Surfer, passing by: will you pause to list the three Beatles songs you like best, today?

. Artists, Culture after Gutenberg, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate . , , , ,
‘Happy Birthday, MIL22!’Photograph by postgutenberg@gmail.com

‘Happy Birthday, MIL22’

Elderly intellectual Parisian piano teachers married to each other in the latest Michael Haneke film, Amour, are exercising their right to musical snobbery when they sniff disdainfully at the idea of someone playing a tape-recording of ‘Yesterday’ at the funeral of a member of their elevated social set. It takes less than two seconds to realise that this exchange could easily have been stolen from real life — the Beatles having been, arguably, the 20th century’s most irresistible agents of cultural democracy before the internet took off.

The letters of Samuel Beckett starred in last winter’s reading at post-Gutenberg — and made our blog’s most popular entry. This winter, the essays of a fastidious, spinsterly Cambridge don psychologically married to his mother for much of his life (or so it always seemed to us) have been our special delight. It hardly matters how E. M. Forster came by his understanding when, in 1940, he answered his own question, ‘Does Culture Matter?’:

Culture is a forbidding word. I have to use it, knowing of none better to describe the various beautiful and interesting objects which men have made in the past … Many people despise them.

[…]

I know a few working-class people who enjoy culture, but as a rule I am afraid to bore them with it lest I Iose the pleasure of their acquaintance. So what is to be done?

It is tempting to do nothing. Don’t recommend culture. Assume that the future will have none, or will work out some form of it that we cannot expect to understand. … The difficulty here is that the higher pleasures … rather resemble religion, and it is impossible to enjoy them without trying to hand them on. The appreciator of an aesthetic becomes in his minor way an artist; he cannot rest without communicating what has been communicated to him … It is therefore impossible to sit alone with one’s books and prints, or to sit only with friends like oneself, and never to testify outside.

… So, reader surfing by, this month, this year, or as long as this blog is alive … are you moved to testify on behalf of the Beatles oeuvre – put your three most beloved songs from it into a comments box below, with or without an explanation or any expectation of a reaction? … A message in a bottle cast out to sea?

Marcel Proust, punk rocker avant la lettre (… a post about, well, … language)

. Culture after Gutenberg, E-books . , , , ,
Fasnacht in Switzerland's MittellandPhotograph by postgutenberg@gmail.com

Fasnacht in Switzerland’s Mittelland

In some lucky, freezing parts of the world, this is a time for the licensed collective madness called winter carnivals. In German-speaking Switzerland, the prelude to Lent named Fasnacht or Fastnacht gives the famously orderly Swiss an excuse for escaping their usual selves in ritualised abandon and disciplined bacchanals – all dressed up in fantasy.

We suspect that it was in this state of mind that a Swiss correspondent of post-Gutenberg’s sent us a link to one of the most unlikely obituaries we have ever read. It might have been written specially for Fasnacht – in deepest sympathy with the spirit of this celebration – even if it is an actual encapsulation in a London newspaper of the life of a 1960s English rocker we confess we had never heard of.

What is it about the life of Reg Presley of the Troggs that makes us especially ashamed of our ignorance? These extracts (below) will explain, to anyone too busy to read the original — who will want to know that the Larry Page mentioned in our first clip was the group’s manager.

Two conclusions occurred to us when, frantic for oxygen, we reached the obituary’s end:

(i) It would seem that long before the villainous internet killed culture — if you believe some of our fulminating, fuddy-duddy, cultural guardians — our era’s counterpart for sumptuously graphic Chaucerian language, describing essential functions of the human body, entailed using a single word beginning with the sixth letter of the alphabet a lot. Okay, an awful lot — through mindless, spontaneous repetition.

(ii) It was not some ignorant online – Amazon! — reviewer but a professional dead-tree critic in faraway 1971 who pronounced rocker Reg the equal of the most venerated writer in the French literary canon.

Page dressed his protégés in loud striped suits and urged them to maintain an impeccable image offstage. Presley, a moderate drinker who smoked, by his own estimation, an average of 80 a day for most of his life, never took illegal drugs. But Page was also particularly insistent that the group refrain from swearing. With time, the musicians found this stricture more difficult to adhere to.

In the late 1960s, a studio engineer secretly kept the tape rolling while The Troggs were airing musical differences between takes. The recording begins on an optimistic note, with one member explaining that: “This is a f—— number one. It f—— is. This is a number f—— one, and if this bastard don’t go, I f—— retire. I f—— do. Bollocks. But it f—— well won’t be unless we spend a little bit of f—— thought and imagination to f—— make it a f—— number one. You’ve got to sprinkle a little bit of f—— fairy dust over the bastard.”

Later in the discussion (ironically the song in question, never released, was entitled Tranquillity) a note of disharmony begins to creep in. Presley offers some advice to Ronnie Bond, the band’s drummer. “You can say that,” Bond responds, “all f—— night. Just shut your f—— mouth for five minutes. Don’t keep f—— ranting down that f—— microphone. F— me, Reg. Just f— off and let me keep going f—— through it. I know it ain’t f—— right. I can f—— hear it ain’t right you —-. F— me. When I f—— hear it in my f—— head, that that’s what I’ve gotta f—— do, then I’ll do it. You big pranny.”

“The Troggs’ Tapes”, as the bootlegged session became known, became one of their most enduringly popular recordings. Parodied in a scene of Rob Reiner’s 1984 comedy This is Spinal Tap, it was eventually issued legally, as a bonus CD in Archaeology, a 1992 boxed set of the group’s collected works. “I was a bit annoyed about the tape at the time,” Reg Presley said, “because it was a while before we knew it even existed. We found out in a pub, in west London. This bloke came up to us and said: ‘You’re the Troggs, aren’t you? Have a listen to this.’”

Presley was informed that pirated copies of the 11-minute tape, unpurged of its 114 expletives, had been eagerly purchased by his rivals in the music business, and that black market vendors were reporting a more satisfactory level of customer feedback than was usual with a Troggs recording.

This was unfair. For Wild Thing, With a Girl Like You and Any Way That You Want Me were outstanding singles which inspired a host of performers, including Iggy Pop. The late American writer Lester Bangs even went so far as to publish a 25,000 word eulogy to The Troggs, which hailed them as the godfathers of punk and called their music “holy”. At one point Bangs, whose critical instincts occasionally betrayed his prodigious consumption of narcotics, compared Reg Presley to Marcel Proust.

[…]

When discussing space travel, Presley tended to depart from the standard vernacular, referring to interstellar craft as “the bugger” or “the bastard”, and to interplanetary communications systems as “tackle”. In 1994 he claimed to have obtained footage of a metallic disc seen hovering over crops, an object which, he said, was “nosin’ around at corn height”, and “sniffin’ around the field”. This, he argued, was “one of the little fellers – the ones with the big cow eyes, which in UFO circles we call the greys. I’ve got a sneaking feeling that they are engineered by aliens who can see the future; if they know a woman is going to lose a baby they take it and they convert it. They put in a bit of extra brain. Maybe no vocal. But they can mind-read you.”

If an alien craft landed and offered to abduct him, Presley reflected in 2006, “I hope I would have the bottle to go. Because I’d like to ask them a lot of bloody questions. And they’ve probably got all the answers. These beings may be 20 million years in advance of us. What kind of technology must they have? You could come back to earth and not know a soul on the planet. But perhaps you would have seen something that would help save the whole human race. And maybe some people have done that.”

Note at a publishing crossroads: is it time for Ian Rankin to move over and let younger Scots writers take his place?

. E-books, The future of publishing . , , , ,

postgutenberg@gmail.com

They’d said it would take me 105 days to get to Mars in Unicorn One. I’d only been going for eight days. The window was facing away from the sun but a glint of refracted light must have found its way through the thick quartz glass. I saw my image reflected amongst the stars. My hair looked terrible.

Now, who on earth could that be?

Ah, … the main character in a delectable short story, ‘Unicorn One’, in a collection titled Storm Damage. Any reader who tests works of fiction by sampling random paragraphs is immediately compelled by this e-work to scroll back a few pages to learn that

 … within ten years of standing on that hill with Tommy, I would be selected as Scotland’s first astronaut. Not the first Scot to go into space, of course, but the first one to be chosen for Scotland’s Independent Space Program. The world’s media had regarded our endeavour as a joke. Too long had we been seen as England’s or America’s poodle. The German press had shown photographs of our most dilapidated, forsaken housing estate ghettoes and asked what kind of people would begin a Space Program with this kind of poverty rampant in their back yard.

[…]

Even within the Space Program, I had not been a popular choice for first astronaut. They had turned down pilots and scientists, Marines and arctic explorers, mountaineers and deep sea divers, only to choose me, a hairdresser from a remote Scottish town.

‘It’s necessary nowadays,’ they had told me, ‘to find people the public can relate to …

When we reached that sentence, at post-Gutenberg, we were not simply shaken out of a mood best described as chiaroscuro-verging-on-dark. Soon, we were reading all the way back from the beginning – an opening that we would have found just as irresistible, had we started where most people do:

There was a beautiful bird on the branch, singing. It was small with brown wings and perfect white chest feathers. Its tone was too shrill and its eyes darted. Its whole manner was erratic. The sunlight was salmon-pink among the trees and I knew something was wrong, something was going to happen. I didn’t hear a sound, except the bird singing, until the shot went off and chips of wood sprang towards my cheek from the tree I was standing near …

To think that in the old days of traditional print publishing, we might never have had the luck of reading John A. A. Logan — a marvellous writer happily undaunted by chronic cold-shouldering by literary gatekeepers. His success in e-publishing turned him into a lodestar for anyone publishing unmediated e-books as independently as Virginia Woolf once released her own experimental novels in print.

When we wrote about him and other young literary Lochinvars a few weeks ago, we did not mention that we had been thinking of how wonderful it would be if Ian Rankin could only award John his latest monster advance from his publisher in recognition of the e-book writer’s infinitely fresher perspective and fizzing imagination. The once-unique Rankin creation, the boozy, crusty and jaded police detective, John Rebus, has suffered, in recent years, from his inventor’s all too-obvious irritation and boredom with being forced to spin yet another tired yarn about him.

In November, this trend earned poor Ian Rankin the gimlet-eyed attention of a contributor to Private Eye’s books section (issue no: 1328) reviewing his latest novel – described as

full of reliable Scots wisecracking and people saying ‘Back in the day’, and … clearly written at one hell of a lick. Like many a previous Rebus outing, its final effect is to call the whole basis of Ian Rankin’s career into serious question.

Ouch. The Eye did not mince its words, fingering the culprit for this apparently lazy and self-indulgent offering by a writer who has by now grown accustomed to having an overstuffed piggy bank:

Brought to a waiting world amid a flourish of publishers’ trumpets, attended by wall-to-wall publicity … Standing in Another Man’s Grave can be marked down as a triumph for the old-style trade-book model …

Of course old-fashioned publishers are still capable of surprising and thrilling us with new discoveries, but at today’s publishing crossroads, you would have to be a fool to look only in their direction for the best new work.

Which is worse: fantasy presented as fact by a high-ranking veteran journalist — or by film-makers not in the documentary business?

. 4th Estate moves, Blogging and bloggers, Leveson Inquiry . , , , , , , ,
Third view of 'The Mysterious Baths,' Giorgio De Chirico (see the last two posts)Photograph by MIL22

Third view of ‘The Mysterious Baths,’ Giorgio De Chirico (see the last two posts)
Photograph by MIL22

Surrealism. Surely, the art movement for our time.

What other tradition in image-making supplies better backdrops for recent events in — say, the dance between media and human life?

On that subject, we are making quick notes about what we know we will find impossible to believe without them, at some future date:

Item 1: a well-known columnist and ex-editor, Simon Jenkins, howls in outrage about facts twisted to heighten the drama in two feature films inspired by recent history.

His opinion on the subject matters. He has been chosen as a special adviser on decisions related to future press regulation, the focus of governmental negotiations with newspapers in the wake of the Leveson Inquiry. This is an appointment that, for reasons deducible below, amounts to giving the machine-wrecking Ned Ludd of Luddite fame a job as factory foreman.

Simon says, about two new films, Argo, whose subject is the escape of U.S. diplomats from Iran in 1979, and Zero Dark Five, a dramatisation of the military operation that killed Osama bin Laden:

Makers of films captioned as “true stories” claim either that fabrications do not matter as they are “just making movies”, or that they are justified in a higher cause. Yet they can hardly be both. Cinema in my view is the defining cultural form of the age. It deserves to be taken seriously, and therefore to be criticised for shortcomings. If the most celebrated of “docudramas”, Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, could go to lengths to authenticate its storyline, why should not any film claiming truth to history?

This is an intrinsically odd objection. The tradition of pretending to tell the truth in the service of art goes back as far as the book considered by some authorities to be the first novel, in the West, Don Quixote (originally, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha; 1605). Miguel de Cervantes, the author, pretended to be merely the translator of an actual historical record of Quixote’s adventures by a Moorish scribe, Cide Hamete Benengeli. The exhausting true title of the book most of us know as Robinson Crusoe (1719) is The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an uninhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was delivered by Pirates.

A delightful essay about Daniel Defoe’s winking invention of Crusoe — unrelated to the subject of this blog — appeared in The Wall Street Journal a few days ago. It describes critics complaining about Defoe ‘going too far in in creating the novel’s solid sense of actuality’. But that is irrelevant to its status in posterity. The essayist, Danny Heitman, is hardly isolated in declaring that ‘the book’s most abiding message is its affirmation of literature itself.’

Item 2: the same journalist, Simon Jenkins, foists a bizarre reality-distortion field on readers every time he writes about internet culture and our increasingly computer-permeated lives.

Against ever-longer odds, he strains to persuade us in elegant prose that we are well on our way to post-digital life. Is he joking? Apparently not, as he goes to pains to present curious factoids for substantiation — for instance, these:

A mild sensation was created this summer by the revelation that Google, Apple and Yahoo executives were sending their children to California’s Waldorf schools, where computers are banned. The masters of the e-universe appear convinced that computers “reduce attention spans and inhibit creative thinking, movement and human interaction”. Classes have reverted to using blackboards, chalk, pens, paper, books and even teachers.

Post-digital is not anti-digital. It extends digital into the beyond. The web becomes not a destination in itself but a route map to somewhere real.

Really? How many children were involved in this trend supposedly sweeping Silicon Valley? An inconsequential sub-fraction — according to one blogger’s good humoured evisceration of the non-evidence in an excellent post on Papyrus News about the rather less overblown report in The New York Times on which Simon was apparently leaning:

The article [mentions] four Silicon Valley firms: Google, Apple, Yahoo, and Hewlett Packard. Between them, those firms have tens of thousands of employees, with tens of thousands of children. A total of 294 children go to the Waldorf School (not all of whose parents work in high-tech industries). Does that mean that 99% of employees in high-tech firms believe that computers do have a role in education?

Nowhere are classrooms ‘reverting’ to chalk and blackboards. In the very week in which Simon wrote his screed, the most-discussed news in education was the explosion in disembodied learning through online courses offered by universities like Stanford and internet tutoring in maths and science for school children.

Nor has he yet produced a single convincing argument or anything resembling a fact to support his prediction of a transition to ‘post-digital’ existence — now mentioned by him in at least three columns.

In 2009, he announced — and was congratulated by several naive commenters for his revelation — that there was a reason why ‘the ghost of Gutenberg’ was about to ‘die laughing.’ And why was that? According to Simon, a new venture was downloading text from the internet and selling on the streets of San Francisco a publication called The Printed Blog. Lo! he crowed triumphantly, ‘[F]or the Jeremiahs who tell me that I and my medium are doomed to litter the fish-shop gutter, I have news. . .’.

If nothing was heard of this thundering victory before he wrote his column or since, it is because there never was any such publishing exercise in San Francisco. You might imagine that either he or his editors should have discovered that themselves — simply by checking, a basic act in journalism — for the column grandly titled ‘Old is new. Even Gutenberg’s ghost has returned to live in Silicon Valley.’ (N.B.: a detail: San Francisco is not and never has been considered a part of the cradle of high technology.)

Yet, last weekend, there was Simon himself playing scolding schoolmaster,

Fiction may be free and facts expensive, but film-makers are not short of researchers. Commentators may be accused of choosing facts to prove their opinions – plague the thought – but that is different from falsification. Nor do they excuse lies as higher truth. The licence to report carries responsibilities.

Well. Erm … yes.

Item 3: a judge cites the fictional spy James Bond’s wide renown to justify a real-life decision unfavourable to chiefly female petitioners treated by undercover police as sexual prey. Some of these policemen had children by the women, even five-year relationships with them, then disappeared without a trace.

In a column last week, Jonathan Freedland recorded with fully-warranted fury that

Mr Justice Tugendhat […] ruled on whether a case brought by 10 women and one man duped into fraudulent relationships by undercover police officers should be heard in open court or in a secret tribunal.

The decision hinged on whether the law governing agents of the state allows them to form sexual relationships with those they spy upon. The good judge believes that when MPs wrote the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) in 2000, permitting undercover police to form “personal or other” relationships, they must have meant it to include sexual relationships. After all, the legislators were bound to have had one particular secret agent in mind. “James Bond is the most famous fictional example of a member of the intelligence services who used relationships with women,” Tugendhat declared, lending “credence to the view that the intelligence and police services have for many years deployed both men and women officers to form personal relationships of an intimate sexual nature”.

[…]

Those involved tell of deep and genuine attachments, the men integrated into their lives as partners, living together, travelling together, attending family gatherings, sitting at a parent’s bedside, even attending a funeral.

[…]

[T]his was the hacking of people’s lives, burrowing into the most intimate spaces of the heart in order to do a job, all authorised by the police. It is state-sanctioned emotional abuse …

Such horror was nearly as hard to believe as Simon Jenkins’s assertions that print was on its way to re-capturing eyeballs lost to screens, or that computers were on their way out of education — only it was actually inflicted on real people.

Item 4: a teacher of the storyteller’s art complained in The New York Times, a fortnight ago, that most of his students were no longer capable of constructing narrative fiction that made sense of the world.

That will hardly surprise any reader who has reached this paragraph of our post. The teacher, Steve Almond — whose splendid essay deserves to be read in full said, in part:

About 10 years ago, in creative-writing classes I was teaching, I began to encounter a particular species of student story. The hero was an unshaven man who woke in a strange room with no idea where he was or why. Invariably, something traumatic had happened to him, though he didn’t know exactly what. The rest of the story sought to reconstruct his arrival in these dire circumstances, via scenes that had been chronologically mutilated for maximum profundity.

My standard reaction to such pieces was to jot earnestly flummoxed queries in the margins like “Where are we?” and “Is it possible I’m missing a page?”

[…]

The underlying … question is whether the story of our species — the greater human narrative — has simply become too enormous, too confused and terrifying, for us to grapple with. This might explain why so many of us now rely on a cacophony of unreliable narrators to shape our view of the world and ourselves …

… So, to summarise these jottings in reverse order: people whose job is to tell stories have given up on trying to make sense; judges justify police mistreatment of citizens, citing figments of a novelist’s imagination as proof of societal sanction for it; a journalist prone to presenting wild invention as fact admonishes spinners of screen fantasies for not doing what is supposed to be his job — strict adherence to the truth.

There is an ancient Hindu conception of the world as all-maya — which means, illusion.

There was a time, not long ago, when it was hard to understand.