Alwyn Turner argues that we are in a “post-fiction world” in which the death of any form of common culture means that any remaining common points of reference (Sherlock Holmes, Daleks and so on) are from the past. Nothing new is coming along that we can assume everybody, or even a healthy majority, will know and understand. (Turner also reminds us that you don’t need to have read a line of Doyle, or even seen a film or TV adaptation, to know who Sherlock Holmes is.) And what stands in their place is the mundanity of fact:

The need for a shared culture remains, but in the absence of fiction we have the dominance of ‘reality’, a social agenda dominated by news stories and sport, not by Morecambe and Wise or who was on Top of the Pops last night. Strip away major events – the Royal Family, Brexit, Covid – and what have been the shared moments of the last ten years? The fortunes of the various national football teams, dissatisfaction with politicians and politics, and a handful of hashtags (#MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter) that emerged from the internet to dominate conversation around the dinner-tables and water-coolers of the nation. It’s all factual. 

Coincidentally, I’ve been reading Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines, which collects short news items from French publications in the early 20th century, any one of which might be the starting point for some convoluted epic by Flaubert or Hugo. Or, indeed, to monopolise a water-cooler for a few minutes.

“To die like Joan of Arc!” cried Terbaud from the top of a pyre made of his furniture. The fireman of Saint-Open stifled his ambition.  

At Troyes, M.M.C., a hide merchant, was run over by a train. One of his legs rolled into a ditch.  

Accountant Auguste Bailly, from Boulogne, fractured his skull when he fell from a flying trapeze. 

The gendarmes of Morlaix were sent to Plougar to substitute lay teachers for the nuns who had barricaded themselves in the school. 

Frogs, sucked up from Belgian ponds by the storm, rained down upon the streets of the red-light district of Dunkirk. 

Nurse Elise Bachmann, whose day off was yesterday, put on a public display of insanity. 

And a few lines later...

A certain madwoman arrested downtown falsely claimed to be nurse Elise Bachmann. The latter is perfectly sane.

Of course the news that an AI-generated summer reading list for the Chicago Sun-Times was weighted heavily in favour of books that, er, don’t actually exist has embattled meat-and-mucus critics crowing over another thing that our new digital overlords have royally arsed up.

But hang on a minute. We don’t need ones and zeroes to invent new works from the likes of Isabel Allende or Percival Everett. Remember Jim Crace’s Useless America, which owed its (non-) existence to a mangled phone conversation with someone at Penguin? Or indeed my own Lady Gaga biography, which never progressed beyond a few weeks of research, but still garnered five stars on GoodReads. 

In any case, even when the product is real, do you really think the (human) author of such thumbs-up compendia has made a series of informed decisions about what should or should not be included? I spent several years on a strange planet called Lifestyle Journalism and, trust me, very often you have little to go on bar a press release and an advertising exec suggesting forcefully that it would be very helpful if specific products from her client might be included, or else. So, yes, this book (or holiday or necklace or vodka or cardigan or chi-chi gluten-free bistro or invasive surgical procedure) is good and you should buy it, because we say so, even if we’ve never been in the same room as the bloody thing.

Ultimately, AI succeeds not by doing things better than humans, but by doing them equally badly.

PS: Another example from the archives: in defence of the Black Crowes review that was more like an educated guess.

I was an early adopter of Twitter and loved its rambunctious vibe for many years. It even brought me a brief moment of notoriety. 

I was relaxed about the change of ownership but gradually sensed a coarsening of the texture, hearty debate being replaced by shrill chanting, like a digital Millwall match. So I used it incrementally less and then, about a year ago, I stopped using it entirely. Few people noticed, I’m sure, but reports from those still in the trenches suggested I’d made the right move. I’m now on Bluesky which, for the time being at least, is more to my taste. And, since the recent US election, and Elon Musk’s prominent role in that unfortunate occurrence, a lot more ex-Tweeters have come on board.

But that’s just my take. Brian Klaas puts things into historical context (did you know about the lunar bat people of 1835?) and explains exactly how Musk weaponised his acquisition and why we should worry whether we use it or not: 

Our attention is finite, and the more we divert it to sensationalist lies, the more that we aid and abet actual conspiracies and corruption that warrant harsh public scrutiny. If we aren’t careful, we’ll meme ourselves straight into dystopia. Unfortunately, amid those embers of a dysfunctional society burning itself down, it’s clear that those who lit the match on the internet will inevitably become rich, now with the help of Musk.

I mentioned a few years ago that the two best ever instalments of the Sunday Times magazine’s venerable A Life in the Day feature were both by actors called Tom. What I hadn’t realised, because like so many others, I’ve lost the habit of burrowing into the weekend papers, is that the Telegraph has for some time been running its own pallid simulacrum of ALitD and, unsurprisingly, it’s not as good.

Well, until the gurning greengrocer Gregg Wallace took his turn and, well, it still wasn’t good but at least it was funny.

(At the Royal Academy shop.)

We’re now so deep into a digital version of reality that consumers need advice on how to use postcards.

No, I probably won’t be watching, although it’s as much time pressures and a general sense of ennui rather than any objection to Qatar’s record on human rights or even the venality that got them the gig in the first place. But I am intrigued by the Fan Leader Network, supporters whose tickets, travel and accommodation have been comped in exchange for “enthusiasm and positive social media comment”. I mean, how can enthusiasm be measured? How do you value performative ra-ra-ra? What sort of comment by one of these Potemkin fans would prompt the Qataris to ask for their money back? (They’ve already cancelled the per diems.) Ah, I know what it reminds me of...

Karen Joy Fowler: 

I’ve long had a morbid obsession with the honours system, as manifested by the various baubles doled out twice a year or so in the name of the monarch. In one sense it’s entirely pointless and silly, but it gives so many hints as to how power and privilege operate in modern society, it can’t sensibly be ignored. This shows especially when we dig down into the particular gongs that particular individuals get. The actors Vanessa Redgrave and Joanna Lumley become dames; William Roache and June Brown, whose fame comes mainly from roles in long-running soap operas, get OBEs, several rungs down the ladder.

One award in particular fascinates; the CMG (Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George) bestowed upon Daniel Craig as he vacates the role of James Bond. No disrespect intended to Craig himself, who deserves a nod as much as Lumley or Roache. But why this one in particular? It’s an honour generally given to diplomats and other senior government servants rather than actors and most significantly, it was given to Bond himself for his various homicidal and amatory exploits in the service of Queen and Country. Except that Bond is a fictional character and the award was given by his creator, Ian Fleming, rather than by a shadowy committee operating under the nominal authority of the Queen. Essentially, an award more usually given to people for doing a thing is here being given to someone for pretending to do a thing. 

And as I look down the rest of the list, I ask myself how many of the recipients – and not just the actors – fall into the latter category.

I’ve written before (here and here) about the strange back alleys into which self-Googling can take you. The problem seems to be that whole sites are based on data parsed from other sites, without a flesh-and-blood bullshit detector in the middle. I have no idea whether anyone but me has seen the page claiming that I was born in Chicago, and died in 2007, but it is there. (If a lie appears in the the digital forest and nobody reads it except its subject, might it just as well be true?)

Anyway, here’s a new one. Nobody knows what I weigh, which is a relief; but they have managed to calculate how rich I am, which comes as a pleasant surprise. It’s just a pity that I’m too dead to enjoy it.

I need to say from the outset that I do not disbelieve Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman when she says she got a job pretending to play the violin while a CD played, at the behest of a man she describes only as The Composer, who didn’t recognise Beethoven’s Fifth when he heard it. Instead – and her current role teaching creative writing at Northern Kentucky University may be relevant here – I might suggest that her account of her time with The Composer, her poverty-stricken Appalachian childhood, her drug addiction and mental collapse occupies a sort of Schrödinger’s Cat space on the fact/fiction continuum. Essentially, it’s better all round if we’re not quite sure if it’s true or not, whether this is a raw, honest memoir or an arch, postmodern, subtly metafictional conceit adopting the trappings of a raw, honest memoir. A solid decision either way makes the narrative a bit less interesting.

I dealt with this area a while back, discussing Salman Rushdie’s attempts to block a memoir by his own protection officer, which had apparently dipped its toe into the jacuzzi of fantasy; the problem being that Rushdie’s whole career had been based on a similar creative fudging of the boundaries.

Again, I’m not saying that Ms Hindman is playing similar games; just that I wouldn’t be surprised or upset if that turned out to be the case. But I would experience a tinge of regret that the ambiguity is over.

Re-reading Mystery Train, in which Marcus dared to reframe the mythology of American popular music – and wider culture – in explicitly literary terms, the careers of musicians and politicians alike compared to Huckleberry Finn and Captain Ahab and Jay Gatsby. He’s particularly cutting about a man who was, at that time, the personification of political venality and vulgarity, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

But even LBJ might have had a vague idea who Huck and Ahab and Jay were, what they meant. What, asks New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik, of a man who hasn’t even read the books he pretended to write, a veritable President for a post-literate age?

Mr. Trump has been playing himself instinctually as a character since the 1980s; it’s allowed him to maintain a profile even through bankruptcies and humiliations. But it’s also why, on the rare occasions he’s had to publicly attempt a role contrary to his nature — calling for healing from a script after a mass shooting, for instance — he sounds as stagey and inauthentic as an unrehearsed amateur doing a sitcom cameo.

An interesting piece about the dimness of contestants on Love Island, although the closing paragraph raises rather more questions than it answers:

All reality TV is a stage, and the men and women upon it are mere players. It is impossible to know whether the Love Island contestants know where Barcelona and Rome are, but are performing ignorance for the amusement of viewers, or if they really don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Are you not entertained?

Making yourself look stupid in order to be liked isn’t entirely a new idea, and in the current mood of anti-expert populism it almost certainly happens in circles other than reality TV; idiocy has become weaponised. But back to the adventures of the orange people in Majorca: couldn’t we have maybe one show per series where they all have to pretend to be cleverer than they are? Although, if we accept the findings of Messrs Dunning and Kruger, the main problem is that they probably don’t know how clever they are (or aren’t).

PS: Earlier vaguely relevant musings on the wondrous science of agnotology.

An extraordinary story by Jody Rosen in the New York Times, about a fire at the Universal Studios in Hollywood in 2008 that destroyed the masters of sound recordings by, among many others, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Patsy Cline, Bo Diddley, the Andrews Sisters, Etta James, Ray Charles, Burt Bacharach, Captain Beefheart, Al Green, Iggy Pop, Nirvana... essentially, a massive chunk of 20th-century American music ceased to exist in matter of minutes. I’m not sure what’s more astonishing, that such a calamity was allowed to occur, or that its full extent is only now being revealed, more than a decade on. 

But does it matter that much? I mean, it’s not as if the music is entirely lost, is it? Well, some of it is: it turns out that some of the material lost to the flames had never seen a commercial release, had never made it off the tapes in the first place. There’s a bigger point, though, as Rosen argues:

But the case for masters extends beyond arguments about bit depth and frequency ranges audible only to dogs. It enters the realms of aesthetics and phenomenology. Simply put, the master of a recording is that recording; it is the thing itself. The master contains the record’s details in their purest form: the grain of a singer’s voice, the timbres of instruments, the ambience of the studio. It holds the ineffable essence that can only truly be apprehended when you encounter a work of art up-close and unmediated, or as up-close and unmediated as the peculiar medium of recorded sound permits. “You don’t have to be Walter Benjamin to understand that there’s a big difference between a painting and a photograph of that painting,” [producer Andy] Zax said in his conference speech. “It’s exactly the same with sound recordings.” 

Comedy that brands itself as dark and edgy requires a certain amount of resistance from its consumers to justify its existence, so I’m sure Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator and star of Fleabag (the second series of which is happening on BBC1) was delighted when several people popped up to declare that miscarriage was not something that should be joked about.


In fact, the miscarriage in the first episode was – apart from its initial shock value, because, no, it’s not something you do expect to happen in a sitcom – more of a McGuffin, setting the stage for a climactic, post-prandial punch-up and developing the awkward relationship between the chaotic Fleabag and her superficially in-control sister. It’s a brave, dangerous show, not least because the central character is a gloriously bloody difficult woman; but it still fits into a classic genre, the British comedy of embarrassment. And now (we’re currently half-way through the series) we’re getting properly self-referential and post-modern, as Fleabag’s droll arch glances and one-liners to camera have been noticed by the sweet, sweary, probably alcoholic Catholic priest (Andrew Scott) she’s determined to shag. If the asides were already Brechtian, the explicit reference to them adds so may layers to the artifice it’s hard to see how she can escape. Verfremdungseffekteffekt, maybe?

Of course, the whole idea of acknowledging the camera’s existence was a key element in the success of The Office, the show that brought Ricky Gervais to most people’s attention. This, however, was in the context of realism, as the cameras were there within the fiction (for the fly-on-the-wall documentary that many of us thought we were watching for the first few minutes of episode one) as well as in reality.


In his new Netflix show, After Life, there are no furtive glances at the camera. The closest we come are the video messages that the terminally-ill Lisa has recorded for her journalist husband Tony (Gervais) and the clips he’s shot of the daft pranks he played on her in happier times. After his death, he declares that the only thing holding his back from suicide is responsibility to look after his dog; the dénouement is [SPOILER ALERT] that, despite his best efforts to become a walking, talking delivery mechanism for toxic abuse, there are plenty more people who love and need him: a new young writer on the local paper he is assigned to mentor; his sad, adoring godson; the amiable sex worker who cleans his house. If the narrative leans towards gloomy neorealism, the setting is defiantly artificial, a pleasant English rural location somewhere between large village and small town, constantly bathed in improbable sunlight, where everything seems to be within walking distance, including the beach. This of course only serves to set Tony’s seething agony in stark relief.

After Life has also prompted complaints, from those who think the nihilistic despair of the recently bereaved shouldn’t be a matter for comedy and, to an extent, I think they’re on steadier ground here, because that is actually what the show is about; where they’re wrong, though is that After Life isn’t in fact a comedy. Sure, calling a 10-year-old schoolyard bully “a tubby little ginger cunt” offers the same sort of transgressive giggle as Fleabag’s gynaecological mishap, but ultimately Gervais’s offering is a tragedy in which funny things are allowed to happen; Waller-Bridge is orchestrating a farce that occasionally throws up tragic moments. (Incidentally, with regard to the language, Netflix seems to be more forgiving than the Beeb; Scott’s priest character was originally meant to refer to his brother as “a cunt” but this had to be changed to something less offensive. So the absent sibling became “a paedophile”. Which is better, apparently.)

I still don’t buy into this notion that we’re in some golden age of TV; it’s simply that more TV is being made, so inevitably there’s more good stuff to be found. Sturgeon’s Law still applies. But Fleabag and After Life are both clearly in the top 10% of that top 10%. As to which is better, I’d just say that while Fleabag dazzles with its wit and sheer devilish attitude, After Life is more like getting a punch in the gut when you least expect it. Fleabag I watch behind barely parted fingers, gasping at its sheer bloody-mindedness; After Life I can barely watch at all, for all the right reasons. Fleabag is a superb piece of Art, while After Life is Life itself.

PS: This just in, via Henry Hitchings on Twitter: Nabokov reference (unreliable narrator?) at the bus stop

We should no longer be surprised that Artificial Intelligence is generating much of what we are encouraged to call “content”, whether it’s words or pictures (ceci n’est pas your mum). The tipping point comes when it’s not just the product, it’s the consumers who exist beyond meatspace. As Max Read reports in New York magazine:

Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”

Which raises all sorts of questions: can there be a valid Turing test if neither party is human (but each assumes the other to be)? And does Baudrillard’s hyperreality become hyper fraudulent? (“Wasn’t it always?” chuckle the cynics.) And if we’re not brains in vats, could we just be phones in racks?

I was going to write something covering the bizarre tale of the band Threatin, which appears in reality to be a figment of its own imagination, with a fanbase to match. In short, an LA-based musician called Jered Threatin booked several venues in the UK, claiming to have sold hundreds of tickets to each gig, but he hadn’t really and as a result the venues and support bands were the losers. I’m torn by this; I dislike dishonesty, but I’m also wary of people who put too much emphasis on the chimera of “authenticity”. In a battle between a bad-haired twit living out his rock ‘n’ roll delusions in public and local metal bands who make a virtue of their “realness” (above and beyond being any good) I’d probably side with old Jered. And yeah, I’d probably have said something about Baudrillard, and how the illusion of Threaten conceals a reality that never existed and all that sort of good stuff.

But I won’t bother because the excellent Everett True wrote a review of their recent London gig which is utterly true, and utterly inauthentic. Which is pretty much what you want, isn’t it?

The more I think about this, the more tempted I am to take it utterly seriously...

If I just assume that I have been having a weird dream, which started with Bowie dying, then the last 31 months or so make more sense

— Sir Robin Jerk Bogg (@robinbogg) 23 August 2018

A man fell into a hole. More specifically, he fell into Anish Kapoor’s art work Descent Into Limbo, which is a big hole, currently in a floor in Portugal.

Two thoughts. First, since this is part of a temporary exhibition, how does one transport a hole, a gap, an absence? How does one insure it? How much does it weigh?

Then, presumably the unfortunate gentleman stepped into the hole because he thought it was only an image of a hole, a picture of one. But it wasn’t; his fall was ultimately a confrontation with empirical reality. As is so often the case, I blame that Belgian rascal Magritte. Ceci est un trou.

Academic research is mainly a matter of finding stuff that people have already written about (so you can include proper references) but got wrong (so you can justify your own pathetic existence by disagreeing with them).