Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category
Friday, January 6th, 2012
Stories were swapped, gossip traded, but there were always boundaries, lines which were never crossed. We all knew the rules.
This is Richard Littlejohn in the Mail reacting to the Filkin report on relations between the police and the press. It’s a fine piece of writing and true; I have been there and done that, though not so often with the police. Littlejohn is right to want the good times back when ‘we all knew the rules’. But, as he probably knows, this is unrealistic. The world he describes may be no more nor less corrupt than the one in which we now live, but it was founded on a different principle – that of trust. There was a shared ethos. The principle on we we are now founded is accountability or transparency. Everything must now be logged and recorded and defections from this ethos must be reported, Diane Abbott being one faintly absurd case. Obviously the trust world is better, it implicitly acknowledges the complexity of human affairs and assumes that humans rather than bureaucracies are better placed to regulate them. But that world has now all but gone and trust has been replaced by accountability. The primary cause is computer technology which has made so many passing remarks public, recorded so many unflattering pictures and created vast databases of information on individuals. It has raised the possibility of universal and perpetual accountability and made human affairs more machine-like. Filkin had no choice but to say what she said and Littlejohn had no choice either.
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Thursday, January 5th, 2012
One of the thousands of wonderful moments in Frasier, the greatest sitcom of all, is when our hero asks his brother, Niles, ‘Do you ever have an unexpressed thought?’ There is a moment’s pause before suddenly feline Niles responds, ‘I’m having one now.’
So, Diane Abbott, do you ever have an unexpressed thought? Or, more specifically, do you ever have an untweeted thought? Was it a lonely impulse of delight (Yeats, do pay attention) that drove you to this tumult in the twittersphere? Face it, Diane, you’re trending for the worst possible reason – you emitted a blatantly racist tweet – ‘White people love playing “divide & rule”. We should not play their game’. Who are these wicked white people? I don’t play divide and rule, do you? If I did, would it be because I am white? Do black people never dabble in d & r? And, anyway, WTF! Do you seriously judge people’s moral status by the colour of their skin? That is what we call racism, that is what everybody calls racism. Well not George Galloway.
Diane Abbott has been my friend for 25 years, he said, perhaps the most massively unhelpful thing Galloway could ever say about anybody, only the obtuse would think her a ‘racist‘.
Well, actually, I don’t think she’s a racist. Her tweets around this subject are mere mindless ideologuery, dangerous in itself but not quite as nasty as racism. What I do think is that she should be on twittercide watch. My first thought was that she was being deliberately provocative, my second – probably correct – thought was that she had tweeted impulsively and thus became one of the many sad victims of the new phenomenon of twittercide.
So, Diane Abbott, do you ever have an unexpressed thought? Or, more specifically, do you ever have an untweeted thought?
There was another case in the papers today. Simon Holt did the internet equivalent of throwing himself off Beachy Head when he emitted a tweet – Oh and by the way, I want your hot body tonight babe. xxxxx – intended for his wife but which, of course, went to all his followers. In fact, twittercide is not a rare phenomenon, confined to marginal politicians and horse racing commentators, millions of such cases happen daily. Scan the ‘feeds’ of young twitterers and you will see the bizarre spectacle of people making themselves unemployable for life. No boss would take on such illiterate, foul-mouthed, vindictive, empty-headed creatures.
The problem is that, while tweeting to their followers, twitterers forget they are also visible to the entire world. Like to many other internet activities, the form lures you into a false sense of intimacy. Abbott plainly thought she was swopping ideological nonsense with a fellow ideologue, only to find herself, hours later, being hounded out of town for exactly the crime she so savagely condemns in others.
I suspect there’s a neuroscientific aspect to all this. The neurological walls that divide public from private utterance are crumbling. Our brains are being hollowed out. At this rate there will be no unexpressed thoughts and all the sustaining complexity of the human world will drain away to be replaced by a featureless, babbling simplicity. But you’ll now have to buy my book to find out what I mean.
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Thursday, January 5th, 2012
Clay Shirky has many gifts, cogent prose is not one of them. Great Gapper tweeted plaintively about this piece, ‘Maybe I’m being slow but I don’t really understand what he’s saying’, a sentiment with which, at first reading, I wholeheartedly agreed (except for the ‘maybe I’m being slow’). On second reading, however, I did manage to detect a point which is, I think, as follows. News cannot finance itself on the internet by traditional means because people now access news in bits rather than bundles (like newspapers); as a result, serious news, which, in bundles, was always a minority interested supported by assorted trivia, will have to seek new forms of funding. Shirky concludes:
When the politically engaged readers are also the only paying readers, however, their opinion will come matter more, and in ways that will sometimes contradict the advertisers’ desires for anodyne coverage.
It will take time for the economic weight of those users to affect the organizational form of the paper, but slowly slowly, form follows funding. For the moment at least, the most promising experiment in user support means forgoing mass in favor of passion; this may be the year where we see how papers figure out how to reward the people most committed to their long-term survival.
‘Politically engaged’ is misleading; there are many serious readers – the best of them, in fact – not placeable in that depressing category, but one sees what he means. The idea that the only possible future for news is way upmarket of where it is now is not original – I made it myself some years ago – but does need restating. The reasoning is simple and twofold: the internet does a much better job of being downmarket than the mainstream media and serious readers are loyal ones who will pay. It is important that Shirky, perhaps the most influential internet thinker, has arrived, however circuitously, at the same conclusion. He is an important player in the corridors of media power. There is a race on to save serious topical writing and the sooner we win the better.
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Wednesday, January 4th, 2012
My mind has been paralysed by the Stephen Lawrence trial. Immediately, everybody seemed to say everything that could be said as if with one voice. For a while, I thought nobody was going to make the link to Leveson and then along came Jonathan Freedland. Quite right too. But, finally, my attention is drawn to this, an against-the-tide rant by Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked. First things first, anybody who uses the word ‘problematise’ is asking for trouble from me and a nagging sense for all readers that what they are reading makes no sense. But, aside from that, there is a truth buried in there somewhere, it’s just that O’Neill comes very late to the party. It was said better, indeed it was said beautifully, by an extraordinary man called Michael Collins in his book The Likes of Us which I reviewed and agreed with in 2004. (Collins has a quality of visonary innocence.I once asked him why he had moved to Frinton. He replied, ‘Because I couldn’t find anywhere in Hove’, a response which combines logic, illogic and whimsy with rare efficiency.)
The Collins points, which O’Neill makes also in less temperate terms, was that certain members of the elite were demonising the white working class, using, among other things, the Lawrence murder as an excuse. Brilliantly Collins quoted a beautiful sentiment from Chesterton. ( I am quoting myself here as well.)
‘We are always ready to make a saint or prophet of the educated man who goes into cottages to give a little kindly advice to the uneducated,’ he wrote. But the real saints and prophets – those of the middle ages – were uneducated men ‘who walked into grand houses to give a little kindly advice to the educated.’ The wisdom of the poor was once deployed to moralise the rich; now that of the rich is used to demoralise the poor.
Indeed, the case was and is being exploited by people who, in another age, would have been temperance campaigners or something similar but whose real motivation was/is seeking out people to whom they can feel superior. But O’Neill goes on to argue that this means justice has not been served. His point is that this retrial was effectively rigged by changes in the law and this rigging, execured by new elites, was part-legal, part-cultural.( I’m not quite happy with the idea that Paul Dacre is a member of a new elite, but I will let that pass.) Well, yes, it wasn’t pretty and neither is the crush of people queueing up to take credit – which is probably why, incidentally, the parents are not currently being given the credit they deserve. But, if it takes this circus to convict the louts in question, then that’s fine by me. The law – especially English law – is dynamic and responsive to cases. It is a national glory and one which is threatened by lesser, over-rationalist and more bureaucratised European systems.
But, thanks Brendan, you gave me away in.
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Wednesday, January 4th, 2012
Sorry, lunch is in the air and I have to reproduce this from a chapter in Nassim Nicholas Taleb‘s book which is being part-published online. Nassim is listing some important thinkers.
John Gray, contemporary political philosopher and essayist who stands against human hubris and has been fighting the prevailing ideas that enlightenment is a panacea –treating a certain category of thinkers as enlightenment fundamentalists. Furthermore he showed repeatedly how what we call scientific progress can be just a mirage. When he, myself, and the essayist Bryan Appleyard got together for lunch I was mentally prepared to discuss ideas, and advocate my own. I was pleasantly surprised by what turned out the best lunch I ever had in my entire life. There was this smoothness of knowing that the three of us tacitly understood the same point and, instead, went to the second step of discussing applications –something as mundane as replacing our currency holdings by precious metals as these are not owned by governments.
Arrangements are in hand for placing a blue plaque on the table at the Halepi, Lancaster Gate.
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Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012
And, while on the subject of lunch, my great friend Paul Wilmott, the only funny quant in the business, has a new business card. Turn it over and it reads:
Gin martini, straight up, with a twist
Sparkling
Medium rare
Red
Both ice cream and custard, please
Milk, no sugar
Says it all really.
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Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012
That has started me thinking about drinking in general – probably because I am not currently doing it. It’s hard not to have a soft spot for the heroes of the genre. While interviewing Kingsley Amis years ago I noticed a clock in his living room move to 5.30 – then the usual opening time for pubs – and, without looking at the clock or a watch, he immediately said, ‘Are you a drinking man?’ It was hard not to be under the circumstances. The great historian Norman Stone, who thought Islam had gone into decline because of the ban on drink, once said I was failing to fulfil my promise because I didn’t drink enough. Norman lunched me once at the Garrick, but the apertifs got out of hand to the point where Kingsley Amis, again, came up to me and asked me if I had eaten yet. I had to reply that in all honesty I didn’t know. Over lunch Norman lapsed into Hungarian. Another celebrated figure, who I know would prefer not to be named, bustled into the Caprice, asked me a question about Margaret Thatcher – this was the last time she was an urgent matter – and consumed an entire bottle of white before I could formulate my response. And, as for Peter Ackroyd in his heyday…… We once jointly designed his tomb for Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, a glass of Kensington Place house white was slipping from his lifeless fingers. I should talk about Christopher Hitchens but I hardly knew him.
My point is that, in the right hands or brains, alcohol works a kind of magic and the wowsers who preach against its evils should be reminded of that fact. Sure, it kills people – Hitch’s cancer may be implicated, but, hell, you’ve got to die of something and David Hockney’s wise words on smoking – ‘You’re still going to die, even if you don’t smoke’ – surely apply. Excess is not necessarily a problem. Nige and I once split four bottles of wine and some other stuff here in Norfolk and I woke, against all natural justice, with no hangover. I think regularity is, in fact, worse. Routine daily drinking above a certain limit – say, half a bottle of wine – is debilitating and acts as a depressant, far better to let the liver recover, as my anonymous friend above does for a quarter of every month.
The problem is that drinking is getting a bad name because it is getting into the wrong hands – dull adolescents prone to street-vomiting and, latterly, rioting. In most of my experience, drink civilises and inspires. I look forward to starting again.
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Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012
Over Christmas an entrepreneurial friend suggested the still emerging incompetence, avarice and criminal iniquities of the London financial system can all be attributed to the death of the long lunch. In the spirit of the season, I agreed at once but only later did I realise the depth of his wisdom. The long lunch – understood as an aspect of a way of life and a world view – may, indeed, have prevented the crash of 2008 and lightened, if not entirely removed, the burdens we now bear.
I was a financial journalist for three years before the Big Bang globalised the City. It was a place where a financial editor would be seen emerging from a taxi carrying a glass of wine, where hacks attended corporate lunchtime jollies without ever discovering the name of the company that was providing the hospitality, where an OBE – one bottle each – was normal and an OLE – one litre each – not uncommon. One City writer used his brilliant skills as an impersonator to pull off stunts that would now get him imprisoned; every time one received a a slightly odd phone call one had to assume, for safety’s sake, it was him. And yet, amidst all the revelry, there was a certain mannered reticence. Work was everybody’s subject matter , but it seemed to go on in the background. Once, while supposedly covering accountancy, I lunched with some very senior City figures and the subject never once came up; instead, we discussed life, literature, railways, philosophy, anything but accountancy. Everybody seemed to have quietly agreed that money itself was important but boring. What money did was interesting, as was life, literature etc., but the tedious shuffling of paper was nothing. I was once at lunch in an oak-lined room near the Bank of England, discussing railways and stuff, when, tactlessly, I asked how much money flowed through those doors annually. There was a deathly pause before a Jeeevesish figure muttered that it was somewhere in the region of the American defence budget and then moved back to the finer points of Heidegger’s dasein or some such.
A long lunch meant you were doing harm to nobody but yourself
It was, I suppose, a small world of post-imperial pretensions and mores that had, in time, to be blown apart by computers, pesto chicken sandwiches at the desk and fraudulent algorithms. I am sure there was corruption and incompetence, but it was not inflated by the system itself, rather it was contained. The City was a village and, as in any village, people could see what you were doing. Most importantly, you were having lunch. The point about lunch (for its true importance you should get hold of a copy of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems in the exquisite City Lights edition, but that is another matter) is that, if they are long enough and alcoholic enough, you really do learn something (the trick, of course, being to remember it). Truth often emerges over the white port.
We’d see truth dawn together?–truth that peeps
Over the glasses’ edge when dinner’s done….
Robert Browning, Bishop Blougram’s Apology
Nostalgically I am overstating the case, but that does not alter the fact that it IS a case. What came after the Big Bang was hyper-professionalism, the glorification of misguided expertise and a City-wide determination to undermine the principles of the free market. Oh and short lunches, lunch being as Gordon Gekko so vividly explained, ‘for wimps’. No, lunch was for wise men.
‘You become more risk-averse with every glass of wine,” said my friend. It’s counter-intuitive and not always true but I knew exactly what he meant. The wine – at least at lunch – embedded you in a society, made you feel known and, therefore, made you less inclined to break the big rules even as you broke all the little ones. A long lunch meant you were doing harm to nobody but yourself; it meant you weren’t spending your time thinking of new and ingenious ways of shuffling paper which is now all that the City really does. So save the Euro, save Greece, create jobs, go to lunch and don’t come back until four at the earliest.
O launch, lunch, you dazzling hoary tunnel
To paradise!
Kenneth Koch, Lunch
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Friday, December 30th, 2011
On the left Martin Kettle opposes a state funeral for Margaret, as did, on the right, Peter Oborne. The reasons are broadly the same: she was divisive and state funerals are for people on whose legacy we can supposedly all agree: generals – Nelson, Wellington, geniuses – Newton, Darwin, and grand old men – Churchill, Gladstone. In peace, Churchill was also divisive, but, as Oborne observes he was ‘the symbol of our lonely resistance to Hitler in 1940′. A similar case could be made for Thatcher in that she crushed the dangerous and corrupt power of the unions, not because, as some have suggested, she hated unions, but because those particular unions, like the banks today, had appropriated powers that rightly belonged to parliament and the people. She also seized back the Falklands. But, okay, even those unions and Galtieri’s two-bit hoodlums weren’t Hitler and the Churchill case for Thatcher case is, therefore, a good deal weaker.
Of course, in a show business culture, it is likely that the Meryl Streep movie will encourage a wave of popular sentiment in favour of a state funeral. People tend to forget their differences when confronted by a blonde in a blockbuster. This, and his Thatcherish backbenchers, will probably push Cameron, ever the PR exec, into a state funeral, an occasion likely to be infested with demonstrators unimpressed by Streep, many of whom, as Oborne observes, will have a perfectly decent case.
My view is entirely personal. I have been such a frequent coffin chaser in my time – having done Pope JPII, Diana, Jade Goody, the Queen Mother - that I have begun to feel it is my genre. A state funeral for Thatcher would seem to be right up my street.
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Wednesday, December 28th, 2011
Being easily embarrassed and neither as good-natured as Nige nor as devout as Andrew, I find Christmas in particular and religion in general tricky. Until, that is, I am confronted with their singular power and logic, at which point I generally start crying, a habit I find even more annoying than do those around me. This is nothing to do with belief – I am a militant agnostic – and everything to do with a form of experience that is very close to aesthetic. In fact, I am suspicious of people who insist they are militant atheists and yet revere art. Either, I assume, they are bluffing or they do not understand the terms ‘art’ or ‘atheist’. Garden variety atheists are fine because they always turn out on closer examination to be agnostics
But anyway (bear with me, this is what we know in the trade as a dropped intro, a very dropped one) I caught a bit of Bill Forsyth’s lovely film Local Hero during some interlude in one of the long calorie-laden days and, predictably, cried. Everything about this film is tentative including its delicate and funny suggestion that the world is made of magic and ruled by very sexy goddesses of the sea and the stars. It is one of the very few genuinely (though tentatively) Pagan films I have ever seen.
What, I then found myself wondering, happened to Bill Forsyth? He still seems to be around but it went wrong for him when David Puttnam, producer of Local Hero, went to Hollywood, closely followed by Forsyth. He then made an American movie, which did very little business and, a couple of years later, Puttnam was ‘ousted’ (a word like ‘dubbed’ which is only ever used in newspapers) and another British invasion fizzled out. Then I remembered that the American movie made by Forsyth was Housekeeping, which, to my shame, I have never seen, and – finally attaining the dropped intro – that was based on the first novel of Marilynne Robinson. At which point, I also remembered that the intimitable Dave Lull had sent me a link to an article by Marilynne in the New York Times. I dived for the laptop, clicked on the link and read the piece twice. Hot damn, I thought, I must blog on this. But then I read it again and, well, what more is there to be said? So just read it and weep with gratitude for Marilynne, the New York Times, for the Bible, for all the wonders of the religious imagination and with pity for those poor militant atheists. Then have a good New Year and, once in a while, bend the knee in prayer. There I said it.
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