Dilettantes with day jobs

Popping over to Nick Cohen’s place I notice two things. First, that he’s had a redesign (a significant improvement, too). Second, that in the process he’s cut Think of England from his list of ‘Comrades’. Such are the thanks one gets for buying his book twice and pointing out the mini-roundabout in Upper Street, Islington.

This cruel, cruel snub I’m sure has nothing to do with the argument we had over the sale of the Huffington Post, in which I criticised Nick for his, with hindsight, quite indefensibly absurd argument that Ms Huffington ripped off those people who blogged on her site for no pay. I say ‘in hindsight’ it was ‘indefensibly absurd’, because I have since realised that she could easily have actually charged amateur bloggers for the privilege of using her platform to find an audience for their twaddle, and made money from them that way before even coming to selling out.

During the course of this ‘debate’ Nick rather childishly busted my pseudonym, but since my 23rd year when I suddenly grew two inches and started ‘filling out’ I’ve generally been the bigger man in most company, so not only will I keep Nick on my list of ‘Friends and Foes’ (right), but I will even go so far as to dedicate to him the following random list of Dilettantes with Day-Jobs.


Matthew Arnold – school inspector
Charlotte Bronte – governess
Anton Chekhov – doctor
TS Eliot – Colonial and Foreign Accounts Clerk for Lloyds Bank of London
William Faulkner – Postmaster, University of Mississippi
Henry Fielding – Magistrate
Nathaniel Hawthorne – weigher and measurer at Customs House
Franz Kafka – Chief Legal Secretary of the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute
Philip Larkin – librarian
Baruch Spinoza – lens grinder
Henry David Thoreau – tutor, repairman/gardener
Anthony Trollope – Postal Surveyor

London and Not-London

Rod Lidl writes a lot of sloppy, pointlessly provocative tosh (as Nick Cohen knows, it's not easy to keep generating controversial angles and moral outrage to deadline), but this is very good:

Not-London does not think like London; it has its own ideas. And these ideas have diverged from those of the capital over the last 20 years; they were always a little distant, but never so much as they are now. Economics is, as ever, at the heart of this widening chasm.

It is often said, by its critics, that the BBC has an inherently left-wing bias across its output. I don’t think this is correct. It is certainly biased, but it is not, to my mind, a left-wing bias: it is a metropolitan liberal bias. It is not noticeably biased on issues such as the minimum wage, or redundancies, for example, or the need for the government to invest in industry, which you might expect if its bias was truly from the left. Its bias is that of London’s: a sort of mimsy faux-leftism based on economic self-interest. We are ruled by the ideas of London — or, to be more accurate, a certain affluent and arrogant part of it. A gilded crescent that stretches from Ealing in the west to Hoxton in the east, south to Dulwich, Greenwich and Wimbledon, and north to Hampstead Garden Suburb. From within this place emanate all the shibboleths of Politically Correct Britain, and its epic sense of rectitude that no person in public life dare challenge.

Evangelistically secular, socially ultra-liberal and unwilling to allow even the mildest challenge to its political hegemony. And you can see why; for the London middle class, immigration, for example, means nicer food on the high street, much cheaper nannies and plumbers and mini-cab drivers and so on. (But this is just the London middle class: to be sure, there are plenty of parts of London that should also be designated Not-London; the poorer, nastier bits, where these views do not hold sway). Beyond London, out in the desolate wilds of Not-London, ie in the rest of England, the economics do not work in quite the same way.

(from a duelling article with AA Gill about the BBC move to Salford, alas behind the paywall)

We’ve all been there

Via Nige I discover this riveting BBC article about cardboard boxes, which includes perhaps the greatest introductory paragraph ever written:

We've all been there. Surrounded by clutter, left with nothing to house the mess. Enter the cardboard box.

I’ve been trying to come up with an homage that might do justice to its majesty (see the comments). Alas my imitations are pale, the best I’ve managed so far being:

We've all been there. Holding a bowl of soup, left with nothing to somehow transfer it into our mouths without creating a mess. Enter the spoon.

Can anyone come closer to the original’s thrilling perfection? What about something like…

We’ve all been there. Standing on the first floor of our houses, wondering how to safely reach the ground floor where we might find the kitchen and other useful rooms without actually plummeting from a window and in the absence of an elevator or fireman’s pole. Enter the staircase.

No, I just can't seem to get that je ne sais quois...

Any excuse

Has anyone yet managed to see a single story in any paper or media outlet about the News of the World phone-hacking scandal that doesn't feature a large image of the lovely Sienna Miller?

Fanatics (revisited)

Yesterday evening, after a long day’s roaming, I was relaxing with a pint in the Bonaparte bar at Bristol Temple Meads rail station when in walked Caroline Lucas MP, flanked by flunkies. She was there, it eventually became clear, to be interviewed by a national newspaper journalist whom I recognised but can’t for the life of me name (poss early 60s, genial but jowly, white hair, black eyebrows.) They sat together at a table for two; she iterating sincerely-held beliefs in a series of firm finger-jabs, he generously indulging this with the honed eyebrow-raised superiority of the senior hack.

But what a curious entourage it was, fussing around the UK’s sole Green MP. Ranging in age from adolescent to decrepit, and clad in alarming garments including a bright purple fleece and a tattered tweed blazer, they really did look like the sort of oddball assortment that you might find, as I previously speculated, meeting in the backroom of a public library to discuss the workers’ revolution. Caroline, it was clear, is the acceptable telly face of the Greens.

Easy to sneer at that lot – as I’ve just proved above – but I suppose they do at least they add a bit of variety to the political landscape, otherwise now entirely composed of identical PPE graduates.

Intro of the Year

According to Baltic legend, when the Arctic storm wind blows down from the mountains across the tundra it heralds the arrival of the Great Wizard, Nischergurje, from the north. In his left hand he carries a gold drum hammer and in his right a Magic Drum, with which he summons his comrades.

‘Do you hear it on the wind? Do you hear its beat! beat! beat!’. The call goes out, enticing the listener to inclusion with those who are already under its spell.

Tim Headley in This is Anfield on Fernando Torres' possible transfer from Liverpool FC to Chelsea.

Gutter press

I note that the 32-year old man arrested in connection with the murder of Jo Yeates hasn't been named. Rightly so, but how do the rules work on this?

The treatment by the media of landlord Chris Jefferies - photos that made him look as odd as possible, and lots of irrelevant tittle-tattle from former school pupils etc - was just about as low as British hackery has stooped in recent memory. The broadsheets were as bad as the tabloids too.

Dear Points of View, I wish to complain....

...about the plummeting standards of journalism on the BBC News website.

One element of my day job (now only an occasional element) is to fire off digestible little daily business news stories for various websites. Coming up with these used to be a cinch because you could simply re-hash the Beeb's efforts a bit. But take a look at this risible piece of 'Peter and Jane' writing posted in the Business section today:

The government will now pocket the money raised instead. The British Property Federation said this was unfair. The government said money had to be raised from somewhere. The scheme in question is called Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC).

Blah de blah. The cat sat on the mat. Then I woke up.

Doubtless this decline in standards is due to the sheer quantity of daily verbiage expected of news websites these days and they're now farming out copy to Indian schoolchildren but really, things have come to a pretty pass indeed when the Beeb isn't even worth plagiarising.

Lynn Barber's mother's shopping list

In the Sunday Times mag yesterday (here, but paywalled) ungrateful child Lynn Barber laid gleefully into her late parents yet again. I particularly enjoyed this...

Then there were the weird shopping lists — Fisherman’s Friends, Nigroids, senna pods, elderflower water, tartan slippers. “Could you just pick up a darning mushroom?” my mother would say, or a summer-weight yellow cardigan, must be Courtelle not Crimplene or Dacron. She had an encyclopaedic knowledge of man-made fibres but the names she gave me never seemed to appear on the labels.

…Shopping for my parents took me to dingy shops in far-flung suburbs where they still had stock left over from the 1950s. A new eiderdown — not on any account to be confused with a duvet — took me from north London to Southall….

Underwear was always a huge problem. My father demanded a particular sort of knitted cotton vest and longjohns that M&S eventually stopped making. I was in despair till I noticed they had some thermal underwear intended for skiing that looked much the same. “What’s this poofy rubbish?” he shouted as soon as he laid hands on it. Apparently it had a silky texture.

Wot, no Wild Swans by Jung Chang?

The Death of Sex

The Sunday Times mag this week carried a lengthy article by feminist academic Camille Paglia about Lady Gaga and 'the death of sex' which, as far as I could tell - and I read it carefully though, of course, as a layman - made absolutely no sense at all.

That article is behind the paywall, but you might enjoy this 1993 fax flame war between Paglia and the equally monstrous Julie Burchill. These two are what some people might admiringly call 'ballsy' women - 'ballsy' apparently meaning 'having the worst and most pathetic masculine characteristics', such as a vast but paper-thin ego.

Clicktivism is ruining leftist activism

Bloody hell, the Guardian’s editors really will let anyone loose on Comment is Free, won’t they? The long-term problem I suppose will be the complete erosion of whatever credibility the name has left.

But in the meantime, somebody called Micah White writes one of the great comic blogposts of recent times, following in the illustrious footsteps of Kingsnorth/Monbiot and Marc Nash.

“Clicktivism,” announces White, “is ruining leftist activism.” This is important because “at stake is the possibility of an emancipatory revolution in our lifetimes.”

The problem, you see, is that “exclusive emphasis on metrics results in a race to the bottom of political engagement.” “Gone”, cries White, “is faith in the power of ideas, or the poetry of deeds, to enact social change. Instead, subject lines are A/B tested and messages vetted for widest appeal.”

Clictivists are comparable to both McDonalds and Wal-Mart (both of which are, as we all know, worse than Hitler and almost as bad as George W Bush). But White is determined to resist, and ends with a stirring call to arms:

“Against the progressive technocracy of clicktivism, a new breed of activists will arise. In place of measurements and focus groups will be a return to the very thing that marketers most fear: the passionate, ideological and total critique of consumer society. Resuscitating the emancipatory project the left was once known for, these activists will attack the deadening commercialisation of life. And, uniting a global population against the megacorporations who unduly influence our democracies, they will jettison the consumerist ideology of marketing that has for too long constrained the possibility of social revolution.”

But who is this Micah White, bravely resisting the use of internet campaigns for leftist causes? He’s a Contributing Editor at Adbusters and an 'award-winning activist'. You can join his online Fan Brigade here.

The three-legged dog of Westminster

What is there to protest about these days? This is an interesting piece on the 'Democracy Village’ protesters in Parliament Square. Tasty titbits include the description of some protesters protesting against other protesters within their own protest for being Christian; and the fact that uber-protester and London landmark nut Brian Haw views the Village as yet another dastardly plot by the State (the sole, overriding and thus far remarkably unsuccessful purpose of the British state being, of course, to prevent Brian Haw from protesting).

But for me the most striking thing about Tanya Gold’s article was the line “A three legged dog lies on the grass.” Unexpected and jarring, it looks like it’s been put in the wrong place:

There are 20 tents, some homemade signs and a sailing boat near a sound system which the inhabitants use to make speeches and read poems. It is not, as the mayor and other critics have claimed, filthy, but it does have a chaotic, never-to-be-seen-again curiosity: a campsite surrounded by the Treasury, the Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey. A three legged dog lies on the grass.

Why is this three-legged dog suddenly brought to our attention? Who is its owner? Is it part of the protest or merely an innocent observer? Or is it a metaphor for something? How significant is the missing leg? Did the State remove it? Does the dog represent the protestors, weakened but defiant? Does each of the three remaining legs correspond with one element of the Treasury/ Palace of Westminster/Westminster Abbey triumvirate? What breed is it, what colour? Above all, is its tongue lolling out so that it looks like it has a big silly doggy grin on its face?

Paywall

On the subject of the Times paywall, I’ve been asking myself: why do I buy newspapers? In fact now I only regularly buy the Sunday Times, which costs £2 a week, the same as the paywall that I’m still unwilling to breach. So why do I buy the Sunday Times for £2 a week?

1. telly guide
2. cryptic crossword
3. a general Sunday ritual
4. columnists
5. film, book and music reviews

For those reasons in that order. I’ll read the sport and some of the news, but it will be stuff I already know from the TV and internet, mainly the BBC. I don’t care about most of the ST lifestyle supplements. I’ll leaf through the mag.

The Times paywall can only offer me 4 and 5, in a different format. But The Guardian is just as good for reviews, if not better, so 5 is irrelevant. That leaves the columnists. The Times probably does have the best roster of hacks, but are they worth £2 a week compared to free papers and blogs?

Possibly, but the other side to this, strangely, is that if I did pay £2 a week I would feel obliged to read them regularly in order to get my money’s worth, and I don’t want to feel tied.

The Times Online needs to tempt me with something new that only it can offer. The web offers interactivity, so perhaps it needs to make its columnists work much harder. Get them all to interact with readers in the way that Peter Hitchens does - in the way that, um, bloggers do for free.

Marina Hyde

In addition to having a magnificent proboscis, Marina Hyde is the closest thing that British hackery has to a Queen of Snark. Read her here on Lindsay Lohan’s incarceration. Hyde manufactures a lot of good verbiage out of the world’s trivial nonsensicalities. Perhaps she's wasting her talents. But then again, who isn't?

Her only serious rival for well-made snarkiness is probably Caitlin Moran, now hidden behind The Times’ paywall (anyone bought into that yet?). But Moran is, like her face, softer and a bit squishier than Marina Hyde, whose prose is as sharp as her nose.

And if you think this comparing of the columnists’ looks and writing styles is irrelevant and sexist since nobody worries about the physiognomies of male journalists, I’d just like to point out that Rod Liddle is sloppy and provocative in a tired sort of way, and Peter Hitchens is frightening, a bit twisted and clearly the less successful younger brother of Christopher.

Agent Green

Yes it was a terrible blunder but surely this headline in the Belfast Telegraph is taking it too far into the realms of conspiracy?

Update- alas, they've fixed the Belfast Telegraph website, which originally said "Steven Gerrard's flying start ruined by USA's Robert Green" .

Opening sentence of the week

Psychotherapy was arguably the most important innovation of the 20th century.

Alain de Botton (reviewing Couch Fiction by Philippa Perry).

Useful word, "arguably".

Fergie

I don't have much to say about the all-round unpleasantness of the Fergie sting/entrapment, but I did wonder, following the similar snarings of Lord Triesman, John Higgins etc, just how many of these traps are set? Do these 'investigative journalists' (ha ha) have a 100% success record, or do we only see the hits, and numerous celebs refuse their dirty money? Is there, in other words, some good left in this world?

Too much prose

It seems that some light can be shed on the Tiger Woods fiasco by an interview he gave to GQ back in 1997. An article by Charles P Pierce portrayed Woods as a vulgar and libidinous frat boy, who cusses freely and makes dubious jokes about well-endowed black men. The story goes that after this interview a Tiger Team of PR goons seized control of his image to ensure that he would henceforth be indistinguishable from the character in his Playstation game, and so he was until the whole phoney structure caved in last year.

You can read the piece by Charles P Pierce here. Or at least you can try, and if you manage to get to the end you deserve some sort of prize, because Pierce must be one of the most mannered hacks in print. The prose is, for me, literally unreadable. The hammered repetition of “Is it blasphemy? Is it?” reminded me of something which I eventually remembered to be a Steve Coogan bit on The Day Today (see below) and overall it recalls the ghastly self-consciousness of Chuck Palahniuk (‘Annoying’ isn’t the right word for his book Choke, but it’s the first word that comes to mind) or even worse, Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, one of the few books I’ve been tempted to throw across the room before the end of the first chapter.

Over at Ragbag Gaw links to some authorly tips. I particularly like this pair from Elmore Leonard:

- Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

- Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".

These are fine rules and should only be broken for purposes of irony or bathos (eg. “If you do that I’ll break every bone in your body, rip your head and limbs off, bury the body parts and dance on the grave,” he explained helpfully).

It's difficult not to write too much prose. Re-writing largely consists of deleting. God knows what Charles P Pierce’s first drafts look like but he should read more Jane Austen and Michael Wharton. Well, everyone should.