RosieBell

Hunt for the Cultural Appropriators/Fusionists

It's a bit late as it's finished its run in my local art-house cinema but do see Hunt for the Wilderpeople if you can. It  has a high New Zealand flavour. Most New Zealanders live in cities but in the backs of their minds is the bush, where men wear Swanndris and hunt wild pig with rifles.

 

The virgin bush – the wilderness – haunts the New Zealand imagination as hedged and cottaged England haunts the English one, and the Highlands the Scottish. The bush is the remains of Eden and the humans who have only been here since about 1300 are the Satans who massacred the angel birds, its true inhabitants. So when the heroes of the story are running through the bush and spot a huia it is a heart stopping moment for a New Zealander. It has the charge of the glimpse of the Holy Grail, it is the Lost Ark for Indiana Jones.

The film starts in a dishevelled bush-cleared farm with a shabby weatherboard house, the outside dunny of corrugated iron, the marcrocarpas and the broken wire fence, the steep, shallow-soiled dense forested mountains, so that those of us have been there can remember the dry slightly acrid smell of the bush and the trunks of the trees thick with epiphytes and moss and creepers, small forests on forest. A social worker brings a boy to be fostered by the couple, Bella and Hec, who live at the farm.

The story is an old theme, of a child who brings love and light into an old curmudgeon's heart, which dates from Little Lord Fauntleroy and Anne of Green Gables. The twist is that the kid is a horrid fat brat, Ricky, (brilliant performance by Julian Dennison) from a deprived urban background. Bella ( Rima Te Wiata), a practical and golden-hearted woman kindly nurtures the boy only to die and leave him with the her husband, the misanthropic Hec (Sam Neill). Through misunderstandings Ricky and Hec end up fleeing through the bush pursued by the barmy social worker (Rachel House), her enjoyably laconic side-kick policeman (Oscar Kightley) and ultimately any amount of hunters and the New Zealand army.

As there has been much annoying talk about cultural appropriation here's a fine example of cultural fusion. It's directed by a Maori (Taika Waititi), a lot of the cast are Maori. There is a Maori theme of an ancestral attachment to a particular place. The culminating moment is when the ashes of the Earth Goddess Heart of Gold Bella are returned to the waters.

There is also a cross-current of languages. Ricky speaks a mixture of social worker jargon, American rap and haikus, which he's been taught as a way of calming himself and expressing emotion. The social worker goes on like an American cop. As well as the curmudgeon theme, which has been given a refresh and charm – and even realism, as a course of bush craft would probably help a difficult urban boy -there's the zany, unjaded humour of The Flight of the Chonchordes with a touch of Hot Fuzz and a car chase including an army of tanks and the usual smashing everything finale.

A personal note. I saw Sam Neill when we were both young and he was beautiful in his first film Sleeping Dogs  where he ran around the bush..

 

It's lovely to see him after he has had a solid screen career now old, still handsome and still running round the bush. It's lovely too that in our youths the New Zealand film industry was thin and spasmodic, now it is well established and this film had an international audience and upbeat reviews.

The New Philistines

Review of The New Philistines: How Identity Politics Disfigures the Arts by Sohrab Ahmari

The Philistines identified by Matthew Arnold had a narrow and reductive view of the arts as only good if they upheld a particular morality. The 1890s and the aesthetic movement upturned them, the aesthetes were despised by the Social Realists in the 30s, who were taken on by the liberal creatives bursting out in the sixties, the New Leftists returned, along with the feminists, with shock and political art and now the identitarians have moved in. The identitarians are Ahmari's New Philistines, who judge, and sometimes make, art via their ideology, caring about the political point rather than craft or beauty. His contention that they dominate the culture is reinforced by how his frequent use of “beauty” and “truth” now seem antiquated as critical terms.

Ahmari has a reverential attitude towards high art, so Part I of his readable polemic, Intruders in the Temple, tells of how he was affronted by a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at The Globe. Emma Rice was the director and it included a sound-and-light show, a gay male Helena and the love juices were date rape drugs. I share his pain as I too have ground my teeth at a goose-stepping Coriolanus, say (Coriolanus is not a Fascist, and it made no sense). Directors making stupid political points are as annoying as hectoring comedians.

However for every modish production of a Shakespeare play with a Hoxton-hipster Hermia there's a straightforward, well-acted piece in robes and furred gowns. In the RSC production of King Lear I saw the other night Anthony Sher was a mound of pelt. Although the director had rehearsed it during Brexit, and thought there were parallels with bad decision-making and a union falling apart he did not present Cordelia as Angela Merkel nor Goneril as Theresa May and left us to draw the modern parallels about power and powerlessness and the times being disturbed.

It shows a particular cultural strength that the educated Shakespearean audience sees interpretations as variations on a theme, because the plays are so well known, as Athenian play goers liked to see what a playwright would do with the myth of Orestes or Dionysus.

I can't get too holy about Shakespeare. He has his longueurs and a lot of his humour is lost with his language so the actors have to force out laughs with cod-fingering. Cuts can be enhancements. There are plenty of excellent productions including those broadcast at local cinemas by the RSC and the terrific Wars of the Roses series on the BBC a while back.

Ahmari does make a good thrust about shallow gimmickry in theatre productions:-

The bhangra and Bollywood numbers, and actors of south Asian heritage in two leading parts, suggested an Indian sensibility. Now a Midsummer with a well-developed south-Asian concept – juxtaposing or blending say, the rich mythology of the subcontinent with English folklore – might have worked well. Such a concept would have required a sincere, rigorous encounter with these sources. Yet identitarian art is rarely capable of such engagement. The texture and weight of genuine difference elude art of this kind, with its ironic posturing and tendency towards the flattening pastiche. Identitarian art rarely manages to raise marginalise and 'subaltern' voices. Doing so successfully requires really listening to such voices in all their rich complexity – whereas identiarian art usually searches for subaltern props with which to bash the 'dominant' culture. Opposing the 'oppressive' mainstream is more important than examining the peripheral as it really is.

Actually I do wonder that Emma Rice wasn't castigated for cultural appropriation by Indians, or someone purporting to speak for Indians. These fashions change so fast. Emma Rice however will not be around to do brash shows based on Shakespearean texts. She has had her marching orders because her use of neon lighting is against the spirit of The Globe. The Guardian thinks that is a bad idea, and The Spectator a good. So it goes in culture-land.

Ahmari finds a parallel with other ideological arts e.g Socialist realism but “Say what you will about the Soviet critics, at least they were erudite. Not so with today's identitarian critics, who care little for art history and aesthetics. What they are blessed with is lots of opinions about everything – all of which invariably revolve around race, gender and class, power and privilege.”

I've seen just such criticism of the gooey headed Corbynistas from dialectic trained old Trots about the Corbys' lack of hard analysis. Unlike Victorian evangelists and Marxists, the identitarians have no authoritative scripture to use as a measure for their particular world view – Foucault comes closest, but Ahmari does not find his identitarians actually quoting so much as osmosing, which he lays out in the second part of his polemic, The Illiberal Imagination. This follows discussions at Artforum. I found it a useful primer for such terms as “queer”, “performative”, “visibility” and “legibility” (something lots of people want to see and enjoy).

Liberal societies have increased “visibility” in the form of social and political rights, and liberal-minded writers were part of this process eg the authors of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Oliver Twist. And as far as visibility is concerned the marginalised have moved more towards the centre. The RSC's King Lear had a lot of black actors without making any identitarian big deal about it and that would not have happened a generation ago. And those who fulminate against political corrrectness, would once have grumbled about a black Edmund and Cordelia.

Ahmari has fun with the appalling jargon his Artforumites use and its view of art as “a place where we can treat the self as historical and social material”. This particular idea has permeated through to artists whose work he goes to see in the third chapter. Some have talent but, “their curiosity is limited by politics; identitarian politics takes away their freedom to explore great big questions in an uninhibited way; without pre-determined answers and concepts. Foucault, hardline feminism and queer theory wrap their art like a straitjacket. If their English grammar sounds broken, it is because their creative grammar is, too, and the source of the brokenness is the same.”

His tour of identitarian art – videos and installations – and dance – political twerking – is amusingly terrible. My own experience of such things – neon tubes of slogans repeating banalities and amateurish looking videos saying things that are neither new nor true – has sent me along the road to the museum of handsome and interesting artefacts. The audience for this work is the highly educated white liberals that it castigates, the ones who take city breaks in grand European cities who have preserved their past.

Of course fashions change. “The Great Wall of Vagina”, plaster-casting 500 women's sexual organs that Ahmari evokes may be deemed to be transphobic in a year or two, and Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, which used a vagina theme in ceramics, is beautiful as well as polemical. Ideological art does not mean ugliness of course- as demonstrated by the great mass of Christian and Islamic art.  So the ugliness may come from lack of craft as anything else. That may be the fault of the art schools, as well as the zeitgeist. Also, while the subsidised galleries and the grant receiving artists may be at work on such things the commercial artists will be turning out posters and cards of quite a different complexion for the mass market. Modern culture is definitely not all of a piece, nor stagnant.

Ahmari's last chapter is about the effects of this ideological art on our society. “Ideas that being with elite, avant-garde institutions invariably trickle down to popular culture, then go on to impact our daily lives.” and he instances criticisms of eg Downton Abbey (which deserves it – the servant class was not treated with anything like that consideration but caste superiority has to be prettied up for the modern audience). Downton Abbey may be castigated by someone in the Guardian but it will be made as long as it makes money and Julian Fellows is ready to turn out scripts.

He thinks identitarian politics is responsible for the rise of white-rage politics of Trump and UKIP.

Is it any wonder, then, that Americans and Europeans are increasingly embracing nationalist parties and illiberal movements?..

Having been told for decades that the promise of universal rights is a lie, that group identity is all that there is to public life, that the Western canon is the preserve of Privileged Dead White Men, and that identitarian warfare is permanent, many in the West have taken up their own form of identity politics. .. When culture only rewards the assertion of group identity (black, female, queer etc.), the silent majority will want its slice of the identitarian pie. They can do identity politics, too; it's called white nationalism. ..

Surely identitarianism is a muted annoyance compared to eg mass migration, demographic changes, a globalised economy and the sense of the world is becoming a more dangerous place. But the cause and effect of culture and politics is a large subject. In crude terms, far more read The Sun and the Daily Mail than get annoyed by The Guardian.

“To repair our politics, we could do worse than to start by expecting better from our arts and culture.”- is Ahmari's final call, and that really is the chicken-and-the-egg. I would expect a generational shift for talent and brains will break out of a strait-jacket and they're at work somewhere on a hub near you. Our society does have teeth and a stomach and it's a wonder what it can digest.

After reading Ahmari I re-read Robert Hughes' Culture of Complaint, which has a similar theme, and is richer and funnier from someone wholly engaged with the art world. It was published in 1992 and how little has moved on from then. What Hughes calls political correctness, we now call identity politics but they are essentially the same thing, constant language policing, a favourite target for conservative satirists.

Satire loves to fasten on manners and modes, which is what PC [political correctness] talk is, political etiquette, not politics itself. When the waters of PC recede – as they presently will, leaving the predictable scum of dead words on the social beach – it will be, in part, because young people get turned off by all the carping about verbal proprieties on campus. The radical impulses of youth are generous, romantic and instinctive and are easily chilled by an atmosphere of prim, obsessive correction. The real problem with PC isn't 'post-Marxism”, but post-Puritanism.

Generous, romantic and instinctive I'd like to believe but what is reported from the universities is an equal impulse for correction, censoriousness and righteousness. And against the post-Puritanism is the post-Restoration of the alt right and Milo Yiannopoulos.

So though not as apocalyptic as Ahmari, I do share some of his concerns. It is a chronic condition for liberalism to be in danger as it is an unnatural state for a tribal species and it has plenty of enemies, whether the new Red Guards of identitarianism,, the Islamic Fascists and their idiot enablers, the Guardian Cultural Sensitives, the Lock-em-Up Tabloids, and a whiff of blasphemy laws from the government.

“It's a free country,” we would say self-righteously at my primary school during disagreements. That sentence had a long political and cultural history behind it. Do they still say it now?

Spats in Nat Land

The latest wheeze of the Yessers has been to crowdfund billboards pointing out the iniquities of the BBC and offering an alternative news service.

There's disagreement about whether this will turn the Noes to Yes. Kirsty Strickland, a Yes supporter, suggested in Commonspace ihat it might be counter-productive.

Room for disagreement on this issue you might think. But not for Wings over Scotland who tweeted a picture of Strickland at the BBC suggesting she might be a Unionist traitor. Wings has powers to usher up swarms of cybernats and they eventually chased Kirsty off Twitter. She protested that she had six weeks unpaid work as a community reporter at the BBC and has written plenty that's critical of the organisation.

Loki, the Scottish rapper, took up her cause. Loki is of that part of the Yes movement that thinks an independent Scotland will be able to do something for the poor in the hard parts of Glasgow, He has come from a harsh background himself and is a clever eloquent guy who finds his way of expressing himself falls foul of the radical side of the Yes movement that has picked up the proper language codes. He himself has had run-ins with Wings.

He designed a Bingo Wings Over Scotland calendar which gives an amusing potted history of the affair and a portrait of the repulsive Wings who has done so much to make the nationalist movement in Scotland vile.

Rings Over Scotland

As for the billboards, they're an opening for creativity:-

 

War Stories

For years afterwards in the 1950s, the war remained an inexhaustible subject with a huge audience. The memory thus transmitted to later generations is a fragmentary one. An obvious reason is the unparalleled extent and complexity of Britain's war. For Russians, arguably the war can be encapsulated by the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad, the core of Vasily Grossman's… Life and Fate. For Americans, memory seems to focus on Pacific islands and D-Day. For the French, on the “syndrome” of occupation, collaboration and resistance. But for Britain, the only European country to have fought the whole war, it cannot be easily abbreviated. Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the 'Desert Rats' in north Africa, the Battle of the Atlantic, Arctic convoys, 'Dambusters', the Burmese jungle, SOE agents, prisoner-of-war camps, D-Day, Arnhem, and lately code breaking and decryption – all of these have powerful resonances… So the war has become a bewildering kaleidoscope of episodes. One of the most important war novelists, Evelyn Waugh, set action in Norway and Crete – both defeats, and both of secondary importance… The Dam Busters (1951) commemorated a real but highly unusual operation. The more realistic themes of wartime films disappeared after 1945, the involvement of ordinary people in and out of uniform, the prominent role of women, and the down-to-earth solidarity of the nation.
    Instead, films of the 1950s – such as The Wooden Horse (1950), The Cruel Sea, (1953) and The Cockleshell Heroes (1955), - concentrated on small-scale historically based episodes emphasising the strains of war on a few stoical but sensitive individuals….
    Despite a commonplace view that the English are excessively interested in the war, it rarely figures as an important theme in post-1960s culture. Its literature is largely forgotten. Films and television serials may occasionally be set during the war years- The English Patient (1996), Charlotte Grey, (2001), Enigma (2001), Atonement (2007) and TV series such as Foyle's War (from 2002) – but they are not about the war, which provides a background for costume drama. This sets England apart from most other countries involved, for which the war remains important as epic or a trauma. No English film is comparable with Lacombe Lucien (France, 1974) Come and See (USSR, 1985), Au revoir les enfants (France 1987), Stalingrad (German, 1993), Saving Private Ryan (USA, 1995), Band of Brothers (USA, 2001), The Pianist (Poland-France, 2002), Downfall (Germany, 2004), Black Book (Holland, 2006), Indignes (France, 2006), Katyn, (Poland, 2008) or In the Fog (Belarus, 2012).

[I would have said Das Boot as well.]

...Nothing with the ..power of First World War poetry remains in our culture from the Second…

The English and their History by Robert Tombs (Chapter - Memory, History and Myth)

What Tombs describes as “the involvement of ordinary people in and out of uniform, the prominent role of women, and the down-to-earth solidarity of the nation” would have been impossible for Waugh to portray, who had no love for ordinary people and whose disllusioned view of the war in his Sword of Honour trilogy, Brideshead Revisited and Scott-King's Modern Europe was that a war that should have been fought for Christian and preferably aristocratic civilisation had been won by Christian-persecuting Stalin and the welfare state.

The most powerful interpretation of that war for me is the documentary The World at War. I think of the title and I can hear the music and see the face after face under the flames. Britain has made excellent television and that was a high point.

The cultural products of World War II that have been taken to heart and are quoted are the television comedy series, Allo Allo and of course the far greater Dad's Army, the creator of which, Jimmy Perry, has just died.

Alan Coren's wrote a perceptive review when Dad's Army first hit the screen:-

They belong to the oldest regiment in the world, the men of Dad's Army. The Sidewinder may replace the siege-engine, and the Armalite the longbow, but the nature and composition of the King's Own 17th/21st Incompetents change not at all. I watched them all troop on again last night, out of step, ragged, potty, insubordinate, inept, and who are Arthur Lowe and Clive Dunn and John Le Mesurier, I said to myself, but Bardolph and Nym and Ancient Pistol. Or, come to that, Schweik and Yossarian and Stan Laurel…

these particular khaki fools do not discredit to the great tradition… The essential quality of mock-heroic is always sustained by the parody of the Brit-in-arms...  and behind the daftness there lies a certain valuable poignancy which is not altogether explained by nostalgia. I suppose what I mean is they would have died too, if the greater folly had demanded it.

Bardolph, Nym and Ancient Pistol are part of a grander and nobler story, the warrior king Henry at Agincourt, whose cause, we are elaborately told, is just, whose valour apparent and who ultimately conquers. Captain Bank Manager Mainwaring, Spiv Walker, and Stupid Boy Pike have no such juxtaposition in the text. Instead the just cause and valour and winning are cultural and historical memories hanging in the air. The England that they are defending is class-ridden, amateur, cosy and lovable - a sea-side town on the south coast with Church teas and a vicar.  Mainwaring is a pompous buffoon but we never doubt that he is patriotic and brave, that his absurd platoon are touched with heroism and self-sacrifice and that the enemy is worth defeating. 

The Unread Guards

So there's Lionel Shriver mischievously addressing the Brisbane Writers Festival about cultural appropriation through the sillier examples of sombreros and sushi and, more seriously, making the old cry for artistic freedom and the play of the imagination. Although what she said was not startling it did inspire performance art. One was from Yassmin Abdel-Magied who staged a walk out and whose article on why she did so the Guardian cruelly published. She was duly minced in the comments.

What did Shriver say in her keynote that could drive a woman who has heard every slur under the sun to discard social convention and make such an obviously political exit?

Her question was — or could have been — an interesting question: What are fiction writers “allowed” to write, given they will never truly know another person’s experience?

No, it's not an interesting question, if it's not as old as Sumerian cunieform, it's as old as Plato about lying for the purposes of art.

Shriver's ideas on identity are “the kind of attitude that lays the foundation for prejudice, for hate, for genocide. “

I do remember the days of cultural exchange, when we thought it was a good thing to broaden our minds by sampling foreign foods, foreign dance, and how this was meant to undermine the foundations for prejudice etc.... And genocide – wasn't the European Holocaust a good deal to do with a culture embracing its own purity, uncontaminated by outside forces?

Her last paragraph is genius in its lack of self-awareness:-

The opening of a city’s writers festival could have been graced by any of the brilliant writers and thinkers who challenge us to be more. To be uncomfortable. To progress.

She was challenged and she was uncomfortable and made her progress across the floor to the exit.

It's mean to make fun of Abdel-Massied's histrionics. So I'll make fun of someone else's histrionics instead, one Maxine Beneba Clarke.

Her tone is a cross between a Red Guard kicking a professor for incorrect thoughts and a Victorian Evangelical deploring novels that depict impure subjects.

Reading a tweet account of Shriver's speech was enough to throw her into a rage:-

Over the next 24 hours, Shriver’s speech – advocating cultural appropriation and publicly sneering at those who ask for consultation and sensitivity in the telling of others’ stories – is all any writer on the festival circuit can talk about. When we’ve tired of dissecting Shriver’s keynote speech, we talk about how desperately Shriver wants to be talked about. Then we stop talking about her at all.

(“Dissecting” with no actual corpse to cut up as Clarke had neither heard nor read the speech. )

Sensitivity? A good quality in any writing. Consultation? From who? I imagine something like a planning permission notice.

Proposed erection of novel set in Edinburgh and Glasgow constituting approximately 400 pages, 23 characters, 4 of who are of a Muslim Pakistani background, 3 Catholics of Irish descent, 2 gays (one camp, the other not). Objections should be lodged by 3 April 2017.

Anyway like those blokes in Bradford who burned The Satanic Verses, Clarke did not need to read/hear the offensive material in order to react to it as blasphemy. She confronted Shriver.

How dare you come to this country and behave like that?”

“When I come to your country,” Shriver’s chin is raised now. Her voice is strict, as if she’s speaking to small children. Though she’s shorter than I am, she somehow still manages to peer condescendingly down the bridge of her nose. “When I come to your country. I expect. To be treated. With hospitality.”

....

“You don’t even know what I said,” Shriver repeats, raising her voice slightly.

I can feel my blood pressure rising. “The entire Australian writing community has a fair idea of what you said,” I scoff. Then softer, in disbelief, almost under my breath. “You’re a disgrace.”

I love that Clarke is speaking for “the entire Australian writing community”. Did she consult? And a "writing community"? How does that work?

(By the way both Clarke & Abdel-Magied go for a setting the scene, dramatising style, which is slathers of icing on insubstantial cake.)

Clarke was outraged by Shriver's hauteur, the hauteur any writer worth her salt would display to some individual who had not read/heard her work before sounding off about it. Of course Shriver treats with disdain philistines responding to something they hadn't read.

Also how righteous and certain Clarke is, like a Southern Baptist preacher denouncing sin. The idea of “cultural appropriation” is established and unquestionable for some, it seems.

Clarke's last sight of Shriver is her sitting alone, which she thinks is a terrible indictment. She has her own cultural blind spot, for aloneness against a bunch of group thinkers shouting “blasphemer” raises Shriver's stature considerably in Anglo culture. Clarke has appropriated for Shriver the gaunt icon of Orwell standing alone against the Stalin-worshipping group think of his own day, and Shriver, though she calls herself an “iconoclast” doesn't really deserve it as about half the opinionated population snorts at sombreros and sushi and being told what you can and can't say.

A third respondent, Suki Kim, did hear Shriver through and is calmer in her response, though she misrepresents Shriver's ideas:-

Being gay is not an identity. Being deaf, blind, or wheelchair-bound is not an identity, nor is being economically deprived.” She tempered what amounted to a right-wing case against affirmative action and political correctness with a paean to cultural exchange, proclaiming, “I hope the concept of cultural appropriation is a passing fad,

Shriver said nothing against affirmative action or even political correctness when it comes to ordinary human interaction, and her words about identity were identity for the purposes of fiction, i.e. it is not enough for a character to be the Gay person, the Deaf person etc – they have to be other things as well, like kind or selfish or troubled.

In a diatribe that has since become notorious, she proceeded to enumerate the various ways in which cultural appropriation—the idea that white artists and communities have stolen elements of minority cultures in ways that are oppressive—was harmful to people everywhere. 

What elements? How can you “steal”* elements of minority cultures by portraying members of them in fiction, writing haikus or dancing the tango? There are things you can steal, loot, treasures, eg those Maori heads that were eventually returned to their home or you can steal the royalties for a song that someone else made up (The Lion Sleeps Tonight for example). But intangibles? She should have named these “elements”, which would have exposed the general wrongness of this idea.

Kim spoke on a panel which was a Right of Reply to Shriver's address:-

Afterward, once I finally finished my own book event and walked into what was known as the Artist’s Den, a private hotel room the festival had rented out for the writers to relax with drinks, several writers congratulated me on my performance. No one was referring to the one I did for my book...

I had been invited to the Brisbane Writers Festival as a writer, but now I was here, foremost, as an Asian. This was yet more proof, if it was needed, that Shriver was spewing nothing but nonsense: Some of us have no choice when it comes to identity. 

Kim has the usual writerly irritation that people preferred to talk about her discussing Shriver's thoughts rather than her own book. Writers – Martin Amis, Gore Vidal – have frequently complained that interviewers would rather ask them about their “views” than the thing that they wrote. She is reasonably pissed off at being the “non-white” representative, the substance of whose work is ignored however she has no qualms about treating Shriver as a white representative, whose opinions are treated as racial arrogance and which she has distorted. Kim can write about who she likes – WASPy bankers and black rappers if she can get away with it, i.e. do it convincingly and so can Shriver.

The examples Shriver gives of the chilling effect of the cultural appropriation movement on her own writing are being taken to task by reviewers and an internal nervousness that she will be vilified by people whom she thinks are wrong-headed and won't have read her work. That is hardly the government censor or the publisher indicating to Thomas Hardy to lay off the sensuality in Tess of the D'Urbervilles. So her complaints seem over the top as far as the writing profession goes – she sells, she is speaking at the Marlborough Literary Festival this weekend.

You write well, you write badly, you write courageously, you write timidly. Our two great humane, and humanist, novelists – George Eliot and E M Forster – were great cultural appropriators, Eliot in Daniel Deronda, a plea against antisemitism in her portrayal of Jewish pawnbrokers, artists and proto Zionists, and Forster in A Passage to India, the most anti-imperialist of English novels with its Muslim and Hindu Indians. They both took pains, researched, asked insiders about their accuracy. Then they imagined and wrote. And by their works we know them.

*(I filched this point from here.)

Against the Grain

The endless, endless tune,
Of Indy vs Yoon

Everyone agreed the campaign for Holyrood was dull, consisting of silly photo opportunities. Social media, cacophonous during the referendum and noisy during the General Election, was a dull grumble.

(An aside. Democratic politicians, like courtiers, have no dignity, nor should they. Asking for a vote is not a dignified act. The dignity is with those putting a cross on a ballot paper or counting votes.)

Counting votes in Edinburgh

 Everyone agreed that the SNP would win an easy majority in Scotland's rebarbative voting system.   And those of us who dread that referendum that is constantly going to be triggered by Brexit, Boris Johnson becoming PM, or favourable opinion polls, were depressed and anxious.  Whatever was said about this election being about taxation, education, the NHS, it was really about the constitution. Willie Rennie, the leader of the LibDems, said in the last leaders' debate, stop threatening referendums. And received wild applause.  So perhaps it started tipping back then. 

The Soviet retro front cover of The National on the eve of the election had the Nicola cult gushing. There are never enough pictures of Sturgeon for them. The heretics were WTF? Land of David Hume? Land of Billy Connolly? Was this Leader taking us to the Radiant Future and enlighten our false consciousnes with re-education camps so we obdurate Naws would share the beautiful dream of independence. 

My own constituency is Edinburgh Central and I had an interesting set of candidates to choose from. All women.  Sarah Boyack, a good Labour MSP (also a cycling supporter), Alison Johnston, a good Green MSP (ditto), Ruth Davidson, a new SNP candidate and a LibDem.   My instinct was to choose Johnston, who I rate. However the Greens are officially indy.  That left Davidson and Boyack. Boyack had the better chance of beating the SNP candidate, so I chose her and Conservative for the regional vote.* 

I woke up Friday morning, just about 4.   Ruth Davidson had won the seat.  3 out of the 4 Edinburgh constituency seats were going unSNP, while in Glasgow the SNP killed off Labour entirely.  As the morning wore on, it was news of a reprieve. The SNP were not in the majority and they would have to coalesce with the Greens for any pro-indy-ref legislation in Parliament. A referendum is off the cards. (Her ungracious SNP opponent refused to congratulate Davidson, as is customary.)

The SNP had run a campaign, BothVotesSNP. But indy supporting non SNPers gave their regional list votes to the more leftwards Greens. So there was rancour from the Wee Free Indies towards the SNPs, because BothVotesSNP lost possible seats for the Greens. And the SNP were scornful at Alison Johnston, a capable and likable Green MSP, for having the insolence to stand in Edinburgh Central, forgetting her proper role should be the SNP's henchman.  

Meanwhile, the Greens hold the balance of power. But, as was pointed out repeatedly prior to the election, it is power they cannot use. They have been put there to support the SNP administration. If they fail to do so, they will be severely punished in 2021. 

said a haughty Sneep.  

The rancour between the pure Sneeps and the Wee Free Indies was a pretty sight.  Wings of Scotland, the Indy guru, was flapping and whirring.

(Wings, for the lucky people who haven't come across him, is the unofficial guru of the indy movement and lives in Bath.)

His exchange with Limmy the comedian shows the auld art of flyting is not dead. 

Limmy's description of the Indies's unofficial economic adviser and the model of manners to the cybernats:-

All right, I have had my fun.  

There's plenty of more sober analysis from the Indy camp about how the chance of a grab for independence has been put on hold, alas.  These well-argued, well-written articles on Common Space and Bella Caledonia don't seem to care how damaging this polarisation of Scotland around this issue is, how much political time and energy campaigning on it takes up which could be directed to something more productive, and even no thoughts for the politicians who had a referendum in 2014, a general election in 2015, a Holyrood election in 2016, another referendum in June and there are municipal elections in 2017. The poor sods are constantly campaigning and could do with a break – and so could the electorate.  

 Craig Murray:-

Finally, it is not a bad thing that the Unionists are now firmly identified as the Tories. Many of them were Red Tories anyway, and all that has happened is that their allegiance has become plain. The stark choice between Independence and the Tories is now visible. It was always there, but at the referendum many did not see it. Having the Tories leading the unionist opposition simply brings the day of Independence closer. There is only one winner in that battle. 

It is true that some of the rich businessmen who are part of Unionism fear the SNP as they mistakenly think they're socialist. Socialists persuade themselves that the SNP will head leftwards, or an indy Scotland would go that way, though Scots are no happier than Southroners about paying higher taxes.  So many of us are voting against the grain of our sympathies and class interests. I'm soft Labourish/Greenish and I don't vote Green as they're indy.  The kind of harder left or Corbynista type who would vote Labour now vote SNP, who are Tory lite.  It's not a natural state of affairs.

A succinct comment laid out how the SNP should act to get some left credibility (which they won't do):-

Embrace the Greens, keep independence on the back burner, and pull the remaining Labour lefties your way. Come up with a credible economic strategy, while hammering away at the failings of the global market. Decline to be a service economy. Could be tricky, though; some of the SNP establishment only differ from the Tories as regards independence and are extremely relaxed about Peter Mandelson too. 

Adam Tomkins, Unionist guru and now a regional MSP in Glasgow is more optimistic:-

Riding both horses at once has been a hallmark of SNP success, but that is about to become a more difficult trick to pull off. Which way will Nicola Sturgeon’s new administration jump?

In her speech from Bute House yesterday there was – intriguingly – something for everyone. A nod to the Tories on education reform; a nod to the Greens on climate change; and a nod to Labour on welfare. Is that how the First Minister plans to run her government – seeking support from different parties on different issues, or will the SNP finally have to choose where it sits on the left-right spectrum? The former course may make for incoherence and indecision, but the latter risks fracturing the coalition that the SNP is.

I am not that hopeful that the Indy vs Yoon-tune will cease to be the national anthem. And those poorest in the country who left Labour to vote SNP?   I doubt if much will be done for them. Let them wave saltires.

*Some in these parts will be outraged I voted Labour with the Corbynista takeover and the anti-semitism scandals however in Scotland the Zio-media obsessive tends to be attracted to the SNP and the wilder fringes of the Nationalist movement rather than Labour.

The dance of democracy

I was in Jordan once during an election. I knew nothing of the the parties or Jordan's constitution but there were huge posters of the faces of the candidates, including women without hijabs. I got the impression of a lively democratic dance, unlike Syria across the border, where the only bill-boarded faces were chinless dictator Assad and his hard looking father.

Notes at the time:-

The passengers were all fairly quiet until we got to a town where the air was filled with election posters hanging from every pole and house. Suddenly everyone started talking, presumably about what candidate they favoured. ...

(At Petra):-

Bus back - through people electioneering - painting their cars election colours and sticking posters to them - messed up the paint job I would have thought. The young blokes were dancing on the cars and trucks and blowing horns while the women looked at them from balconies. This was very jolly and like elections in the nineteenth century here. [Including the ladies keeping away from the male throng.]

There's an election in Scotland on 5 May for the Scottish Parliament. Nary a poster. They have been banned from Council property eg street lamps, and this has happened right across Scotland. A visitor wouldn't realise a Government with tax-raising and considerable spending powers was being elected.

The number of councils passing legislation banning political material on their property has increased dramatically since the last general election in 2010.

….

The main reason cited for the bans is the expense of removing election material from council property after the country goes to the polls.

But an expert fears that the lack of posters could contribute to lower turnouts and have a deleterious effect on Scottish democracy.

“People often don’t pay attention to politics. They need every reminder they can get (to turn out to vote). One way of reminding people is by posters in localities. It is important for democratically getting people out to vote and mobilising them,” says Alistair Clark, senior lecturer in politics at Newcastle University (link).

All right, I hated the ubiquitous blue Yesses and less frequent (vandalised) purple Noes that covered the country before the referendum, and which took a long time to finally disappear. You will still come across a fresh Yes sticker. But that's because of my hatred for referendums, not to mention Scottish nationalism. Visitors took it as vigorous democratic debate, and visitors' impressions are superficial, as mine of Jordan were, no doubt. Still, it reminded the citizens that this was an important event, and that they should get out and vote. Posters before the vote show hope, and afterwards the poignancy of a time and an opportunity passed, and lost.

My own city of Edinburgh has banned them:-

Labour Councillor Ewan Aitken also voted against the ban.

He said: “This is not a ground breaking decision on democracy but it is a sign that political parties have fewer and fewer resources and so are looking to reduce the demands on their teams. I voted in favour of keeping them as I think they add mood and colour to elections.

“Democracy is about how people feel and that is always an environmental as well as an intellectual thing. Posters don't win elections but they help make elections.”

Compared to, say, massed ranks at a Nazi rally or synchronised North Korean leader-worship, democracy's ceremonies are dishevelled and haphazard and often enough make for cynicism eg the pointless leaders' debates. And it's true that much political activity takes place on social media these days. People don twibbons and change avatars and pass around simplified-to-idiocy memes.

Still, though we can't get back the time when an election was an event dominating a town as in the nineteenth century, politics should come into the physical space - the street, the wall, the lamp post, and not be considered as litter. That includes attendance at a hustings and the walk to the poll booth (a curse on postal voting, and anathema on voting on line). The bookies changing the odds and the long night watching the results roll in* add to the drama and suspense and catching a moment, like seeing a band live.

A sign of a free society is a poster of the First Minister with added moustache and fangs. Assad's chinless mug covered Syria and had not once been touched up with spray paint.

*The Beeb replayed the 1966 election on the 50th anniversary, and it was watched by those interested in politics and British history as drama as well as social history.

The Rebel Yell on Facebook

My piece on the railways made the obvious point that as trains were an unstoppable technology transforming society, so for us tare computers. We have seen from recruiting jihadis and social media exchanges, which was one thing that stoked up the Yes vote in the indyref, how the internet is changing politics.

This article by Kevin Maney makes a similar parallel in the context of the American election. The development of the railways, as well as the telegraph and industrialism in general exacerbated the differences between the North and South of the USA and ushered in the American Civil War (the first modern, much photographed war).

Like today, the technological revolution in the mid-1800s ushered in a disruptive new era of connectivity, and transportation technology was key...

Amazingly, none of the presidential candidates talk much about technology, yet our software-eats-the-world whirlwind drives everything that’s cleaving the country and throwing its politics into chaos. The parallels to the dynamics of the 1850s are a little scary. After all, the Whigs’ self-destruction was a prelude to the Civil War.
…..

In 1850, New England was essentially Silicon Valley, and the Northern states created and embraced new technology while the Southern states held tight to agriculture and a way of life that also happened to include the moral outrage of holding slaves. ..

Look today at red states vs. blue, or even Trump supporters vs. “establishment” Republicans. Those divisions broadly define where digital-cloud-mobile technology and the modern economy work in favor of the population vs. where they work against them. Trump says “make America great again,” which, to his supporters, means “make America what it used to be.” To people whose livelihoods have suffered because of economic shifts ushered in by technology, moving backward looks better than moving forward—not just in economic issues but in social mores as well.

Kevin Maney doesn't really press the parallel along to a civil war. I suppose if an industrial revolution of steam and metal produced weaponry on the battlefields, in a digital revolution most of the actual fighting between the anachronisms and the moderns will remain on line. I have to steal this quote from a FB friend:- I've come to the conclusion that Trump is what would happen if the comments section became a human and ran for President. “

The Railways: Nation, Network and People by Simon Bradley

I'd like to be magisterial and say The Railways: Nation, Network and People by Simon Bradley is the definitive work, or as comprehensive a book as you can find on the history of Britain's railways. I'd like even more to be the happy pedant, pointing out lacunae in the description of how Britain adopted the standard gaurge against Brunel's broad gauge. But I know almost nothing of railways, though I love travelling by train, so have to come to this book as the general reader of a well-written, entertaining piece of social history that cites novelists and poets as well as engineers. Simon Bradley quotes the book-making Victorians – Dickens, Trollope and Surtees as well as films like Brief Encounter, The Railway Children and the opening scene of a Hard Day's Night, where the Beatles dodge their screaming fans “behind poster hoardings and into telephone boxes and photo booths” in the cluttered concourse of the 1960s.

 

Bradley's book tells a big story – the technical development of the railways and their social impact, and embroiders it with fascinating details eg the contents of the luncheon baskets and the placing of toilets, the slight ring underfoot on the Southern Railway's preferred concrete over timber platforms. He devotes a whole chapter to signals, which doesn't stoke my boiler, however, his writing flows and he never loses sight of the human beings – in this case, the solitary signal-man on duty in his box. He explains the sensible height of British platforms (set at 915mm i.e. 3 feet) with a step or two to the train compared to the steep climb on the Continent. He gives the reason why Cambridge station is such a trek from the town centre because the dons feared loss of control of undergraduates and pulled strings to ensure that the station was built well over a mile away from the town.

Former platform on National Cycle Network 1

The railways created their own kingdom “a physically separate domain, in thousands of route-miles fenced off from the rest of the country and ruled by their own mysterious rhythms and laws.”

Cyclist on National Cycle Network 1

Simon Bradley was a young train-spotter – not just of the locomotives but of those working on them. “Driver and ganger alike belonged nonetheless to the world of proper work, visible and practical and comprehensible – a world away from the office-bound lives of most of our own fathers.” He conveys the excitement of the Victorians as this great force entered into their lives, as transforming as computers and the internet in ours. The landscape was altered with embankments and tunnels and viaducts.

Detail of former railway bridge, now carrying cyclists and pedestrians

He points out that bridges were a relatively rare sight before the railways came. Oldest bridges were almost all bespoke structures. Only when canals arrived were bridges multiplied to standard engineers' design. Now their striding arches are one of the splendours of the British landscape. (For cantilevered iron, the Forth Bridge beats the preening Eiffel Tower any day of the week, and how much finer the Glenfinnan Viaduct is than pompous static showoffery like the Arc de Triomphe.)

Viaduct on the National Cycle Network 1

“Part of the fascination of the railways is their permeation with memories and traces of obsolete working routes, and the human lives and destinies they shaped. The physical record is often patchy, because different aspects of the system have changed and developed at wildly varying speeds. The modernised freight network envisaged by Dr Beeching is already utterly lost; the diffuse small-scale system which he knocked for six is more remote still. Yet the bridges, tunnels and earthworks that carry the twenty-first century traveller are still predominantly those the Victorians witnessed take shape.”

Bradley moves beyond the Victorians and their share-owned competing railway companies through to British Rail and to today's mess of ownership – state subsidy of dividends to share-holders:-

“The old British Rail system was subsidised between 1 billion and 1.5 billion. Subsidies since this time have reached as high as 6.3 billion….Much of this money comes nowhere near the operating side of the railway, but is sucked straight out again in dividends, administrative and legal costs ,inflated salaried and bonuses. Nor is the system cheap for its users. [Grossly expensive, and Byzantinely complex in fact.] All of these features are intrinsic, not accidental, parts of the business model under which the railways were privatised – a process that,… was meant to address the supposed scandal of a public opened system which required high subsidies in order to operate. It has proved an extremely expensive way of saving money.”

Though Bradley does follow to the modern age via the marshalling yards and the change to diesel, it is the Victorians and Edwardians who dominate from when the technology was innovative and exciting.

The new words such as stoke, shunt, siding, running out of steam, on the right lines. Time, once set by the “guildhall and town hall and church steeple” was set by the “power of capital”. The landowners were challenged and there would be battles between the surveyors and navvies and estate workers where theodolites would be smashed. (In Middlemarch there's just such a scene – not quoted by Bradley.)

As the railways developed they were felt at the time to be as unstoppable and transforming as our own digital revolution. So in Trollope's Rachel Ray set in Devon, which was late to be connected, the timid matron Mrs Ray says of her journey to Exeter:- '“I thought the train never would have got to the Baslehurst station. It stopped at all the little stations, and really I think I could have walked as fast." A dozen years had not as yet gone by since the velocity of these trains had been so terrible to Mrs. Ray that she had hardly dared to get into one of them!' ' There are obvious comparisons with the elderly of today who once wondered at the young's sci-fi interweb thing now complaining of the speed of their Skype.

The railways have been with us for long enough to have created their own archaeology. I live across the road from the busy Edinburgh to Glasgow line, which I walk or cycle under every day. My commute goes past an embankment which was once a line and is now the National Cycle Network 1 cycleway. On the route are ghosts of platforms and you are riding unaware over a viaduct which is visible from the street a hundred feet below. There was a railway yard, now a place for billboards (advertising was a huge feature of Victorian stations). Another part of it is scrubland which the Council is planning to turn into a further cycleway, restoring a bridge or two.

Once a railway line, now scrubland, future cycleway

The living railway, Glasgow to Edinburgh line

When I see the great nineteenth railway structures – the viaducts, the Forth Bridge, the grander railway stations, I feel that we are lesser beings living in the half ruin of a mightier civilisation. We don't build such grandeur any more but conserve with our heritage industries, our endless touristing.

Bradley's last chapter is about the volunteers running old lines. He describes a “steam-hauled express arrives from a visitant from the another world, a sort of industrial unicorn or dragon.” Crowds gather to view this icon of another age, as beautiful and obsolete as a full-rigged man of war.

“Made vivid again, here is something that transcends Nature, an amazing work of man; what H.G Wells, writing in 1901, proposed as the best symbol for the century that had just passed, 'a steam engine running upon a railway.”

The Flying Scotsman

Will you stay in our lovers' story?

There are multitudes who really loved him. Young misfits found him a transformative influence  and have loved his music and him ever since.  As with a private death the true lovers should be the ones with the greatest right to speak – and to sing.  Analysis of musical and cultural importance will come along soon enough.

Those who complain about other people speaking and singing and weeping should STFU. 

Julie Burchill scored highest for pointless mean-mindedness. I can put up with her going on about her ever fascinating self as she will often chuck in shrewd and funny insights but not this time with her "sob-signalling".

Brendan O'Neill who is usually the most annoying of contrarians wrote an excellent piece about how in the age of tabloid nosiness and celebrity scar flashing, Bowie stayed private.  As Flaubert lived like a bourgeoisie and thought like a demi-god, so Bowie was a public spectacle and left his secrets for his intimates. 

Back in '73 Martin Amis called Bowie 'a mild fad'.   In his pompous youth Amis was sent off to Rolling Stones concerts and the like to produce disdainful writings. though he seems to have had less feeling for rock music than the average teenager blagging the latest album.

Amis's young and amoral characters are anachronistically uninterested in music, quite out of step with the Anglo youth of his times for which it was THE art form – their stories, their feelings, their own dreams as they strummed a guitar for a year or two and scribbled down lyrics. The young of the 70s and 80s without music are as odd as the present day young would be without Smartphones.

Skinheads used the dramatic apocalypse (bang not whimper) 5 Years   

as a theme song and in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting the characters are delicate about the right mood music to accompany their shooting up. Welsh's tribute was this:-

I daresay there are other notables who have refrained from writing one as well and haven't told us about their refraining.

The cybernats  got a splash for their crappy behaviour but the Nats of my Facebook acquaintance were reacting like everyone else, sharing memories of gigs and the musical among them jamming the back catalogue.  Nicola Sturgeon reminisced nicely about how as a wee girl she had listened to Major Tom over and over, to see if it could turn out right for him.  Meanwhile Unionists have taken delight in putting round the picture of Bowie in full Union Flag regalia while Europhiles claim him as a European. 

I am sad at his unexpected death and I can totally understand the flowers and the weeping from the real fans.  I preferred his contemporaries Lou Reed and Pink Floyd and only owned Hunky Dory and Space Oddity. Still, all the well-known songs and words are sloshing in my head and here's one of my favourites played on an organ.

 

 Life on Mars works on an instrument it wasn't written for and it works without the words as well, which is a test of a tune.  It is one of those soaring rock anthems which for the 70s and beyond young people were our epiphanies, our hallelujahs. As Bowie said in Memory of a Free Festival:-

The Children of the summer's end
Gathered in the dampened grass
We played our songs and felt the London sky
Resting on our hands
It was God's land
It was ragged and naïve
It was Heaven
…..

Oh, to capture just one drop of all the ecstasy that swept that afternoon
To paint that love upon a white balloon
And fly it from the toppest top of all the tops
....
The Sun Machine is Coming Down, and We're Gonna Have a Party