Jeff on Art

The great Jeff is on fire as never before, what with publication day looming. But he still finds time to spot an artist of prodigous gifts and high promise - this fellow. I think we should post appreciative comments and thank him for the tipoff...

Heyer We Go Again

My father (who, on one memorable occasion, did dye his hair, to hilarious effect) was, as I might have remarked before, a man of simple tastes - but they were often also markedly contradictory. One of his two favourite novelists - the two he would read and reread endlessly - was Nevil Shute, a more than competent writer who celebrated the kind of quiet male virtues that are now quite out of fashion (though, in more exalted and subtle forms, they are central to Shirley Hazzard's work). His other favourite was, by way of contrast, Georgette Heyer, a 'woman's writer' if ever there was one. I thought she too, with her sub-Austen Regency romances, had been long forgotten - but no: the current Book At Bedtime on Radio 4 is her Arabella. It seems there's a bit of a Heyer revival going on - and we really shouldn't be surprised. With Austen mania at fever pitch, it's bound to spill over into sub-Austen, pseudo-Austen, post-Austen, meta-Austen and the rest, simply to meet demand. Heyer's efficient - and notably well researched - romances may lack all that makes Jane Austen great, but they have found their moment. Again.

Men, Do Not Dye Your Hair

And, speaking of human enhancement, do not, gentlemen, dye your hair. The matter of male hair dye has intruded on almost every conversation I have had recently. It even came up in relation to Nick Cave's new album. Each of my interlocutors has retreated, traumatised, in the face of my vehement opposition to the artificial colouring of the ageing male's hair. It doesn't matter with women - they start dying their hair soon after they're born. For them, the process has been normalised. Older rock stars like Cave are expected not to look quite right. But a hair dyer who is neither female nor a rock star is an abomination. They never look right. This is partly because they always get the colour wrong. I have seen wealthy, prominent grandees who look like Duracell batteries - copper-coloured top -  and ordinary drones with lined faces surmounted by improbably black mops. Some think they can mitigate the worst effects by 'leaving a little grey around the temples'. This, of course, makes matters worse by establishing a stark and deeply implausible contrast. But chromatic ineptitude is not the only issue. Dyed hair always, for some reason, makes men look older, an effect that rapidly descends into grotesquerie as the years go by. Also I cannot get over the rather old-fashioned idea that it is not a masculine thing to do. Men should face the body's rotting with a heroic chin, a glass of whisky, a good book and a wry smile, not with a bottle of Grecian 2000.

Did Coffee Cause the Enlightenment?

Quinn Norton imagines a future drug called Morvigil which would cut your need for sleep, improve your concentration and make you smarter. She compares the effect of such a drug to the effects of coffee on the eighteenth century. It caused all sorts of problems but it also led to the Enlightenment. Morvigil would cause a second Enlightenment. The idea that coffee caused the Enlightenment is, to say the least, contentious. It doesn't make sense - the arrival of a simple stimulant would be equally likely to be correlated with a new Dark Age; that, in this case, it wasn't is neither here not there. But what is interesting is the technocratic rhetoric. Human enhancement is a dangerous delusion that will not go away. As demonstrated by the coffee-Enlightenment point, it is a consolingly simple idea. Obviously we can't enhance ourselves because, being human, we don't know what an enhancement would be. An interminable argument follows from this. I've had it a hundred times, but nobody has yet dented my ironclad scepticism on the matter. And now for some coffee, which, as it happens, always makes me deeply irrational.

Shirley Hazzard - Bryan Is Right

Acting on Bryan's urgent recommendations of Shirley Hazzard, I bought both The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire, and, slow reader that I am, I have finally completed both. I have to say, He Is Not Wrong. These are two novels quite unlike anything I'd ever come across in contemporary fiction (though there's a distant affinity with the great Marilynne). They deal primarily with love and, of all things, goodness, and they do so with a subtlety and layered complexity that is rarely encountered (though often imitated in works that are merely dull). The Transit of Venus works through the gradual unveiling of its characters' depths in a plot of extraordinarily ingenious construction and enormous range, in which things yet seem to happen as they do in life - i.e. not at all, then all at once, and often, crucially, beyond our control. The Great Fire inhabits a similar world, but is more intensely focused on a handful of characters across a shorter stretch of time (shortly after the Second World War). One of the results of this intense focus is that, as Bryan notes, by the end the emotional pressure is almost unbearable. Read it and weep (or not, according to choice) - but read it, and read The Transit of Venus. Indeed, it's probably safe to recommend every word Shirley Hazzard has written.
Here are the basics.

For Felix Hoffman and Hermann Dreser

As I feel a headache coming on, it seems only right to pay tribute to Felix Hoffman and Hermann Dreser, who - on this very day in 1899 - patented Aspirin, which seems to me to be the nearest thing we have to an everyday superdrug. Not only does it kill pain pretty effectively (especially in combination with codeine), cool fevers and thin the blood - there's also good evidence that it's preventative against a wide range of illnesses, including various forms of cancer. And yet - perhaps because it's so cheap and easily available - it's grievously undervalued, and many people (especially, in my experience, women) never go near it. They don't know what they're missing.

Still Smiling Through

The only thing that surprises me about this is how positive the outlook of the white working class remains (44 percent think immigration is 'a good thing'!) and how little different from the middle class's view of things. This poll is, it seems, linked to the BBC's White season - which begins well, on Friday, with an extraordinary documentary (made by an American film-maker), Last Orders. After that it lapses back into something more in line with the familiar BBC world view. The best account of the plight of the white working class (in London at least) is Michael Collins' excellent book, The Likes Of Us. Bryan will no doubt furnish us with a link to his very fine review...

My Kinda Guy

My enthusiasm for Apple has been on the wane lately - I have been subject to a series of appalling computer crises. But it perked up on reading this quote from Steve Jobs - 'We do no market research. We don't hire consultants.' I have long held that the quality of a company is inversely proportional to the size of its marketing department and the number of its management consultants. Needless to say, Apple is officially the most admired company in the world.

The Footedness of Beaches

Discussing the three right feet - each wearing a trainer - that have washed ashore in Canada, Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer, said, 'Left footwear and right footwear often tend to wash up at different times at different places because they float differently. There are beaches that collect mostly rights and other beaches that collect mostly lefts.'I was in danger of never finding that out. My mild OCD will now oblige me to check every beach I visit for its footedness.

On Patriotism 2

Let your chest - if you are English, okay British - swell a little when you read this letter to the New York Times.