About Sarah Huckabee Sanders

White House press spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders has said it doesn’t matter whether the videos tweeted by Donald Trump were real; what’s important is that “the threat is real”. If only Jean Baudrillard were with us today.

About Godwin and Streisand

Went on an interesting diversion in class yesterday about memes, touching on the idea they have to start somewhere, even if the originator is anonymous, maybe even blissfully unaware of what s/he spawned. That said, when there is a definitive patient zero for a digital phenomenon, the rewards tend to be a wee bit abstract, as witnessed by this encounter between the man who identified The Streisand Effect and the man who gave his name to Godwin’s Law.

About loss

The late Mark Fisher, on the relatively new experience of being able to reconnect with your childhood gaze through the wonders of technology:

By then, thanks to VHS, DVD and YouTube, it seemed that practically everything was available for rewatching. In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost. 

I think I know what he means; an extended episode of gentle melancholy, for me extending from about eight to 28, during which we thought we might never see that particular episode of The Herbs, or Ludwig, or Crystal Tipps and Alistair, again. Now they’re available wherever we look and all we have left to miss is the melancholy. But I pity kids today who’ve always been able to have Peppa Pig on tap and don’t know what missing even means.

PS: Flashback to the time I went to Tokyo and whole swathes of childhood that I thought I’d imagined opened up before me.

About tattoos

I’ve occasionally toyed with the idea of getting a tattoo but was never able to decide on a design, which is probably why I live out my midlife crisis through this blog instead. But I saw this on Kingsland Road and... well, what do you think?

About knowing capitals

From an otherwise rather sensible article in The Spectator about the uselessness of CVs:

Charles said his own trick was to conduct interviews, normally amiable chats about nonsense, and then at the end ask the applicant to name the capital of Nicaragua. He marked their answers out of ten. Saying: ‘Oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue… Santa something?’ got zero points. A laugh, followed by silence, got three points. Anyone who actually knew the answer (Managua) was eliminated on the grounds of being scary. The correct, ten-point answer was: ‘No, but I could look it up in a moment.’

Scary? Really? Well, that’s me screwed. 

(Also, remember that the current Foreign Secretary used to edit The Spectator.)

About intersectionality and things

From Susan Hekman, ‘Identity Crises: Identity, Identity Politics and Beyond’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 1999:

Political necessity has thrown together ethnic groups who, at best, have little in common and, at worst, have a history of ethnic hatred. Groups categorised as, for example, ‘Asian’ or ‘Hispanic’ are made up of diverse peoples; their designation is a result of the dominant group’s inability or unwillingness to recognise their differences.

...but lumping diverse peoples together as “the dominant group” is OK, I guess.

About anti-elitism

Everybody’s a curator these days, it seems — which probably means that nobody is. Including those who really should be curators, like Jamie Sterns and Andrew Edlin, who offered to show absolutely anything that anyone submitted for their New York show, irrespective of quality, provenance, whatever. The only restriction was size.

(Thanks, Emma.)

About preferred pronouns

Oh dear, this one has the potential to get me into all sorts of trouble, so I should state at the outset that I fully support the right of trans people to be accepted as whatever gender (or none) they present and, er, that’s it.

OK, the current series of the venerable TV quiz show Mastermind is trundling merrily along and until now the only real controversy it’s spawned is whether creaky old sitcoms should be allowed as specialised subjects alongside such solemn, improving material as Mussorgsky’s Paradiddles and Endangered Invertebrates Of The Isle Of Wight.

But a few days ago (well, it was broadcast a few days ago, would have been recorded a few months ago, but you get my point), one of the contestants made an unusual request — and here’s where things get particularly awkward because it’s very difficult to describe what happened without effectively taking sides. Charley Hasted (specialised subject Sherlock Holmes) is a non-binary person who prefers to have the pronouns they/them applied to them. (See what I mean?) The occasionally-irascible host John Humphrys apparently didn’t accede to this request on the show. As the respected archivist of all things British and gameshowy, Iain Weaver described it:

Extreme discourtesy from host John Humphries [sic], who refused to address Charley Hasted by their preferred pronoun. “It would be confusing,” fumed the question-asker off screen. No, it’s not confusing. It’s terribly simple, it’s basic manners.

It seems to be an open-and-shut case of a curmudgeonly septuagenerian stick-in-the-mud refusing to acknowledge that traditional gender roles and identities are merely arbitrary social constructs and he ought to check his cis privilege, right? Well, yes and no. It is indeed polite to use address people as they wish to be addressed (and I’m not sure whether Weaver’s misspelling of Humphrys’ name is passive-aggressive snark or just a goof) but it can also sometimes be confusing. While Charley may prefer to be addressed as “they”, there are reasons this isn’t such a great idea that are nothing to do with stomping all over anyone’s gender identity. “They” has a very specific grammatical meaning, as a third-person plural pronoun. It refers to more than one person or thing, none/neither of whom is either the person speaking or the person being addressed. If it’s used in other ways, it gets very confusing. Consider this extract from an article about record shopping:

I spoke with Glenna of Gramaphone Records about dealing with the woes of “bros being bros” over plates of shrimp in a small mariscos restaurant. They perform under the name Sold and serves as techno buyer for the Lakeview shop that’s been providing DJs dance music since 1969.

OK, so we start with Glenna, singular; one infers (from the name) female, but that may not be the case. Then suddenly “They” throws us into the plural world, especially as it’s followed by “perform” which implies plurality; but “under the name Sold” could denote either be a solo or group identity; but then, retrospectively, so could Glenna. And then “serves”, which suggests third person singular. It’s a grammatical car crash, leaving the casual reader to worry more about how many people are talking than what’s being said. Maybe Humphrys has a point after all.

There are two potential objections to my (and JH’s) objections. One is that the third-person plural has long been accepted as a way of creating a gender-neutral third person singular; for example, “if you call for a plumber, they’ll come within the hour”. Well, to be honest, I’ve always hated that, while applauding the core sentiment behind it. There are multiple ways to construct a sentence that avoids both the implication that all plumbers are male, and the implication that plumbers always work in groups. “A plumber will come within an hour of your call.” There, not that difficult, was it?

Others might infer that my objection to the use of “they” in this way is something akin to the response of reactionaries who grumbled about the hijacking of the honest, innocent word “gay” to describe all sorts of frightfulness. Well, no, because there are any number of synonyms for “gay”; “they” and “them” and “their” mean what they say and are pretty much irreplaceable, unless you’re going to avoid pronouns altogether, which would sound a bit like:

Charley took Charley’s place on the black chair and did very well on Charley’s specialist subject, although Charley’s general knowledge round let Charley down a bit, as Charley would be first to admit.

But, as I said, I fully endorse Charley’s right to live as Charley likes and be treated as Charley likes. Language changes, evolves, sure, but it can only do that successfully if it allows people to keep up, otherwise a move that aims to encourage acceptance and inclusiveness will only breed resistance and hostility, not to mention unnecessary confusion and ambiguity.

So here’s my suggestion: think up a new set of pronouns, applicable specifically to people who’d rather not be stuck in either of the boring old “male”/“female” boxes. There are plenty of monosyllables that don’t have any particular meaning. “Zoy”, maybe. “Zoy” as subject, “zom” as object, “zor” as possessive. It really doesn’t matter, so long as everyone knows what it means.

Essentially, it’s perfectly OK to ask to be excused from petty rules and restrictions, especially because it might wake people up to the fact that such rules are rather outmoded and needn’t be applied to anyone. But every now and then, we find out that such rules do actually serve a purpose, which is nothing to do with forcing non-binary people into restrictive cis boxes, just ensuring that we can all say what we mean. Anyway, this:

About my non-existent book

I’ve long been fascinated by the saga of Jim Crace’s Useless America, a book that never existed but, thanks to a typing error or a misheard phone call or something, came to life within the Amazon hive mind. In fact, such occurrences aren’t that unusual. A few years ago, I was supposed to be writing a book about Lady Gaga, but after a few thousand words, the publisher decided the market was glutted with such products and elected not to go ahead with it. (This sort of thing is also fairly normal practice.) However, the title, cover and provisional release date had been released to the online and high-street retailers, so the book now had a virtual existence that would never be realised. And it’s still there, hovering amidst the ones and zeroes; as I type this, it’s the 10,363,298th best-selling book on Amazon.

Over at GoodReads, though, things have progressed to the next level. Not only does my non-book exist, but you can find out how good or bad it is; three people have bestowed upon it an impressive five stars. Which makes me wonder how well it would have done if I’d actually written the bloody thing.

(One of the people who was so nice about my masterwork is called Miley Cyrus, although I assume she isn’t really. Which adds another level of postmodern wonder to the whole thing.)

About Schiele

Yesterday’s Evening Standard featured an advertising wraparound that makes a virtue of society’s prim and proper attitude to the naked body. But I suspect many people would be more shocked by the pubes on the original than the nudity per se. (See here, here and here for past musings on the subject.)

About clever

The World Health Organisation is just another club of ‘clever people’ who want to bully and tell us what to do. Ignore. https://t.co/UM6IwirmY0

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) 9 November 2017

Now, I’m not one of those bleating, entitled lefties who thinks that every supporter of Trump and Brexit is by definition thick as a pound of economy mince, notwithstanding the Pennyslvanian supporter of The Orange Toddler who explained his choice thus: “When he speaks you can understand what he’s saying, you don’t have to look up the big words that he’s trying to use to confuse you.” But the antipathy towards education on the populist right almost goes without saying. It’s most forcibly expressed by those, like Trump and Farage, who have experienced high-quality, expensive schooling and clearly failed to benefit from it; I wonder, were they bullied for their inability to grasp the second law of thermodynamics, maybe forced to stand on a chair and conjugate Latin verbs in their vests and pants?

Whatever the deep-seated motivations of the leadership, though, it’s a statistical fact that the higher up the educational ladder you’ve travelled, the less likely you were to vote for Trump or Brexit. And as far as I can see, only in the Anglo-Saxon world can “clever” be used as a pejorative.

About Billy Joel and that sort of thing

Something I wrote for Rock’s Back Pages in 2003 is available for free for the next week. I believe you need only cough up an email address to read it. Contains dead white men, guitar solos, swears.

About myth

Am proceeding crisply through Laurent Binet’s excellent  The 7th Function of Language, which starts off with the death of Roland Barthes and then turns into The Da Vinci Code for people who can read without moving their lips: he describes Barthes’s most famous book as being about “the contemporary myths erected by the middle classes to their own glory.”

I think what often gets lost in discussion of RB is that he wasn’t celebrating the elevation of such phenomena as steak-frites or wrestling to mythological status; he’s (at least trying to be) an iconoclast. But his tactics have been recuperated into a sort of wistful pop culture nostalgia; and Binet’s book, in a way, makes a dangerously entertaining myth of Barthes himself.

About a word

I’ve just used the word “ouroborically” in a piece of academic writing and I think I need a lie-down.