Intelligent Life and the Essay

It has always depressed me that so few British magazines are willing to devote adequate space to thought-provoking essays. Have we only the staying power for the page length articles of the New Statesman or The Spectator? There’s a place for persuasive, succinct journalism – it would be tiresome to see every debate from every side – but isn’t that why our newspapers have Comment pages?

I must have scoffed when I first saw a copy of Intelligent Life, a self-styled ‘lifestyle and culture’ magazine. It's not only the preposterous, presumptuous name, but the word ‘lifestyle’ conjures unfortunate comparisons with Monocle and the Financial Times’ glossily crass supplement, How to Spend It. Magazines are odd place to look for advice on how to live.

Anyway, I don't remember how I first came by a copy — most likely in a bout of departure lounge profligacy — but I’m glad I did. The latest edition includes an article by Bryan Appleyard on Andy Warhol. Did you know that the auction record for a Titian, an artist widely regarded as the greatest painter of them all, is $16.9m, whereas a Warhol print will routinely sell for five times that? When you next see a Warhol, any Warhol, ask yourself if it’s worth so much more than this. 

Recommended Reading: The Riots

Anthony Daniels takes David Cameron's 'sick' Britain theme a little further, claiming in the NY Daily News that 'young British people are among the most unpleasant and potentially violent young people in the world' and in The Australian that Britain's 'young population is ugly, aggressive, vicious, badly educated, uncouth and criminally inclined'. 


In an interesting post at the LRB blog James Meek writes about how, when it comes to riots, London differs from Paris and although we live side by side in reality we're miles apart. 

From new grudge break to ancient mutiny

There is something terrible about wanton violence, destruction and ransacking. Most troubling, for the observer, is the ecstasy and alacrity with which it is carried out, that it seems to happen for no reason other than a desire for mayhem and havoc. When the Vandal king Genseric sacked Rome in 455 it was as much about loot as the destruction of Rome as an idea an emblematic act in itself.

After the disturbances of Monday night it would be useful to draw a distinction between the feckless thugs intent on violence and those involved only in the looting. Some will have been involved in both, of course, but others (a majority?) simply sought to capitalise on a moment of mass lawlessness. It is safe to assume that a fair number of the looters broke no other laws that evening. They were not involved in arson, nor did they assault the police. But why were they so eager to join their thuggish peers in looting their own neighbourhoods?

Here are some facts about the looters. They had homes to go, clothes on their backs, and were well (in some cases, abundantly) fed. They have all had the chance to be educated and were raised in a society where, until Monday at least, the closest we came to ransacking shops was the stampede that customarily accompanies the opening of a new outlet of Primark.

We comfort ourselves that we are not fundamentally brutal and egoistic the moment enforced law is suspended. Yet the looters in Clapham, freed of their everyday constraints, were committing crimes that only a fear of the law normally prevents. So Monday's looting remains unexplained, and we are left looking for answers. I doubt if we will find any. 

Our society relies on two types of law. There is the obvious deterent of police on the street, the courts and the prisons. But there is also what Primo Levi, in If This is a Man, called ‘the moral sense which constitutes a self-imposed law’. In an ideal society the former would render the latter redundant. But is it unreasonable to expect, in a semi-civilized society like ours, that it should at least hold sway? I hope the law catches up with the looters and they're forced to confront their misdeeds. It’s too convenient to write it off as herd behavior. We witnessed an anarchic, primal lust for material goods. In a you-are-what-you-have culture, where he who dies with the most toys wins, where the things you possess are thought not only to represent you and display your financial worth but be integral to your identity, should we really be shocked when people seek to obtain illegally things they feel so far from being able to afford?

Whatever the reasons, such a swift and wholesale disintegration of order is deeply concerning. It seems obvious now that London’s simmering gang culture would spill onto the open street; there was going to be a moment when these hardened thugs could no longer satisfy their nihilistic bloodlust by fighting each other, and when you're on tele everyone knows how tough you are. That moment arrived on Monday night. The Met and the rest of us could but watch on in stunned disbelief. It is only our intrinsic sense of right and wrong that prevents us running with the mob. If we have lost Levi's 'self-imposed law' it must be the job of the courts to administer justice until we've found a way of reclaiming it. 

God's Creation blog

Not enough action. Needs more conflict. Maybe put in a whole bunch more people, limit the resources, and see if we can get some fights going. Give them different skin colors so they can tell each other apart.

***SPOILER***

One of them is going to eat something off that tree You told them not to touch.

Read it all here. 

To go on living

I used to be a member of a gym. After a couple of months I couldn’t remember why I’d joined, so I quit. Those hours I spent on the treadmill are lost forever. Unlike team sports, going to the gym has no social dimension. But health bores are everywhere, and their struggle to be healthy has itself assumed unhealthy dimensions. Why are people so obsessed with exercise and healthy living? Mark Edmundson thinks that ‘health and well-being are now simply ends in themselves. We want to go on living in order to go on living, and not for much more.’

Trent Bridge crowd a disgrace

Praise aplenty this morning for the Indian captain MS Dhoni after his decision to allow Bell to be reinstated after tea. But instead of lauding Dhoni we should be lamenting the despicable behaviour of the Trent Bridge crowd, the petulance of Ian Bell, and the questionable conduct of England captain Andrew Strauss.

Unbelievably, when interviewed after the game, Bell seemed to express relief, not that Dhoni had magnanimously allowed him back to the crease but that the Indian captain had come to his senses, claiming "the right decision was made for the spirit of the game". Even allowing for his humiliation, which must have been very great indeed after such an elementary mistake, it was an astonishingly crass thing to say.

The fault for the entire debacle lay with Bell. The ‘spirit of the game’ was only broken if Kumar (the fielder on the boundary) deliberately set out to deceive the batsman by acting as though the ball had crossed the rope. Such a ploy seems inconceivable. Every Indian fielder, Eoin Morgan and both umpires appeared to be aware the ball was still in play. Tea was not called. The fault belongs entirely to Bell. Since when is it part of any sport - ‘spirit of the game’ or not - to automatically enact a reprieve for idiotic mistakes? There is no suggestion the Indian team were involved in a deceit or that they played any part in leading Bell to believe the ball was dead.

The dignified manner in which the Indian players came onto the field after tea amid deafening boos, the faces of the crowd contorted and ugly, made one wonder how England’s players might have reacted in similar circumstances. Would Pietersen have provocatively cupped his ear to the crowd like a football? Either way this much-vaunted ‘spirit of the game’, which appears to me no more than simply being sporting, should be practised by the players and the crowd; the former failed, the latter failed demonstrably. The sheer hypocrisy of a vitriolic crowd booing a team for supposedly having breached an unwritten code of conduct cannot have been lost on the TV audience.

What about Andrew Strauss? Aware of the hostility of the crowd, the Indian team, and Dhoni in particular, would have been feeling vulnerable during tea. We’re full of praise for Dhoni this morning, but the lateness of his decision suggests he was prompted to reach it only after a visit to the Indian dressing room by the England captain. India are a professional team and Dhoni is an experienced captain, why couldn’t we let them reach their own decision? There is something sickeningly condescending about an England captain lecturing the tourists on what is, and what is not, permissible under this gentleman’s code.

As Mike Atherton points out in The Times this morning, the last time the burden of such a tough call fell on the shoulders of an England captain he failed. Guardians of the ‘spirit of the game’? Only when it suits us.

After Dhoni’s act of enforced charity yesterday, England cannot win this Test with their heads held high. 

What I'm Reading 3

In his brilliant book of essays Working the Room, Geoff Dyer describes falling in love with this woman. But they’ve never met. In fact, he’s never seen or heard of her in any context other than this one photograph. How can that be?

“Well, whoever she is, she’s beautiful. Actually, I can’t really tell if that’s true, for the simple reason that I can’t see enough of her face. But she must be beautiful, for an equally simple reason: because I’m in love with her.”

Eloquently put, but is it possible to fall in love with a figure in a photograph? Well, possibly. We’ve all leafed through a book and found ourselves fleetingly besotted. It's important, too, that we differentiate between falling in love and being in love, the former a state of vertiginous possibility, the latter one of some certainty. 


And can’t it feel like we love someone before we ever lay eyes on them? The feeling that we’ve waited for such a person, and when we finally see them they are perfectly familiar. And yet we think of love as an intense attachment to somebody as they are at this very moment. But something of love is constituted by the idea of a person, not simply (or only) the physical being before us. If we can love something not yet there — the possibility of a future, the person we hope they become — then falling in love with someone you’ve only seen or heard isn’t quite as absurd as it sounds. 

Unfortunate Events

A man wandering nonchalantly through a car park with an assault rifle, an old lady prostrate on the pavement whilst a man tends to his bicycle, a parked van in flames, a woman squatting behind a car with her trousers down. Just some of the moments of menace, crisis and comedy unwittingly captured by Google Street View. Michael Wolf spent hundreds of hours finding and re-photographing these calamities for A Series of Unfortunate Events. 

The Toning Shoe Fad

I’ve always doubted if the ludicrous ‘toning’ shoe actually worked. Turns out this gimmick is more likely to be doing you harm than good. 

Draft cover 3

Here’s my cover for Alex Capus’s forthcoming novel A Matter of Time. Delicately made criticisms that lead to a change for the better will be rewarded with a free copy of the book. Make two worthy suggestions and I’ll send you two copies, and so on, until you have more than you know what to do with.

On Service

Before I get going I should make it clear that as a student I worked for a few days in a job that required me to serve people. During that brief stint, the foul nature of some of the customers was enough to ensure that I would never unthinkingly say an unkind word to a waiter or waitress. I try to be kind. I give the benefit of the doubt. I have even been known to smile. But this desire for harmony is being strained, and here’s why.

We’re crawling out of recession, times are hard. Quite understandably, restaurants, cafes and shops are trying to make the most of every customer. But there’s a disconcerting development afoot: waiters and waitresses, it seems, are being urged by their managers to push customers into spending more. If I have to endure many more exchanges like this, I cannot vow to keep my composure in check:

ME: A bowl of muesli, a black coffee and an almond croissant, please.

WAITRESS: Great. And would you like some fresh orange juice?

ME: Just these two, please [he places a packet of pasta and a jar of ragu sauce on the counter].

SERVER: And would you like some Parmesan today?

ME: I would like the spaghetti alle vongole, please?

WAITER: No starter for you today?

ME: Please could we have two glasses of tap water and the wine list?

WAITER: Of course. And maybe a glass of champagne to start?

On each of these occasions I have forced a ‘no thank you’ through gritted teeth. If I want something, I will ask for it.

Perhaps because it’s new to me, this aggressive selling is so much more infuriating than being constantly pestered (‘is everything ok with your meal’? To which answer should be ‘It was, and we’re having lunch’). It's more annoying, even, than the constant refilling of wine glasses. The waiter deliberately pouring all that remains of the bottle into one glass before asking if you’d like another. Worse than a maitre d’ who ums and ahs as he surveys the legions of empty tables, pretending it’ll be an effort to fit you in. Somehow they always find room.

Venting Spleen again

A friend, whose opinion I value highly, read this and urged me not to let my blog become a place of perpetual whining and sounding-off. One diatribe after another is no fun, she said. And besides, these rants of yours are fogeyish and don’t show you in a good light. And yet I've always thought the French dramatist Henry de Montherlant was on to something when he said: ‘happiness writes white’.

So I’m going to keep this piece of spleen venting brief. Not because I don’t have a lot to say on the issue, and certainly not because the garment in question does not deserve thousands of words of ridicule and scorn (it does), but because this thing is so ludicrous that one picture is all that’s required.

When did somebody first think that neither trousers nor shorts would suffice, and that these were the answer?

p.s. there’s another rant to come this afternoon, after which I’ll do my best to be positive.

How to Begin 2

One other glaring omission (and one missed opportunity) from yesterday’s list of best opening lines. Some openings are so synonymous with the book that eventually the line comes to stand for the book itself. That’s certainly the case with Camus’s existentialist classic The Stranger.** You would do well to find a more detached and chilling line than Meursault's ‘Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure’

And they have been stingy with their quotation from the King James Bible, quoting only the first sentence and omitting the poetically brilliant second. The first sentence is iconic; the second should stir even the most secular heart:

‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.’

**I’ve always thought George W. Bush unfairly maligned. But when he named The Stranger — a book about a man who, with scant provocation, kills an Arab and feels no remorse — as his summer read in 2006 I began to wonder.

How to Begin...

These are apparently the 100 best opening lines in literature. Good to see Bellow's Herzog, but scandalously no mention of his epic bildungsroman The Adventures of Augie March, which boasts, to my mind, the greatest opening salvo of them all:

I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

The master at work: a manuscript page from The Adventures of Augie March

The Price of a Peach

We live in an Age of Price Comparison, so I was unsurprised a reader should be in touch about yesterday’s post, Daylesford: It's Love.

The soup and sandwich cost roughly £6. Give or take a few pence, that’s on par with the competition.

The price conscious customer would do well to avoid the fruit. This Spanish peach, weighing a paltry 138 grams, costs a staggering £1.32. I buy peaches very infrequently so have no idea if that’s untypical. But four 33 pence bites later it doesn’t feel like value.

I know it was bought in Belgravia. I understand it’s organic. But £1.32? For a peach? Think about that.

The Daylesford Organic Spanish peach, yours for £1.32

Incidentally, when TS Eliot wrote ‘Do I dare to eat a peach’ he was thought to be alluding to Prufrock’s feelings of sexual inadequacy, not the cost of a piece of organic fruit.