‘The kind of face you want to punch’
February 8, 2010 8 comments
World’s greatest historian Niall Ferguson is in the “news”, and the Mail provides some useful background:
He is considered a leading expert on foreign affairs and once described himself as an ‘ardent Thatcherite’ but now calls himself a ‘liberal fundamentalist’.
What is a liberal fundamentalist? Is it someone who encourages a proliferation of different readings of his fundament? Or is it someone whose fundament is itself liberal? Is On Liberty, say, the sacred text, from which no deviation is possible, on which Ferguson’s philosophy is built? Or does he prefer an endless jouissance of individual interpretation of some other set of primary texts, perhaps in the manner of the Taqwacore movement? Does Ferguson encourage liberal use and exploration of his own fundament? Enquiring fans of Niall Ferguson, and of his fundament, want to know.
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You’re not from around here, are you?
February 5, 2010 28 comments
Did you have any travel difficulties over the festive season, readers? Well, they were as nothing compared to what Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, went through!
I’ve been marooned in Paris the last three days, waiting for a plane home after the snowstorm mess (“Poor Charles,” you’re all saying). Last night, having been struck by how polyglot Paris has become, I collected data as I walked along, counting people who looked like native French (which probably added in a few Brits and other Europeans) versus everyone else. I can’t vouch for the representativeness of the sample, but at about eight o’clock last night in the St. Denis area of Paris, it worked out to about 50-50, with the non-native French half consisting, in order of proportion, of African blacks, Middle-Eastern types, and East Asians. And on December 22, I don’t think a lot of them were tourists.
Mark Steyn and Christopher Caldwell have already explained this to the rest of the world—Europe as we have known it is about to disappear — but it was still a shock to see how rapid the change has been in just the last half-dozen years.
Imagine the author, heroically collecting data by counting people who looked like native French in a dingy suburb of Paris. How, you might wonder, did he decide what native French looks like? Did he count only those men and women wearing berets and/or carrying baguettes? In that case, I’m surprised he saw so many!
Obviously it cannot possibly be, as a kneejerk librul might uncharitably suspect, that Murray just counted white faces, since of course, lots of black people, Asian-seeming folk, and even “Middle-Eastern types” are native French, in the sense that, um, they were born in France. These foreign-looking coves can be tricky that way sometimes. So we can surely be confident that the data-collection principle employed by renowned scholar Murray, as he prowled the trottoirs of St-Denis, was not the jaw-droppingly ignorant and racist method of counting whites as French, and non-whites as not, and expressing shock at the result. The puzzle remains, then: how on earth did he do it?
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Cloud cuckoo land
February 4, 2010 5 comments
“Innovation consultant” Charles Leadbeater, co-author of IDon’tThink, has happened upon a new high-concept concept: “cloud culture”. In a nice touch, his essay on the subject at Edge appears to have been machine-translated in the cloud to Japanese and back again.
This is the cloud culture equation. New stores of digital cultural artefacts will become more accessible in more ways to more people that ever. More people will be able to explore these digital stores to find things of value to them. That could set in train a process of akin to the collaborative creativity that drives open source software. The open source software movement’s rallying cry is: “many eyes make bugs shallow.” The more people that test out a programme the quicker the bugs will be found. The cultural equivalent is that the more eyes make culture richer. The more people that see a collection of content, from more vantage points, the more likely they are to find value in it, probably value that a small team of professional curators may have missed.
Sic.
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Quiet, please
February 3, 2010 15 comments
As the Irish ask: why keep a dog and bark yourself? Well, one reason might be that you have had your dog debarked. Debarking in this context has nothing to do with stripping the epidermis from trees or getting off a ship. As the New York Times explains, it is rather a gruesome bit of unspeak for a surgical procedure in which a dog’s vocal cords are cut. The dog is not merely having its bark removed, but a part of its anatomy deliberately maimed, so as to appease complaining neighbours. (Debarking is thus substantially more euphemistic than the poultry industry’s debeaking.) Dog owners who submit their pets to a debarking are quoted by the NYT as insisting that their dogs are no less happy afterwards, which rather makes one wonder why this “humane” procedure could not also be applied with profit to certain humans.
Terry Albert, of Poway, Calif., said her life revolved around dogs: she boards them, rescues them, and even paints portraits of them. And she refuses to give them up. She has had two dogs debarked. “You may think it’s horrible,” she said. “But if I had to give up my dog or get the surgery, I would choose the surgery.”
Brave Ms Albert, choosing the surgery, is scheduled to have her vocal cords cut by a surgeon next Wednesday morning. Meanwhile, would it not be to Britain’s enormous benefit if we were also to volunteer George Osborne for a debarking, thus pacifying those millions of citizens whose lives are made a misery by his near-constant outbursts of wheedlingly aggressive and meaningless noise?
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Tradition and the individual chucklehead
February 2, 2010 22 comments
Martin Amis is interviewed for Prospect:
MA: People assume that it’s the gloomy buggers that are the serious ones — but in fact, anyone who has ever been anywhere in fiction is funny. Yet there are whole reputations built on not being funny. Who’s that German writer doesn’t even have paragraph breaks?
TC: I don’t know him, I don’t tend to read that kind of German writer.
I believe Amis might have been thinking of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, who in my opinion is extremely funny. Meanwhile, what is the import of Amis’s curious locution anyone who has ever been anywhere to mean — presumably — “anyone who is any good”? Where do you go when you’re good? Does Martin Amis have holiday snaps to prove it?
Leaving us pondering that question, Amis motors on:
MA: Coetzee, for instance — his whole style is predicated on transmitting absolutely no pleasure.
TC: Do you admire his books at all?
MA: No. I read one and I thought, he’s got no talent. The denial of the pleasure principle has a lot of followers. But I am completely committed to it, to pleasure.
Whether one takes pleasure in Coetzee’s style or not is, I suppose, a matter of taste. But the claim that Coetzee has got no talent convicts Amis as irredeemably second-rate in the matter of literary judgment.
Firstly, to couch his opinion in terms of the man Coetzee himself and whether he has “talent”, rather than in terms of the merit of the books themselves, is of a piece with Amis’s longstanding, schoolboyish preoccupation with the ranking of literary figures (M. Amis himself not seldom considered among them), and is really to express personal envy passed off as aesthetic evaluation. Secondly, the choice of “talent” itself as the criterion for the good writer, though it perhaps once began as a more-or-less-serious borrowing from Eliot, has long been in Amis’s conversation and writing an obsession at once cartoonishly egotistical (he has never been shy of referring to his own “talent”) and depressingly middlebrow. In combination, Amis’s puerile infatuation with “talent” and his laboriously hedonistic avowal of loyalty to “the pleasure principle” show that what he values above all in fiction is a kind of chucklesome facility, of the sort he once was able to practise himself.
That J.M. Coetzee’s astringent genius does not register on Martin Amis’s talentometer is, I conclude, certainly to the discredit of one of them.
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An itinerant seller of quack medicines
February 1, 2010 24 comments
One need not be an uncritical admirer of the work of Howard Zinn to wonder idly why noted obituarist Oliver Kamm is so keen to denounce an ideological opponent as not only wrong but a charlatan (Merriam-Webster: “one making usually showy pretenses to knowledge or ability: fraud, faker”). Might it somehow be related to the fact that Kamm himself has an impressive track record of pontificating about subjects on which he has failed to do the most elementary research or of which he lacks the most rudimentary understanding?
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How to rate hotness in the TLS
January 29, 2010 9 comments
In the TLS, Leo Robson reviews the film Nine:
Marshall has made a strenuous effort to assemble an international cast, only one of whom — Loren — is Italian. So we have Marion Cotillard, the only decent singer given the only decent song (“My Husband Makes Movies”), playing Guido’s exhausted wife; Judi Dench as his seen-it-all costume designer, dispensing weary wisdom between puffs on her cigarette; and Penélope Cruz as his mistress. This last actress is exquisitely embarrassing in an early number (“A Call from the Vatican”) where she slides around a stage in lingerie. Kate Hudson, playing a reporter for American Vogue, is similarly coarse, and pained-looking. It would be unnecessary to pass judgement on the physical condition of the film’s actresses if the costumes and choreography weren’t so intent on titillation. Sexy glamour is the quality to which the film aspires most keenly, and which it fails most flagrantly to meet.
I don’t know about you, but the plea here that it is necessary for the reviewer to pass judgement on the physical condition of the film’s actresses does not strike me as wholly persuasive? Personally, I might be hesitant in print to announce that I am capable of passing judgement on the physical condition of women in this way — firstly, I am not actually a doctor; and secondly, even if I were a doctor, I would probably need to examine them in person in order to arrive at a reliable evaluation. But then, I suppose the loftily quasi-legal, quasi-medical tone of Robson’s self-justification is meant to render somehow more respectable and objective the implicit announcement that he himself did not feel “titillation”. In other words, the physical condition of the film’s actresses is self-importantly fastidious unspeak for the reviewer’s opinion of their “sexy”-ness, or lack thereof.
Oddly, there is no mention in the review of Fergie, whose “Be Italian” is (in my opinion, pace Robson), the film’s “only decent song”. How long will TLS readers have to wait for that august organ’s definitive pronouncement on her physical condition?
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iPad, YouPud
January 28, 2010 16 comments
So yesterday Apple Computer, Inc released their long-awaited table computer, some kind of rhomboidal display unit with an enormous bezel, but no legs like an actual table would have? Oh, sorry, tablet. Here are some of the things Mr Steve Jobs said about the table computer. First:
It’s so much more intimate than a laptop.
Intimate was perhaps a brave word to use about the iPad, given that lots of people were just about to start calling it the iTampon. But anyway, what is intimate about a rectangular computer? Usually only people and their relationships (or, at a stretch, body parts) are said to be “intimate”, but now apparently inanimate objects can be intimate too? With each other? With you? Really?
Mr Jobs also said that the table device was “better than a laptop”. What about those nice small, cheap laptops known as netbooks?
The problem is netbooks aren’t better at ANYTHING. They’re just cheap laptops.
So, um, at least they are better at being cheap than other laptops? But if you like things because they are cheap, Mr Jobs doesn’t want to know you. Honestly, nor do I.
Obviously the table computer is massively better than a laptop at, say, browsing the web, because:
You can see the whole page — it’s phenomenal.
I’ve dreamed of doing that on my laptop! Haven’t you? Seeing the whole page! Imagine! All right, whatever.
Also, the iPad is apparently better than a laptop at doing email and word-processing and stuff, even though it doesn’t have a keyboard? But don’t worry: it has a make-believe onscreen “keyboard”, of which Mr Jobs said, courageously:
It’s a dream to type on.
Yes! A really bad dream, maybe. (Revealingly, there is a massive keyboard attachment sold separately.)
Finally, and perhaps most rousingly, Mr Jobs said:
we’ve tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.
The technoberal arts, I think that’s called.
Are you gagging for an iPad, users?
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Modern tomes
January 27, 2010 5 comments
In this long and fascinating NYT article about thriller writer James Patterson comes a remarkable statement by one Larry Kirshbaum, former CEO of Time Warner Book Group:
“Jim [Patterson] was sensitive to the fact that books carry a kind of elitist persona, and he wanted his books to be enticing to people who might not have done so well in school and were inclined to look at books as a headache,” Kirshbaum says. “He wanted his jackets to say, ‘Buy me, read me, have fun — this isn’t “Moby Dick.”’”
Good for Patterson! Who the hell wants to read Moby-Dick anyway? Or at least every day? But, you might mumble-quibble, how can books have a kind of elitist persona? Merriam-Webster offers for persona “a character assumed by an author in a written work”, “an individual’s social facade or front”, or “the personality that a person (as an actor or a politician) projects in public”, so perhaps Kirshbaum means that books project an air of not being for everyone. It is true that, willy-nilly, many books project an air of not being for people who have not yet learned to read, but I’m not sure that people who can read yet count as an “elite” in the United States. Then again, Kirshbaum refers not to an elitist persona exactly, but only a kind of elitist persona. Books are sort of forbidding objects, right? Do I hear you mutter that books are, for all that, easier to use than an iPhone? Bloody elitist. We don’t want your sort round here. Not in our massive publishing conglomerate.
Lots of people, who probably wear tweed and have dandruff and squint myopically if they ever emerge into the daylight, are worried about the publishing industry these days, but I for one am confident that the future of the book is safe in the hands of executives like Kirshbaum, who are heroically willing to recognize that the public at large hates and fears books.
I think I have never read a book by James Patterson. Have you, readers?
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Amis on the filthy foreigner
January 26, 2010 15 comments
Martin Amis has predictably outraged the bienpensants with his call for euthanasia booths, but an eagle-eyed unspeak.net reader has spotted something more bizarre buried in his effortful verbiage:
How is society going to support this silver tsunami? There’ll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops.
Terrible immigrants? How exactly are these immigrants supposed to be “terrible”? Amis cannot mean for us to imagine people who are really bad at being immigrants, because the most incompetent immigrants of all would never have got into the country in the first place, much less had the organizational capacities to gang together and mount an “invasion”. So one must conclude that terrible immigrants are, on the model of “terrible lizards”, immigrants who are particularly frightening, with scaly skin and massive teeth, like velociraptors and T Rexes stamping down the high street and — as a secondary implication of Amis’s syntax — “stinking out” the place, presumably with their strange bodily unguents and spicy foodstuffs.
Martin Amis has not yet announced that he will be campaigning for the BNP in the forthcoming election, but it can surely be only a matter of time?
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