Robin Carmody messaged me on FB to say he’d just been reading my le carré rereads on ilx, and enjoyed and agreed with them. Since one of my projects here is I guess to begin to centralise my boringly dispersed and rhizomatic self, I thought I’d link them here. This is the original, inset in a longer ilx thread: liveblogging Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. This is the same excerpted at FT (i.e. all the rest of the entertaining ilx chatter cut away). This was intended as a liveblog of a reread of Smiley’s People, except things ran away with themselves and I ended up just posting some thoughts (on an ilx thread no one else ever contributed to).
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Ramsay’s Neo-Leninist
Micro-Party Nightmares
As my friend
RT said:
“would watch”
Of course It helps no one to say that — as a child watching pop on telly — I always found him cold-eyed and creepy.
I was brought up not to mock strange people — not to point at them in the street or to gang up tease them at school. The only two fights I ever got in I was defending the weird kid against the popular bully — even though I wasn’t really friends with the former (no one was) and on the whole got on fine with the latter. (I was also rubbish at fighting, so these interventions weren’t exactly of consequence…)
But in this instance I think this completely fritzed with my antennae. First, I assumed — and I suspect this was quite widespread — that even though *I* wasn’t a fan, lots of people surely were: that Sir James Savile was widely loved and considered loveable, just not by me. Maybe I was just being parochial, or a class snob? And second, a kind of defensiveness would kick in on his behalf, when you heard the rumours, as you did, now and then. Obviously he’s an odd man — visibly solitary in the buzz of crowds — but odd isn’t a crime, and, look, don’t smear the weird kid! Anyway, this — tidied up after conscious reflection — is somewhat how I thought, if that’s the right word.
And I’m now tempted to generalise, and at least to wonder if something like this isn’t what allowed him to play so many people who should have known better. A friend noted last night the absence, when Savile died, of any kind of outpouring. No one much coming forward to say how lovely he was to work with, for example. How “beloved” actually was he? Everyone knew? My intuition as a child was apparently right — my unease has just been horribly confirmed — but of course I didn’t “know”. True, I didn’t enjoy watching his shows — so I outsourced my judgment in all regards to all those (imaginary?) fans who apparently DID like him, and basically forgot about it. All around, this unpleasant week, I’ve been sensing that EVERYONE was doing something similar — including people genuinely nearby, with a power to step in and stop him, but also plenty sitting in audiences not really enjoying watching him but assuming someone present must be. It isn’t exactly that I feel self-disgust at complicity — I wasn’t often even in those audiences, so I’m only complicit in the not very useful sense that “we all are”. It’s that the reasons that caused me to entirely tamp down and set aside my initial youthful abreactions, to suspend my alert judgment, are aspects of myself I’m usually fairly proud of. Yuk.
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Entirely unsurprisingly, the word ‘troll’ now has a politicised range of meanings—all the way from anonymous internet bully to subtly provocative dialectician, with a fractally wriggly continuum linking these extremes—and the comment this is a response to (a) made it reasonably clear which meaning one s/he had in mind* and thus (b) deserved a better (or at least more self-aware) answer than “By using the word X you can only be saying Y about me and I know myself well enough to say this is false.” Of course dsquared was trolling here — and it’s not as if Farrell is historically that good at identifying the motivations of the people he deems trolls by his own over-simplified (which is to say self-exculpatory) definition. The revealed fact of the faultline is an indication that people on both sides are uneasily (=angrily) aware that they too exist within contradiction: “just a lot less so than those OTHER deluded clowns,” the more twerpish partisans on both sides are busy telling themselves.
*And yes, s/he later disappointingly backed away from a good strong usage…
]]>Other things to note:
i: clips of young Fleetwood, a gangly long-hair beanpole pulling goofy faces; clips of young Mcvie, small and compact, stern-faced, focused, always avoiding looking into camera. Compare both to how they are now
ii: the way Fleetwood always speaks for McVie, sat darkly right there beside him, keeping his counsel (“John always felt…”: why can’t John say what he always felt?)
iii: no one seems to get close to the nut of what went awry (money, drugs, sudden vast fame, various semi-related violations of idealised integrity, sex…), nor do they really recognise they’re nowhere near it. As anecdotes, it’s compelling; as self-analysis or wider cultural acuity, really nowhere…
iv: this was a generation who escaped the cramped given futures of their backgrounds into (someone else’s) musical facility rather than (someone else’s) verbal facility. “My” generation of pop-figures trusted music far less; placed far more uncritical trust in borrowed systems of words (tempted to say “college-boy” words). Which is perhaps why the reflection on display here seems so much more open and beguiling, right or wrong. It hasn’t convinced itself it’s “cleverer” than you; it isn’t looking over its shoulder all the time; its insight isn’t something you anxiously need to go away and read up on.
v: With iv in mind, significant perhaps that their “younger-generation commentator” has to be a Gallagher. He doesn’t bring much beyond simply stated fandom — but who might they have invited that allowed themselves even this? (And not clouded it up with second-guessing, I mean.)
vi: “B. B. King (…) said that the only guitarist that sent shivers down his spine was Peter Green…” Don’t read anything pejorative into the word “borrowed” here.
vii: [added a little later] Andy Capp-style flat caps as the fashion accessory of the Thames Delta Blues Kids, 40 years on.
Then I started imagining the factories and warehouses full of these pale green and poorly fashioned figurines, and started feeling a bit ill myself: it’s not such a bad habit, when something mass cultural entertains you momentarily, to imagine how it would strike you en masse.
In my day-job I have to read — and deal with — the terms “appropriation” and “subversion”, maybe not exactly en masse, but far too bloody often. The people using these words (not just these words) mostly imagine they are observing stuff from a higher intellectual plane: on the whole they’re really really not.
]]>Not just “my” relation, surely? Josh quotes Warshow: who I should read, of course. Influence doesn’t exist, but the sky on my planet is still that shade of yellow some days (today, for example). Hi Josh.
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