested in the currents of ideas which drove British postwar fiction. It's also terribly composed, and pays no attention to the potential tonal discrepancies between eulogistic descriptions of one's wife and throwaways like 'the water was gonad shrinking'. Full marks for attempts to posit a postwar avant-garde, though, even if this is mucked in with lengthy celebrations of (NO! NO! NO!) Kingsley Amis.

- Well-written (adj.) - I (re-)read Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction earlier this week. I need to write about the appropriation of the Sebaldian voice against Sebald's own arguments about style and kitsch. The decontextualisation of Sebald - only seven years after his death - is infuriating. For now I'll only remark on the wonderful Clive Scott's cautionary reminder, in his obituary for W.G.S., that the infinitely imitable nature of the style of a novel like Austerlitz was/ is a joke that flies in the face of the absolute alignment of form and content that Sebald achieved. For me, Sebald is a Beckett unashamed by the ultimate embededness of style within historical context. There is no superfluous melancholy in The Rings of Saturn; there is nothing whimsical or unearnedly peripatetic about Vertigo. Going back to On the Natural History of Destruction made me ask one or two severe questions of my thesis, I can tell you.

Anyway, that's for another day. I'm off to bed. Xx

Man, he used to be so cool....

2009-03-26T10:43:00.002Z

Just trawling the internet, trying to recover from a mild hangover and avoid writing a lesson plan, when I came across this interview that I did for a guy in Sweden's hipsterish music website back in the olden, golden days of AHRC funding, no pressing deadlines, Truck Festival etc etc. In celebration, a few Teknikov highlights:

- Sharing a stage with DFA's occasionally excellent Prinzhorn Dance School. It wasn't the gig or the company that made this evening memorable, however: it was the post-show shenanigans which allowed our reputation as Norwich's most immature band to spread beyond the confines of the fine city. Yes, we had 'handbags'. Mat and I stole Tony's hat for the nth time that week. Retrospectively, I can understand why he was a bit annoyed. Anyway, he retrieved said item of clothing and started hitting me around the face with it, provoking an unsightly tussle from which no-one emerged with any credibility.

- The Art School gig. This was a great night. The support act was an American chap who none of us had ever met before and he turned up at the venue, guitar in hand, precisely half an hour after he was supposed to be on stage. Our set got really squeezed because we were on late. Naturally, we spent the intervening period drinking cheap Oranjeboom and getting more and more nervous about the delay, an anxiety which transformed into adrenalin the moment we went on. About halfway through the set, and midway through a song, someone figured out how to turn the hall lights down and the backlights came on completely unexpectedly, at which point everyone went mental. There was a moshpit! People were dancing!

- Truck 2006. This was amazing. We spent three or four nights in Abingdon prior to this show doing what we do best, namely going to the pub, arguing, telling each other ghost stories, talking about football, and failing to do any rehearsal whatsoever. Somehow, this cocktail of procrastination worked wonders. We were the first band on and the atmosphere was incredibly tight, as one of the biggest thunderstorms I have ever seen in the UK was half an hour from breaking. I had sweat running into my eyes before we started playing. The tent was absolutely packed as we were one of the first bands of the weekend and, from the stage, we could see more people running across the field to come and see us. We then spent the rest of the weekend getting drunk, arguing, telling each other ghost stories and talking about football...

- The MacBeth. Our pre-Christmas 2007 jaunt to Hoxton was probably my favourite of our London gigs. Once again, we were incredibly late onstage thanks to the previous band, who took ONE BLOODY HOUR to get their equipment offstage. The gig organiser, who gave the impression of just having escaped from rehab (probably not uncommon in a known haunt of Amy Winehouse and Peter Doherty) had to plead with the stern barlady to let us play at all, and he only did this because we were all devoting energy to being conspicuously angry and walking around kicking our amplifiers like Ian Brown on the Late Show. Anyway, we got on and all of our instruments went absolutely mad. The Roland sounded as if it had fallen victim to some antagonistic nanotechnology and (as so often happens) my guitar string snapped during the very first song, meaning that I had to play the atrocious spare guitar for the entire gig. When we finally got going, though, we were ace, albeit in a frighteningly distorted, No Wave kind of a way.

Obviously, I won't go into all the times we were crap, or apathetic. Can you tell that, contrary to what I've gone on and on and on about in the past, I'm missing Teknikov rather a lot?

Half-arsed, putting off going to work, news digest

2009-03-23T13:51:00.004Z

HOT!

Ferenc Gyurcsany resigns as Hungarian PM, but not before deploying some ever-so-slightly emotionally manipulative language (he's such a Blairite). Actually, it all seems to be a ploy to prevent President Sólyom calling an early general election, but let's allow the almost completely unmourned (and, lest we forget, multi-millionaire 'socialist') Gyurcsany have his moment of spurious dignity. Here's a quick flashback of his career highlights:

Saudi 'terrorists' (Feri's cracking wheeze about the supposed extracurricular activities of the Saudi national football team.)

A moment of unguarded honesty brings a major European capital to a standstill.

OFF!

On the subject of people who can't be trusted to be left alone with a microphone for five minutes, Chris Moyles is in hot water again/ Chris Moyles has been a dick again/ Chris Moyles is still not funny.

I hate to say it, but I frequently feel as if Moyles is the embodiment of the noughties British zeitgeist.

THE PRESS!

And, carrying on the theme of zeitgeist-embodying loudmouths, The Damned United, Tom Hooper's adaptation of David Peace's novelisation of Brian Clough's scarcely believable 44 days in charge of Dirty Leeds (made more dirty by their being Moyles's team of choice) is out this weekend. The BBC's Pat Murphy interviews Martin O'Neill, manager of Aston Villa and former Clough underling, about it here. O'Neill is, as ever, an eloquent interviewee (he studied law at Queen's University prior to joining Forest, and is an avid amateur criminologist in his spare time), and I was surprised by the uncanny resemblance of his diction - close, spare, precise - to my dad's.

'Woman met alien near Norwich'

2009-03-22T10:31:00.000Z

Yes, it's true. It's in the Evening News, so it must be.

Ferencváros - Newcastle, 1996

2009-03-20T16:43:00.003Z

I remember the hype around this game really distinctly, for some reason. I also remember absolutely despising Newcastle at the time and really, really wanting Fradi to win. All the attention before the game focused on the home team's prodigiously talented young midfielder Krisztián Lisztes, who some pundits were painting as the great new hope for Hungarian football. Sadly, Lisztes's career has been dogged by a series of injuries and, while he's won plenty of trophies in the Bundesliga with VFB Stuttgart and Werder Bremen, there seems to be a sense that he might have become a real star. As is sometimes the case, the Czechs ended up with publicity at the expense of the Hungarians, and the most famous midfielder to come out of Central Europe in the mid-1990s was the great Pavel Nedvěd, who is still going strong at 36 for Juventus.

A few things came out of this video for me. Firstly, the extent to which Hungarian football has declined over the last decade. When FTC's name came out of the hat as Newcastle's draw, they were genuinely considered a threat to Shearer et al's chance of progressing. Nowadays, Huungarian sides are looked upon as soft touches: when Zalaegerszeg-based ZTE sneaked a 1-0 first leg victory against Manchester United in a 2002 Champions League qualifier (before being thumped 5-0 in the return at Old Trafford) it was considered an upset of almost implausible magnitude. The result was so unusual that, according to some of my (non-football-loving, female) students, Béla Koplárovics, scorer of the winning goal in Zalaegerszeg, attained overnight fame throughout the country.

Secondly, of course, is the decline of Newcastle over a similar period. Given some of the players they've fielded since the unpleasant sacking of Bobby Robson in 2004 (not to mention some of those that Robson himself chose to deploy) it's probably surprising that they've lasted this long without being relegated. This year, their number might well be up, and my guess is that it's only the plight of semi-local rivals Middlesborough, the subject of internet rumours regarding imminent administration (rumours, I'd best stress, on the internet), that's acting as any kind of comfort for them at the moment. Just seeing the short clip above brought back memories of how good that Albert - Lee - Ginola (left on the bench that night in Budapest) - Ferdinand - Shearer side could be. Srnicek's early error, however, is an augury of how the next thirteen years were to turn out.

Thirdly, there's a lovely moment in the video where Rob Lee sees a slightly-scuffed shot hit the post and then trickle teasingly along the line before the Fradi goalkeeper comes to his senses and jumps on it. Various Newcastle forwards raise their hands as if they're about to begin celebrating, but as soon as the referee signals 'no goal' they're back to business. There's no John Terry-esque referee-harrassing here. Have we really got this bad this quickly?

'Writers are lampposts, critics are dogs': Paulo Coelho Opiating the People

2009-03-19T13:13:00.005Z

Yeah, well I'd rather be a dog than a lamppost, you dirty old hippy.

You can barely move in Hungary for people reading Paulo Coelho's, er, 'books'. It seems that the fall of communism facilitated not only the eastward surge of capitalism but a concurrent (and, if you ask me, related) influx of pseudo-spiritual bullshit.

It also fits the tendency of mainland Europeans to be far more susceptible to earnestness than the snarky British. It's almost disappointing to be out here knowing that you will never, ever be able to see the point of Bono, Depeche Mode, or the Smashing Pumpkins in the way that a Frenchman, an Italian, or a Hungarian can...

Advertising

2009-03-17T09:30:00.004Z

I've just discovered that my old friend Seb has a blog. He's never been one to sit on the fence...'The motorist lobby are hypocrites' is the best post title I've seen this year and I couldn't agree more with the sentiments he expresses about the hypocrisy of MacKenzie et al.

Be warned, though: he's a Liverpool fan.

The bleak shall (not) inherit the earth

2009-03-16T12:07:00.003Z

So British drama controllers are planning a shift away from the 00s 'bleak paradigm' to return us to the programming which prevailed back in the days when Tony Blair was a wisecracking ingénue and foreign policy meant, and only meant, 'Maastricht' or 'Sarajevo'.

It might be a stupid question, but can't we have both kinds of television? I've been happy to avoid the torrents of Tunbridgian disgust that have no doubt accompanied Channel 4's somewhat risky decision to adapt Red Riding, but I also accept that there is a significant sector of the audience demographic who will always be a little bit more Hamish MacBeth in their tastes, no matter how hard the expensively-denimed advocates of broadcasting edginess try to convert them. Unrealistically sidelining financial questions for a moment, surely there is another form of programming which could be downsized to make way for more drama and, since we're being utopian now, more intellectual content of the John Berger/ Kenneth Clark/ Death of Yugoslavia mutant Reithianist school (the one that educates the viewer but probably in a way incompatible with Reith's ideology)? Come to think of it, are the light entertainment/ reality TV hybrids that are so common now actually any cheaper to produce than some sexily conscious Play for Today type material?

Alright, I'll stop fantasising and return to my lesson plan. Sorry.

Szabadság: Pt. I

2009-03-15T18:26:00.004Z

As one gets closer to the Danube, the intersections of streets and boulevards in Districts VII and VIII will suddenly provide a long view, across the river to the Gellért Hill, where the snow has not yet melted. Invariably, our line of sight is interrupted by the Szabadság (Liberty) Monument at the southern end of the hilltop, an allegorical figure who flings her arms open back over towards Pest and working-class District IX, Ferencváros.

If the IXth sounds familiar to the British ear, it is almost certainly because of the football team of the same name who play there, their stadium a few miles down Üllői út plausibly the object of Liberty's gaze. 'Fradi', as they are popularly known, were a famous name on the European scene until the mid-1990s, and most recently made English headlines when drawn to play Millwall in a UEFA cup tie in 2004, thus allowing two of Europe's most unreconstructed sets of supporters the opportunity for an unfriendly get-together. Fradi won the tie, but were soon to experience domestic ignominy for the first time, being relegated to the second tier for financial irregularities in 2006. Because of a promotion bottleneck - only one team from each of the 'B' Liga's regional sections is allowed to go up - they have yet to return to the top flight, and their generally conservative fans have hinted darkly at a conspiracy on the part of the Socialist (read: high-taxing modernisers with a paradoxical faith in Thatcherite deregulation) MSP government of Ferenc Gyurcsány.

Ferencvárosi TC encapsulate, at this moment in time, the problematic nature of the EU at the close of the 00's. Owned by British businessman Kevin McCabe, whose prize football asset is Sheffield United, and managed by ex-Leeds striker Bobby Davison (who uses McCabe's other team as a source of young English loanees), FTC's recent history seems to mirror the opening up of Central and Eastern Europe to Western investment and management philosophy. McCabe's company has big ideas for the club, involving a stadium redevelopment and a medium-term plan to see the boys in zold and fehér playing for big money in the Champions League, another footballing institution which is representative of early 21st century European economic trends. But Fradi have an older symbolic value. Like Chelsea in England, they're a side who have traditionally represented the socially conservative section of the working class, and since 1989 they have been a rallying point for elements of the Hungarian far right.

The Hungarian far right agenda might be summed up according to three key principles. Firstly, it is hostile towards both Jews and Roma, although its phobias are not limited to its principle scapegoats. Secondly, it is irredentist. A popular graphic symbol amongst its members is a map of Hungary - actually, the portion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire sublet to Budapest - prior to the Treaty of Trianon. Parts of modern Croatia, Romania, Slovenia, and Ukraine, and most of Slovakia, are incorporated into 'big Hungary'. Thirdly, like the British medium-to-far right, it is adamantly anti-European.

Ferencváros thus find themselves in the curious position of exemplifying the conspicuous mobility of capital in post-2004 Europe and embodying an attitude which might be said to be its antithesis. As hostility towards Gyurcsány and the MSP swells due to Hungary's modishly collapsing economy, one might grasp in the situation a worrying indication of the dominant tendency in European dissent in 2009. The financial crisis - it seems glib to use the word 'present' here - has loosened the cap, never altogether sealed tightly, on the resentments of immoderate conservatism across the continent. A number of commentators, often liberal or leftishly inclined, have predicted a 'hot spring' for Europe this year and for the nations of the 2004 accession in particular. Romania, the Baltic States - one of which, Latvia, has already pegged its currency to the Euro - are seen as likely flashpoints of civil disturbance. Bulgaria is extremely unstable. Demonstrations against Gyurcsány wouldn't be a new thing here, but we can expect more of the same as the year wears on. Western Europe, however, seems just as liable to witness unrest. France we already know about, but Italy, Ireland, and even the usually timid UK seem to be approaching the red part of the thermometer. Greece and Iceland have already reached their internal tipping points.

It's absolutely crucial to note here that what we stand to see is anything but a repeat of '68 or, for the former communist states, '89. In the West, the recent history of civil disturbance offers only France and Greece as examples in which the voice of dissent was (broadly) leftist. The 2006 Dublin riots and a series of particularly nasty, racially-driven outbursts along England's M62 corridor share much in common with the nihilistic outbreaks of joyriding and vandalism that erupted in the likes of Blackbird Leys and Benwell in the early 1990s. In these cases, no progressive political argument was being made. Frustrations that might have been harnessed by the left - bad housing; unemployment; the neglect shown by successive governments to former industrial areas - came out anyway and attached themselves to specific targets within the disaffected community. Does anyone really believe that the 2000 Paulsgrove riots were really about paedophiles? Why did they not take place in, say, Cheltenham? My inclination is that the right are slowly getting the first dibs on resentments that, ideally, might be addressed with an entirely different mode of analysis.

*

As ever, we are hampered by our inability to think ourselves into history. 9/11 remains the cardinal example of this in recent memory: few can honestly say that the attacks prompted anything byt a mixture of objectless anxiety (a vague, 1939-esque premonition that Things Would Never Be The Same Again), and a childlike faith that a benevolent agency would act as the invisible hand of stability. Eight years later, we're still twiddling the same abacus. History is elsewhere, a set of past tenses which were eventually recuperated as the just-about-inhabitable present. Teaching a humanities subject at a university can provide a salutary crash course in this weltanschaung, which can't quite be described as apathy. Progress and security are interpreted as the ability to make judgments about things that happened a long time ago: we are invited to assess the value of Heart of Darkness according to our certainties about the wrongness of colonialism. Each text allows a new opportunity to rate ourselves a historical (allegedly disposed-with) demon: Hitler, Idi Amin, Field Marshal Haig, postwar austerity. First year students, unwittingly, are the 21st century's premier proponents of Whig history. Given that their lecturers, and a still-sizable number of their secondary school teachers, cut their teeth on Marx, Althusser, Adorno, and Derrida's seance with Marx, one has to wonder where this guarded optimism is coming from. Repeatedly, politics is displaced into parts of the world where Whiggish benevolence might still be seen to be required: Palestine, Sudan, Tiber, Iraq. Borrowing a notion half-remembered from Slavoj Žižek, it might be said that their appeals are made to the grace of the system, the capacity of which for discretion is read as some Darwinian zenith of political possibility, rather than directly against it. Anything wrong is interpreted as a malfunction within the system, which must be normalised, rather than as an inherent flaw. I've resisted writing about this so far, but the well-intended jubilation surrounding Barack Obama's victory is the categorical example of this: as if Obama's incessant realpolitiking during the election campaign were not enough to make us suspicious, we should remember that the new president is opposed on principle to certain rights that a significant number of his worldwide admirers believe should be inalienable. Labour's 1997 victory - which is not the same thing as a victory for Labour in 1997 - should have served as a cautionary reminded about this kind of triumphalism. In each case, the victory of a nominally left leader acts less as a prompt for real advancement and more as (spurious) proof of our own political perfection. We have no sense of ourselves as historical beyond vague platitude's about the electorate's capacity to 'make history'.

Meanwhile, the right persists with its own unpleasant brand of selective historicism. I've talked at length about the wolf in lamb's clothing of the conservative commentariat, whose assumption of the voice of 'sensible opinion' has allowed for the propagation of opinions which are, quite simply and irreducibly, extremist. Most troublingly, the likes of Richard Littlejohn have been allowed, time and time again, to play the wounded party as they reduce all left-wing critique to the analysis of a crypto-Stalinist 'metropolitan elite'. Absolutely everything they disagree with is dismissed with the wholly unearned seen-it-all-beforeness of a Phillip Larkin poem: they are allowed, like Nick Griffin is, to represent themselves as the revolutionary vanguard of the free- and right- thinking. In spite of the fact that they have a variety (and the majority) of established media platforms to speak from, they are permitted to claim that they are subject to a left-wing conspiracy which aims at their silencing.

To be continued...

Hillsborough 20th Anniversary

2009-03-15T11:29:00.003Z

There's a piece in today's Observer about the Hillsborough Disaster. Twenty years on and countless eyewitness accounts later, this is still almost unbearably moving. It's shocking too - the anecdote about the policeman telling survivors not to use an advertising hoarding as a stretcher because they were 'vandalizing the stadium' took my breath away.

The tragedy, seen retrospectively, was a watershed in British politics. In its wake, it became unacceptable (or, for more cynical parties, inexpedient) to make Mail-like generalisations about the behavioural tendencies of large groups of people. The article makes it abundantly clear that the disaster was not attended to sufficiently because the police assumed that there had been crowd violence. And yet crowd trouble itself was less the result of a spontaneous desire to fight than it was a conduit for the frustrations of a Britain that was, successively, broke and dominated by an uninclusive monetarist attitude as it moved through the 1970s and 1980s. The old cliché that rave culture put the lid on hooliganism by providing a comparable, and yet nonviolent, outlet for the desire to be part of a mass movement is more true than the noun at the beginning of this sentence would have you believe: very few people were 'fighting just for the sake of fighting'.

If crimes tell us more than anything else about our culture, can disasters be said to do the same thing? Much ink has been used describing the links between the series of rail tragedies around the turn of the Millenium and the negligence of the Blairite government. Hillsborough, along with the Zeebrugge ferry sinking, are the totemic catastrophes of the Thatcher era. The latter resulted from the attitude that time is money: the boat's bow doors were not secured before departure, provoking the investigating judge to mention a 'disease of sloppiness'. The same carelessness was evident at Hillsborough, but there were clearly other complicating factors. Thatcher declared her intentions towards football supporters with her notorious ID card scheme and one club - Luton Town, owned by the commitedly neo-Tory David Evans - had already made moves to implement it. Fences were put up at the majority of grounds, as if the players, rather than opposing supporters, were the object of aggression. Travelling fans were locked in cramped football specials to ferry them to and from away games. There was little consideration shown for the large majority of fans who did not participate in disorder, and a blanket lack of willing to engage with the social problems that motivated those who did.

On the subject of social problems, the fact that the tragedy occurred in South Yorkshire is fairly unavoidable. Taylor's report bore out the suspicion that inept, inconsiderate policing was largely to blame for what happened. The S.Y. force in 1989 was staffed largely by veterans of the Miners' Strike, and the conflict had clearly imbued the organisation with a siege mentality. As the article, like many before it, shows, the police were utterly incapable of interpreting the events as anything but violence and disorder. By the time they performed the necessary measures, it was far, far too late.

The public response is all that remains in my memory from that day - I was only eight years old. I didn't find out about Kelvin MacKenzie's sociopathic line on it all until much later on. The Sun's reportage on Hillsborough is arguably the biggest misjudgment in British journalism since Rothermere's backing of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, and the paper's sales on Merseyside are still significantly lower than in the rest of the United Kingdom. That MacKenzie has made sporadic attempts to defend his editorial choices that week tells us a lot about the ongoing pervasiveness of Thatcherism.

I began going to football the following year. The fences were still up at Feethams, but the attitudes surrounding football had already begun to change. Although I've seen them get unnecessarily baton-happy on a few occasions, the police are now generally responsible and cooperative when it comes to crowd management at football. More importantly, the popular and political determination that nothing of the sort should ever happen again is ongoing. Articles like this contribute to that will.

'Are you getting this, ground control?'

2009-03-14T09:15:00.004Z

Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama is the Classic Serial on Radio 4 at the moment. I wouldn't normally mention this but for the fact that I spent yesterday evening reading up on what I like to call 'spooky space stuff' in the wake of the International Space Station's near miss with some orbiting litter earlier this week.

Rendezvous with Rama is one of the most depressing books I've ever read, even by the standards of most post-1945 science fiction. I'm not by any means saying that sci-fi is bad, but its typical tropes - the evacuation of the earth, travel over multi-generational time periods, sequestration in stasis - leave me pretty cold. The one that genuinely pisses me off, though, and this is unquestionably a highly significant part of Clarke's weltanschaung, is the reduction of female characters to childbearing and nurturing roles. In Rama, this (covertly) has the structure of a revenge fantasy: the woman who ends up tasked with the 'Eve mission' - Rama, it transpires, is a celestial opportunity for humanity to start again, and its investigators have been lured there for a short, knockout, Darwinian tournament - begins the novel as a highly-respected scientist. It's over a decade since I read it, but I'm sure that there's a lot of male-endorsed chaff about her nascent maternal stirrings. Anyway, there seems to be a lot of that about in science fiction. However women come out of Flaubert's work, or even that of an unrestrained cock-waver like Henry Miller, it's very rarely like this.

That said, I'm interested in the power a lot of sci-fi has to induce such a sense of dislocation in me. Dostoevsky or Kafka or Sartre or Camus or Blanchot or Robbe-Grillet (okay, maybe The Plague, which has certain tendencies in common with sci-fi) don't do that to me. Ray Bradbury or William Gibson, on the other hand, do. If someone could venture to name the effect I'm discussing, I'd be fascinated (I don't think 'the uncanny' does enough work, in this case).

'A small club gamely failing in a rich man's world' (or not, as the case may be)

2009-03-12T22:50:00.003Z

Eminently correct football Cassandra David Conn on the crisis at my club, which only seems to find itself in the news when everything has gone wrong.

2009-03-11T19:41:00.004Z

Me, last week:

Julie Myerson is right to say that our writing tells us much about ourselves that we don't already know.

Last week, what I didn't already know about myself was that I was writing a sentence about someone who was about to become extremely (in)famous indeed. It's come to a pretty pass when the literary affair of the year isn't the Sartre-Robbe Grillet debate, or even a spat between Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens, but a kerfuffle over the self-indulgent 'mumoirs' (THAT IS MY NEOLOGISM TM TM TM COPYRIGHT IDST!!! Seriously, I just made 'mumoir' up. They might as well give me the royalties cheque now...) of an Islingtonite mother-of-three who can't get her head around the fact that her son smokes a bit of dope.

In all seriousness, I recognise that 'a bit of dope' actually does - contra the assertions of many of the smug hippies on the Guardian's Comment is Free blog - have the potential to derail one's life in potentially serious ways. This probably deserves qualifying by saying that something approaching the opposite is true for many individuals (cannabis can focus people just as it can distract them; not all users spend their entire life in a smoky room watching Harold and Kumar), and that those who are affected negatively by it are often negotiating less contingent stresses and strains. From what I've read about the Myersons, it seems that her son was ludicrously overpressured by parents who felt that they were doing anything but: from my teaching experience, I can say that Britain is overrun with teenagers who have had it banged into them that nothing but relentless, quantifiable achievement will do. This doesn't mean that kids are being encouraged to learn about things; it means that they are (implicitly) being pressed to learn by rote - wherever that's possible - so they can get the best grades/ the best job. IMO/ IME this is a specifically middle-class problem. There are lots and lots of potentially talented individuals for whom university becomes a self-destructive circle of mechanistic revision and joyless socialising, rather than an opportunity to, well, find out about what I remember Karl and I, in a flash of almost revolutionary wisdom, agreeing to term 'stuff'. It is all too rare to meet a student who says something like 'I picked English Lit/ History/ Classics because I find the subject bottomlessly interesting and, to tell you the truth, I don't give a fuck what grades I get because the studying is rewarding enough in its own right.' That's a pity, because they're invariably the ones who get the best results.

Anyway, despite not liking the idea of Jake, who I get the feeling is probably one of those pious weedheads who listen to Manu Chao, I am on his side. His mother is hacking out the typical Islingtonite route of building a literary career grounded on an erroneous belief that their own experience is somehow more vital and visceral than that of anyone else (what price the mother of a heroin addict from Burnley being given the opportunity to publish such a book?) and, on those terms alone, offends my most deeply-held principles. She's the new Wife in the North.

Oh, and my own parents? They are bloody good at 'no pressure', to the extent that not an eyelid was batted at my numerous C-grade GCSEs. In the most memorable example of 'no pressure' (as far as I'm concerned), my mum once semi-encouraged me to go to London for a play-off final when I had a four-hour exam in Norwich the next morning. True to form, I refused to go and spent the evening in the pub instead, but it was nice to be trusted to be able to do well even if I had gone to London. I get the feeling that the meddling committed by the Myersons of this world doesn't accomodate pre-exam play-off piss ups...

Arsenal Stadium Mystery

2009-03-08T10:55:00.003Z

Arsene Wenger compounds his resemblance to Jack Straw by claiming that Arsenal may be a priority target for extremists. It's not the greatest excuse for falling into fifth place, is it? In fact, it's almost 'dog ate my homework' country.

I think he's been reading this novel.

'In our hour of financial need'

2009-03-04T19:37:00.003Z

The Guardian staples its colours to the mast: as hundreds of jobs go in the media, Farringdon expresses solidarity by paying Matthew Fort to optimise our pizza-buying experience. Well, as they say, if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem...

Let's just say Nero's tuning up again.

Disappointment

2009-03-03T19:06:00.000Z

Am I the only one who was misled by the adjective in this article?

Actually, come to think of it, I probably was...

Writing: fun?

2009-03-03T09:25:00.002Z

Writers respond to the question 'writing for a living: a joy or a chore.'

Will Self's answer is probably most consonant with what I think about writing fiction. Nobody is making you do it, contra to what Amit Chaudhuri seems to be arguing (I've met Chaudhuri a few times and this point seems typical of his Eeyorishness - he's also a classically-trained singer and one occasionally gets the impression that he'd rather be doing that most of the time.) It's pleasing that self refuses angst here. Ronan Bennett is straight to the point as well: 'I am not a tortured writer', he says, pleasingly opting out of the mythopoetics I was discussing last week. Julie Myerson is right to say that our writing tells us much about ourselves that we don't already know, and that this can often be frightening (but, I think, it's just as often comforting or reassuring). Geoff Dyer claims to prefer the tinkering and toning to the initial act of invention, something I can sympathise with at times.

But John Banville? Bloody hell. I'd like to credit him with being ironic here, but I suspect - having read The Sea, simultaneously the least original novel ever and the one that behaves as if is the most radical - that he isn't. Banville's utter pomposity is perhaps matched only by that of the actors in Blackadder.

Self is riding the updraft of my estimations at the moment, though. As a bonus, read the transcript of his absolute demolition of Richard Littlejohn and his 'novel' To Hell in a Handcart here.

2009-03-02T22:34:00.003Z

Fascinating stuff from Germaine Greer - perhaps the best public speaker I have ever had the pleasure of being in an audience for - on the disparities between male and female humour, and the old lie that men are funnier than women. I can't really add much to this, because I'm knackered, other than to say that I agree that the majority of men I know who really, really enjoy making other people laugh (ie, me) look for a kind of acceptance in it. I'm not sure that this is a bad thing, though...

Petrolhead Propaganda

2009-03-02T09:36:00.003Z

The Hungarians all laughed at me when I told them that I can't drive. It seemed wise not to get into an ethical debate about the subject.

On that note, here's the ever-reliable Evening News doing its part for the Norfolk drivers' lobby...

That link will stop working in a week or so, by the way: for future reference, the story is about a man with a phobia about speed cameras...

Monday morning - a shot in the arm

2009-03-02T09:14:00.002Z

I'm starting to like Monday mornings quite a lot. The last few weeks have made me realise just how much I enjoy teaching, especially when its results can be as immediately clear as they are in language classes. I like to think that I'll bring what I've learned in this field back into academic teaching: although I believe that the ideal humanities seminar is characterised by a certain formlessness and natural fluency, the pedagogic realities in the UK at the moment make this more or less impossible. Literature seminars too often collapse into a situation in which the teacher is having to explain (what is inevitably their own take on) a text that the class have not been able/ bothered to read, and setting lesson objectives in such circumstances is basically pointless. It is pretty dispiriting to have a group of twenty, three of whom are bursting at the seams to discuss the narratological difficulties of The Turn of the Screw, whilst the other seventeen are making excuses for not having got beyond the first page.

Language teaching has been a different kettle of fish, and has certainly offered pointers for how university seminars might be better run. Firstly, the school I'm teaching at insists that groups should contain no more than seven. Secondly, you can't do this work without a lesson objective. Thirdly, the students all (seem to) want to work.

This isn't to say that I'd prefer to be a language teacher, only that the literature seminars in the redbrick and Brutalist universities are predicated on utterly unrealistic conditions, and that far too much of the work the tutor is asked to undertake there involves making simplifications for students who, I'm sad to say, probably shouldn't be there in the first place. Tutors, predictably, become unmotivated, and a degree of cynicism creeps into a process that should not accomodate such an attitude. We're being asked to encourage independent thought amongst a generation for whom critical thinking has been reified as a banal 'well, it can mean anything you want it to mean, can't it: that's just your opinion'. The great license of poststructuralism has been turned back upon itself, or even been ventriloquised, by the Fukuyamas and Fukuyama-lites who would have us believe that our democracy has been perfected because we can propose the deferral of any opinion.

Anyway, that is for another post. What I meant to say is that I particularly enjoy my Monday morning class, because it's exclusively male, and nearly all my other students are women. Predictably, Monday is the silliest, most unruly class, meaning that I really have to come out of myself to have any authority. This morning, I think I cracked them, although this did involve a long argument about whether or not an Audi can do 280 km per hour, and whether one should do this or not. I think I'll avoid getting into cars driven by Hungarians for this reason...apparently, it's 'normal' to rag your motor to the top of its capacity.

And we were supposed to be talking about film reviews...

Hard Fact Time

2009-03-01T11:54:00.003Z

I feel lucky to be in a different country while this situation worsens. Having a new job, meeting new people who speak a language I know next to nothing of every day, tends to take the edge off situations like the precarious health of one's local football team's finances. Last night, though, after an exchange of texts with my brother, I sat down for twenty minutes with a glass of cheap red wine to try and figure out exactly what I think about it all.

My brother and I are both in our mid-to-late twenties and we could both reasonably be said to be beyond the age of no responsibility. He's a full-time journalist with a few years worth of experience, I'm a PhD in English supposed to be transforming my thesis into a fully-fledged book proposal. Last time our football team achieved any real success, I was nearly nine and he had just turned seven, so we were understandably not going to celebrate that by going out on the town and getting drunk and sentimental. Last night, I realised that the window of opportunity for that kind of abandon has just about gone. It will probably be a few years before the club is in a position to challenge for anything again, and I just can't see either of us being a position to suddenly drop everything and travel across the UK for a vital end-of-season away game
by the time that situation comes about.

I've seen Man Utd, Spurs, Liverpool, Arsenal, and Chelsea fans who have never set foot inside a football ground wildly celebrating winning various competitions. I've seen them argue with each other about the relative merits of their clubs as if they had any real connection with the place. I've seen them moved almost to tears by adverse results while sitting in the pub on a Saturday afternoon. All Thom and I have got from Darlo in the period of time when we can afford to actually follow a club with the 'passion' all of these plastic fans proclaim they feel is disappointment upon disappointment upon disappointment. The chances are that next time - if there is indeed to be a next time - Darlo get promoted, I'll be sitting in a conference room somewhere, or something equally adult.

Another point in all of this is that, for all the complaining fans do when their clubs go into administration, there are people who (understandably) have no interest in football whose livelihoods are damaged when '1p in the pound'-type settlements are imposed by preferential creditors. It's all well and good the 'club being saved for future generations', but when its debt management agenda can involve other, smaller, companies taking a serious hit in the pocket, there's something pretty grubby going on. Football fans need to be less blinkered about what 'administration' actually means: it isn't just a problem for the club which results in a ten point deduction, it has a real and palpable effect in the community. Clubs must learn to live within their means soon, even if that means a number of them going part-time. I'd rather see Darlo fielding semi-professional players than think that their mismanagement had cost anyone a job or their livelihood.

'I'm forty, and I've done nothing I'm proud of.'

2009-03-01T10:44:00.005Z

Talking of plotting, we went to see Gus Van Sant's biopic of Harvey Milk last night. I enjoyed it, although the ending was pretty heartbreaking, and thought Sean Penn was outstanding in the title role. He may even have undone some of the damage done by his pompous, dick-waving directorial turn Into the Wild, but it's a little too early to say.

One note about Milk, though. It's very interesting how many films recently have dealt, in one way or another, with crises in the ego of the successful male. Here's the list that immediately springs to mind:

Goodnight and Good Luck (2005) - David Strathairn's fantastic portrayal of Ed Murrowgoes beyond the manifest politics to attempt a psychologisation of the newsman during his contretemps with Joe McCarthy.

Michael Clayton (2007) - George Clooney's high-powered fixer confronts himself at the same time as taking on the ethical shortcomings of corporate America.

Frost/ Nixon (2008) - Pretty much the same: Michael Sheen's David Frost isn't just taking Nixon to task, he's - with the aid of Sam Rockwell's left-leaning academic - interrogating his own lack of political responsibility.

The Damned United (2009) - Well, it's not out yet, but it's safe to say from the trailers (and the source novel) that the film will be at least as much about what took place in Brian Clough's head as what happened on the pitch.

Milk did open up avenues for psychological explorations, but it tended to close these down in ways that the above films didn't (or won't). Each time, we were returned to the dynamics of interpersonality, to engagement, to what one might do to alter their immediate political circumstances. There was less hand-wringing here than in a film like Michael Clayton, although it was, indisputably, a film which took an acute interest in how men perceive themselves and their achievements. Van Sant's decision to suggest psychologisations without following them up in their entirety gave the film a rather unusual texture, but it was probably the right directorial choice. In a way this was the anti-Dark Knight, in as much as Christopher Nolan's second Batman film repeatedly offers us glimpses of political engagement at the end of a long, incredibly dark tunnel of angst without ever quite letting us reach them. Good stuff, anyway.

'Sometimes I get an idea for cinema...'

2009-03-01T10:19:00.004Z

Sometimes I get an idea for cinema. And when you get an idea that you fall in love with, this is a glorious day. That idea may just be 1a fragment, but it holds something. It might be a scene, or a part of a scene, or a character, or a way the character talks, a light or a feel ... You write that idea down. And thinking about that idea will bring other ideas in – there's a hook to it. And things start to emerge. And then you see, one day, a script. A script is just words to remind you of the ideas. And you follow that, but always staying on guard, in case other ideas come in, because a thing isn't finished till it's finished. And one day, it's finished.

A reticent David Lynch is interviewed about his creative processes in the Observer. This is exactly how I like to think of Lynch working. 'How a character talks' seems to be just as valuable as a work's point of origin as the McKee-esque dynamic of a protagonist and their antagonism: of course, Dale Cooper's almost absurdly earnest delivery in Twin Peaks might be said to set the tone for the whole series. Lynch's remarks here make me think of M. John Harrison's novel Climbers, which, to me, is almost about the writer's attempt to establish narrative connections between particularly powerful images or Wordsworthian 'spots of time'. As in much of Henry Green's writing, 'plot' gets subordinated and reduced to the status of a defile which allows the reader to move between outcrops of particular poetic intensity.

Green, I think, worked from the same kind of premises as Lynch. Also reticent, or elliptical, when asked to provide statements about creative process, he memorably said that his novel Loving, set in an Irish country house during WWII, grew from a remark made to him by a man who had once been a butler. Upon being asked what the best feeling in the world was, the butler replied:

Lying in a bed on a Sunday morning with the church bells ringing in the distance, eating hot buttered toast with cunty fingers.

My friend Lorcan has a joke about Creative Writing students. He was a manager in the postgraduate bar at UEA for some time, so he became pretty familiar with the odd human traffic of that place. He'd meet Creative Writing PhDs and ask what their novel was about. In the first year, they say 'It's about Vincent van Gogh, but from the perspective of his mistress.' In the second, they say 'It's about Rembrandt, but from the perspective of his mistress.' In the third year, they say 'It's about Paul Gauguin, but from the perspective of his mistress.' Because the degree is never finished, you can substitute as many artists as there are years. The point is, though, that the inflexible plot device, whilst perhaps having some kind of hard, Aristotelian, attractiveness, is no substitute for that salacious phrase, or that nagging sound of a voice awaiting embodiment, or the misleading simplicity of a certain quality of light. In Twin Peaks, the death of Laura Palmer was a giant MacGuffin which legitimated the earlier inventions of Audrey's come-ons, Cooper's voice, and the light through, and the smell of, the Douglas Firs.

2009-02-27T18:20:00.001Z

Michael O'Leary, I'm beginning to think, is the world's greatest satirist...

He's like some character in a Bill Hicks routine magnified by, well, a large number.

'Every legal means'?

2009-02-27T18:04:00.003Z

Trust me, Gordon. Most of us would be more than happy for you to drop the adjective from that sentence.

Woo!

2009-02-27T17:55:00.004Z

After an absolute ballache (as my brother would say) of a week, in which I have been forced to teach like I've never taught before, it was refreshing to check my e-mail and find an e-mail praising one of my lessons (one that I thought had bored the students to death). I was going to quote it, but my paranoiac instincts made me wonder if the sender might Google her own e-mail content...

Just been to a training session, which was actually a marketing opportunity for O.U.P.'s Hungarian wing. Most of the teachers present were not Hungarian, and those who weren't were TEFL bunnies. I was sat at the front trying to disguise the fact that I'm a moonlighting Eng. Lit. doctor.

Two very long posts to come soon - one part two of the 'Writers' thing and the other...well, the other is very long. I'm not sure where it ends up.

England bad, England good...

2009-02-25T12:00:00.002Z

Darlington are going into administration. Given the situation we're in, it could - could - be the end.

In better news, I just swapped my SIM cards back to phone HMRC and spoke to a very helpful Mackem called Daniel, who assures me that I am now registered. They have something about avuncular northerners there - when I was trying to get my rebate, the only person who stopped me going stir-fry was a genial Yorkshireman called Mick who seemed as bemused by the process as I was. That's a bloody relief though, anyway!

'Miffy, Muffy, Tufty.'

2009-02-24T18:14:00.003Z

A.L. Kennedy's new series on becoming a Writer.

I've a lot of time for A.L. Her novels aren't exactly wheel-inventing, but they're funny, compassionate, and well-observed (long-time readers will appreciate how odd it is for me to use these the last two of these words non-pejoratively.) Once again, though, this is the media playing up the cult of the Writer whilst laying the blame for a diminishing 'national literary culture' - who does she think she is? Sandor Petőfi? - on anyone but Writers themselves. This is a fallacy that benefits nobody but the nouveaux mandarins behind the now-global industry in postgraduate creative writing courses. But, A.L., isn't it often the case that these courses, which, whilst not exactly promising, intimate the enhanced likelihood of publishing contracts and/ or the representation of agents at their conclusion, reveal cohort after cohort of 'Miffys', 'Muffys', and 'Tuftys'? I know you're guaranteed to meet a grizzled, alcoholic ex-miner on every single CW course, but they usually soon become a totem for an authenticity which is subsequently, miraculously, distributed through and across the group. CW courses are full of people who are used to being told that they are relatively talented writers, because they are, who then choose to ignore the relatively part and decide that they don't need to graft to make it better. Unless 'grafting' means spending hours in a bar, talking not about books by other people, but by the minutiae of motivation and 'inhabitation' of voices as it pertains to their own work.

So many CW enrollees I have met read works of literature in a purely cannibalistic manner, looking to see what devices could give their projects a shot in the arm. Form becomes the instrument of a commercially-viable 'novelty', vis-a-vis the appropriation of people like Georges Perec and Harry Mathews to the ever-proliferating mass of CW coursebooks. To me, this is not an example of literature being regarded in good faith. I'll sit and talk drunkenly about books for ages, for far too long, but I can't participate in those seedy conversations where - for example - Henry Green's dialogue or Elizabeth Bowen's stillnesses become as little as something I can have too. Sure, I'll recognise a congruence of intentions, and there's writers who work now - M. John Harrison at his best, Peace, Chris Paling in parts - who I like because they appeal to my 'working' sensibility. But I could never look at Harrison, extrapolate a Mills & Boon-style template for the 'quasi-fantastic novel of northern melancholia', then work to it by rote. To me it's always something to work away from, to acknowledge as well as possible whilst drawing a line of consecration around it, than to chop up and decontextualise like some Sicilian tomb raider.

So Kennedy still wants to have, and still wants writers to have, their ego. They are still skinny and poor, they still live off coffee and perhaps something a little stronger in a giftless genie of fag smoke. They live at an extreme. IMO, the majority of CW students manufacture that environment as much as possible as a vital stage in that most ersatz of process, becoming Writer - I know a couple who could be said to have existed within this stereotype by necessity rather than by pretence, and it's no coincidence that they're the ones I might take seriously. But it is the ego of the Writer that obstructs the activity of becoming reader, which is, still, an unavoidable (and yet utterly pleasurable) necessity in the creative apprenticeship. The reason we are ending up with bucketfuls of myopic novels about adolescence and studenthood, which are, unquestionably, the dullest topics on which one might write, is because of the CW agenda's partial nurturing, which tells young writers they are 'good' but does not encourage them to look beyond the limited scope of their own experience and send them towards the rather bloody large stock of other peoples' which can be found, conveniently, in the average university - or even municipal - library. Don't talk about 'control' and 'motivation' as if you were Stanislavski until you've at least familiarised yourself with a page or 3,000 of Flaubert or James or Bowen, don't talk about 'atmosphere' until you've done M.R. James and Patrick Hamilton backwards, and don't talk about 'Japanese influences' because you're read a few pages of Murakami.

David Peace and Will Self have both talked, repeatedly, about the potential harmfulness of the CW system and I think it's time more people listened. There may be people reading this who are CW friends, and if you're my friend you're probably exonerated from this on the grounds that we've almost certainly been over this ground and you've agreed with me about the dangers I've mentioned above. I'm sorry, but I felt like I needed to say all of this.

Edward Upward, RIP

2009-02-22T13:38:00.003Z

I can't believe I didn't notice this for almost ten days, but Edward Upward, the last surviving member of the Auden Generation, has died aged 105. His early collaborations with Christopher Isherwood are some of the most interesting literary documents from the late twenties/ early thirties, and set the terms for how the developments of Surrealism were to be negotiated by English writers. His novel Journey to the Border is certainly worth reading if one is interested in the influence of Kafka on pre-1939 English fiction. Sad news.

Derek Raymond

2009-02-21T15:09:00.002Z

Read what I had to say about him here.

If anyone could keep a hard copy of this for me, I'd be very grateful.

(I'm glad to see a nod for Gerald Kersh's wonderful Night and the City here, as well.)

Fame, albeit limited

2009-02-21T13:10:00.002Z

Apparently my note on Derek Raymond's I Am Dora Suarez is in today's Guardian. Mint.

Sorry lads, we're bizzies...

2009-02-21T10:47:00.003Z

The police have postponed Everton's home fixture with Stoke so the BNP can have a get-together in Liverpool. With any luck, this means that Nick Griffin has got on the wrong side of the Blues' vaguely Christopher Walken-esque manager David Moyes.

I've met the Hungarian police a few times this week. On Tuesday, a couple of pensioners burgled a flat in our block (you've read that right - Jenny's description makes it seem like a particularly vigorous outing for Compo and co). The Rendőrség pulled up in their car about two hours later, just as I was attempting to get into the block without my outer-door key. The leader walked over to me and tried gamely to speak English while I tried gamely to speak Hungarian, a conversation which eventually elicited the information that I 'should' drink the bottle of wine I was holding in my hand. Still, at least he didn't confuse me with the superannuated robbers.

Then, on Wednesday, I made my usual short-cut to WestEnd mall, an implausibly large shopping outlet containing about three million shoe shops, through Nyugati Station. The station had been evacuated the day before because workers had found some unexploded WWII grenades on a construction site next door, so the Rendőrség had decided to go and do some tokenistic 'anti-terrorist' quota-filling in the station. As in Britain, this generally involves stopping all men between 14 and 40 and making them feel guilty for a couple of minutes. In this case, they checked my passport briefly and returned it politely, without the supercilious attitude that I've seen so often from British police (particularly at football matches, where I've witnessed some absolutely ludicrous timesheet-completing activities.)

Don't get me wrong, I'm very far from being one of those 'maaaan, the police are, like, always bad and that' type people,* and I've met some very polite and helpful PCs in Britain, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, and Spain (where an officer just chuckled and gave me the right answer when, rather tipsy, I asked him for directions to the train station I was standing right outside at five in the morning. In Italian.) But I'm convinced that I have one of those faces. My criminal record is pristine, but I have:

- been asked for my name and address whilst mucking about innocently in a park, aged 14.
- been thrown out of a W.H. Smith store by a security guard, aged 13, because I'd been in there 'too long'. (I was looking for Christmas presents, you wanker.)
- had my luggage and all my possessions heavily scrutinised by the French douanes at Calais on two separate occasions. I admit that the second time this might have been provoked by my making a sarcastic remark, but I only did that because the police were treating everyone like idiots, as they generally do in France.
- been put into an 'escort' on my way to a match at Lincoln, only to realise that it was full of the full complement of Hogan's finest, who'd travelled en masse to the end-of-season fixture in the hope of a 80s-revivalist pagger.
- Been accused at Carrow Road of beating up a Dagenham & Redbridge supporter outside the ground and stealing his ticket. In all fairness, this was due more to some lacksadaisical organisation (it's a long and boring story) on an ex-girlfriend's part than to over-zealous policing
, but still...

I used to sit opposite a hopeful for the police when I had a rubbish job at a stationery wholesalers. He was a nice guy, and intelligent, but he had this spooky regard for 'the law' as this immutable, inherently correct thing which made me wonder about what his attitude would be if he lived in a country which places less emphasis on personal freedoms than the UK - Berlusconi's Italy, for example. One of the many ways in which I used to kill time in that job was by constructing ethical dilemmas of ever-increasing baroqueness for him to solve, but his answer was always 'if it's against the law, it's against the law, and I'd arrest them.' I hope that not all potential PCs are so dogmatic. I should add, in mitigation, that he had an uncanny attractiveness to muggers and random assailants, and that he was from Grimsby, a town which could make anyone yearn for some Dixon of Dock Green-style idyll.

Anyway, I'm thinking of going to the football this afternoon, so we'll see how they do 'crowd'** control in Budapest.

* My uncle is a raconteur ex-policeman with a caché of good stories. He arrested Keith Moon at Prestwick Airport once. Moon pulled a 'gun' on him, and pulled the trigger, only for a flag with 'bang' written on it to protrude from the muzzle...
** Average attendances at Soproni Liga 1 games have dropped below 2,000 this season, largely due to the fact that Hungarian football has been ruined by corruption since 1989, and everyone in BP supports Italian, German, and English teams. 2,000 would be understandable in a country the size of, say, Slovenia, but Hungary's population is twice Scotland's. I'm thinking of going to see my local team, current champions MTK, play Kaposvar at 5.00pm, but I'm slightly depressed by the thought that they've had <1,000 gates this season.

Quack, croak, glug, and whatever noise a water boatman makes Pt. II

2009-02-18T08:30:00.003Z

Further to last month's note about an imminent proliferation of ponds, Teesside has got in on the act by creating a new waterfowl reserve at Saltholme, between Hartlepool and Billingham. There are already a few reserves around there, notably at Seal Sands, where we once spent a day on a school trip, learning absolutely nothing but having a fantastic time chucking sand at each other and trying to make the teacher cry. The article is right, though: there's definitely something East Anglian (read: Sebaldian) about that stretch of coastline, although I dare say that you can still go walking there without coming upon a method-writing UEA creative writing student at every turn in the path. Or Will Self.

Yorkshire Gothic (Again)

2009-02-17T09:51:00.002Z

Carol Rumens selects the 'Lyke Wake Dirge', a fourteenth century funerary poem in Cleveland dialect, as her poem of the week. Brrr.

Here is a link to Pentangle's brilliant setting of the poem, which unfortunately has a homemade montage of some American graveyards attached.

Some things turn out well in the end...

2009-02-17T09:39:00.003Z

The man responsible for the song with the greatest pop-sax break in the world ever, although - controversially - not responsible for the sax break itself, turns up after having been missing for a worrying amount of time.

Were I ever to write a novel intending to capture the essence of the British 1970s, that video probably contains all the research material I should need...

Beat that, Gordon Brown...

2009-02-16T12:41:00.003Z

For Valentine's Day, we took the chairlift up to the top of Janoshegy and messed around in the snow:

Hungarians, like most Europeans I have ever come across, don't find the notion of spending all Saturday in the pub watching Sky Sports News very appealing. Free time and fresh air are treated as sacrosanct, so the summit of Janoshegy was, in spite (or because) of the weather, crawling with daytrippers sledging, cross-country skiing, ambling, and, er, jogging. Anyway, it was all very bracing.

Fresh air makes you hungry, so we jumped off the bus back to Pest before it crossed the river and went for a pizza in a side street off lovably grim transport hub Moskvá Ter. Afterwards, we thought it might be a good idea to wander over to the cinema and see if there was anything worth watching. Our options were The Dark Knight (vetoed on grounds of length and Jenny's intolerance for relentless grimness) and Revolutionary Road (vetoed on the grounds of my dislike of shit films.) So, giving up on the idea, we set off through the mall to take a tram back to Pest.

Then we saw, of all people, someone who I am 99% sure was controversial Hungarian PM Ferencz Gyurcsany - apologies for using the English name order, I still can't help it - stepping out with his wife and who I presume was his daughter. They were followed by two heavies, so whether it was FG or not (and my new students say that there was no reason that it shouldn't have been) it was certainly someone reasonably important and stately looking. What was odd was that I didn't observe anybody making a big deal of his being there.

I hope for his sake he went to see The Dark Knight rather than Revolutionary Road. RR sounds like it has a serious dose of authenticity-itis: 'if it's miserable, it must be good etc etc.' Every cinema in Budapest is showing it about sixteen times a day...

Self and Sinclair! Head to Head!

2009-02-10T14:57:00.004Z

My friend Chris, or Attic Fantasist as he's known for blogging purposes, has beaten me to this, but the two most visible literary representatives of psychogeography in the UK both feature prominently in last weekend's newspapers. Firstly, Will Self describes his 'growing affinity' with fellow tramper - although, as AF points out, he would probably have resisted the 'psychogeography' tag - W. G. Sebald in a frankly curious Guardian article. Secondly, Rachel Cooke does a much more sensible piece on Iain Sinclair, in which she walks around Hackney with him in anticipation of his new book That Rose-Red Empire. Sinclair has, in the past, been slightly disparaging about Self's somewhat posturing take on psychogeography, which - as I understand it - runs the risk of making its theory and practice overly co-optable (Self might retort that Sinclair is one to talk, of course). Here's a chance, then, to compare and contrast their ideas as they are represented in the mainstream media...

Lots of Sebald features about recently, isn't there?

English Lessons in Petfood Wonkaland

2009-02-10T12:22:00.002Z

Yes, a title like that should grab 'em.

Sorry to any regular readers for the low postage this last week. I've been working, and canvassing for work, a fair bit. I've finally got some lessons organised and have now even got a couple under my belt. Man. I'm teaching English as a language subject. How weird.

Anyway, yesterday I went to a town called Budaörs to meet with a company who need some language tutoring done a few times a week. As the title of this post implies, it's a petfood company, although the Budaörs site is (thankfully) not the factory. Anyway, I had to sit alone in the boardroom waiting for the HR manager to come and see what I was all about. It was like being in a Graham Greene, or perhaps Evelyn Waugh, novel: sitting alone in this swanky corporate facility, in an unfamiliar town, surrounded by a wide variety of sample petfood products, feeling absolutely knackered thanks to a lesson taught at 7.30 that morning. The place was a little bit like Wonka HQ if it appealed to dogs rather than children. If this wasn't surreal enough, the view out of the window was of the rather striking landscape of the Buda Hills, which look ever so slightly like Pennine crags.

Anyway, I got the work. I think I've established three contracts through the school, and I have a couple of potential private students. I finally feel like I live here.

I've also been designing my new blog, which will host all the outpourings of my currently frustrated inner football correspondent. The link will come soon. It looks nicer than this blog, possibly.

A vain and self-serving request...

2009-02-07T20:05:00.003Z

Would it be possible for anyone who bought the Grauniad today (Saturday) to have a look in the Review section and see if my contribution to the 1000 novels list was printed?

If so, could you save it for me? There's a pint/ glass of wine/ bag of paprika/ amusing postcard in it for you.

Pestering people...

2009-02-03T15:48:00.001Z

...is not my default position, but I'm being forced to do it at the moment.

If anyone needs any (paid) writing done - unlikely, I admit, given that most people who I know read this blog are themselves writers - please feel free to get in touch.

'Is that smoke I can smell? Quick, pass my fiddle.'

2009-02-01T11:04:00.002Z

'Self-facilitating media node' Rio Ferdinand interviews embattled PM Gordon Brown about life, leadership, and Raith Rovers for the Observer Sport Monthly.

Read me...

2009-01-31T17:43:00.003Z

My articles on Henry Green's Back and Patrick Hamilton's Slaves of Solitude are now up on Albion magazine's website, alongside an interview with Billy Bragg.

Read them, Jenny's articles on Raymond Williams and Francophilia, and the rest of the magazine here.

Quack, croak, glug, and whatever noise a water boatman makes

2009-01-30T19:03:00.002Z

This is good news, I think:

Number of ponds in Britain to be doubled to pre-Industrial levels.

Well, I wanted to blog one more news story today, and it was either this or Jonathon Jones proclaiming the death of the YBAs. See how grown up I am - I haven't even linked to that article. Anyway, ponds are great. There should be more of them.

2009-01-30T17:48:00.003Z

The idea first came because I didn't have the courage to paint a real figure, so I thought, I have to make it clear, so I thought, I'll have to make it clear, so I'll write 'Gandhi' on this picture above Gandhi. I can remember people coming round and saying That's ridiculous, writing on pictures, you know, it's mad what you're doing. And I thought, well, it's better; I feel better; you feel as if something's coming out.

David Hockney

2008 Film Reviews #6: The Edge of Love

2009-01-30T11:18:00.002Z

The Edge of Love (John Maybury, 2008)

I must be clear here and state that 5/10 for The Edge of Love means something entirely different to 5/10 for The Thin Red Line. This is an Ebertism: as the 'most powerful pundit in America' says:

When you ask a friend if Hellboy is any good, you're not asking if it's any good compared to Mystic River, you're asking if it's any good compared to The Punisher. And my answer would be, on a scale of one to four, if Superman is four, then Hellboy is three and The Punisher is two. In the same way, if American Beauty gets four stars, then (The United States of) Leland clocks in at about two.

A good system, I'm sure you'll agree. So, to put it in ever-so-slightly different terms, where Malick's film has many of the accoutrements of excellence, which it proceeded to waste, Maybury's slice of WWII lit-rom promised to be an exercise in Grade A uselessness. Before going to see it, I thought that there was absolutely no way that it could bear up to the expectations of someone writing a PhD thesis on its subject matter, namely the literature of the Blitz, let alone someone whose take on contemporary interpretations of that period is that they are generally opportunistic at best. Well, I was almost wrong. Matthew Rhys is more than acceptable as Dylan Thomas, and the frequently derided Sienna Miller was hugely convincing as Thomas's impulsive wife Caitlin. Even Keira Knightley, possible playing herself, survived the ordeal intact (as did the generally reliable Cillian Murphy). Maybury did well to limit his scope to the internecine relationships between the four main characters, thus limiting the likelihood of any serious historical vandalism, and most importantly resists the easy option of pulling punches when it becomes necessary to depict non-domestic events. Indeed, on three occasions - Thomas being beaten senseless by a soldier in the blackout, a direct hit on a busy nightclub (based on the Cafe de Paris incident in 1941), and Murphy's commando leader performing an emergency amputation on a Greek partisan - the film achieved a viscerality that poked through the sheen of its nostlagic stylisation. There's the correct level of 'unreality' here, as well: it seems that Henry Green and Elizabeth Bowen were more valuable reference points that Sarah Waters and Goodnight Sweetheart. Not bad, then, but there's still something a little cloying about it all, and the literary angle could have been played in a slightly less clichéd way: there was perhaps room for a further exploration of the contrast between Thomas the self-professed poète maudit and Thomas the BBC employee. This is touched on, but eventually seems to become little more than a partial character assassination.

'We really do need to get people to dinner'

2009-01-30T11:03:00.002Z

Priorities clearly straight in Davos, then.

Perhaps the WEF could have waited a few minutes more for their hors d'oeuvres in the context. Turkey calling Israel to account for itself might not be a geopolitical anomaly on the scale of, say, Britain doing the same to the United States, but it's still registers as surprising on the diplomatic barometer.

Me? Talismanic?

2009-01-29T21:03:00.003Z

So I leave Norwich and Tesco finally get permission to build their store on the site of the old garage on Unthank Road. I lose count of the number of times I signed petitions against it. It occurred to me after a while that the two inordinately expensive Budgens/ Alldays/ Co-Op (delete as applicaple to your own Norwich-span) stores were actually rather enjoying their captive market of all the students who couldn't be arsed/ didn't understand how to use Mr. Banhams the butcher or (apparently Richard Hoggart-approved) fruit & veg shop. So, boo to Tescos, but equally boo to the Unthank Road branch of Co-Op.

John Updike, 1932-2009

2009-01-29T06:37:00.003Z

RIP. I never read many of his novels - although I do have a garish hardbound copy of Couples - but he was familiar to me as one of the most insistent proponents of Henry Green's work as Green fell into relative neglect over the latter half of the twentieth century. His introduction to the Loving - Living - Party Going anthology has been an important way into Green for many first-time readers: odd, of course, that the quintessential postwar American novelist should be so astute a reader of such an unalterably English writer. Fitting though, somehow.

Reading: postwar British modernism

2009-01-28T11:22:00.003Z

Just as an aside, I'm reading Bryan Appleyard's The Pleasures of Peace, which is about British art and culture from 1945 - 1989, and deals specifically with the way in which modernism disseminated in art, architecture and literature in the postwar era. It's much more open to notions of a British avant-garde than comparable studies, even if it (rightly, I think) ascertains that this avant-garde worked more by misprision of Franco-American ideas than by grasping the proverbial bull by the horns. Annoyingly, he doesn't cover music (by which I mean modern composition/ improv/ 'academic' music rather than the Beatles and punk) due to what he modestly admits to be his own vagueness about the field, but otherwise TPP is full of useful post-thesis ideas. Lots on English Surrealism, postwar architecture, the British Poetry Revival, Ballard, Bacon, Henry Moore etc. And he's pretty down on Larkin and the Movement, even if this critique is implicit and based on reading them as quasi-modernist in spite of themselves.

2008 Film Reviews #5: The Thin Red Line

2009-01-28T11:08:00.003Z

The Thin Red Line (Terence Malick, 1998)

I'd been meaning to watch this for years, and finally purchased the DVD so I could have the privilege of doing so. War film; ensemble cast; highly-respected auteur at the helm. What could possibly go wrong? Well, I'll tell you what could. Having three principle characters bearing fairly significant resemblances to one another could be deemed a mistake. Getting Sean Penn to phone in his performance wasn't a great move. Implying that you're going to attempt an extensive study of the ethics of conflict - the kind of study that informs the film's source text - and then devoting around three quarters of an hour to the tactical mechanics of overwhelming a machine gun emplacement is a little contradictory.

All the discrete elements of The Thin Red Line - war movies, big themes, Penn, George Clooney, Arvo Part on the soundtrack - end up coagulating here. I'm sure that something about this must elevate it above the morass of blood-and-thunder war films, but perhaps that's only a (false) implication that Malick manages to sustain by his repeated use of Part's Annum per Annum and Hans Zimmer's portentous refrain: so many signifiers of meaningfulness are present, minus the content.

2008 Film Reviews # 4: Quantum of Solace

2009-01-27T11:26:00.004Z

Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster, 2008)

The title itself solicits derogatory substitutions of the abstract noun 'solace', the best-scanning of which (Quantum of Rubbish, IMO) is, sadly, semantically useless for describing the ineptitude and insensitivity that courses through Daniel Craig's second turn as James Bond. Okay: this is my gripe. There has been a tendency amongst certain film and TV critics over the last few years to automatically celebrate any piece of work which exacts a switch towards a supposed gravity. In some cases (Christopher Nolan's Batman films) this praise is justified, whilst in others (namely QoS and Casino Royale) it isn't. Reboots are invariably risky affairs, but New Bond preserves little to no awareness of the historical and sociological contexts that resulted in the relative light heartedness of all the pre-Craig films, even the pleasingly edgy Timothy Dalton outings Licence to Kill and The Living Daylights. While the old format looked tired while Piers Brosnan was scrapping with the ridiculous Colonel Moon in Die Another Day, the fact remains that Bond was, by that point, painted into a corner that the imitiation of fresher approaches (specifically the Bourne films) would only render more inescapable.

There is now no defining trait or content that can be said to belong wholly to the franchise, with the important exception of QoS's unabashed openness to product placement. As one might expect, this sits awkwardly with the allegedly uncompromising new direction. As Bond drinks himself silly on an overnight transatlantic flight, attempting to purge the guilt that has been brought about by the death of Vesper Lynd, no opportunity is spared to inform the audience that he's on a Virgin plane, or that he's drinking Gordons gin. As in the preceding films, particularly the latter two Brosnan efforts, the placements are given an ironic slant, but - in this context - the attempt at self-reflexive humour shatters the dramatic unity of what is supposed to be a pivotal and poignant scene. Similarly, the death of Gemma Arterton's sprightly foreign office agent, framed as if to add an extra layer of uncompromising brittleness to Old Bond's unwritten rule that the butter-wouldn't-melt Moneypenny types always get out okay, fails to rectify the tacky sexual politics by which virago figures like Grace Jones and Sophie Marceau are dispensed with in earlier films at the same time as leaving a straightforwardly bad taste in the mouth of the viewer. This is New Bond falling victim to a narcissism generated by all those fawning reviews: the characters are not expressive of, but simply expedient to the maintenance of, a narrative hard-mindedness. It doesn't work.

All this, and we still haven't got to the villain. Mathieu Amalric did the rounds in the press before QoS's release, puffing Dominic Greene as a Bond villain for the twenty-first century, a political chameleon whose talent for spin obviates any need to rely on muscle. (Greene, by the way, is an enviro-criminal, planning to hold South American water supplies to ransom. The worthiness of Bond's operations against him is negated somewhat by the extratextual fact that QoS was filmed in six different countries, which suggests to me a carbon footprint well in excess of anything that could be managed by, for example, hollowing out the innards of a Japanese mountain to build a glitzy, Ken Adam-styled rocket launchpad.) Anyway, the promo-pack image of Greene as a Blairite (or Sarkozyist) villain lasts roughly as long as the amount of time it has taken me to type this sentence. Amalric's character makes Robert Carlyle's putatively psychopathic Renard in The World is Not Enough seem like a Sunday school teacher. Goldfinger, Scaramanga, and Max Zorin would all have baulked at this chap's willingness to dispose with henchmen, and all would have been wary of challenging him to a square-go. On top of this incongruity between press self-image and filmic reality, there's the irritating importing of CR's world domination narrative into QoS. Greene is supposed to be patched, at a fairly high level, into the conspiracy by which Bond was foxed in Venice in the preceding film, but I have to confess I had more than a little trouble discerning how this might be the case, other than in the fact of Amalric bearing a passing facial similarity to preceding chief baddie Mads Mikkelsen.

In summary, the 'darkening' of the Bond franchise, allegedly a much-needed injection of political and psychological realism for the post-9/11 consciousness, seems to me much more a marketing reboot based on demographic analysis than a genuine attempt to add diplomatic and emotional thickness to the series. The worst thing is that Craig, by far the most thespy actor to inhabit the role, seems to genuinely believe in the stated motive of the whole enterprise. Hopefully, the third film of the reboot sequence will see the critics take this ersatz worthiness to pieces.

2008 Film Reviews # 3: High Anxiety

2009-01-27T11:18:00.003Z

High Anxiety (Mel Brooks, 1977)

I appreciate that this film is, objectively, worth more than a four. What's difficult to express is just how much I was looking forward to seeing this: it was billed to me as a parody of Hitchcock and Freud, which sounded like a shoo-in as one of the greatest comic ideas of the twentieth century. Why it doesn't work (for me) I can't quite put my finger on, except by stating that Brooks's pandemonium-filled approach seems gauche compared to Hitchcock's subtle teasing out of the humour that inheres (especially according to Freud) in the impasses of human sexuality described by psychoanalysis. This psychodramatic comedy is already in North by Northwest, The Man who Knew too Much, and even Psycho, each of which incorporates a greater degree of comic content than Brooks seems willing to acknowledge. If a parody of Hitchcock doesn't account for the extent to which all Hitchcock films defend themselves in advance with huge measures of self- referentiality and parody, then it is more or less doomed from the off. Four out of ten.

2008 Film Reviews #2: X-Files - I Want to Believe

2009-01-27T11:09:00.002Z

X-Files - I Want to Believe (Chris Carter, 2008)

Apparently the team behind this film have argued that its lack of critical success was down to people finding it too 'dark'. I'd contend that it was probably more to do with the fact that it was complete bollocks; a messy, unsculpted, tensionless romp through the tropological entrails of the TV series (read: photogenic snowscapes, backwoods laboratories, David Duchovny's once-fresh gallows humour). This is all elevated to a new plateau of unintentional hilariousness by Billy Connolly's camp turn as a soothsaying pederast. I Want to Believe's denouement was the recuperation of Mitch Pileggi's Assistant Director Walter Skinner, a moderately interesting character at some point in the mid-to-late 1990s, from his descent into an extremely vague region of bad guy-dom that took place around the turn of the Millenium. As if this wasn't 'made for TV' enough already, there's an annoying subplot about Scully, who reminds me of one of E.T.A. Hoffmann's Enlightenment wenches, going through the theological wrangle. As I say, nice photography, but the Canadian landscape lends itself to that kind of thing anyway. Two out of ten.

2008 Film Reviews # 1: Shoot 'Em Up

2009-01-27T11:01:00.004Z

Okay, this is an irregular feature - I started writing these before Christmas, but I've picked them up again now because I needed to get some stuff off my chest about the movies I saw last year. The list goes worst-to-best in order, so you'll get all the grim stuff first. Note that this is about films I saw for the first time last year, which doesn't necessarily mean that they're 2008 releases.

Shoot 'Em Up (Michael Davis, 2007)

A film that came out late one film night when we too befuddled to decide what to watch. A film in which the allegedly 'comic' premise begins with a young woman being shot dead in cold blood immediately after giving birth. A film that stakes rather too much on the willingness of people to find Clive Owen munching carrots hilarious. A film that not so much exhausts all of Paul Giamatti's post-Sideways goodwill as makes him more or less unemployable. Seriously horrible. One out of ten.

Frost/ Nixon

2009-01-25T01:52:00.003Z

We've just been to the beautiful Muvesz Mozi cinema up by Nyugati Station to see the Hungarian advance screening of Frost/ Nixon. I have to admit that I was feeling rather cynical about the film, and was actually arguing the case for us giving new Pacino/ De Niro vehicle Righteous Kill a go (I was shouted down because Jenny couldn't face watching a movie with 50 Cent in it.) It struck me that we were going to get a poor imitation of the decade's big media procedural, George Clooney's Goodnight and Good Luck: what we actually saw was considerably more chipper, due largely to the fact that Michael Sheen has given an Austin Powers-esque, erm, sheen to Frost, who always seems to be on the cusp of proclaiming the shagadelic charms of his girlfriend. Frank Langella, coincidentally (perhaps - insert Twilight Zone music here) a major character in Gn & GL, steals the show as the eponymous ex-president, and there's admirable support from Sam Rockwell as Frost's highly-politicised researcher and Matthew MacFadyen as (believe it!) John Birt.

I wasn't enormously sure about the ending, which seems to offer Nixon some sort of recuperation, and Ron Howard does his best - particularly in the first 45 minutes - to muck up a good script with some shockingly unwarranted camera trickery. Clooney was far more restrained with the cinematography in his own period piece, using rapid cutting only to provide intensity to the newsroom situation. Howard employs the device willy nilly - in one scene of fairly relaxed dialogue between Frost and Birt, which lasted no longer than a minute and a half, there must have been over ten different shots. It was like watching the overedited goal highlights on Match of the Day.

Otherwise, though, this really worked. It was suspenseful, which is a real achievement in this case because the film had to do so much work to explain to its audience why both Frost and Nixon had cause to get het up about. On top of that, it did a good job of illustrating the mechanics of television (and, by inferral, movie) production and financing. One came away with the sense of why and how Frost, or Paxman, are television interviewers and you and I are not, and this communication of the nature of a particular kind of professionalism is the mark of some neatly economic storytelling. I think Gn & GL was a better film, but this hit the spot for a Saturday evening.

Brighouse, Bootle, Featherstone, Speke...

2009-01-25T01:39:00.002Z

Interesting, vaguely psychogeographic, article on the effects of the CC on the towns and cities of the M62 corridor here. I'm particularly taken with the rumour about Glasshoughton (spelled incorrectly in the article) Xscape. Indoor ski complexes somehow seem to gloss all of the industrial, economic, and technological upheavals of Britain in the Callaghan - Brown period, which I'm going to (probably annoyingly) call the 'long eighties' here. The visual, and some might say social, focal point of late-period-Ballard imaginative construct Milton Keynes is an Xscape which is visible from as far away as the M1 interchange: it's a frightening place (for a dyed-in-the-wool northerner) and an odd template for - and one has to use the word tentatively in the case of Rugby League Land's former industrial centres - the 'regeneration' of Britain beyond the Trent. Anyway, congratulations to the Observer for an engaging and refreshingly un-patronising article about the north.

Is this true?

2009-01-24T14:08:00.001Z

Study suggests Britons more bored and tired than the inhabitants of any other European nation.

Youll like this...not a lot, but you'll like it

2009-01-23T15:19:00.005Z

Of course, everyone else in the world will have used the same title for posts on this subject. Lazy me.

South Bank's finest conservatively-minded celebrity magician has a blog. Sample excerpt:

Whilst on the plane to Barbados I saw the headlines about Prince Harry and an explosion of reaction to him calling a co-soldier a ‘Paki’. When I saw it had happened two years ago I had to ponder upon who caused the ‘explosion of reaction’. I don’t think it was Prince Harry if it was two years ago (because I didn’t hear the explosion then) but rather the media NOW who had just found out and decided to try to throw the shit as far and wide as they could. I wonder why? Who cares? After all isn’t it an abbreviation of Pakistani? I know that I couldn’t care less if someone calls me a ‘Brit’ and would think myself to be a pretty pompous ass if I did. The soldier concerned seemed to have treat it in the right way, recognised it for what it is, a nickname, and got on with living. How desperate can newspapers get? Oops sorry. Did I say NEWS papers? ; Isn’t this story to old to be considered as ‘news?

Woah, Paul. Outrageous. Someone's got to stand up for the decent majority in this country and stick it to the PC brigade blah blah blah blah. I'd suggest Paul and his ilk go and live on Charlie Brooker's imaginary 'Daily Mail Island', only the Mail seem to have got his goat by publishing unflattering pictures of Debbie McGee.

(Seriously, though: what makes some people think that 'Paki' and 'Brit' could possibly occupy equal ranking in the league table of offensive words?)

Also, I hope you have noticed that Daniels, although definitely not a 'pompous ass', ends many of his simple statements with either one or two question marks??

I hope he doesn't do any crazy magic on me now.

Berks in the Fens

2009-01-23T14:52:00.003Z

Good old Will Self in his introduction to Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker:

This book breaks the alleged rules of literary composition. Of course, there aren't really any rules, or if there are, they're there for deadheads who want to be taught naturalism by some berk in the Fens.

I wonder if Will was forced to rescind that remark when he gave a keynote paper during last summer's conference devoted to the distinctly unberklike W.G. Sebald, held (unsurprisingly) at UEA?

Anyway, he goes on to qualify this unnecessarily warlike opening remark a couple of pages later by saying something that I think is pretty urgent:

The cod-naturalism that infects so many texts is not an arbitrary convention, it's the very essence of what modern identity is. The idea that what I say to you will be immediately and lucidly comprehended is one of the most prosaic delusions of this most neurotic age. Everyone wants to be understood as as if the world were in a position to provide unconditional love. This is balls.

Self in a nutshell, then: one cantankerous provocative gesture eclipsing a beautifully-thought point. Clearly, though, if it was all the latter no-one would ever have heard of him, and he'd be writing literary criticism read only by enthusiasts and postgraduates. What a Wildean place to be.

War (yes, I know, 'what is good for/ absolutely nothing', and so on.)

2009-01-23T14:29:00.002Z

I've left out 'fantasy' because I have an idea about that which involves getting someone better qualified than me to do it, and skipped straight on to war and travel.

First thought: another glaring snub for Henry Green (Caught and Back, this time.)

Second thought: but Richard Aldington makes it!?

And the rest: Heart of Darkness surely belongs in the 'family/ self' category, although I appreciate this is 'war and travel'. Glad to see a bit of Asterix to balance the Tintin. The list is very of its time, and pays what might be lip service to recent publishing phenomenons like The Kite Runner. Surely John Buchan is 'war and travel' rather than 'crime'. A.L. Kennedy's Day is good for what it is, but not the 'masterpiece' the Costa judges believe it to me (more timeliness). Evelyn Waugh's Put Out More Flags is a fantastic call, but the web editor is going to get fired over this summary -

Basil Seal, posh and feckless, has been a leader writer on the Daily Beast, a champagne salesman, a tour guide, a secret policeman in Bolivia, and an adviser on modernisation to the emperor of Azania – all way relationship between a young southern writer, a Polish Auschwitz survivor and a Jewish New Yorker interweaves a host of complex themes (survivor guilt, ancestral guilt, madness and betrayal). The movie was Oscar-nominated; the book was banned in libraries across the States. But this is not just about provocative comparisons. Styron is a writer's writer, capable of setting a pastoral idyll in Brooklyn, and the traumas narrated occur alongside a classic American coming-of-age story -

which resembles the book I've read up until the toponym Azania, at which point the parse becomes farce as we're offered a description of (of all books) William Styron's Sophie's Choice. If they've fixed that error in a few hours time, remember that you can still see this triumphantly tasteless Colemanball here, for ever, for free. Moving on, it's good to see children's literature represented - I always thought The Machine Gunners was beautifully creepy - and Sebald's finally appeared, with his own subsection.

Not bad, though, Guardian, not bad. I'm enjoying this feature.

1000 Novels - State of the Nation

2009-01-23T00:02:00.003Z

I like Ian Jack's columns usually, but he's ever so slightly wide of the mark with the following generalisation about the Kitchen Sink writers:

Northern England was not on its way to producing Nabokovs and Roths. These writers approach their subjects without any originality of form or language. To them, as to the reader, what mattered was the thing described rather than the means of description.

Fair enough as applied to Barstow and Braine, and perhaps to Sillitoe, but I think David Storey deserves a little more credit than that. This Sporting Life is a very strange work, and marks Storey out more as a descendant of the Brontes (and, to be a little more contentious, a contemporary of Camus) than as a chippy Stuckist.

Elsewhere, Ruth Scurr gets it right regarding Zola, whilst glossing over the sheer, Coriolanus-like, oddness of both novels. Mark Lawson puts GB84 in some illustrious company, seemingly, however, using it as a mere counterpoint to Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. At least he doesn't do as he threatens and include The Northern Clemency.

Answers on a postcard for Rowan Williams's non-selection of The Brothers Karamazov?

In the lists, there's one Elizabeth Bowen (where the 'nation' is Ireland, but I think The Heat of the Day might be an English SOD novel), lurds of Dickens, a misplaced (to my mind) Sentimental Education, a blast from the undergraduate past with Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest, far too many modern American novels, nae James Kelman, a shoehorned Of Love and Hunger, The Magic Mountain, pleasing recognition for The Radetzky March, a wonderful Roth (P.) with American Pastoral, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (adapted for radio last year featuring Johnny Vegas, who seemed to be playing himself), Rebecca West's haunting but slightly patronising The Return of the Soldier, Trainspotting (which only accentuates the lack of Kelman), and usual suspects such as Stendhal, Wharton, Wolfe, and Thackeray.

Only question: how does one define 'state of the nation'? How far is this state allowed to be communicated allegorically? If Of Love and Hunger is a novel which does the state of Britain in the Thirties by metonym, surely Henry Green's Party Going does the same but better?

Family and Self

2009-01-20T18:19:00.002Z

And here's the 'family and self' section, which (quite bravely, I think) squishes those 1940s Elizabeth Taylor/ Molly Keane type novels about domestic catatonia with the modernist and existentialist big guns (or those that hadn't already cropped up under 'comic'.) I think a few might contest the absence of works by Pessoa, Blanchot and Paul Auster. I would have liked to see a few more by Elizabeth Taylor, perhaps, and I'm extremely surprised not to find Elizabeth Bowen here, although they may be saving her for some uncanny/ Gothic category to come. In terms of my recent reading, Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March would have a strong case as a novel of family and tradition, and W.G. Sebald could go under either of the headings here for Vertigo and The Emigrants respectively.

Comic Novels

2009-01-20T18:03:00.003Z

So the Guardian '1000 Novels' list is onto 'family' now, having covered comic fiction yesterday. Having embarassed myself on crime, I'll add my nominations in much better faith this time (as in, I'm not accusing them of making shocking omissions on this occasion!)

Alain Robbe-Grillet: Jealousy, The Erasers.
Iris Murdoch: The Black Prince.
Gustave Flaubert: Sentimental Education.
Patrick Hamilton: Slaves of Solitude, Mr Stimson and Mr Gorse (which could also have been a crime nomination.)
Henry Green: Nothing, Doting, Back.
Evelyn Waugh: All of Sword of Honour.
Gertrude Stein: Tender Buttons et al.

Is it facetious to say that I also find Death in Venice really funny? Also, I think J.G. Ballard's later novels court laughter in a vaguely self-parodying way.

Incidentally, I was very pleased to see Kafka get a mention under 'serious comedies', contra the angst-ridden claim that 'one may never laugh at Kafka' I once heard, and argued with, in a research seminar.

Correction

2009-01-19T00:10:00.004Z

Or 'A Criminal Error', depending on your fondness for punningness. I suspect myself of having been a moron. The crime fiction special didn't omit Conan Doyle, Christie, and Ellroy - it actually gave them their own sections (as it did the late Michael Dibdin, whose Aurelio Zen series I forgot to mention) that I didn't notice this lunchtime. Credit where credit's due, and all that, and I feel particularly doltish as regards Nicholas Blincoe placing And Then There Were None right at the top of his A.C. list. My non-omission related quibbles stand, however.

Sorry...

Crime Fiction

2009-01-18T13:49:00.003Z

One more thing from today's Guardian Online - there '1000 Novels You Must Read' series is in crime fiction mode today. A few observations:

1 - It's certainly nice to read a list where you're familiar with a significant proportion of the entries.

2 - I know Conan Doyle mostly did short stories, but The Hound of the Baskervilles is a shocking omission. It's pretty disingenuous to knock Holmes out of the crime lit canon on a technicality.

3 - As is And then there were None. I'm surprised no-one makes a case for Christie.

4 - Glad to see John Sutherland pick Eric Ambler, although the list does demur the boundary between 'crime' and 'thriller'. However, Cause for Alarm is clearly Ambler's best novel (read it, it's the first vaguely grown-up piece of espionage fiction.)

5 - The Rankin selections seem a little arbitrary.

6 - Ditto Chandler, who gets two entries, but no Farewell My Lovely, arguably the most representative Marlowe novel.

7 - A bit unbelievable, this one. No James Ellroy. I know his novels are gruesome and, arguably, repetitive, but they've restyled the grammar of noir in a way that we're only just beginning to see the effects of.

8 - And, talking of those effects, I'm not sure that David Peace's 1974 and 1977 deserve to be on here at the expense of 1980 and 1983. Perhaps 1977 and 1980 would have been the correct combination.

9 - If they're trying to get the avant-detective thing right, surely Gertrude Stein's Blood on the Dining Room Floor (which is magnificently unreadable as only Stein can manage) or George Perec's A Void would be better places to begin than The Name of the Rose or The New York Trilogy.

10 - Good call by Carmen Callil for Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, but it seems to me that she's only read the first five pages...

11 - The definition of 'crime' is rather stretched. Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square is only as criminally-minded as, for example, Jean Rhys's Good Morning Midnight or Gerald Kersh's Night and the City. If you're going for angsty novels with an atmosphere of noir-ish gloom, Green's Party Going (with its mysterious 'Hotel Detective') would have to be a candidate. Conversely, Hamilton's Gorse Trilogy is definitely crime fiction.

Right, time for some interview preparation.

And, on a lighter note

2009-01-18T12:37:00.003Z

Hungarian graffiti artists clearly think that the world can always do with just a little bit more Mr Bean. There appears to be some strange trend for 1980s British comedians in Budapest: in a nightclub a few weeks ago, we saw a girl wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with a picture of Hugh Laurie's face.

Post- Post- Thatcherism?

2009-01-18T12:00:00.004Z

If you can forgive him the Euston Manifesto for a moment, there's an interesting and in many ways correct piece by Nick Cohen in today's Observer on class and the credit crunch. Okay, so the bit about identity politics at the end is rather Daily Mail, but I think the symptomatic nature of the article is what is most interesting: once again, we see a (broadly) leftist journalist present the economic crisis as what Homer Simpson once called a 'crisetunity'.

So, in the comments section on Cohen's blog I note that one respondent has talked about an imminent return to 'proper politics'. Having worked as a university tutor for three years, I feel in a position to gauge the distance between where we were eighteen months ago and something resembling 'proper politics': it was huge. Middle-class students in Humanities are, and there is ample historical proof of this, a more than adequate political thermometer. But 'politics', even to my brightest students, is nearly always a question of social vetos and quibbles about 'authenticity' (identity politics writ small and reinscribed into the pseudo-culture of independent music.) Whimsicality tended to happen in place of discontent. Humanities undergraduates often live a life of antifolk records and knitting circles based on the quasi-political scenes in the Pacific Northwest: they tend to steer clear of challenging cultural forms in favour of those that are soothing and faux naive. I've frequently made the case on here that the likes of Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, and the late David Foster Wallace are the representative authors of this mindset, which - understandably, of course - wants humanism so badly that they are prepared to fly in the face of a welter of available evidence. The correlative of this is that this desire for humanism, for 'only connecting', becomes, in its lack of critical rigour, a co-conspirator with those agendas that want to make homey, artisan, 'niceness' into one more income stream. Maybe modernism needs to be taught on the proviso that it is much more difficult to turn Finnegan's Wake into a marketable lifestyle choice than it is to perform a similar trick with the authenticity-driven Mcsweeneys generation.*

I guess the point I'm trying to make here is to ask whether we are yet in a position to try and anticipate positive outcomes of the Crunch. What price a renewed inquisitiveness and social conscience amongst undergraduates, for example? If they make their cultural and political choices, as I suspect they do, on a conviction that the post-9/11 world is simply too threatening to take any notice of if you have the facility to ignore it, what happens when that facility is removed? Is Blairism-Thatcherism finally going to become subject to a popular critique of its theoretical base, rather than limited interventions aimed at its particular manifestations?

* Of course, it's entirely possible that the CC and its attendant politics has very little to do with fictional form and the sociology of reading, but that's just the grain these posts tend to follow...

Most uncanny

2009-01-17T17:48:00.002Z

I accidentally - I won't say how, you'll think I'm weird - saw this blog in Google translation. It was like having a weird French double, an alternative cuisson homme...

The So-Called Thirty-Nine Steps, Pt. II

2009-01-17T13:04:00.002Z

My Mum sent me a press clipping about the Rubbish Thirty-Nine Steps: apparently it's caused all kinds of furore in England. Unfortunately, said furore seems to have mostly occurred on the part of people who read the Daily Mail, which I worry exposes some unconscious right-wing proclivities I might have. The BBC have attempted to justify the manifest inadequacies by arguing that the novel is 'far-fetched' anyway, claiming that the adaptation is 'faithful to the spirit and period of the book' (it isn't, actually) but liberates the writer to 'feel free to re-imagine it for a modern audience'.

All of which begs the question: what is the historical 'grain'? Surely fidelity to the (bad) ideology in the novel would not have seen Penry-Jones's Hannay profit from a learning curve in gender relations - as soon as the protagonist becomes progressive, we stop seeing the rude actualities of the era as Buchan inadvertently exposed them. Surely it's better for a modern audience to have a genuine grasp of the ideological realities of a moment in time so that a genuine sense of historical distance can be created? I'm not sure I agree with the political redemptions or mollifications of characters like Hannay: do we need him to develop in order to become the mouthpiece for a liberalism which we already (and problematically) take for granted? Isn't that just a sop to the vanity of our own moment's self-awarded notion of 'progress'? Does the drama become better when Hannay becomes more likeable?

Rubbish Thirty-Nine Steps now has its own Wikipedia entry.

'It's not the type of people or group you want your pub to be associated with'

2009-01-17T12:56:00.003Z

Trowse publican bans BNP meeting in his pub after they book a function room under a group alias.

This might be a good point to refer you all back to Nick Griffin's confident assertion that the only types in the region who find the BNP offensive are 'a bunch of silly students and elderly University of East Anglia lecturers who do not represent Norfolk people', pace this post.

Andrew Coleman now vies with Chesley Sollenberger for my 'man of the week' award.

Football, Sublime and Ridiculous

2009-01-16T18:17:00.004Z

I just celebrated being offered an interview by watching the paradigmatically graceful goal 'new Zidane' Yoann Gourcuff scored for Bordeaux against Paris St. Germain last weekend whilst simultaneously listening to the hook where it all goes 'Scottish Tourist Board advertisement' in the first song on the new Mogwai album (still up in its entirety on MySpace). Here's the goal:

But football: bloody hell. I'll be chirruping the disapproval of a billion know-nothing Daily Mail columnists here, but this 'Kaka to Manchester City on half a million quid a week' affair is absolutely beyond the already-hugely-budged pale. I won't insult your intelligences by pointing out how much useful stuff that money can purchase.

Elsewhere this week - I read Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March and Malcolm Lowry's Ultramarine, and now I'm re-reading Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. And did some other stuff. Writing, mostly.

Looking for work...

2009-01-11T18:55:00.002Z

So, there's five CVs out there now. I'm one of those people who finds asking for jobs roughly as easy as walking up to a stranger and asking them on a date (ie, practically impossible), so I think I've earnt a bit of cooking time and a can of beer.

Went to the National Gallery again yesterday. Wish they'd give me a season ticket for free or something. I'll post something more interesting about it when I've chased away the 'jobhunt butterflies'.

New Year, Old Myopia

2009-01-08T16:25:00.005Z

Kate Kellaway's article on place in literature. Apparently, setting a novel in Hounslow or Willesden is a radical departure from the Hampstead convention. Except Kellaway tries to defend the Hampstead convention by making out that its critics (J.G. Ballard, a Hounslow-and-Willesden man himself, is one of these) are actually promoting an anti-woman agenda. (!)

Of course, the eye of this article only shifts away from London and its immediate environs about halfway down, when we're given examples of regional fiction which are either so blindingly obvious as to scarcely need mentioning (anyone writing an article on literature for a serious newspaper should know better than to try and present Niall Griffiths as an obscure author) or simply not regional. Phillip Hensher's The Northern Clemency, for example, is the product of a southern-minded, if not precisely southern, author looking to show that he can 'write the north'. The thing about The Northern Clemency, however, is that it packages its content with the London-based reader in mind: as a record of the Miners' Strike, for example, it is very much of the persuasion that the strike requires a framing of quaint, Full Monty-ish, otherness rather than (as in the case of David Peace's GB84) becoming the metanarrative in itself.

Reading M. John Harrison's Climbers, and A.L. Kennedy's well-founded remarks in Kellaway's article, I'm led to think that the real regional novel needs to make as few concessions as possible to a demand for the staged regional picturesque. Climbers uses its locational details in a way that would seem deictic or anatopic to the non-northern reader; that is, all place names ('Stand Edge', 'Holmfirth', 'Ellesmere Port') are unframed and stand-alone. Descriptions of, say, the industry of the Cheshire plain are made with reference to a knowledge that is already familiar with that place: Harrison rebels against the pressure of the industry to situate the non-provincial reader, implicitly arguing that the north-west is only as in need of locational explication as, for example, Regent's Park. One finds the same in many of Mark E. Smith's lyrics (my favourite? 'They talk of Chile/ while driving through Haslingden', from English Scheme.) One might even note that the Lakes Poets tended to treat their settings as givens, rather than write 'I drove up the M6 for four and a half hours/ got stuck in traffic on the toll bit near Birmingham/ listened to Radio 4 on the way/ made knowing remarks about Withnail and I/ then wandered lonely as a cloud.' That's what people like Hensher don't do, and I think that this detail is more important in the scheme of English cultural politics than is commonly admitted.

Anyway, I've covered most of this before. It's actually coalescing into a proper, grown-up article now - has anyone heard of a Journal of Northern Studies I can submit it to?

Happy New Year

2009-01-01T11:08:00.002Z

I hope 2009 delivers, whoever and wherever you are. I'd type more but Hungarian lager/ shampagne has immobilised the part of my brain which makes sentences. Perhaps an excursion into the time-old alibi of music vids on Youtube will make up for this...

Bloody hell, as Alex Ferguson might say....

2008-12-28T21:59:00.002Z

As an addendum to the below, I just watched the BBC and Rupert 'Adam from Spooks' Penry-Jones make a complete hyperexpository (yet wildly unfaithful) hash of John Buchan's The 39 Steps. Speaking as a massive, massive Hitchcock fan, I thought the Robert Donat version was bad enough, but this little travesty was up there with that woeful Dracula the Beeb did a couple of years ago.

2009 - The End of the (Literary) Affair

2008-12-28T00:11:00.002Z

So, I noticed that my good friends at the Guardian Guide gave David Peace, longtime head whippet of contemporary British fiction as far as I'm concerned, the entire 'D' section in their 'things to watch 2009' listings, only they were talking less about the writing itself than forthcoming film and TV adaptations of 'factive' football parable The Damned United and Doomsday-by-white-dogshit crime sequence the Red Riding quartet. In protest, I'm re-reading TDU so I can be especially pernickety and cranky when the big screen version comes, but I think it's RR I'm dreading more. I just know that this will go one of two types of terrible: Scenario 'A' see it hammered into the Prime Suspect slot, with the result that it solicits thousands upon thousands of complaints from the Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells demographic and any aesthetic merit of the programme will go undiscussed due to the resultant controversy. Scenario 'B', which is, now I come to think about it, the more likely, will see the writers doing everything in their power to turn it into Prime Suspect, only set in the 1970s and in Leeds, so it'll be more like Prime Suspect with additional Life on Mars.

The third scenario is that it is absolutely brilliant and everyone responds to it with the same gusto that has hitherto been reserved for The Wire, only I won't be able to see it, with the result that my totally puerile 'I liked it first' gene will kick in. If this is the case, I apologise inadvance...

(post 200)

2008-12-21T19:16:00.000Z

The formula for the good contemporary (British) poem is, perhaps, that which switches on the massively developed circuitry of serious intellectual effort and the quicksilver infantile play circuitry of pleasure simultaneously and at the same time.

- Andrew Duncan