I grow old, I grow old and language is dribbling away from my control. Case in point: this article, which describes a mid-70s Joni Mitchell album as “vibey” without explaining what that might mean. To confuse matters, it does feature contributions from the vibraphone player Victor Feldman, but I don’t think that’s what seals it. A social media callout prompted some interesting possibilities, including “more atmospheric than formally tight” which fits but could also fit supermarket muzak. And then we find that Hoxton Square is similarly vibey and it looks as if it’s a word, like “cool” and “hip”, that served a very precise purpose until the estate agents got hold of it.

I was born in 1968, which really was one of those years, wasn’t it? The assassinations of MLK and RFK, the Tet offensive, the Prague Spring and its sudden end and of course the student revolts, most famously the Paris événements. Indeed, I made my entrance in the midst of the latter kerfuffle, albeit in bucolic Devon rather than at the Sorbonne. Indeed I’ve occasionally adopted the slogan above (“May 68, beginning of a prolonged struggle”) as a statement of biographical intent.

And then I discover, in Joan Didion’s The White Album (named, of course, after one of the best records released that year), a line that trumps it: 

By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.

PS: Further good stuff from the Didion: discussing the mansion being built for then-California-governor Ronald Reagan, she observes:

In the entire house there are only enough bookshelves for a set of the World Book and the Book of the Month, plus maybe three Royal Doulton figurines and a back file of Connoisseur...

And, yes, we used to sneer at the likes of Reagan and Dubya for their perceived intellectual shortcomings, but they now look like Socrates and Plato compared to what came after. Talking of which, the Trump presidential library is a thing.

PPS: And a further zinger:

The public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony.

I hadn’t read any Didion before. I think I need to catch up.

From the Instagram account (of all things) of The Face magazine (ditto), a piece that affects to investigate the phenomenon of Gen Z and younger millennials going on cruises. And among the factors they apparently appreciate is the fact that a cruise offers “a way to have everything from your day-to-day life replicated”.

So what the younglings really want from these cruises is a simulacrum of normality, but on a big boat. Damn, I’m so old, I remember when the whole point of a holiday to leave everything from your day-to-day life at home.

PS: They’ve deleted it now.

Just came across something I wrote for The Guardian in 2008, offering a sort of “OK, boomer” sigh avant la lettre, suggesting that old people should stop appropriating pop music. Which in turn prompted this delightful response:

Presumably by ‘old’ the author means himself; he’s bald and looks very boring. Probably not intelligent enough for classical though; Andy Williams fan? Nana Mouskouri?

PS: On a happier note, I’m now in the dictionary. For context, go here.

Wailing and gnashing over a public broadcaster making the classic mistake of trying to lure younger listeners now, rather than just waiting until they get old:

I hear that in a BBC radio staff meeting yesterday, management told staff to reduce the age of people listening to @BBC6Music by 5-10 years, with an optimum of listeners in their early 30s. If true, this is madness: an utterly skewiff corporate notion of who might listen or why.

— Chris Thorpe-Tracey (@christt) April 6, 2023

But then, searching for something else, I come across a theatre review from last year (of a show that sounds disturbingly as if I might have written it, but also pretty bad, which tells its own tale), where the writer appears to accept this logic, even if he’s old enough to know better, and to get the joke: 

I detest clever-dick plays that make the audience struggle hard to find meaning but allows them the warm glow of self-congratulation for getting an obscure reference. I studied Eliot in A-level English and devoured the Marx Brothers films at what was then the National Film Theatre in the 1980s. Is The Waste Land on the curriculum now, in its centenary year? And who under 50 knows about Groucho and his siblings and will therefore get McGuinness’s oblique references to old routines and one-liners? Writers can write what they want, of course, but it’s odd to pitch a play exclusively to an ageing demographic.

Any odder than pitching it exclusively to the young, who apparently don’t want to watch a play, or listen to a radio station, that would have them as an audience?

 Zoe Williams:

If you trail off a text with “…”, this situates you right in the middle of generation X, but if you ask a younger acquaintance what is so wrong with ellipsis, you doubly age yourself, first by using ellipsis and second by knowing what it is called.

In an effort to extricate myself from the bubble of liberal groupthink, and to maintain access to what I maintain are the best obituaries in the English-speaking world, I’ve subscribed for the past couple of years to the Daily Telegraph. But a joke’s a joke, and the paper’s increasingly unhinged tone over so-called “wokeness” (once Brexit was done, they desperately needed something else to keep their readers appropriately furious) has finally exhausted my patience. In common with all publications, the DT is desperately attempting to reach younger consumers but its letters and reader comments suggest they have yet to succeed. The comment below concerns last night’s final of Strictly Come Dancing but to be honest it might as well have been about the Beeching axe, or the Gallipoli debacle, or the 1832 Reform Act. Even the name sounds like a middle-ranking minister in the Eden administration. Thank you, and goodnight.

From Dear Reader, by Paul Fournel. A young intern explains to a wizened editorial hack how to use an e-reader.

“How do I go to the next page?”

“You turn pages by sliding the corner on the bottom.”

“Like a book?”

“Yep, that’s the prehistoric side of it. A sop for seniors. When people have forgotten about books they’ll wonder why it works that way. Vertical makes more sense. Scrolling down would be more logical.”

“Jack Kerouac will be pleased.”

She doesn’t get it.

The implication being, of course, that you, the dear reader of Dear Reader, will get it. Incidentally, Dear Reader is available on Kindle.

PS: And of course, I’m assuming that you, dear plougher through the Cultural Snow, will also get it.

PPS: On similar lines, I overheard this earlier today in a charity shop. A mature lady spotted a set of wireless headphones and asked the friendly, helpful 20-something on the till to explain.

“So I can put them on my head... and there are no wires?”

“Yes, you just put them on, and they connect to your phone.”

"My phone? Why would I connect them to my phone?”

Given that it is a bit irrational to mourn the death of someone you never knew, I was still sadder to hear of the passing of the actor Helen McCrory than of the Duke of Edinburgh a week before. Mainly because McCrory was little more than half the Duke’s age and left two children under 16, but also because she was a fabulous, compelling performer. And on the occasions when she wasn’t inhabiting another character, she appeared to be a wise, perceptive woman; here she is talking to The Chap in 2019.

 88.8% of young people in the UK define themselves as creative, we are informed. 

Two thoughts. First, anybody can define themselves as anything they bloody well want. It doesn’t make it so.

But, rather more intriguingly, what do the remaining 11.2% call themselves? Destructive?

I once came across an English Language school textbook from the mid-1960s. The author clearly wanted to make a connection with the new breed of teens who formed his audience and one of the tasks he set was to create some publicity material for a fictional new “Pop” (because I’m sure it was within quotes) Group formed by their school friends. He was even good enough to think up a name for the combo – “THE GAY SWINGERS”.

And, more than half a century later, it continues....

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

An open letter warning that a culture of public shaming is stifling debate has attracted more attention for the names attached to it than for its content.

Chief among them is, almost inevitably, JK Rowling, whose descent from hero to zero has been more precipitous than that time John Lennon said something apparently disobliging about Jesus and saw his records being burned in the deep South. But other names – Chomsky, Steinem, Rushdie, Amis – will probably prompt blank looks among the millennials and Gen-Z-ers who are propelling the so-called cancel culture that the letter addresses. They know Margaret Atwood for that TV show.

Some of the responses have matched the spirit of the original letter. Emily VanDerWerff, a trans writer at Vox, expressed her regret that one of the founders of the site had signed the letter, but accepted that he was entitled to his own opinion – a liberal attitude that feels quietly heretical amidst all the shrieking.

By contrast, one of the other signatories, Jennifer Finney Boylan, swiftly recanted her own involvement, not because of the content of the letter, which she describes as “well meaning, if vague”, but because of some of the other people on the list. Which raises two points: first, why add your name in the first place to a “vague” letter on such a contentious issue?;  and then, if it’s the other names only the list, doesn’t that rather reduces the whole argument to the level of a high school popularity contest? That said, a question of who sits next to whom in the cafeteria may resonate more with the target audience than the musings of Noam Chomsky do.

PS: And now Jodie Comer gets it in the neck for, uh, what her boyfriend’s politics may or may not be.

PPS: I actually got round to reading the full list of signatories and notice that it includes two of my cultural favourites, Greil Marcus and John McWhorter. But should that in and of itself encourage me to agree with the letter? Or, conversely, if I don’t like what the letter says, should I burn my copy of Lipstick Traces? It’s so confusing...

PPPS: Another view from Billy Bragg.

I first noticed the phrase “OK Boomer” a few months ago, but didn’t really get it. I’m neither a boomer nor a millennial; I believe I fall into the sociological sweetie jar called Generation X (named after the Douglas Coupland novel, not Billy Idol’s band or the Deverson/Hamblett book about 60s kids) so I believed that I had no particular skin in this game.

But I’m being pedantic, aren’t I, and referring back to books and music from the seriously olden days, which is exactly the sort of behaviour that prompts the phrase in the first place. It’s a non-specific “you wouldn’t understand” whine, just the sort of thing I probably wielded towards my own parents when I was about 15 and had been listening to Joy Division and writing some bloody awful poetry when I should have been doing maths revision.

What is interesting though, is that, by undergoing the intense analysis its suffered in the past few days, the #OKBoomer meme has immediately lost its special power, its ability to act as a secret code between the young, something that the old farts won’t get or even notice. It’s like a long-lost film or album that held us all in special thrall because nobody had ever seen it – A Clockwork Orange, for example, which couldn’t officially be shown in Britain for decades – that reveals itself to be pretty ordinary in daylight. But that was before your time, wasn’t it?

Stolen from Hegemony Jones on Facebook.

If we are going to have a made-up intergenerational culture war where one generation gets accused of being “problematic”, and the other gets accused of being “snowflakes”, can we agree in advance to make it about something - anything - other than Friends? I’m well up for a completely meaningless and invented ruck with the youth, not least because they are all going to outlive me, the little bastards, but I’m not prepared to die in a ditch in defence of the most anodyne shit known to man. A man has standards. It’s hardly Ice-T or Piss-Christ.

So there was a blog meet. Remember them? It was when people we only knew as authors of blogs, often under whimsical pseudonyms (noms de blogue?), would gather awkwardly in a bar (the location of which would have taken days to agree on) and start to develop real-life relationships, slightly hampered by the fact that we didn’t know whether we should be addressing each other by our blog names or those that our mums had sewn onto our school jumpers. Not for nothing was it called meatspace; it was bloody and indigestible and made you sweat if you consumed too much and could wreak havoc with your bowels. The real fun came in subsequent days when we all tried to translate the analogue experience into blog form, remembering different jokes, different drinks, different disagreements and flirtations and awkward silences.

• Good Night and Good Riddance: How Thirty-Five Years of John Peel Helped to Shape Modern Life, by David Cavanagh
• Magical Girl (2014, dir: Carlos Vermut)
• The Archers

I’ve just worked out how old I’ll be if this lasts another 10 years and I want to hide under the table...

...people are always saying the words are banal and why doesn’t anyone write lyrics like Cole Porter any more, but we don’t have any presidents like Lincoln any more, either.