James Farrar

To return to an old theme of mine - the hidden riches of suburbia - I discovered the other day that my particular neck thereof (which I prefer to describe as the Earthly Paradise, in the hope of pushing up property prices) had harboured a writer of whose existence I knew nothing. His old home had quite forgotten him, despite the fact that no one ever wrote better about the marginal countryside hereabouts. Now the local memory has been stirred by a reading, which I attended last night,and a small exhibition. He was a writer of huge promise - at his best, perhaps, when trying least hard - and seemed capable of great things. When he died he was some months short of his 21st birthday (like another World War II poet, Sidney Keyes). Even with the accelerated growing-up that goes with fighting a war, that is very young. His mentor and champion was his English teacher, the splendidly named Alwyn 'Trubby' Trubshaw, who lived to the age of 99 - a year longer than my own English teacher and mentor, whose funeral is, as it happens, tomorrow.

Survivors of a Lost World

Going round art galleries must be one of the most exhausting activities, physically and mentally, known to man. Some people seem able to keep it up for a whole day, but for myself I'm always worn out after an hour. Therefore I take care only to look at a few things I might actually want to see, rather than traipsing through gallery after gallery of our great national collections.
Yesterday, in my capacity as occasional art correspondent to this blog, I spent an hour and a bit in Tate Britain (always a pleasure - at least as compared to the ghastly Tate Modern). Ignoring (for now) the Millais blockbuster, I wandered around in the British 20th century - unsatisfactory in many ways, which I won't go into here - and then, in skirting the Turner Prize retrospective, I found Gallery 1 and a small, but startlingly beautiful, display of medieval English alabasters, on loan from the V&A - this tells you a bit about it, but sadly without images - and you really have to see these things in the stone flesh, up close. Battered and faded, they pack an extraordinary punch, partly as things of beauty in themselves, but with an added charge of desperate sadness for the lost world of rich and potent imagery they represent - the world of signs and meanings swept away in the brutal iconoclastic destruction of the Reformation (dang, there's always a downside).
This happened in our country less than 500 years ago, and, on a world scale, it was no isolated (or even especially brutal) incident. Is there something intrinsic to human nature that leads to this wholesale destruction in the name of a greater 'authenticity'? Or is it another of the delusions of rationalism, riding pilion on an atavistic desire to destroy what went before, to overturn the idols? The Catholic Mediterranean world seems to have a better record in this regard than the puritan wing of Christendom - or Islam - still less the destructive rational cults unleashed by the Enlightenment. Or maybe this is an illusion... Anyway, for a moving and beautiful - and short- encounter with art, you could harldy beat that small, little visited corner of Tate Britain.

Brown the Wildebeest

I thought this was a story about the Tory wildebeest, but, after Brown's embarrassing cock-up over the troops who aren't actually returning from Iraq, maybe it's Labour's. Brown's addiction to spin is more serious than Blair's. It seems to be getting the better of him. This ill-advised stunt has echoes of the Laura Spence affair. Perhaps his greed for spin will get the better of him.

The Contents of My Mind This Morning Caption

On the Mind

Live Science places the mind-body connection at number ten on its list of unexplained phenomena. Number one is the Taos Hum, which is just stupid. How body produces mind is, of course, the most important unexplained phenomenon because, unlike all the others, we have now idea how it might be explained. This was the point I was making in my book review at the weekend and which was so brilliantly and entertainingly described by Jerry Fodor. 

Anyway - bear with me, this will make sense in the end - we seem to have found a suicide gene. Past experience suggests this claim will be swiftly withdrawn. But the point is the form of the thought. An amino acid called glutamate is said to be involved in the creation of suicidal thoughts. Meanwhile, the professional sceptic James Randi has offered a prize of $1 million to anybody who can show that $7,250 speaker cables are any better than cables costing $80. Randi usually exposes claims about paranormal phenomena. The implication here, therefore, is that audiophiles who claim to hear a difference are victims of the same kind of deluded hysteria that makes people believe in aliens, ghost, out of body experiences and so on. Finally, here is an interesting discussion on the authority of the critic. Ronan McDonald points out that traditional critics who might aspire to teach their readers have lost power to the new critics who simply find things they believe their readers will like. This issue is also raised by this muddled piece about the Turner Prize.

All of these stories are evidence of a struggle within the contemporary imagination about the nature of reality or, to put it another way, about the objective status of mind. Is a thought about suicide reducible to the effects of a single chemical? Is the audiophile really hearing or difference - in which case what can it mean to say he is deluded? - or simply lying? He may be enoying the benefits of something like the placebo effect, which, as we know, is objectively effective. And does authority play any role in our reaction to art or can we only rely on our untutored, subjective judgment, of our mind?

These are all, in fact, the same story.

The Proud to be British Caption

For Chip

Time for a list of most overrated comedy phenomena of recent years. 1: Little Britain...
Actually, a comedy phenomenon as such is a rare thing these days. Historically, shows like The Goons and Monty Python have become phenomena - but that was a long time ago, when there were shows that 'everybody' watched/listened to and that became mass-membership cults with a not-so-private language of catchphrases etc. Now it's more a case of breathtakingly bad comedies proving unaccountably popular (anyone seen My Family?) and infinitely better comedy just trundling away in the vast open spaces of multichannel TV. The BBC just about showed Seinfeld, Larry Sanders and, more recently, Arrested Development - and Channel 4 just about showed Scrubs - but they might as well not have bothered. They'll never be phenomena anyway, but thank heavens they're still around, somewhere. On the other hand, The Simpsons is a phenomenon - but no candidate for that overrated list.

Two 4s, Two Anniversaries

While Stephen Fry was being fawned over on BBC2 in Fry At 50, he was simultaneously (such are his magical powers) on Radio 4, taking part in the network's 40th anniversary celebrations by fronting Radio 4: This Is Your Life, with Matt Lucas embodying the network as an out-of-touch but louche old fart. He probably lost the core audience in the first five minutes with an entirely gratuitous f-word, but after that it settled down to a stream of cosy in-jokes for Radio 4 aficionados, some quite funny, others utterly lame. The programme that preceded it - a big round table affair - was more satisfactory. I'm sure most bloggers would agree that Radio 4 is worth celebrating once in a while, and well worth preserving as a truly unique national institution, one that can be seriously annoying but which we certainly wouldn't wish to be without.
Oddly, there was yet another anniversary celebration last night - of the 25th birthday of Channel 4 on More4 (Dame Liz Forgan, fresh from Radio 4, was in this as well - though not, by some oversight, Fry). This programme was deeply depressing - a succession of smug (and spectacularly ugly) kidults congratulating themselves on all the 'transgressive' and 'subversive' things they'd done. It was like watching a stop-motion compendium of all that has gone wrong with this country (and TV) in the past 25 years. Looking back over the 40-year history of Radio 4, by contrast, brought no such sense of loss, decay and witless self-destruction. Channel 4 has never grown up. Radio 4 was always grown up.

Ponder Post 14: Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry and I share a birthday - August 24th - but little else. This time round, Fry was 50 and the BBC has marked this rite of passage with a Stephen Fry Night on BBC4 and, last night, with Stephen Fry: 50 Not Out on BBC2. I watched the latter with mounting incredulity. The first problem was Emma Thompson. Everything she says sounds desperately phony and patronising. The second problem was the format of simply asking a lot of friends and colleagues to say how great Fry is. It was, in fact, a straight luvvie-fest. The third problem was: why? I've never quite got Fry. I can see he is gifted and intelligent. But I simply don't find him that funny and the soupy voice and prose are deeply off-putting. (Many of the luvvies said he 'loved language/words' - this is only ever said by and about the illiterate. Saying somebody loves language is like saying they love air. Fry is not illiterate and he doesn't, therefore, love language.) I now admire him, however, because I heard him talking about manic-depression on the radio. It was unaffected and moving. But even those who do find him funny must have been startled by all this incontinent gush just because he's 50. He is big, but, surely, not that big. He is, psychologically, interesting, but gushing luvvies are not qualified to explore that. So Fry at 50 as a cause for a big TV fest - why?

The Barbecue Caption

I notice some fatigue setting in with the picture captions. Perhaps the moment has passed. Perhaps Ian Russell has expired. Their value to me is, of course, they give me something to put on the blog when I wake without a thought in my head. I am in that condition now. Thoughtless, utterly. What better way to capture this state than with a barbecue? More mindless than ballet, more barbaric than Jeremy Kyle, more... no, mind quite blank.