The title of this blog comes from a line in Haruki Murakami’s novel Dance Dance Dance and if you’d asked me in 2005, when I started this thing, I would probably have said that Murakami was my favourite living writer. He was certainly the only one whose books I’d automatically buy as soon as they appeared, in hardback, without reference to the reviews. I was a completist, hoovering up his hard-to-find early books, his non-fiction, the various critical works (at one point I considered a name change to Cultural Scentlessness) and then, and then... I’m not sure if I changed or he did, but I realised the hardback of Killing Commendatore had sat on my shelf unread all the way through lockdown and poor old Nobel bridesmaid Haruki-san became one of his own passive anti-heroes, dumped and left alone with his spaghetti and jazz records and cat.

But then, just before Christmas, I needed to buy a last-minute Secret Santa gift and the only useful shop in the vicinity was a branch of Waterstone’s and the gift I chose wasn’t a book and I always feel awkward if I go into a bookshop and buy only non-book things (and if you’re reading this, I suspect you’re the same) and I chanced upon a Murakami I hadn’t noticed before, his non-fiction anthology Novelist As A Vocation. So I bought it. And now I’ve read it.

Two takeaways. One is a quotation:

People who absolutely love school, and feel sad when they can’t go, probably won’t become novelists.

And the other is an anecdote from Murakami’s early writing life (and not that one about the revelation at the baseball game). When he was grappling with his first book, Hear The Wind Sing, he translated it into his decent but imperfect English, thus simplifying the style and sentence structure, and then put it back into Japanese.

Which ties nicely into my two resolutions for the coming year. First, to rationalise all the half-formed story ideas on my hard drive, and prompted by the fact that great many of my friends (here and here and here and here and here) have got their authorial arses in gear in recent months, I’m going to knuckle down and actually write another bloody book. (I mean, Julian Barnes has retired so I guess there’s a vacancy.) And because I’m frequently shamed by the hard grind that my students put in to perfect their English language skills, I need to get my own grasp of French back to some semblance of adequacy. So, let’s begin. From a novel that’s been simmering for the past few years:

La dernière chose que j’ai goûtée, c’était un pigeon.

Let’s see where that takes us. 

PS: Also from the book, the normally apolitical Murakami dips a toe into the murky waters of identity:

I might, at one time, become a twenty-year-old lesbian. Another time I’ll be a thirty-year-old unemployed househusband. I put my feet into the shoes I’m given then, and make my foot size fit those shoes, and then start to act... Basically I just go with the flow. And as long as I’m following that flow I can freely do all sorts of things that are hardly possible. This is indeed one of the main joys of writing novels.

And, possibly a touch of that cultural scentlessness:

...I get the sense that in Japan and Asian countries the “modern” that necessarily precedes the “postmodern” did not, in a precise sense, exist.

For the record, I don’t think Bardot was a terribly good actor or singer, nor did she make very many good movies, but that’s not the point. Her arrival in the 1950s signalled a new perspective on female sexuality that resonated well after she ceased to be a major draw in the cinema. She was John Lennon’s first celebrity crush and her look influenced any number of 60s dollybirds (Christie, Faithfull, Rice-Davies, et al) as well as cementing in the mainstream media the association of Frenchness with sensual misbehaviour. She was important, and that’s what qualifies her for obituaries. Her later descent into far-right wingnuttery is neither here nor there. Incidentally, I’d disagree with Justin and also stake a claim for Norman Tebbit. He wasn’t the first senior Tory politician from a humble background – Heath, Powell and Thatcher came before him – but he was the first to eschew elocution lessons and as such must be a role model for the current crop of right-wing populists.

Talking of which, the question of how colossal a shitbag the teenage Nigel Farage might have been rumbles on. I don’t know, as I wasn’t there. But I do come from a roughly similar vintage, being four years younger than him, and am an alumnus of a similar school (selective, single-sex, sporty, cadet corps, faded grandeur, a strange blend of academic rigour and macho philistinism). And racism was bloody everywhere and as the only Jew among the student body, I was on the receiving end and I’m pretty sure that the handful of non-white kids got it even worse. The low point came in 1983 when we staged a mock election and the National Front came a strong second and I wouldn’t be surprised if even that result was massaged downwards to avoid some unpleasant headlines. I remember the names and I remember the faces. I’ll be charitable and assume it was all youthful bravado and they’re now respectable, productive members of society. I’m sure I said some pretty toe-curling things myself at that age. But if I see any of those names and faces appear over the parapets, perhaps by getting involved in politics, perhaps as cheerleaders for a certain former student of Dulwich College, maybe I won’t be so discreet.

PS: More about the good art/bad artist conundrum here.

I was recently getting a bit self-indulgent about how blogging used to be a community but now feels like howling into the wind. Which I guess says something about its place in the continuum of massive leaps in communication technology that were identified as a big threat to existing formats, only to die in their own right (see faxes, BlackBerry, MiniDiscs, VHS, smoke signals and more). One of the victims of the social media onrush, or so we are told, was the notion of TV as a collective experience, the whole Morecambe-and-Wise-Christmas-Show meme, watercooler moments even before offices has watercoolers. It was best expressed during my brief, inglorious stint teaching secondary school English, when I asked a bunch of 13-year-olds what TV or movie they liked and one girl declared flatly that the only thing she liked was “stuff on my phone”.

An article about parents who hire tutors specifically to buy social advantage for their children is mildly depressing until one of those tutors rather lets the cat out of the Birkin with the admission that “an English accent implies that you're well-read, that you're well-educated, even if you're not.” Now it seems that we’ve got beyond Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital and Hirsch’s cultural literacy into a state where cultural plausibility is all that matters. And even then, we know it’s bullshit, but still go along with it. I mean, would anybody who’s actually read The Great Gatsby attend a Gatsby-themed party, let alone throw one?

I’m guessing Zadie Smith has read Gatsby, and a few other books as well. But the number of people who can say the same is falling, as she suggests in an article excoriating the British Library for its treatment of its staff:

You know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out that what a country values can change over time. Sometimes, though, there’s a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you’ve actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word – but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass – and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little island – even more people will begin to suspect that in truth you do not value culture at all, and are in fact running a giant heritage museum in which the only cultural workers you respect are the dead ones.

The UK government has decided that migrants entering the country under skilled worker visas will now need to demonstrate the ability to speak English to a B2 level (equivalent to A-level). Now, having taught English to both native speakers and non-native learners, I actually have some personal experience upon which to base my usual scattergun pontification, but plenty of people have already come to the same conclusion anyway: this requirement would mean that any such migrant would be speaking the language at a standard that the majority of natives couldn’t hope to match. And in their comments about the change, the anti-migrant contingent just reinforce the point with all the eloquence one might expect: 

Joshua Rothman on the effect AI is having on reading:

Artificial intelligence, in itself, is unmotivated; it reads, but is not a reader; its “interests,” at any given time, depend fundamentally on the questions it’s asked. And so its usefulness as a reading tool depends on the existence of a culture of reading which it can’t embody or perpetuate.

Indeed, a culture that AI is helping to eradicate, or at least change beyond recognition, as Rothman himself predicts: 

Suppose we’re headed toward a future in which text is seen as fluid, fungible, refractable, abstractable. In this future, people will often read by asking for a text to be made shorter and more to-the-point, or to be changed into something different, like a podcast or multi-text report. It will be easy to get the gist of a piece of writing, to feel as if you know it, and so any decision to encounter the text itself will involve a positive acceptance of work... Perhaps new stylistic approaches will aim to repel automated reading, establishing zones of reading for humans only. The people who actually read “originals” will be rare, and they’ll have insights others lack, and enjoy experiences others forgo—but the era in which being “well-read” is a proxy for being educated or intelligent will largely be over.

Although maybe we’re already there. In class the other day I was talking to an articulate teenager who expressed more curiosity about her own country than her high school’s sanitised history curriculum was able to satisfy. But when I told her I could suggest a few books to fill in the gap, she visibly recoiled. That word. Books. Ugh.

PS: Gary Shteyngart foresaw that ugh, more than a decade ago.

PPS: Composers are doomed as well, it seems.

“Too often people go to university to explore research and knowledge.”

—Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Business and Trade

I’m not even sure if it’s possible any more to identify a left/right divide in politics, especially as the two sides increasingly seem to share each other’s behavioural clothes. I mean, what are the recent outbursts of flag mania around England if not a recuperation of what, when done by leftists, was decried as “virtue signalling” (taking the knee, for example)? And Gavin Newsom’s knowingly unhinged tweets are clearly intended to troll of The Orange Toddler but I have no difficulty imagining a left-wing populist doing that sort of thing for real.

And in the possibly irrelevant world of books and similar clever stuff, Philip Hensher rails against “progressive gatekeepers” for elevating ideological purity above any concept of literary quality. But, as Hensher himself acknowledges, this is just the same tactic that the forces of conservatism deployed when they wanted to get rid of The Well of Loneliness (and Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Last Exit To Brooklyn and Ulysses and Tess of the D’Urbervilles und so weiter).

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

A thoughtful review, by James Marriott in the New Statesman, of Stefan Collini’s book about the glory days of Eng Lit, ending with the author’s pessimistic moan: 

I am grateful to my former teacher Professor Martin Eve for drawing attention to an extraordinary document from the University of Warwick, which endeavours to ensure all communications from said institution are at once Provocative, Curious and Optimistic. 

Nah, me neither. But, as an example, we are entreated not to say something as anodyne as “Scientists make breakthrough in development of fridge-free storage for vital medications”. Now, I would have thought that was rather a good thing for a university to announce, for any number of reasons. No, instead the headline should be: “Medication proteins so stable, you can pop them in the post.” You know, like sweeties. And, at all times we should operate under the banner of Beyond; indeed, “Using ‘Beyond’ as a subject noun makes ‘Beyond’ an entity that is actively driving change.” 

So, not only childish and inane, but consciously anti-literate as well. Warwick is the 74th-best university in the world, you know. God help the rubbish ones.

For the past couple of years I have been teaching foreigners to speak English, a pursuit that’s far more rewarding and, frankly, easier than what I was doing previously, teaching English-speakers to speak English. 

So I was intrigued to see the news that anyone intending to migrate to Britain for work purposes will have to reach a standard equivalent to an English language A-level. Presumably this is one of the policies that Labour hopes will lure back from the bosom of Reform UK voters who become enraged at hearing the language of Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Piers Morgan elbowed out in favour of Urdu, Bulgarian, Farsi or Yoruba. Insisting that incomers can speak to local language to a high standard will encourage integration, harmony and all that lovely Coke commercial stuff, right?

Um, really? As I recall, getting native speakers to jump through the hoops required to pass English language GCSE (the qualification usually taken at 16) is a massive effort and many of them fall flat on their faces. Even to suggest they attempt an A-level (normally taken two years later) would provoke abject ridicule. Indeed, the combined entries for English language and English language/literature A-level last year came to just under 20,000. (In comparison, there were over 100,000 for the various flavours of maths.)

Of course, students could reasonably argue that they don’t need to take an English A-level, because they already speak English very well, thanks for asking. Five minutes on any UK-based news site that permits comments would disabuse you of that argument and, intriguingly, it’s the people who are most vehement about the horrible foreign types coming over here and talking funny who seem to have forgotten what spelling, grammar and punctuation (especially punctuation) they were ever taught. (One recent example: “Well don't Reform 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧you have given us hope at one stage it was like is it worth living but Nigel you are the man Thank you 👏👏👏👏❤️”)

So what will be the effect of importing thousands of migrants who can speak the local language more accurately and mellifluously than the natives? I just imagine them stepping out of immigration at Heathrow, their minds a jumble of cream teas, Harry Potter and the London Eye, asking in cut-glass tones of all the cabbies and bobbies and chirpy Cockney flower sellers they encounter, “Why don’t you speak ENGLISH????”

PS: Of course, George Voskovec got their first, in 12 Angry Men.

Recent stuff that doesn’t justify a post on its own, all sort of smooshed up together: an occasional series.

Interesting article by Patrick McGuinness in the LRB, flashing back to the case of his former teacher Chris Jefferies, who was spuriously accused of murder and dragged through the tabloid mire, apparently because he had strange hair, didn’t own a TV, didn’t like sport and, most reprehensible of all, appeared to have been an excellent English teacher. “Did they really think showing a Jean-Luc Godard film or reading Browning indicated murderous potential?” asks McGuinness. Well, yes, of course they bloody did. As always, these staunch defenders of Western culture run away screaming when presented with anyone who knows or cares about Western culture at any level deeper than a commemorative tea-towel from the V&A.

McGuinness also recalls the activities that Jefferies ran for boys who didn’t want to join the school Cadet Force: 

It was like a version of the Foreign Legion for misfits: the asthmatics and the diabetics, the boys with the hearing aids and the boys on crutches, the epileptic, the attention-challenged, the marginal, the sad and the emotionally combustible. We loved it.

PS: Now I’m reminded of the 1997 election and the deeply weird Tory candidate Dr Adrian Rogers, who declared that his opponent Ben Bradshaw “is a homosexual, works for the BBC, rides a bicycle, speaks German: he’s everything about our country that is wrong.”

I don’t go into politics so much these days, mostly because it makes me sad and angry. But I was interested by what Vivek Ramaswamy, soon to get a plum job in the Trump administration, had to say about American culture, and the response to it: 

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers. (Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates). More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”

And there’s much in there I might agree with. On the other hand, this is also the culture that venerates a semi-literate charlatan like Trump, so without all that intellectual mediocrity, Ramaswamy wouldn’t have his new job.

I wrote a while back about someone who gave a disobliging review to a play because it was stuffed with obscure references; not that he, the reviewer, found them obscure, but he assumed that younger theatre-goers would be baffled by TS Eliot and the Marx brothers.

And now Fiona Mountford goes one better, delivering a kicking to a revival of Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love because it’s “three hours of often indistinguishable men exchanging achingly arch lines about the minutiae of classical grammar and quoting screeds and screeds of Latin at each other”. And of course Ms Mountford gets the minutiae, the screeds, even, because she read classics at Oxford; but she thinks the other punters probably wouldn’t. The fact that the play’s author is a refugee speaker of English as a second language who never went to university at all doesn’t seem to figure in her calculations. “Far too often,” she sighs, “it feels less like drama and more like intellectual masturbation and that, surely, is not why we go to the theatre.” Quite right too. It’s why we write theatre reviews though, or should be.

PS: To be fair, Stoppard himself has worried about leaving the audience behind.

Several points arising from the tale of Rev Dr Paul Chamberlain, who apparently brought a group of schoolchildren to tears when he told them that Santa’s not real and their parents eat the biscuits supposedly left for him. The first and most obvious is how easy it is for devotees of one myth to brusquely dismiss another. How would the reverend gentleman react if someone else told the children that Santa is real, but Jesus is just a fairy story to make people behave themselves?

Also, when I saw the headlines, I assumed the traumatised kids were five at most. In fact, they were all in Year 6, which makes them 10 or 11 years old. And they’re still shocked by the revelation that Santa is a fraud? Isn’t that a bit weird?

The University of Sydney (alma mater of such awkward squad stalwarts as Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes and Clive James) has been grappling with the issue of how to reconcile people’s right to speak about stuff that annoys them, with the right of people not to be annoyed by that speaking. To this end, they have commissioned an external review that makes a number of recommendations, most of them eminently coherent and sensible, and this one: 

The University should amend its policies and procedures to make clear that each person utilising a word or phrase is responsible at the time the word or phrase is used to identify to the audience the context in which it is used. (New Civility Rule)

Um, er, OK, what? I mean, context is often useful to promote understanding, especially if a word or phrase is obscure or contentious. But does this mean every speaker has the responsibility to ensure every word s/he utters is perfectly clear to everyone present, utterly devoid of any trace of ambiguity or nuance? And then, what if the words used in the contextualisation require further contextualisation, and so on to infinity? If not, what the hell does it mean?

The end result of course will be that all public speech at the university will be reduced to the most banal, basic components, words that are incapable of offending, words that cannot be misunderstood (deliberately or otherwise), words that cannot challenge, cannot provoke and ultimately cannot educate. Which makes the continued existence of the University of Sydney look a bit bloody pointless, no?

Now, please excuse me, I need to write a companion post that identifies to the audience the context in which these words are used. I may be some time.

(Thanks to James Ley for alerting me to this.)

I got into a polite exchange of views a couple of days back over an otherwise unexceptional story about, of all things, expensive mince pies. Or, more specifically, over the language used by the good citizens of Orford, in Suffolk, where the Pump Street Bakery makes delicacies that are supposedly the priciest mince pies going. When one of the locals described them as “bespoke”, I was confused, because there had been nothing in the article to tell us this was the case. In fact, if they really were bespoke, or what I’d define as bespoke, created to the precise specifications of each customer, then the price (£25 for six) wouldn’t seem so exorbitant.

And it was only when a second person used the same adjective to describe the pies that I realised what was going on. “Bespoke” doesn’t have that specific meaning any more, the sense of having a suit made where every detail, the measurements, the cloth, the precise diameter of the buttons, is decided by the person paying the bill. It just means something luxurious, something posh. Something that costs £25 for six. 

I wrote about this a decade ago, discussing how I no longer use certain words (“iconic”, “surreal” and so on) because I can’t be sure whether they’ll be understood to have (what I regard as) the correct, precise meaning, or a more fuzzy definition (“famous”, “odd”). I’ve subsequently learned that there’s a linguistic term for this; semantic bleaching, a sort of meh-ification of our discourse, where the meaning of a word loses its intensity and, ultimately, its usefulness. “Curate” is another example. What once suggested a discriminating expertise employed to select pieces (pots, poems, plesiosaurs) for public consumption now means nothing more than choosing.

Does this matter? Well, if you think that it’s useful to have some words with a precise meaning, even if we don’t deploy them all that often, then yes, it does. But if it matters that much, what do we do about it? That’s where discussions on Friday tended towards the full and frank. I suggested that even though this use of “bespoke” was what the interviewees actually said, it was the duty of The Guardian to find some way of indicating that it wasn’t an accurate use of language. The pies aren’t bespoke, any more than they’re purple or three miles high or made in Burkina Faso. Maybe a discreet “[sic]” after the word? Or just replace it with what they really meant, which is “posh”. This does run the risk of insulting or demoralising people who may not have all the cultural capital of the average Guardian journalist, or editor, or reader but to be honest we do it all the time. If an interviewee commits a grammatical solecism (“you was”, for example) it will miraculously become “you were” by the time it’s published. Nobody’s yet died. 

And, yes, language moves on and the meaning of words changes. Which is great when the language is expanded, and we get neologisms like “skibidi” and “rizz” and “brat summer” and most of these will sound positively archaic in five years time but while they’re here they define a generation and baffle another generation and that’s what they’re for. But taking a useful word like “bespoke” and giving it a meaning that can be served by a dozen other words – essentially making the original word useless – doesn’t expand language. It makes it smaller.

And there’s a practical, mundane angle to this. I teach English to people who don’t have it as a first language. I always encourage them to aim first to be understood, and only then to worry about speaking “correctly”. But at some point they want and need to know what the correct version is, the right tense, the right conjunction, le mot juste, even if they don’t always hit the target. And if my students come across the word “bespoke” and ask me what it means, do I just tell them it means “posh”, so as not to upset two people in Suffolk?

This morning I discussed Craig Raine’s A Martian Sends a Postcard Home with a group of bright, polite and (above all) curious Russian teenagers. The gist of the poem is that an alien is describing commonplace objects and phenomena to his friends and that once we decode the things – from books to toilets to dreams – that he’s writing about, we see them anew, as if through fresh eyes, or whatever sensory organs Martians have.

There were extra layers of decoding that the students had to do though. First, the purely linguistic, which I’d expected – what is impatience? But then I realised they were being tasked with identifying things which which they have only a very fuzzy acquaintance. Home phones. Wristwatches. Postcards, of course. And pretty soon we can add books and cars you drive yourself to the list.

I wonder how long before they’re baffled by the very idea of dreams.