The barbarian

I don’t know whether David Starkey is a racist. I doubt very much whether he knows either, because the word has ceased to have any empirical meaning, now being little more than a Humpty-Dumpty term of socio-political abuse (see also “politically correct”). But – probably inadvertently – he has raised another issue, about black culture. Or rather cultures, as his fellow panellist Dreda Say Mitchell argued, rightly pointing out that black British people should not be defined as a group  in terms of second-hand gangsta archetypes.

But if this is the case, that there is no single, homogeneous black culture, surely the same applies to the majority (dominant, mainstream, white, British, Judeo-Christian, whatever you want to call it) culture. Starkey probably wouldn’t wish to be defined by the antics depicted on The Only Way Is Essex. Indeed, I suspect he wouldn’t wish to be defined by comparison with Simon Schama or Niall Ferguson either. And if it’s impossible to define culture at the micro-level of self-publicising TV historians, (What would the collective noun be? A pontification?) then how the hell can you do it on a broader scale? What is white culture, English or British or western culture? It’s everything, and as such is nothing.

While the neds and scallies and oiks and rudies of all colours were smashing windows and burning buildings, it was Dr Starkey who – again by accident – laid waste to culture as we know it.

(Five Chinese Crackers weighs in, with just the right combination of passion and forensics; and you’ve probably already read Charlie Brooker on bling, but anyway. And then Rhodri Marsden on how the above video clip fits into everything. You may be none the wiser, but don’t say you aren’t better informed. PS: And also something about the contribution of urban [non-]planning, by Owen Hatherley. Do I spoil you or what? That said, I might write about something unriotous next time.)

Turandon’t

Sir Jonathan Miller personifies a delicious paradox: he is an exceedingly clever man, and also a bit of an idiot. A few years ago he criticised the RSC for casting “that man from Doctor Who” as Hamlet, conveniently forgetting that David Tennant had taken substantial roles for both the RSC and the National several years before he first set foot in the Tardis.

And now we hear that the tenor Alfie Boe doesn’t much care for going to the opera; indeed, he didn’t select anything from the genre when he was on Desert Island Discs yesterday, favouring instead a rather Q/Mojo-friendly selection of classic raawwk (Dylan, Zep, Floyd, etc). Sir Jonathan is not impressed, remarking: “I’ve only worked with him once and he sings rather well but I know he comes from something other than opera. He was a car mechanic, I believe.”

Now what the hell is that supposed to mean? OK, there’s the straightforward snobbery of the remark, which conveniently forgets that Kathleen Ferrier worked in a telephone exchange, and Enrico Caruso installed drinking fountains. I suspect that when Miller directed his first opera, there were antediluvian ponces who objected to his own shady past as a comedian, film-maker and medical student. But “Something other than opera”? Does he mean that opera singers should be clones, pod people, spawned in glorious, sterile isolation from any cultural influence that might contaminate what the Good Doctor (Miller, not Who) thinks is right and proper?

You know, I reckon he probably does. And who are we to argue? He is, after all, an exceedingly clever man.

To shake the tattered arras

The charms of a Somerset village may be extinguished by the proposed building of a vast housing development, we are told. This would really only be a story of local interest – albeit one that exemplifies all sorts of deliciously English conundra about the competing claims of class and aspiration and ‘heritage’ and cold, hard cash – except that the village under threat is East Coker, which shares its name with a poem by TS Eliot. He first visited the place in 1937, when he discovered his ancestors had lived there in the 17th century, before emigrating to New England; his ashes are interred in the village church.

This connection is strong enough to have provoked the concern of the TS Eliot Society of America, which has added its voice to the usual hubbub of opponents to such change, from devotees of architectural history to people worried about the value of their own houses. (Only in Britain is the phrase ‘affordable housing’ a pejorative.) Now, I could understand the Elioteers’ concern if their man had actually lived and worked in East Coker, if its skies and fields and stone and timber had seeped into his poetic soul. But it was only really the idea of East Coker that prompted him to write the poem, its small role in his own heritage and identity, its place in the continuum of life. Had his family come from Nempnett Thrubwell or Huish Champflower or Wellington Without, who can say that the piece would have been radically different?

It’s interesting to consider what Eliot’s own reaction might have been. No doubt he was a frightful snob: apparently, when the first edition of ‘East Coker’ sold 12,000 copies, he declared that this proved what a bad poem it was. And I’m sure he would have been baffled by the success of Cats, and found the notion of Andrew Lloyd Webber getting a peerage as utterly wrong. But despite his High Tory, High Anglican instincts, he was also deeply impressed by the Vedic notion of impermanence: as he says in the poem, “Houses live and die.” Although, as if to admonish anyone who wants to read too much into his own lines, later on he also says “The poetry does not matter.”

And here he is in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture:

Neither a classless society, nor a society of strict and impenetrable social barriers is good; each class should have constant additions and defections; the classes, while remaining distinct, should be able to mix freely; and they should have a community of culture with each other which will give them something in common, more fundamental than the community which each class has with its counterpart in another society.

Eliot may have liked East Coker as it was in 1937, but he would have been aware that it had changed enormously since his forebears left it in the 1660’s; and that it would inevitably change again and keep changing. Also from the poem:

Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces...

Or, since I stopped writing poetry years ago: Shit Happens.

Top table

Because I’ve spent a big chunk of the past few weeks going to fancy-schmancy restaurants (I know, I know, pity me), I do find myself pondering even more deeply than usual the precise methods that allow us to identify some things (food, books, music, shoes, whatever) as just that little bit better than something else in the same category. Of course, ultimately it’s subjective, but equally, sometimes you don’t just *think* it or *feel* it, you know it. I’m thinking of two restaurants in particular, which for reasons of personal safety I’ll call X and Y. Both have hugely talented chefs, pay top money for the best ingredients and have helpful, charming, well-informed staff. And neither, needless to say, is exactly inexpensive.

So why do I know in my bones that X is better than Y? It’s something to do with the service: when a waiter at Y brings you a dish, the whole process is meticulously choreographed and scripted. I’m sure the staff at X have equally rigorous training, but it doesn’t show; or rather, you can’t see how it’s done. You can believe they’re serving you because they want to, because the transaction brings them as much pleasure as it does you. This may, of course, be a cruel illusion, but its one that is expertly sustained throughout the meal.

I could argue that it’s a matter of class, but that’s a pretty loaded word, even more so in a hierarchical country such as Thailand than in the West. On the other hand, I’ve heard Americans use “classy” to describe someone who not only knows what fork to use, but also helps old ladies across the road. Maybe that’s more like it. OK, a brief anecdote that clarifies why restaurant X is classy. A few years ago, a group of wealthy Chinese businessmen dined there. At one point, one of them snapped his fingers to summon a waiter. The waiter began to respond, but the maître d interposed himself, appeared at the businessman’s side and asked: “I’m sorry, sir, have you lost your dog?”

Of course, it’s very easy to turn this into a declaration that a certain kind of person isn’t allowed to play with the pretty, sparkly trappings of high living or high culture. From the New Yorker a couple of months back, Kelefa Sanneh discusses Jay-Z’s book Decoded:

One day four years ago, Jay-Z was reading The Economist when he came across an article bearing the heading “Bubbles and Bling.” The article was about Cristal, the expensive champagne that figured in the rhymes of Jay-Z and other prominent rappers. In the article, Frédéric Rouzaud, the managing director of the winery behind Cristal, was asked whether these unsought endorsements might hurt his brand. “That’s a good question, but what can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it,” he said, adding, slyly, “I’m sure Dom Pérignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business.” Jay-Z was irritated enough that he released a statement vowing never to drink Cristal again, and he started removing references to Cristal from his old lyrics during concerts. (He eventually switched his endorsement to Armand de Brignac.) In Jay-Z’s view, Rouzaud had not only insulted hip-hop culture; he had violated an unspoken promotional arrangement. “We used their brand as a signifier of luxury and they got free advertising and credibility every time we mentioned it,” he writes. “We were trading cachet.” (Actually, the book, not free of typos, says “cache.”)

It’s that last sentence that really puts the knife in. The problem with Jay-Z isn’t that he’s black, or a rapper (Sanneh is a black hip-hop fan), or even that he’s so crass as to discuss the mechanics of product placement in the open. And the matter of whether he can tell Cristal from Krug in a blind tasting is left unraised. Sanneh’s complaint is that he can’t be arsed to hire a decent proof-reader, which betrays a lack of respect for his reader. Not classy.

To be fair, in Jay-Z’s celebrity world, one might have to trade class – however you define it – for credibility. His latest protégé, Hugo, has raised a few eyebrows, bluegrass reimaginings of hip-hop million-sellers not necessarily being what you’d expect from the English-educated spawn of Thai aristocracy. I met him at a party a few weeks ago (Hugo, not Mr Zed); he’s frightfully well-spoken, far posher than I am. I didn’t check on his spelling skills, but I bet he’d never snap his fingers at a waiter.

A shallow piece of dignity

Much rabble-rousing was occurring in the Twitsphere yesterday around the hashtag “#savelibraries”, a response to proposed cuts to library services in England and Wales. People were encouraged – initially, as far as I can tell, by the comedian-cum-provocateur Robin Ince – to explain in sub-140-character form why they thought these temples of auto-didacticism were a good idea. And there were many heartwarming tales of people finding refuge in these temples of bookishness, and of using them as springboards to better things, better worlds, better lives.

Every now and then, someone popped up to suggest that the best way to support libraries is to use them; politicians would not dare to cut back a service that millions of voters used on a regular basis. I felt a little guilty at this. OK, I haven’t been in the UK much in recent years, but when I have, I haven’t exactly been battering down the doors of my local reference section. I’m not sure whether I’ve even had a library card since I was a child. Do they still have library cards, or do users get a chip implanted in their necks? I don’t know.

But then why should I feel guilty? I don’t make use of housing benefit or income support or domestic violence refuges or soup kitchens, but I still think they should be available as part of an overall need to iron out the social creases. Which suggests that my perception of libraries – a place for people who can’t afford to buy that many books – is diametrically opposed to that of the head of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, who  claimed that they were too white and middle-class. So should the sort of earnest Guardian readers who campaign to save libraries visit them to demonstrate support, or avoid them because they can afford to buy books at Waterstones, and they’re crowding out the single mums? God damn you England, why does even reading have to be a class issue?

One observation, or maybe two. When I was editing the Guinness Book of Records, I’d be on the receiving end of accusations that I was dumbing the product down, that there were too many pictures of luscious babes in the world’s most expensive bikinis and elderly Indian gentlemen hammering nails into various bits of their anatomies; and not enough info about the world’s rarest tulip. My argument, then and now, was that we were persuading the most book-averse demographic – boys of about 12 – to ask for a book for Christmas, and around that time it was only us and JK Rowling who could do that. And I still maintain that that’s not a bad thing to be doing.

On the other hand, when I enter a bookshop or library, and wander to the fiction section, and seek out the C’s, and I see half a dozen Jonathan Coes and even fewer JM Coetzees, separated by a vast breezeblock of Paulo Coelho, I do wonder whether simply saying to people “Here are lots of books; why not read some of them?” is quite enough.

Of facts and calculations

Not surprisingly, the spending cuts affecting higher education in the UK look likely to have a disproportionate impact upon institutions that only or chiefly offer arts-based courses. Just as happened in the Thatcherite 80s, the balance has been tipped in favour of notionally “useful” subjects, that can guarantee the fastest possible return on investment; the difference now being that a far higher proportion of that investment is provided by the student rather than the state. The spirit of Thomas Gradgrind, Dickens’s utilitarian schoolmaster with his pathological loathing for anything other than facts, hangs over the coalition like a chemistry experiment gone wrong. Leaving aside for a moment the heretical notion that a university education might be allowed to transcend the banalities of the balance sheet, and that having lots of educated, knowledgable people is good in and of itself for society as a whole, there are two reasons why this imbalance is stupid and self-defeating.

The first is that people who study arts subjects make money, for themselves and for the wider community. The whole Cool Britannia phenomenon was slightly embarrassing at the time, and now feels utterly cringe-making, but it did draw attention to the fact that there are some things – art, music, fashion, literature, even the odd movie – that the British can still make pretty bloody well, and other people will want to buy them. The Young British Artists – many of them spawned by Goldsmiths College, one of the institutions that seem likely to have their government support reduced to zero – were successful not just because of their creative skill, but also because of their entrepreneurial instincts. Moreover, because people like Damien Hirst and Jarvis Cocker were associated with British education, lots of foreign students thought it might be a good idea to come to Britain to study, bringing their dollars and euros and yen with them, much of it to the universities themselves.

Of course, just because Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Music and the Central School of Speech and Drama will suffer massive cuts in public subsidy, it doesn’t mean that Britain will stop producing good artists and musicians and actors. It just means that those artists and musicians and actors will come disproportionately – even more so than at present – from social groups where students can rely on the financial support of their parents. There’s nothing wrong with posh people; I’m hardly a horny-handed proletarian myself. But if the creative community is almost entirely drawn from the offspring of the professional classes, this will inevitably be reflected in the art and music and drama that is produced. Less Mike Leigh, more neo-Merchant-Ivories along the lines of Downton Abbey, which might produce a welcome fillip to the tourism figures for stately homes in the coming decades, but hardly presents an image of the United Kingdom as a nation ready to make a big noise against the clamour of the 21st century. I mean, why on earth would David Cameron (Eton and Oxford), Nick Clegg (Westminster and Cambridge) or George Osborne (St Paul’s and Oxford), not to mention the man tasked with the review into tuition fees (King’s, Ely and Cambridge) want to do such a thing?

The second point addresses the whole question of what a university education – indeed, any education – might be for. Yes, the Gradgrinds are right that we need more scientists and engineers to compete with the technological challenge offered by the growing Asian economies, not to mention plenty of lawyers and accountants to keep the wheels oiled and a doctor or two to stop them all dying on the job. But a modern society, a modern economy, also needs salespeople and marketers and copywriters, HR and PR staff, all sorts of people who are clever, but not in ways that can be neatly encapsulated by an academic or professional qualification; otherwise the glorious innovations of the scientists and engineers would just be garden-shed self-indulgences. Oh yeah, a few teachers might be handy as well. And what they learn at university is just as useful to them in their jobs as the science is to the scientists. Not necessarily the specific details of the literature or history or philosophy in their text books, although they’re always handy in a pub quiz; but the skills involved in dealing with something – texts, data, an ethical conundrum – coming up with a response to it, and communicating that response to an audience, coherently and accurately and persuasively.

That might sound like an easy call compared to isolating a genome or building a bridge, but evidence would suggest that people who can really do that aren’t all that thick on the ground, and they’re rather useful to businesses and other organisations. Not all employers need bridges to be built for them, and very few need an understanding of the geopolitical effects of the Congress of Vienna. But most employers need to draw on the sort of intellects that can analyse and explain the geopolitical effects of the Congress of Vienna, even if those intellects are engaged in planning a PR campaign a new bridge that your client’s just built. And while there are people who didn’t go to university who can do that, a degree course that challenges and provokes and teases such aptitudes from a student must surely be seen as a good thing, for the economy, for society and for its own sake.

Or maybe it’s just that if nobody studies arts subjects any more, eventually nobody will know who Thomas Gradgrind is?

People like us

One of the more difficult by-products of the UK Government’s recent spending review has been that everybody’s been forced to talk about social class again. As a public conversation it’s embarrassing enough, but it’s further complicated by the fact that no two people can agree on the precise vocabulary, or what it means. So the Guardian and Mirror argue that “the poor” will suffer the most; while the Mail and Telegraph chronicle the indignities to be endured by “the middle classes”. Clearly there is some sort of connection between income and socio-economic status, but it’s pretty hit and miss; think of anomalies such as poor, middle-class vicars and wealthy, working-class builders. The slightly ghastly sounding Middle Class Handbook classifies the tribe as those earning between £30,000 and £200,000, whereas the average income in the country is closer to £25,000, which suggests that in financial terms at least, the middles are somewhere near the top. Maybe we should just call them the bourgeoisie and shoot them all and be done with it.

One almost yearns for the years when everyone had a defined station in life, and stuck to it, as depicted in that epitome of guilty pleasure, Downton Abbey. Julian Fellowes, the creator of the show, has something to say regarding those who have found fault in its historical verisimilitude:

The real problem is with people who are insecure socially, and they think to show how smart they are by picking holes in the programme to promote their own poshness and to show that their knowledge is greater than your knowledge... The fact of the matter is that the really posh people are pleased to see something on television that isn't about a dead prostitute in a dustbin, and they seem to just be enjoying the programme.

Thanks, Julian, that’s explained everything. Although, as some have cruelly pointed out, Fellowes is married to a lady-in-waiting to Princess Michael of Kent, which makes him about as classy as a Big Brother contestant puking WKD over her Burberry tracksuit.

:-(

If you Google the name of the place where I lived between the ages of four and fourteen, the first result is for the Wikipedia page. The second is the entry on www.chavtowns.co.uk.

Class Waugh

I’ve long felt uneasy about my fondness for the writings of Evelyn Waugh, simply because the man was such an utter bastard. I’ve just come across a piece detailing some memos that he wrote when two of his books were being considered for Hollywood adaptation. (Neither happened.)

The first, on Brideshead Revisited, surprises only because it contains so many errors of grammar and spelling. Maybe he didn't take as much care when writing to mere Americans; or maybe his novels had the benefit of a good proof-reader.

But it’s the note about Scoop that’s a real jaw-dropper. On the decision to move the setting of the story from Africa to Europe, he writes:

It is appreciated, however, that this is a question of higher policy involving race relations in the USA and that if, for the moment, niggers may not be treated as the subject for comedy, dagoes must suffice.

And then:

It has lately been demonstrated that cinema audiences do not know whether the films they see are spoken in Italian or English. It is useless to write down to their level. Try to produce a work of art.

What price now for a shallow piece of dignity?

I'd hate to give the impression that the works of Douglas Coupland are essentially a string of vaguely connected smartarseries. On the other hand, this is from Life After God:

"One day I came home from the library, where I had spent the afternoon trying to make people feel middle class by scowling at them."

(And in response to all your kind messages, fine thanks, unless or until I need to go anywhere.)