Category Archives: culture

08 May

Government-sponsored Nihilism

Russell Brand, Caitlin Moran and Dizzee Rascal are to be added to the A-level syllabus. Brand’s 2012 testimony on drug use to a House of Commons committee will be in an A-level in English language and literature course in a development dreamed up by the exam board and the educational charity, The English and Media Centre. It will sit alongside Caitlin Moran’s Twitter feed, the BBC Newsnight interview with rapper Dizzee Rascal and the work of former Guardian columnist The Secret Footballer.  News of these innovations has already provoked members of the Department for Education to denounce the new syllabus: “It is immensely patronising to young people to claim that they will only engage with English language and literature through celebrities such as Russell Brand”, said a senior source in the department.

I read about all this in The Guardian which, in a spot of dumbing down all of its own, asked its readers to email and tweet to say whether they think these additions to the A-level are “a rubbish idea or a total genius.”I’ve no doubt that the journalist who “wrote” that phrase would defend himself by claiming he was being “ironic.”

The Guardian went on to say that accusations of dumbing down are “hysterical.” (I wonder if they meant that word to be taken in the ironic sense too?) Of course there has been relentless dunbing down for forty years and more. The A-level examining boards know it. I have some experience: some years ago when I was commissioned to write an article for The Times Educational Supplement on the subject, I had the very devil of a job trying to get the various boards to let me – purchase, not borrow – past papers for comparison. That was twenty years ago. I thought things were bad then but, to imitate The Guardian’s faux-proletarian “irony,” the syllabus was “total genius” in those days, but now it is “a rubbish idea.” If I may go back to the olden days, when I was studying for English literature A-level, we were required to have detailed textual knowledge of three Shakespeare plays – and if you were after top marks, you had to show a background acquaintance with the whole canon. Candidates were expected to be able to quote poetry from memory. And we were asked to read the whole of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall as well as verses by the metaphysical poets John Donne and Andrew Marvell.

Standards were incomparably higher all across the curriculum at primary as well as secondary stages. I attended a sort of Bash Street junior school in Leeds in the 1950s. There were forty in the (working class) class and we were learning clause analysis at the age of ten. In O-level maths we studied the binomial theorem and the beginnings of the differential calculus. In O-level RE we had show an understanding of the synoptic problem involving the first three gospels

Most teachers couldn’t do this stuff nowadays, let alone the pupils.

The government and the mass media go in for dumbing down for two reasons. First, they are pretty dumb themselves and know nothing of the intellectual tradition of the West – and what little of it they have stumbled across (in the interstices between pop music and fashion) they despise: “Shakespeare not ‘accessible’ to ‘kids.’ Eliot ‘elitist’ and so on.” Secondly, they have a vested interest in doing as little as possible to sharpen the critical faculties of the barbaric drones who constitute the underclass. Nobody has described the chronology of our demise better than R.G. Collingwood:

“From Plato onwards, Graeco-Roman society spent its life in a rear-guard action against emotional bankruptcy. The critical moment was reached when Rome created an urban proletariat whose only function was to eat free bread and watch free shows. This meant the segregation of an entire class which had no work to do whatever; no positive function in society, whether economic or military or administrative or intellectual or religious; only the business of being supported and being amused. When that had been done, it was only a question of time until Plato’s nightmare of a consumers’ society came true; the drones set up their own king and the story of the hive came to an end…”

Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedinmail
07 May

Job application

To whom it may concern…

I should like to apply for the post of Chairman of the BBC following the retirement of Lord Patten. You will want to know why I think I am the right man – sorry, “person”! – for the job. I must confess that I am motivated partly by fear – the fear that the BBC’s character and  reputation – described by Chris Patten as “precious and wonderful” – might be lost. Particularly, I fear that right wing politicians will use this time of crisis, precipitated by the vacancy at the top, fundamentally to alter the historic and humane socialist ethos of the Corporation. The BBC has a long and proud record of vigorous opposition to Conservative governments and leaders: who can forget the brilliant hatchet job editors and presenters performed on Margaret Thatcher, especially the coverage of her death and funeral? Let us not forget that it was the BBC alone that transformed the image of Tony Benn from loony commissar to national treasure. I fear that this great tradition in political broadcasting might be lost. And of course the BBC is the last remaining champion of the NHS – “envy of the world” – and state education

The BBC is the most reliable and respected news service in the world. For decades It has relentlessly told the truth about Israel: that it is a pariah state operating a system of apartheid against hard-working and peace-loving Palestinians whose only “crime” is daily to fire Kyatusha rockets into Israeli towns and villages. This accurate picture could change overnight if the forces of the right were to use the present interregnum to influence the BBC’s highly ethical foreign policy. And Israel is not the only example of where such a catastrophe could occur. For example, BBC coverage of events in South Africa since the glorious liberation under St Nelson Mandela in 1994 has always offered to the world a true picture of that admirable rainbow nation, with its new-found equality among all races and classes, increasing economic prosperity and remarkable reductions in crime, violence and political corruption. And one of my greatest fears is that, without the BBC’s unbiased “telling it as it is” portrayal of Muslims in Britain, there would be a rapid rise in incidents of Islamophobia. Also the BBC has a noble record of “doing what it takes to stop UKIP.” This must not now be compromised by political interference from the right.

But my concerns are not confined to politics. Art and culture are what define a nation and its people. Again, the BBC has long represented truly democratic and popular taste and resisted a growing trend towards a savage, out-dated and exclusivist elitism. The welcome introduction of pop music into the Promenade Concerts is particularly praiseworthy – though I admit this has not proceeded as quickly as many would like. Nevertheless, there is thankfully never a half hour on Radio Four which does not include its cheerful blast of pop music; and presenters are to be commended for their ingenuity in managing to do this regardless of the subject matter of the news story. The greatest cultural achievement of the BBC over long years of struggle against the reactionary tide of opinion has been the way it has transformed the cultural language itself. For example, in all BBC programming, the word “music” now means “pop music.” And “art” chiefly features the outstanding work of pioneers such as Damien Hirst and Lord Saatchi’s generous sponsorship of the best in modern art. “Poetry” too has been democratised and, although there are still occasional and regrettable mentions of elitist snobs such as T.S. Eliot, poems on the BBC are now almost exclusively and properly used to promote and support a humane socialism. Terrific strides have been made – if not quite, or not yet – in the actual provision of bread and circuses, then at least the Corporation can hold its head high for that it continues to commit vast amounts of effort and money into coverage of such cultural gems as Red Nose Day, The Eurovision Song Contest, the Oscars, the BAFTAS and of course the Glastonbury Festival.

I look forward to discussing these and many similar matters with you at interview. I will close for now by saying that Lord Patten himself is “precious and wonderful” and by re-echoing his characterisation of the BBC as the same.

PS Above all we must ensure there is strong resistance to all moves to abolish the BBC’s income from the universal tax…I mean of course the “licence fee.”       

Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedinmail
18 Apr

Magic realism

Don’t let the fact that Gabriel Garcia Marquez (RIP) is extravagantly praised by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and a shoal of lefty South American politicos put you off reading his novels. But, among the justified tributes to Marquez, some very misleading things are being said. Principally that, with Borges, he was the founder of magic realism – a style of writing fiction which mixes together mundane reality and magic, the supernatural, elements of the fairy tale and so on. The genre has often been linked with surrealism and especially with Salvador Dali.

But the founder of magic realism?

For this we must go back somewhat further than the life of Marquez. Thomas Mann was an early practitioner. And so was Hermann Hesse in those enchanting and magical novels Steppenwolf, The Glass Bead Game and Narcissus and Goildmund. We might think also of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and his novella Victoria. Then there were the German poets such as Klopstock, so enthusiastically taken up by Gustav Mahler – a magical realist if ever there was one.

But even these writers were latecomers on the scene. I’ve mentioned fairy tales and these – particularly in the collection by the brothers Grimm – are surely the origin of the genre of magic realism? In these we have ordinary life penetrated and suffused in the supernatural: witches cast their spells; goblins and pixies appear in forests which are at once natural and unnatural; people have their heads cut off and yet can still run around.

Marquez was an interesting writer and deserves to be read but when it comes to magic realism, he didn’t start it. Perhaps the serious critics will mention this fact. So far we have heard only from the newspapers and the golly-gosh arts commentators at the BBC. These types are renowned both for hyperbole and their extremely short memories.  

Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedinmail