neither your cat nor your dog are really bothered

I’ve always been a little intrigued by the concept of Weltschmerz (the Germans always have a word for it) – perhaps as someone who cultivates it a little, as others cultivate bonsai trees: there, I said it so you don’t feel you have to - and today I’ve been thinking about that Merchant Ivory adaptation of E.M. Forster novel's Room With A View (1985) in which Denholm Elliott says – a propos of his son, who's a little given to hooting 'truth! beauty!' up trees; some would say he should get a job – “I don’t hold with this world-sorrow, do you?” 

In asking this – with a degree of implied spiritual enquiry, kind of an I-thou moment; he has a greater emotional range than the average British character actor - D.E. expresses a degree of weariness with world-weariness, sorrow about sorrow thereby intimating his commitment, albeit negatively expressed, to groundedness and joy. Meta-emotion is what makes you human, of course, meta-emotion and opposable thumbs; your dog can feel happy or cross but it can’t experience ennui or schadenfreude like it can’t operate the remote control - which is probably a good thing on the both counts.

Meta-meta-emotion, on the other hand – let’s not even go there, this just make you Henry James – and no-one wants that. (P.S. Your cat is also not intrigued by the concept of Weltschmerz – it rejects the concept out-of-hand as bourgeois mystification and existential bad faith, it demands that you feed it and stop reading this rubbish on the internet).   

this is the b-side of our single, sports fans

Are you a little jaded today? Native hue of resolution sicklied o'er by the pale cast of thought? It happens sometimes.

Listen: you could do a lot worse than watch this somewhat Dada-esque video in which the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band perform 'Canyons of Your Mind' - while sending up Dylan-mania and letting Viv Stanshell wander off and then back on again wearing a kind of giant Easter Island head for some reason.

Three minutes of your life you won't want back.

from the kitchen sink to proto-fascism via the new jersey turnpike: twenty-seven word film reviews, with longer bits in smaller type

This article contains SPOILERS in respect of the films A Taste of Honey and The L-Shaped Room.

I’m All Right Jack (1959, dir. John Boulting, starring Ian Carmichael, Terry-Thomas, Peter Sellers, Liz Fraser, feat. Malcolm Muggeridge as himself) - Supermac-era industrial relations satire; obvious/ mean-spirited sometimes; Peter Sellers (as shop steward Fred Kite: “ah, Russia…! all them cornfields… and ballet in the evenings!”) - redeems experience.
 

A Taste of Honey (1961, dir. Tony Richardson, written by Shelagh Delaney, starring Rita Tushingham, Dora Bryan, Murray Melvin)     

The L-Shaped Room (1962, dir. Bryan Forbes, adapted from the novel by Lynne Reid Banks, starring Leslie Caron, Anthony Booth, Brock Peters, Cicely Courtneidge)

These films - mirror images of one another in some respects - dance around themes of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, freedom, constraint more interestingly than do the ‘belligerent male antihero’ films of the same era (your ‘Saturday Nights’ and your ‘Look Backs’). 

At the start or towards the start, each protagonist has ‘falls pregnant out of wedlock’ (as we used to say); each film ends with a kind of rapprochement with the older generation; in the middle, joy, struggle, love, heartbreak, a sense of running up against the limits of an indifferent-to-intolerant social world (narrower limits in ‘Honey’, somewhat looser limits in ‘Room’). 

In the former film, a wholly different and better kind of family life seems briefly possible for Jo and Geoffrey (the gay chap Jo pals up with, after he pops in to and buy shoes at the shop where she works, and who then redesigns her shabby half-derelict warehouse-like flat for her, literally letting the light in). As Jo’s pregnancy advances, Geoffrey visits the ante-natal clinic for her and collects leaflets from a puzzled nurse; he cooks, she smokes (there's so much that we didn’t know back then; if we knew, did we care?), they hang around doing fun kinds of nothing the way most young people do, bantering good naturedly about the anticipated happy event: 

   Geoffrey:  (serving pudding with a flourish) So what you gonna call it?

   Jo:             The cake?

   Geoffrey:  No, not the cake. The baby. 

                (It’s funnier in broad Mancunian.)

Geoffrey’s departure and Jo's good-for-nothing mum’s re-appearance then figures as a kind of sudden foreclosure, defeat snatched from the jaws of victory as sometimes happens in these sorts of films (one reason why the people who don’t like them, don’t like them – yes, I’m talking to you, Peter Bradshaw). 

In ‘The L-Shaped Room’ by contrast, the finale is promisingly both open-ended and, to a degree, self-referential (Jane’s boyfriend Toby, who isn’t the baby’s dad by the way, is a writer; ‘The L-Shaped Room’ is the title of a memoir that he writes, and leaves as a gift her; do we make our lives in the telling of them?).  This difference in mood may also be a class difference with all that that implies in terms of money, cultural capital and all the rest – while the unexamined life is not worth living, it's also true that, as Virginia Woolf and others have pointed out (A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas), there have been and still are structural differences, some relating to gender class and so on, in who gets access to the proper examination of one’s life. (It's, like, your base and your superstructure, innit?) Guess what, it may also be, in some aspect, a difference between Leave and Remain… and I’m not being wholly facetious or anachronistic about that, I’m thinking of David Goodhart and other theorists of the postwar imaginary… so you can buy me a drink sometime and ask me what I mean; be careful I don't try to read you my 1960s-set time travel story 'Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind' (feat. Vashti Bunyan, Rudi Deutschke).

The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963, dir. Ken Hughes, starring Anthony Newley, Julia Foster, Robert Stephens, Wilfrid Brambell) -  Wish you could run round seedier parts of early-1960s London for an afternoon? This (feat. Warren Mitchell as North London Jewish grocer) is next best thing.

Being John Malkovich (1999, dir. Spike Jonze, written by Charlie Kaufman, starring John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, John Malkovich) -  Glorious late-1990s indie comedy; portals, mind control, the dance of disappointment, the New Jersey turnpike, fin de siècle sexual politics. Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich; what’s not to like? 

The Commune (Kollektivet) (2016, dir. Thomas Vinterberg, starring Fares Fares, Ulrich Thomsen, Trine Dyrholm) –    Absorbing Aesopian dog/reflection story. Mid-1970s Danish professional, don’t recklessly destabilise your nuclear family (& underpinning Judaeo-Christian assumptions) by reaching for some inchoate collectivist New Age ideal!

Passengers (2016, dir. Morten Tyldum, starring Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, Michael Sheen) -  Liked this, but (as with Wall-E, Dark Star), found the set-up more compelling than the plot; Aurora should’ve made a different choice near the end (no spoilers). 

Every Day (2018, dir. Michael Sucsy, starring Angourie Rice, Justice Smith, Debby Ryan) -  Watchable, unmemorable fantasy romance (premise: modern teenager doomed to daily, not post-mortem, metempsychosis); like ‘Time Travellers’ Wife’ but less inherently silly; because ‘a Y.A.', less well-known.

-----------------

Red, White and Blake (2017, dir. and starring Will Franken) – Set-up: canter thro’ Milton, Swedenborg, 1789; well-briefed, delivered in gonzo/ punk style… tidy! Reveal: sudden lurch to transphobia, Islamophobia, unconnected alt-right talking points... sour taste, disappointment, worry.

If you wanted to read more about what’s good about this documentary – and also about the ‘yuk’ factor induced once it has, metaphorically speaking, had three or four too many G&Ts at the family wedding and thus progressed from telling embarrassing and somewhat racist jokes to sharing actual pro-Trump pro-Brexit so-called theories derived from the alt-right media via twitter; of course, ultra-Remainers can be almost as annoying (yes, you're objectively right about climate and about the Erasmus programme; just please stop sounding so damn liberal and entitled about it) – read Jason Whittaker’s review. (Jason’s Head of the School of English and Journalism at the University of Lincoln and he’s written or co-written various books about Blake, including one on ‘William Blake and the Digitial Humanities': he knows so much about these things). 

I’m not meaning to say or imply, by the way, that Will Franken’s ‘alt-right’ (read his Index on Censorship piece, google him, make your own mind up). For my money I don’t think he is, I think he’s a talented stand-up comedian who knows plenty about William Blake and holds some horrible political views. So it goes. I do mean to imply, though, that it’s precisely this kind of contrarian minority-baiting right-wing shock-jock rubbish that helps to lay the cultural groundwork for fascism, helps to make it more thinkable and thereby more possible. This is, in other words, 'punching down' - an idiom which, like 'doubling down', has become vastly more popular in recent years, which tells you plenty about the zeitgest in and of itself. Let's level with ourselves here: this is a world in which Dark Money and Big Data are aiming to subvert the whole fallibly-democratic Operating System of the West and in which the too-rigid parameters of hegemonic late capitalism threaten to drive our whole civilisation to the brink of ecocide. If your gut-level response to such a word is "social justice warriors are annoying" or "women wearing the burka look like postboxes", then frankly there might be something wrong with you; you'd be well advised to have a think about how you're choosing to use your talents as a writer, film-maker, satirist or what have you. (Some of the great creators have had something wrong with them: Ezra Pound wasn't a very nice human being by all accounts and neither was Enid Blyton). When I talk about fascism, incidentally, I'm well aware that it’s 2019 - so we’re not talking goose-stepping Nazis or Mussolini-worshipping Miss Jean Brodie, no, we’re talking “networked, dispersed, entrepreneurial, crowd-funded, conniving gig-economy fascism” [Laurie Penny]. Weird, scary times...

 

dusting those logical positivist cobwebs away: an appreciation of bryan magee as memoirist and youtuber

Earlier this year, I spent a couple of months taking in Bryan Magee’s ‘Confessions of a Philosopher’ and also looking at some of his TV interviews with philosophers recorded during the 1970s and 1980s (they’re all available on youtube, decent audio, mostly about 45 minutes long – so it’s possible to take them in while doing the washing up, cleaning etc if you’re so inclined; #DustingWithSchopenhauer, as it were, though it’s his chats with Herbert Marcuse and Iris Murdoch that I’d particularly recommend).

‘Confessions’ is, loosely, a kind of autobiography told by way of an explication of what (in Magee’s view) philosophical problems are, also what the philosophically inclined layperson should read (Kant, Schopenhauer) and what, given life’s other pressing demands, s/he probably shouldn’t bother with (most of logical positivism). While the tone is, at moments, a little impersonal – don’t read this if you want to know about the author’s sexual awakening, his family life or whether he’s ever had a dog - it nevertheless takes in childhood, youth, university, time spent (invested?) as a Labour politician, broadcaster and all the rest, also his personal friendships with both Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell. Magee talks about the latter as someone with the manners of a Victorian gentleman (Russell was already nearly thirty when Queen Victoria died), whose family background had accustomed him to being on conversational terms with the leading statesmen, thinkers, writers of the age:

When I mentioned to [Russell] what seemed to me an unsalvageable fault in Marxist theory, he said: ‘I made exactly that point to Lenin, but I couldn’t get him to see it.’

One thing I found rather winning about both the book and the broadcasts is Magee’s utter lack of false (or, indeed, any) ‘modesty’ in the conventional English sense – though this goes hand-in-hand with an admirably unsparing approach in other ways. In respect of his current affairs broadcasting, he writes that “I was among the many midwives of the revolution in social attitudes that characterised the 1960s”; better, he opens his broadcast interview with Frederick Copleston about Schopenhauer by stating that he holds himself, Bryan Magee, to be the foremost living authority on Schopenhauer “but then I couldn’t very well interview myself.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Fred!!  

It’s interesting, by the way, that Magee who was raised in a thoroughly secular home, imbued with what we might call ‘metropolitan liberal values’ (élite? no, that must be something to do with disproportionate wealth and power, not reading a book once in a while and liking opera), and who has largely since lived for culture and for ‘the life of the mind’, should have such a sympathetic view of religious faith in general and Christianity in particular – and this despite never experiencing the ‘God-shaped hole’ that we Christians like both to talk about, and from time to time peer into our unconverted friends’ psyches in the hope of discovering. For one thing, as someone with a high regard for Kant’s work on the nature and limits of what can be known, Magee finds atheism (as constructed by the likes of Richard Dawkins and other pub bores, at least; there are better atheists) facile and unpersuasive. For another, though Jesus of Nazareth gets a B-minus for his somewhat thin epistemology, he’s highly commended in other respects. Magee makes particular mention of Christ’s love, including for the 'least deserving’ – which is also, for this Christian and sinner (me, I mean, I’m trying to be rhetorical), about nine tenths of the point. Of course, Christianity is mostly not what people think it is – and I say that as someone who isn’t spiritual at all, more sort of… religious (and also a kind of 1970s Marxist sociologist manqué; I mean, who hasn't secretly wished at one time or another that they'd written Learning to Labour? I know I have!).

See also: a recent interview with Bryan Magee, a reflection on philosophy on TV and the role of the public intellectual more generally (both New Statesman).