Loud speakers

As the news comes in that the old-skool, analogue TV signal will be switched off in the UK next year, one might be forgiven for thinking that the ones and zeroes have finally triumphed. But apparently not. First there’s the story of the Occupy Wall Street protesters getting round a ban on amplified sound by what they describe as the human microphone – essentially an agitprop variant on Chinese whispers. And then we hear of one Nyanza Roberts, a teacher from Hull who is accused of using Facebook to make some unflattering remarks about her students. The neat thing here is that parents only became aware of the comments when some thoughtful soul printed them off and pasted them on walls and lamp-posts around the neighbourhood. Which is, I suppose, nothing more than social networking gone analogue.

PS: This just in from the London protest:

China crisis

An interesting (if you find yourself at all interested in that sort of thing) exchange between Andrew Marr and Jeremy Paxman on Radio 4’s Start the Week (about 13 minutes in, available until Sunday). If you can’t be bothered to follow the link, Mr Paxman (who used to present the show, but is there to plug his new book about the British Empire) thinks that the listeners will need a brief explanation of what prompted the Opium Wars of the 19th century; Mr Marr (who presents the show now) reckons they’re Radio 4 listeners, with all the assumptions about class and background and education that are implied by that, so they’ll have a pretty good idea.

I’m not sure. I vaguely remembered what it was all about, but that’s mainly because I did 19th-century history at A-level. Had the subject been the chemical properties of phosphorus or Greek adverbs or the impact of chaos theory on monetarism (or indeed vice versa) I might have appreciated Andy or Jezza giving me a gentle nudge in the right direction. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Any assumption about the level of knowledge and/or understanding that you can expect from your listeners/viewers/readers is going to leave some of them feeling patronised, others confused.  The pervading atmosphere of media inclusivity, which means assuming as little as possible about the knowledge base of the audience, surely alienates as many people as it includes.

But need it be that way? Supposedly, in this glorious digital age, we should be able to tailor sources of news and information so that we are only told about things that we find interesting. So we could choose to receive less foreign news, more business, not so much celebrity schlock, more sport (but no golf) or any such combination. Maybe the next step is to offer bespoke factual programming that’s crafted to appeal not just to what we want to know, but how we want it expressed; to a specific level of understanding, so the individual listener is neither baffled nor bored.

You see, if it had been the Schleswig-Holstein Question they’d been discussing, I’d have needed some help.

Hitler has only got one fishball

Sorry, yet another attractive-Asian-teenagers-in-swastikas story, closely following the Japanese cosplay and Thai game show tales. And we’re back in the Land of Smiles, for the tale of a Catholic school in Chiang Mai where the kids interpreted fancy dress in a manner that the present Pontiff might find a little disturbing (albeit less so in his younger days). The link, incidentally, is to the Daily Mail, in case you’re sensitive about associating with such a rag; but since we’re discussing TEENAGERS dressing as HITLER, a certain sense of proportion might be in order here.

However, if you really don’t want to go there, this gist is this. The Sacred Heart school in Chiang Mai has a tradition  of holding an elaborate fancy dress parade on sports day. This year the procession was led by a female Hitler; some students were dressed as SS guards (wielding toy guns) while others waved Nazi flags.  Many offered up an enthusiastic “sieg heil” or two. Some of the expats in attendance voiced their reservations but many of the teachers, let alone the students, simply didn’t understand why anyone might take offence.

And this is the issue. The notion of Hitler as the epitome of evil, a sort of über-bogeyman, just doesn’t resonate in most of Asia, especially with the young. Sure, they know he was one of the baddies – but just one of them. It’s not as if he’s Voldemort.

Still, at least Hitler’s Café in Mumbai has changed its name now.

PS: And some even more startling images from prachatai.com:

 

Against the current

The sainted Roger Ebert has torn into an intermediate level ‘retelling’ of The Great Gatsby that replaces great slabs of Fitzgerald’s heady prose with unspeakable blandness:

There is no purpose in *reading* The Great Gatsby unless you actually *read* it. Fitzgerald’s novel is not about a story. It is about *how the story is told*. Its poetry, its message, its evocation of Gatsby's lost American dream, is expressed in Fitzgerald’s style – in the precise words he chose to write what some consider the great American novel. Unless you have read them, you have not read the book at all. You have been imprisoned in an educational system that cheats and insults you by inflicting a barbaric dumbing-down process. You are left with the impression of having read a book, and may never feel you need return for a closer look.

Well, yes, but... As several of Ebert’s respondents have suggested, in the real world, the choice is not so much between reading emasculated Fitzgerald and reading real Fitzgerald, but between reading emasculated Fitzgerald and not reading anything whatsoever. This is a line I used often when I edited the Guinness Book of Records, which was often attacked for being glossy and sensationalist compared to the glory days of the McWhirter brothers: at least we’re getting 12-year-old boys to read books, I said, and that shut them up. Sometimes I almost convinced myself.

Meanwhile, that other great sage Prince Charles has declared that it is “awful” for young readers that there are no more Harry Potter books on the horizon; which would suggest that children eased into the world of literature by the Rowling brand are unable to break out of Hogwarts and attempt more challenging texts. That said, would that be such as great loss if the next thing they reached for was Gatsby Lite?

A book where men may read strange matters

Annie recently mentioned a bright but book-averse 13-year-old, and now a survey for Pearson indicates that 70% of boys can’t make it beyond the 100th page of a book. It’s suggested that the fault lies with the choice of set texts, but since the books singled out for criticism include Macbeth (violence and skulduggery that make the Bourne series appear rather tame, and a hero who’d fit in quite nicely on The Apprentice) and Of Mice and Men (doomed, dysfunctional bromance, plus violence), I can’t really see it; in any case, neither of them is particularly long.

So should we tinker with reading lists, and include more books that will engage the attention of pubescent males? And if so, which books? Or should we just accept that, as long as they’re functionally literate, plenty of people – not only boys – are happier in a book-free world?

Sous les pavés, le plagiat

British universities are riddled with plagiarism and cheating, it seems, although the poor, anonymous grunts using iPods as crib sheets could argue that they’re only taking tips from German aristocrats and the spawn of Arab tyrants.

At least in academia there are clear rules as to what constitutes plagiarism – the only problem is catching the buggers doing it. In what purports to be the real world, definitions are rather more blurred. Michel Houellebecq admitted to lifting big chunks of his most recent novel from Wikipedia, but invoked Perec and Borges as precedents, so that’s OK; the young German author Helene Hegemann said that her book Axolotl Roadkill did contain substantial elements from another text, but in any case, “there’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.” It wasn’t plagiarism, it was mixing, it was sampling; rather than calling on Borges, she was just taking tips from Berlin DJ culture. And everyone decided to let her off as well, because they wanted to be down wiv ver kids, like.

Journalism is stuck somewhere in the middle. Hacks aren’t expected to annotate every reference – indeed, they’re specifically permitted to remain tight-lipped about the identity of their sources – but at the same time they’re not really supposed to lift whole paragraphs from elsewhere and pass the action off as some sort of postmodern affectation. What is depressing is that it’s often done so badly, so artlessly, with no attempt to disguise the crime. Plagiarising journalists are often bad writers, so the stuff they’ve nicked is usually better written than their own work; and because they can’t write, they’re completely unaware of how easy it is to spot the lurch between styles.

But the real forehead/keyboard interface happens when they scoop something up from an online source – few are quite dumb enough to choose Wikipedia, but it does happen – and can’t be bothered to change the formatting, or remove the hyperlinks. I think we’ve reached a point where we can’t expect writers to have written the stuff they pass off as their work; but is it too much to ask that they might have read it?

PS: The title is a crap pun that’s been done several times before, but it’s in French, so that’s OK.

Decline and fail

Evelyn Waugh, interviewed in 1964, offers his opinion on James Joyce:

He began writing quite well and you can see him going mad as he wrote, and his last books... only fit to be set for examinations at Cambridge.

Every day I close the book

A few recent articles kicking around some similar ideas to those contained in my post last week about the value of arts and humanities courses. In The Guardian, Terry Eagleton goes all serious on us (“What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique.”) while Charlie Brooker is brilliantly, witheringly sarcastic: “instead of studying the whole of human history, why not focus on a concentrated period, such as the most exciting five minutes of the second world war?” And in a similar spirit, blogger Robin Tomens vows to join the philistines: “Perhaps I could reinvent myself as the type who doesn’t watch foreign films or listen to ‘weird’ music. This could be my New Year’s resolution. After all, who would care or notice?”

Read them all. Because you can.

Printernet

Jeffrey R Di Leo argues, in the US Chronicle of Higher Education, that The Book As We Know It is not necessarily dead, but at the same time is certainly no longer integral to the educational process. Indeed, his point is much the same as the one made by that disgruntled Simpsons fan on Amazon, although Dr Di Leo quotes Barthes rather than Bart (a joke that was a tad creaky when first made in the Modern Review in the early 90s, and rigor mortis was setting in by the time Stephen Bayley got hold of it, but I still like it).

Di Leo types:

Many concerns about the intellectual quality of digital publications are valid, and digital content can be easier to plagiarize. But those concerns are historical, not permanent. There is nothing intrinsically inferior about spreading knowledge on a screen rather than on a printed page, and plagiarism is an ethical issue, not a material one. Words may look better in print, and a book may feel better in your hands than a Kindle or an iPad, but the words are the same.

Most of which is true, but I’m not sure it’s wise to dismiss so brusquely the *feel* of a book. Even in academia, where books are often read to a purpose other than pleasure, they still provoke an emotional response – a relationship, even – that transcends the mere process of getting facts into the reader’s brain. The words may be the same, but that’s not always the point.

Moreover, while the potential for digital books to enhance the reading experience is obvious, I’m not that sure the punters will actually go for it. There have been many innovative experiments in digital publishing, such as Geoff Ryman’s 253, a hypertext novel about a Tube journey, and Train Man (Densha Otoko), which began life on a chat forum, but neither of them achieved anything more than a niche reputation until they were remastered in more conventional formats (Train Man became not only a book, but also a TV show and a movie). Di Leo would argue that this was the fault of critics and consumers, who failed to seize the opportunities that the digital versions offered. And this hesitancy persists.

I’ve always been a big fan of footnotes in dead-tree books, and when, over a decade ago, I first encountered the hypertext version of The Waste Land – which offered annotations to Eliot’s own annotations – I squealed with delight. This, surely, was the way forward for writers and publishers: not a reference was too obscure, not a word too difficult, because anything could be explained, elucidated, glossed, translated, without breaking the flow of the text. I think I’ve discussed before some of the other books that might benefit from such treatment (Nabokov’s Pale Fire; Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; BS Johnson’s The Unfortunates; Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual; Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman) but there seems to have been very little action on this front. The received wisdom is that today’s multi-tasking youth, who can simultaneously play Grand Theft Auto, message their friends, watch The Inbetweeners and roll aggressively towards policemen will have no problem flitting between text and notes. But few, it seems, want a book that’s anything other than linear in structure. I’ve been informed in no uncertain terms by several publishers that readers (of print books) find too many notes distracting, and that they should be a) reduced in number and b) sent to the back of the text. I can’t see that they’ll be any more keen to have their leisure reading interrupted by hyperlinks.

Although I adore conventional books, I don’t object to their being challenged by digital versions: as Di Leo says, the words are the same. But it would be something of a pity if the only reason e-books succeed is because they’re cheaper to distribute, and easier to take on holiday, and nobody wants to take advantage of their other possibilities.

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?

Knowledge is powerless

I’ve always been uneasy with the notion of Chinglish, as so often it’s an excuse to laugh at the fact that some foreigners aren’t entirely fluent in English. Ha ha. Of course there is no real equivalent in Asian culture (amusing examples of idiot gweilo making clumsy mistakes in Chinese), not because of westerners’ faultless grasp of oriental languages, but because we so seldom even make the effort and thus risk failure.

That said, there is fun to be had with the collision of languages and cultures. Sometimes a text makes perfect sense in objective terms, but still seems ever so slightly weird; for example, when a packet of Japanese incense is described as:

A convenient item to carry with you when visiting a grave.

And then there are those moments when all pretence to meaning is abandoned and what seems to be a random selection of English words are thrown against a wall; take the following, which I saw on a Bangkok billboard a few days ago:

You’ll find original super supecial road, it’s so great future!

Or indeed those that really are slightly off-target attempts to say something special in English, like this:


from the protests that took place in Bangkok earlier this year. As Andrew Marshall of Reuters explains, the slogan expresses (or would, if these purportedly educated Thais had got to the page that covers verbal adjectives) the disdain that many within the anti-Thaksin middle classes have for their poorer compatriots in the provinces, where the former Premier’s support is concentrated. But, presumably unwittingly, “UNEDUCATE PEOPLE” also communicates the agenda that countless governments and businesses and media concerns seem to be following these days, although few would admit it.

Don’t regret the error

I’ve always preferred the films of Terry Gilliam to those of Martin Scorsese. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the former is in some objective sense a better director than the latter; it’s just that while Scorsese’s films often deal with characters who are teetering between sanity and insanity, triumph and disaster, with Gilliam you’re aware that the whole production is doing that, with the director balanced precariously on top of the whole edifice.

So I have an instinctive sympathy towards the notion of a ‘festival of errors’, of the sort being staged in Paris this weekend. The French education system, in common with so many others around the world, has become so fixated on targets and examination results and serving the needs of business that students have become pathologically averse to making mistakes, and as such they’re unable to make intellectual discoveries of their own. The moment a teacher says “He’s a nice kid, but he asks too many questions”, you know there’s a problem, and it’s not with the kid. The only permissible query now seems to be “Will this come up in the exam?”

Paradoxically, by encouraging children to experiment with failure, we’re actually raising our expectations of what they can achieve, what they can cope with. The alternative is that they’re unable to deal with ideas that exist outside the parameters of the syllabus, the phenomenon of “we haven’t done that”. Although maybe it’s too late, when we get to the stage that books have to be written because 21st-century children can’t understand the antiquated language. Not Chaucer or Shakespeare or Milton, mind you, or even Dickens or the Brontës; they need help with the Famous Five novels of Enid Blyton, the first of which was published less than 70 years ago.

Capitalist piglet

A lasting memory from my days at university – one of the few actually connected with my studies – was a tutorial about William Blake which gradually turned into a discussion of the last chapter of The House at Pooh Corner. Our tutor, a man who died far too soon, elucidated Blake’s notions of Innocence and Experience in terms of Christopher Robin’s attempt to explain his own Going Away to his friend Pooh:

“I’m not going to do nothing anymore.”
“Never again?”
“Well, not so much. They don’t let you.”

Which had quite a resonance for a bunch of fresh-faced 18-year-olds, many grappling for the first time with overdrafts and washing machines, but not quite yet in the real world. At least we were still allowed to do nothing. We were studying English after all.

Many miles and years from the 100 Aker Wood, I happen upon a piece about the bloody iPad. The schtick is that the author, Peter Bregman, wants to give his back because “any free moment becomes a potential iPad moment.” And that’s the problem:

But something – more than just sleep, though that’s critical too – is lost in the busyness. Something too valuable to lose.
Boredom.
Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue. Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on. And that’s where creativity arises.

The funny thing is, Bregman isn’t some eternal student, a balding soixante-huitard who still deploys Christopher Robin and Blake and Alice and Syd Barrett and The Wind In The Willows and The Magic Roundabout in an effort to destabilise the military-industrial complex and justify the fact that he never irons his trousers. He’s writing for the Harvard Business Review, for crying out loud. This is work he’s talking about. So the next time your boss catches you staring into the middle distance when you’re meant to be doing something even less interesting, just tell her that you’re brainstorming with yourself, and she can run that one up the flagpole and see who plays Poohsticks with it.

“...a sausage roll with custard over it”

When I heard that Malcolm McLaren had died, and his long-term antagonist John Lydon spoke of him with some degree of affection, I tweeted:

When Simon Cowell dies, will Joe McElderry order us to miss him?

The point I was trying to make is that there’s not that much *moral* difference between McLaren’s quasi-Situationist shenanigans with the Sex Pistols, and Cowell’s pimpery to the proles of airbrushed eunuchs like little Joe; it’s just that in the 70s, the music was better.

But I was wrong. Of course I was wrong. Here’s a video of Malcolm last year, already clearly unwell, railing against the karaoke culture of Cowell and Blair and their ilk. If anyone was going to blame him for SuBo and Jedward, he wasn’t going to take the rap. There’s also a great riff about the sexuality of wine-tasting, as well as rock ‘n’ roll, William Morris, failure and much more.

Sorry, Malcolm.

The kids are all wrong

For many years I’ve been fascinated by the Langley Schools Music Project. Its weird appeal is summed up by Fred Schneider of the B52s, who remarked that “When I heard about the Langley Project, it seemed very interesting, but I did have the thought that it might sound like children singing off-key in a gym.” The point is that it really does sound like children singing off-key in a gym, because it *is* children singing off-key in a gym, but thanks to some strange conjunction of place and time and innocence and the instinctive brilliance of their teacher Hans Fenger, it’s also exceptionally moving. I saw Langley Mark II in action a few years ago, when Fenger worked his magic on some kids from south London schools, and it was lump-in-the-throat time. Old warhorses like ‘God Only Knows’ and 'Sweet Caroline’ became intense hymns of longing and exultation, reducing hacks and mums alike to tearful wrecks.

Fast-forward three decades and we get this:



It’s been made by the children and staff of Lewes New School, an independent establishment in Sussex that aims to offer “an educational environment on a human scale”. And yet that human scale is exactly what their version of ‘Changes’ seems to lack. It’s pleasant, it’s funny, it’s sweet, and I’m sure the kids worked hard and learned a lot and had a fine old time doing it, all of which is good. But there’s something just a bit too slick about the whole thing; for a start, the arrangement and instrumentation is too close to the original to match, say, the Langley version of ‘Space Oddity’. Maybe next time Lewes New School could just offer us some children singing off-key in a gym.

The wrong sort of clever

“...a thinly veiled comment about how important it is to wrap things up nicely - to write only what you can write in the duration of a Sats exam.”

I think I’ve found the story that encapsulates what’s wrong with education in the UK. Read this.

Rivers of blah

A long while back, probably around the time I was writing strongly worded letters to The Independent about their reviewers’ abysmal taste in sturdy footwear, I worked for the PUSH University Guides. One of my bright ideas was to write to hundreds of famous people (this was before celebrities were invented) to ask if they had any anecdotes, advice or sardonic one-liners about their time in higher education.

For some reason, one of the people I contacted was Enoch Powell. Why I thought that yer average A-level student might be interested in the reminiscences of a right-wing politician whose greatest (in)fame had arisen a quarter-century before, I’m not sure. But in due course, a communication was forthcoming from his Eaton Square eyrie, manual typewriter, notepaper not A4, pale blue to match his scary eyes. He let it be known that looking back at his time at Cambridge in the early 1930s, he regretted not having availed himself more of the social life; and he wished me to pass this on to our readers.

I immediately fashioned an image of the young Powell, an awkward, provincial, lower-middle-class youth, thrust into the lush, louche decadence of Cambridge; on a Saturday night, in his room, ploughing through Thucyides and Pliny while beautiful, confident, gilded aristocrats drink and flirt and smoke and cavort in the quads and fountains, their joys filtering through his window. And he wanted to join them, even for half an hour, but he knew he never could. For all the harm he’d done to race relations and social cohesion, from then on, I felt rather sorry for him. Even as I read the text of his notorious Rivers of Blood speech, he seemed less like a wannabe dictator, more like the butler in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, fatally unable to make that crucial human connection; hugely intelligent, but entirely lacking in understanding.

And on vaguely related matters, however cheesed off you are with the gimps and chancers who pretend to run this country, please don’t vote for the BNP today. The reason they can’t make a human connection is that they’re subhuman.

Songs from a (school) room

A short piece for RBP, about childhood and Leonard Cohen and stuff.

La Chanson de Roland II (the cover version)

Legend!ary journalist/musician/raconteur Everett True is reinventing himself yet again, this time as an academic, a process we can all follow in his thought-provoking new blog. Like Socrates with access to the complete K Records back catalogue, he poses questions that bounce between alt-rock, lit-crit, cult-studs and back again.

Here’s a frinstance, with specific reference to Roland Barthes: “Have there been any famous examples of post-structuralists being reprimanded for plagiarism?”

Funny you should ask, ET. One of the key books in my intellectual development (could that sound any more poncy?) was Myths and Memories, by Gilbert Adair. It was essentially a reworking of Barthes’s Mythologies, but from the point of view of a Scot born in 1944, rather than a Frenchman born in 1915. That said, Adair does explicitly acknowledge his debt; and after I'd read it, I went on to read Barthes, and then Baudrillard and Debord, and even tried to get into Deleuze, so nobody missed out, especially when the royalty cheques came round.

Essentially, Adair can’t be accused of plagiarism because he tells us that he’s plagiarising; he offers a knowing, known pastiche, not a forgery. Matt Barton, in his essay A Critique of Plagiarism, suggests that context is all:

My purpose here is not to praise dishonesty or dismiss it as harmless. What I am arguing is that a student who downloads a paper and submits it as her own is not so much guilty of “literary theft” as she is of lying about the type of work she performed.

So, provided she subtitles her essay ‘A Post-structuralist Tribute to Wikipedia’, she’s OK. If she doesn’t, she gets an ‘F’.

The thing is, if we follow the logic of Barthes’s Death of the Author (essentially, that as soon as a text is read, it ceases to be the sole intellectual property of the poor sap who typed it), we are all – including the reader – writers; and we are all – including the writer – readers. If credit for authorship is shared, so is any culpability for plagiarism.

One of Small Boo’s least favourite business maxims is that one about not pointing your finger at someone else, because three will point back at you. As she so eloquently notes, this is not true, provided you point like Alvin Stardust does, with all your other fingers splayed out in different directions. And in a culture where authorship is dead, it is not to Barthes that we must turn for the final verdict, but to Stardust: we are all plagiarists; we are all plagiarised; his leatherette fingers are pointed at you and me alike. Alvin ripped off 1968-era Elvis, and was in turn ripped off by Travis in Blake’s 7. We are victims, we are villains; we are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon; in the great continuum of creative thought, Everett True is Roland Barthes is Gilbert Adair is one of the drummers from the Glitter Band.

And I bet Socrates never got an answer like that.

Duchy original

More shavings from the cultural Parmesan:

1. A vignette from Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, which would appear, annoyingly enough, to be as good as everyone says it is:

Often I was joined by a very kind widow in a baseball cap who conducted an endless and apparently fruitless search and murmured to herself, for some reason, about Luxembourg.

It’s the subject of the murmuring that’s so perfectly chosen: Belgium or Cleveland would be too obvious; Mongolia or Ouagadougou too self-consciously wacky. But Luxembourg is just right.

2. In the BBC3 documentary Deborah 13: Servant of God, the eponymous pubescent creationist goes to stay with her equally devout but slightly less intense brother Matthew at university. He introduces her to the joys of clubbing, but leaves the floor when Katy Perry’s lesbian-till-graduation hit ‘I Kissed A Girl’ comes on: “I’m not going to dance to this song because I don’t agree with it,” he announces as he flounces. (Incidentally, did anybody else think Matthew was the campest fundamentalist Christian they’d ever encountered?)

As Matthew and Deborah stand outside assessing the experience, a slightly déshabillé young lady stumbles over and asks if anyone might be good enough to write on her prominently proffered ladybumps.

Matthew demurs, having previously recounted how he’d fended off the amorous attentions of a mud-spattered wench with the horrified retort, “you’re dirty!”; he's clearly a very picky young man. He then determines that she’s a fresher, and asks: “Why are you letting people write on your boobs on your first night?”

“I’m not,” she responds, “this is, like, my third night.”

3. And following on from the earlier reminscences about Uncle Tom Dolby and all, at Rock’sBackPages, I attempt to concoct a retrospective pop genre: Postmodern Futurism.