Via The Urban Woo (retd). How to make your seasonal pastimes truly Zen, even if they have to be conducted virtually. Have as happy a time as the present hateful circumstances allow, with triple word scores aplenty for 2021.

 

It feels as if a pattern is forming. Following on from recent posts (here and here) about Radio 4 programmes in which a state of not-knowing appears to be a desirable quality in presenters and/or guests, here’s yesterday’s Daily Mail. Rather than seeking to elucidate or evaluate complex restrictions for the benefit of its readers, the newspaper’s role now seems to be to share in their confusion, their ignorance, and even to make a virtue of it. And in this case, it’s about something rather more important than knowing a particular bit of violin music.

PS: Earlier thoughts about agnotology etc here and here.

If people can’t stop themselves from talking and eating in cinemas, I don’t see how we can impose any kind of social distancing in the darkness, so I won’t be seeing Tenet on the big screen in the near future. Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s succinct review suggests that I’m not missing much, but at the same time, I’m intrigued...

#TENET is a PERFECT film if your idea of perfection is a radio play with stunts

— Frank Cottrell-Boyce (@frankcottrell_b) September 6, 2020

One Jay Hulme, an “award winning performance poet” posted this earlier today. Poetic licence?

The Corona virus lockdown and mass unemployment has led to more people in their fifties, who aren't exactly digitally savvy, suddenly spending hours of their time online, and it's a disinformation nightmare.

Algorithms have been feeding them inflammatory nonsense for months now.

— Jay Hulme (@JayHulmePoet) August 24, 2020

As is the way of such things, the above tweet prompted first healthy respectful discussion and disagreement and then within hours things got nasty and Ms Cosslett deleted the whole thing. My response was that yes, I’d become aware of this a few years ago when a younger colleague asked if she’d done something to annoy me. It turned out that my use of (what I thought was) correct punctuation had expressed grumpiness too her; as if I need a full stop to be grumpy.

Cosslett’s real point was that online communication is developing as a distinct linguistic ecosystem and rules that apply elsewhere don’t necessarily need to be used. But why, I wonder, do “younger people” get to call the shots? They didn’t invent the medium. I first sent a tweet in 2006, a text message in 2000, an e-mail in about 1992 and nobody back then told me I overpunctuated. I’ve learned not to call people out for their spelling/grammar infelicities (unless they’re criticising educational standards or the supposed poor English of immigrants, in which case they deserve both barrels) so I’m rather hostile to the idea that I might be called out for actually getting things right.

Is the problem, I wonder, that younger users perceive orthodox punctuation, sentence structure, capitalisation, etc as a passive-aggressive rebuke to their own, apparently more free-form language? Deep down they know they’re in the wrong, but they project their self-loathing outwards because it feels better that way. A bit like – in the context of the current pandemic – non-mask-wearers yelling abuse at those who cover up. As also happened to me yesterday, by a charming gentleman who wished to inform me that covid is a myth created by the Illuminati and something vaccine something Stonehenge blah blah sorry I can’t hear you with my mask on. And no full stops.

Dickon Edwards on taking part in a live event that suddenly had to migrate to Twitter:

It’s a frustrating experience, as not only is my computer slow, but I realise I am so much slower at tweeting than most. I manage about three questions before the 30 mins of questioning is up... I am a little unhappy about this, feeling forced into a new digital Darwinian era that favours only those who have fast computers and fast computer skills. I worry now that I have even less place in a pandemic-hit world than I did in the one before.

Anyone remember the Millennium Bug? The panic was that All The Computers Would Fail, but two decades ago, many of us had only the sketchiest idea of what that would mean. I was maybe a bit ahead of the curve, having worked in the hinterland of IT and multimedia for a bit, but I still didn’t have a mobile phone, or even a personal email address. I wrote cheques, I posted letters. My TV had five channels. All we really knew was that if the bug were really that bad, and all the computers stopped, the aeroplanes would fall from the skies.

Today, computers are the only things that are working, while nine-tenths of meatspace grinds to a halt. And the aeroplanes don’t fall from the skies, because they don’t go there in the first place.

In a plague-ridden world where physical contact is taboo and We Are All Digital Now, it’s comforting to note that analogue culture is still thriving and even reproducing.

Captain (now Colonel) Tom Moore, who has raised over £30 million for NHS charities is inevitably going to become a contested symbol of the current epidemic. At the moment (it’s his 100th birthday today) he’s all but untouchable, but, splendid as his achievement is, more cynical souls know that things like this don’t just happen without some serious behind-the-scenes lifting from PR and marketing people. But nobody wants to point this out right now, for fear that his (doubtless quite accurate) image as an ordinary old soldier just trying to help out will be damaged.

In an odd way he has much in common with Harry Leslie Smith, the crotchety Corbyn fan who devoted his last years to railing against the evils of austerity and supporting the NHS. But of course Captain Tom has been embraced by mainstream media in a way Harry never could – because that prickliness, of course, was just as much Harry’s brand, and he was just as much a PR confection as Tom.

In Situationist terms, Tom represents a recuperation of the Harry brand, the plucky old soldier who still wants to do his bit – but this time, doesn’t want to ask too many awkward questions.

I’ve been impressed by the ingenuity of so many people taking up the Getty Museum Challenge and whiling away the lockdown hours by recreating art masterpieces with whatever they have to hand. Behold, my own humble contribution, an attempt at replicating Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White.

From The New Yorker, Fran Lebowitz on lockdown:

The only thing that makes this bearable for me, frankly, is at least I’m alone. A couple of people invited me to their houses in the country, houses much more lavish than mine. Some of them have the thing I would love to have, which is a cook, since I don’t know how to cook. And I thought, You know, Fran, you could go away and you could be in a very beautiful place with a cook, but then you’d have to be a good guest. I would much rather stay here and be a bad guest. And, believe me, I am being a bad guest. 

(Thanks, Clair.)

2016 was the last year that seemed to be characterised by lots of famous people dying and now as then the relative significance given to one dead celeb over another speaks volumes, dragging into its orbit issues of taste and class and the dreaded canon. Who, ultimately, matters more, the bass player of Fountains of Wayne or the fat one from Little and Large?

Wondering whether the world will die first of a virus or claustrophobia, I suddenly have time to read and plot the end of society. Where should I start?

The latest tranche of Dickon Edwards’s online diary brings us up to date with Covid-19 and mentions The Decameron, Boccaccio’s collection of tales purportedly told by a group of people holed up in a villa to avoid the plague in 14th-century Florence – a reminder that social distancing has a long and noble heritage.


I remember flicking through my mother’s Everyman edition, in which parts of the naughtiest tale – that of Alibech and monk Rustico – were left in the original language, which I always felt was a particularly half-arsed flavour of censorship, suggesting that we are all potentially corruptible, with the exception of those who have taken the trouble to learn medieval Italian.

While we're panic buying loo roll, sales of Albert Camus rocket in France. The secret of French élan? Existentialism and bidets.

— Isabel Rogers (@Isabelwriter) March 8, 2020