EVEN NOW THERE ARE PLACES WHERE A THOUGHT MIGHT GROW

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Props to the NME for this week's encouragingly modernist 'Future 50' feature.

I could grumble at the inclusion of fashion designers and Apple employees, and at the typically unhelpful hyperbole getting in the way of a good cause, but overall this is a hugely welcome mini volte-face after the recent regression into low-brow corporatism.

I actually went on the net after reading the piece and checked out some bands/artists based on NME's recommendation, something I haven't felt compelled to do in a painfully long time.

Follow this up next week with a Krushchev-like denouncement of the Pigeon Detectives and I might even start buying it again regularly.

M83 - SATURDAY=YOUTH

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As some of you may have divined, I’m not all that enamoured with the current trend for ‘80s revivalism.

The new M83 album Saturdays=Youth does however point to ways in which the decade god forgot might be put to good artistic use. Yes there’s a good deal of stylistic plagiarism going on here - lots of superficial pastiche in lieu of real creative transformation of the past.

But frankly, any band as heavily indebted to the Cocteau Twins as these guys are is OK in my book (steering towards the Cocteaus, Kate Bush and My Bloody Valentine, and away from Peter Gabriel, Bon Jovi and A-Ha might stand as a useful guiding precept for anyone thinking of indulging in this particular form of accelerated postmodern nostalgia).

Saturdays=Youth embodies all the lush esoteric loneliness of the eighties, at a time in which such emotive separatism is once again looking like one of the few pertinent ways of responding to a climate of vigorous conservative commercialism.

ON ROUGH TRADE’S ‘COUNTER CULTURE ‘07’ – MORE YANKOPHILIA

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There might be plenty of good stuff out there, but Jesus Christ it’s difficult to identify what is genuinely worthwhile amidst all the hubris, celebrity shite and low-brow media hysteria that has penetrated the alternative cultural sphere in recent years.

The Rough Trade compilation from the end of last year provides ample opportunity for a modest recovery of optimism, although again it’s necessary to underline how much of the best and most innovative stuff on this release from a bulwark of British independent music is American.

Tunes by Glasvegas, Dan le Sac Versus Scroobius Pip, and Von Sudenfed (w/Mark E. Smith) do however offer some hope for imminent improvement closer to home.

IN THE INVALID LIGHT OF THE MORNING

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I wept at the space between cities

Archipelago of loss

LITTLE AMIS: THE FOLLOW UP

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Just been to a talk at Man Uni called 'Education in a Neoliberal World'.

When asked what could be done to get rid of Martin Amis, Terry Eagleton suggested that the knobs on all the university doors be raised by six inches as a means of thwarting the diminutive Islamaphobe. 'He even has problems dealing with curbs, so that should do the trick', said Eagleton, who also revealed that Amis's creative writing classes apparently consist largely of him reading a long passage of Bellow or Nabokov and saying 'wow'.

Talk was pretty good too. The ghost of '68 was brought-up several times in reference to the recent university strike action, without it ever seeming like a hollow gesture.


(He does actually look like a bona fide midget in this photo, doesn't he?)

HJ HAD IT WRONG, IN MANY RESPECTS: NATIONAL IDENTITY Pt. 3

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Henry James contrasting America with England ('Hawthorne', 1879):

No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class--no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life--especially in the American life of forty years ago, the effect of which, upon an English or a French imagination, would probably as a general thing be appalling. The natural remark, in the almost lurid light of such an indictment, would be that if these things are left out, everything is left out.

The natural remark, to my mind, is that a place with most of these things left out sounds like a very good place indeed.

POEM

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The first bit of action in years. Sat there
with blood coming out of our eyes, applauding
immaculate artistry of a wayward soviet.

Excitement when the volcano burst; autumn
spliced to a memory with a finger’s flick, holiday
blockbuster playing out summer’s end.

Move the earth to be with my good friends,
Move the earth to be there when it ends.

Our absolute team
has gathered light of evening,
shards tumbling out of our globular arms.
Shoulders lug ash.

You were too pretty with me:
you built towns with your charitable hands
but you left no footprint.

We will take on the world with a rock and a book.

Right in the dead-middle of the air
a hard-boiled hulk of a man is visible;
red yolk stiffening to a heavy glue.

NATIONAL IDENTITY Pt 2

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I saw Ian Hislop on a recent BBC Who Do You Think You Are? programme quoting William Cowper:

England, for all thy faults, I love thee still

The more apt poetic evocation, for me, comes from Linton Kwesi Johnson:

Inglan is a bitch
dere's no escapin it

LITTLE AMIS AND BIG STATEMENTS

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At the end of last year I saw Martin Amis speaking in a ‘Literature and Terrorism’ debate at Manchester Uni, and two things about the night made an impression. The first thing that struck me was that Amis is an almost laughably small man, providing a sort of poignant proof for the axiom about the startling diminutiveness of famous people. Seeing him on the stairs outside the lecture hall, after he had just fielded the inevitable staunch criticism from fellow speakers for his recent advocacy of neo-con politics, he looked lonely and slightly out of place, not at all comfortable in his latest role as an under-fire political cause-celebre in this archetype of northern red-brick normality, seemingly rather pathetically cut loose from the urbane, metropolitan world he ordinarily inhabits.

The second thing I remember, and the thing most relevant to the present discussion, is Amis trying to prove the point, now quite fashionable in political and cultural circles, that the Western left-wing intelligentsia has become woolly and relativist to the extent that it will routinely show misguided sympathy for such decidedly anti-humanitarian causes as Saddam Hussein, Palestinian terrorism, suicide bombers and the like.

Amis related an anecdote about another recent speaking event, at which he asked audience members to indicate if they felt they were ‘morally superior’ to the Taliban, a request that was met with bafflement, unease, and apparently only a smattering of raised hands. When the same question was posed of Nazi Germany, of course, the response was almost unanimous.

It seemed to me at the time that this was all a bit silly. ‘Morally superior’ is exactly the sort of reductive, chauvinistic slogan debates as vital and delicate as this can do without. Moreover, as a phrase it seems to epitomise the kind of cantankerous mid-twentieth-century-radicalism-grown-reactionary militancy currently favoured by Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and their ilk. Making statements like this, Amis came across as stubborn and upper-class snobbish, looking a bit foolish beside his co-speakers, whose arguments were, I thought, much more nuanced and sensitive to the demands of a mind-bendingly complex issue.

Nevertheless, Amis’s assertion of the need for principled affirmative statements in the context of the present volatile international climate is perhaps not one that should be dismissed out of hand, even if his particular choice of wording was unfortunate. Amis quoted DeLillo’s now famous argument in Mao II, an argument which states that terrorists, with their ‘new tragic narratives’, have appropriated cultural authority from novelists. For Amis, if I’m not misinterpreting things too much, the task of the post-9/11 novelist (and presumably that of other artistic and cultural figures) must therefore be to take back this authority from the terrorist, and not to let a fear of sounding old-fashioned, absolutist and moralistic prevent you from making firm proclamations of belief. Fundamentalism in all its various manifestations, so the line goes, is not likely to be efficaciously countered by guilty liberal ambiguity and cavilled, sitting-on-the-fence rhetoric.

This seems to me to be a more than reasonable assertion, and you might want to view the post below on Thatcher in light of this.

MARGARET ON THE GUILLOTINE

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Apparently many people are gearing-up for the supposedly imminent passing into the night of Margaret Thatcher, preparing to throw ‘Thatcher Death Parties’ as soon as the good news filters through.

Just to forestall what will inevitably be a media frenzy of fairly above-average proportions, I’d just like to offer my twopenny’s worth in rebuttal of the likely suggestion that such festivities might be interpreted as in some way inhumane.

I’m relatively young and have never met Margaret, but on TV, and in books and newspapers etc she has always struck me as, on a personal level, a completely fucking shit human being, not at all one of those people of whom it is possible to say ‘I’m sure she’s a nice person, but …’, and an emphatic riposte to the popular notion that ‘there’s a little bit of good in everyone’.

As with all public figure deaths/births/marriages, our reaction to the event of Thatcher’s death will be less a reflection on the individual than a reaction to what she as a socio-cultural shibboleth represented, which might be summarised as follows: authoritarianism, militarism, greed, social heartlessness, radical egotistic individualism, the end of the welfare state, privatisation, aggressive consumer capitalism, untrammelled economic avarice, anti-union bullying, homophobia, jingoism, racism, divisive England/South-centric majority-rule politics, anti-intellectualism, horrible nasal atonal upper-class speech, snobbery, elitism, bad taste, malign traditionalism, shoddy creative standards, sententious quasi-Churchillian rhetoric, emotional callousness: basically, a cornucopia of everything that is shit in life.

For many people, the death of this woman will represent something like a final, belated divine retribution, and reminder that the unequivocally evil cannot prosper indefinitely. It will also offer a chance for a celebratory declaration that the above values are categorically and unambiguously things that must always, always be vehemently opposed.

Thatcher ruined countless lives in Britain through her political actions, and had a hand in some even more appalling misdeeds elsewhere, in the Falklands and Northern Ireland, and through her tacit support for South African apartheid and such one-dimensionally murderous villains as fascist Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Rejoicing over her final demise will be a chance to make up in some small, exuberant way for all the myriad violence, death, and unscrupulous uncompassionate political nastiness she visited on the world throughout the course of her undeservedly long, comfortable life.

The truly humane thing to do.