One of the surer signs of advancing age is that you find yourself saying things you remember your parents saying. I’ve long been detached from the pop music scene, but yesterday marked a new level of dissociation. In the never-ending fight against flab, I went to the gym. There is always something blaring out of the speakers, and I usually manage to ignore it. Yesterday, though, it was so loud and insistent, I couldn’t avoid it. Several long tracks were played. They all had near identical throbbing beats, but the lyrics were different. Track one went:
I can’t wait until the weekend
I can’t wait until the weekend
I can’t wait until the weekend
I can’t wait until the weekend
I can’t wait until the weekend
I can’t wait until the weekend
I can’t wait until the weekend
I can’t wait until the weekend
I can’t wait until the weekend
I can’t wait until the weekend
I can’t wait until the weekend
(Repeat ad infinitum)
The second track was a subtle variation on this masterpiece:
I can’t wait until Saturday comes
I can’t wait until Saturday comes
I can’t wait until Saturday comes
I can’t wait until Saturday comes
I can’t wait until Saturday comes
I can’t wait until Saturday comes
etc etc
The third track explored a whole new area of the artist’s emotional palette:
Put your hands in the air
Put your hands in the air
Put your hands in the air
Put your hands in the air
Put your hands in the air
Put your hands in the air
(and so on until I had virtually given up the will to live)
Now, I’m not going to claim that in my day we had proper music, made our own entertainment, could have a night out at the pictures and a bag of chips and still have change out of sixpence for the tram fare…but we did actually require our heroes to write lyrics (often fey and pretentious it’s true) and we did require them to master the rudiments of their instruments. Now we seem to have (almost) lyric-free, and certainly instrument-free “songs” that are almost identical to each other. I just don’t get it. But then, I’m an old git.
memo to self:
1. Buy iPod
2. Load with Vivaldi
3. Go to gym.
Guardian Unlimited Books | News | Author John Fowles dies aged 79 I was sad to read of the death of Fowles. The French Lieutenant’s Woman will go down as one of the most engaging postwar British novels, notable especially for a postmodern twist: alternative endings, presented by an intrusive narrator. That novel is a useful read for anyone studying Victorian history or literature, as Fowles did some extensive research, documented in un-novelish footnotes.
The Collector is a kind of Hitchcockian thriller, very well plotted, and genuinely creepy.
He would have a considerable reputation on these two novels alone, but he produced a good deal of other fiction and critical writing. One of the last grand old men of English letters.
Literature-Map – The tourist map of literatureThis is an interesting concept. Key in a writer’s name and watch the map develop. An interesting way of finding new authors similar to ones you already like, methinks.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft scans British Library
Reading stufff like this makes you wonder how long the printed book has got left. But the book has a great resilience, and I can’t imagine a time when it would be more pleasant to sit under a tree on a summer’s day with a hand held electronic device rather than a physical volume with pages.
Initiatives such as this will be important for research, but won’t, in my estimation, signal the end for the traditional book.
BBC NEWS | Politics | Blunkett resigns from the Cabinet
Blimey! Cabinet minister does honourable thing shock horror…
BBC NEWS | England | Lancashire | Jail for eBay phishing fraudster A long time ago, in another lifetime, I taught this man. The last thing I recall him saying to me was that he was going to be famous one day. Well, he made it.
Weekly book reviews and literary criticism from the Times Literary Supplement
The last time I mentioned Theodore Dalrymple in this blog, I received an angry comment from a reader in which Dalrymple was labelled a fascist. I replied, mildly, that although I could see that Dalrymple was certainly conservative (and maybe Conservative) that didn’t mean he was to be equated with Hitler and Mussolini. The writer apologised for the intemperate language, and withdrew the comment. I suspect that what was behind his words was the uneasy feeling that Dalrymple often speaks some harsh home truths, many of which are uncomfortable to paid up wishy washy liberals such as me. I think the strength of Dalrymple’s commentary resides in his experience. I can’t think of any commentator, of the right or the left, who has such a fund of first hand experience of the British underclass as Dalrymple, and it is that which lends his comments authority.
This collection of his writing ranges across all of his consistent themes. In particular, the relentless vulgarisation of British (or more particularly English) culture is a recurrent motif. Much of what TD says rings true, though, like the reviewer here, I wonder why he doesn’t lay the blame more squarely at the feet of American globalisation. It’s easy to observe the complete lack of deference, of manners, of respect today. And I think popular culture plays its part. Where I work, the campus shop has a big display of its best selling magazines. They are, without exception, crudely sexist men’s magazines which, paradoxically one might think, show a distinct misogynist streak, as this article amply demonstrates. Here’s a sample of what the young male students find so irresistible about these magazines:
Zoo is currently searching for Britain’s dumbest girlfriend. Tony Miller from Manchester proposes his lady love, Fi: “I’m going to get her a stale turd for Christmas,” he says, “because it goes with her shit brain.” Zoo had more than 200 entries to its competition to “win a boob job for your girlfriend”, a prize to “transform her into a happier, more generous, intelligent, spiritual, interesting … version of the slightly second-rate person she is today”. Pictures of Jordan before and after her own journey from B to DD are featured, along with a selection of breasts to solve the reader’s dilemma: “Which type of tits do you want for YOUR girlfriend?”
These, and semi-pornographic “newspapers” such as the Sun and the Star regularly outsell serious newspapers (all of which, thanks to the student discount, are cheaper). And this is in an educational establishment.
The editors (and the readers) take the view that it’s all ” a bit of fun” and that anyone who objects is a fussy prude. But I think that misses the point – the relentless objectification of women, to the point where they are reduced to the sum of their sexual parts, can’t not contribute to a climate where proper respectful relations between the sexes are debased, leading to the kind of situation described in Dalrymple’s book, where “No grace, no reticence, no measure, no dignity, no secrecy, no depth, no limitation of desire is accepted”.
The government’s introduction of all-day licensing, cynically presented as a way of making our binge-drinking youth suddenly sophisticated Europeans sipping a dry Chablis whilst discussing Proust, is in fact a green light for the drinks industry to promote even further the kind of reckless excess that we see more and more frequently on our streets, as this article demonstrates.
Meanwhile, the government appoint a “Respect Tsarina” whose main claim to fame is her drunken speech to chief constables in which she suggested “you can’t binge drink anymore because lots of people have said you can’t do it. I don’t know who bloody made that up, it’s nonsense.” She suggested that some ministers might perform better if they “turn up in the morning pissed” as “Doing things sober is no way to get things done.”
It goes without saying that in Topsyturvydom, she retains the full confidence of the Prime Minister.
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Arts | Famous portrait ‘not Shakespeare’
This is hardly a shock. Actually, if you google for the Grafton portrait, the first hit is the Norton site claiming it’s Marlowe. This is another example of the way that Shakespeare gets romanticised. We seem to want to possess him, and an authentic portrait (and a diary, letters, laundry lists etc) would help. But it isn’t going to happen. Why anyone would think this had to be Shakespeare is beyond me. The attribution is based on the flimsiest evidence – the sitter is the same age Shakespeare would have been, and…er, that’s it.
Having said that, the reasons advanced as to why it can’t be WS are just as pathetic. The expert says “it is very unlikely that in 1588, Shakespeare would have been able to afford a costume of this type.” OK, I’m sure that’s true – but wouldn’t people have dressed up for a portrait? Or couldn’t the painter have imagined some clothes? And if WS was so poor, how come anyone thought he’d be able to afford his portrait in the first place?
I wish we could accept that we will never know that much about Shakespeare. We seem to be able to accept this lack of knowledge with other great literary figures (Homer, Chaucer for instance) so why not WS?
…because it’s changing the world aparently, according to this article on the new Flock browser. I just liked the picture.
I’ve reluctantly turned this on, as I keep getting comment spam from brainless morons in Coleslaw Arizona…
