Clive Davis

OLD DEVIL UNMASKED

Much as I like Kingsley Amis's work, the idea of a 900-page biography is a little off-putting. Frank McLynn assesses Zachary Leader's epic in the Literary Review:

Leader’s extremely readable book will probably be controversial in its own right, as there are dozens of stories relating to people still living which adorn its pages. ... Even more surprising, since he owns him as a friend, is his portrait of Martin Amis, Kingsley’s second son. Martin does not emerge with particular credit from this account, so that one wonders what kind of a beast a genuinely iconoclastic analysis of Amis fils might be... Surprisingly from a professor of literature, this is an extremely entertaining volume. Of the author’s dedication and commitment there can be no doubt, and my only concern is the length. Napoleon, Caesar, Marx, Freud, even Captain Cook might merit 900 pages. But Kingsley Amis? No way.

The one essential KA novel? Lucky Jim is the people's choice, but I've always preferred the small town satire of That Uncertain Feeling (better known to Peter Sellers fans as Only Two Can Play.)

BITTER TRUTHS

In a lecture at Oxford, Spectator editor Matthew d'Ancona considers how the media deals with the new realities of terrorism and the "long war":

...The underlying problem is not, in my view, something as simple as media bias, but rather a category mistake. The media has yet to learn the new language of a new conflict. It flounders like an English tourist abroad with a badly-written phrase-book.

As a hawk, he's equally disenchanted with the way the allies made the case for invading Iraq:

It is hard to think of a greater failure of public diplomacy in modern times than the presentation of this war. Indeed, the problem with the so-called "neocons" - Cheney, Rumsfeld et al - is that they are not "neo" at all. They have used old Cold War language to describe an utterly modern conflict. This war may well, for a start, be longer than the great struggle of the second half of the last century.

....The anti-war lobby has the slick movies of Michael Moore, brilliantly-crafted popcorn politics, militancy for the multiplexes. And what do we hawks have? The sickening images of Iraqi prisoners piled into a pyramid, that's what.

[Via Comment Central] File under the category of "sad but true".

IDIOT WIND?

Another pummelling for Twyla Tharp's new Dylan musical, this time from the aptly named Slate:

It's hard to know what to make of Tharp's manic choreography, a festival of contortionism, tightrope walking, unicycle and skateboard riding, and trampoline bounding. But it's clear that she has a penchant for literalism... When Capt. Ahrab sings the lines in "Desolation Row" about "Cinderella sweeping up," a female dancer grabs a broom and begins furiously doing housework at stage right. During "Like a Rolling Stone," balls roll in from the wings, and "the jugglers and the clowns" described in the lyrics materialize onstage. Sitting in the orchestra seats, I began to worry that "Buckets of Rain" might be the next song.

NEXT DOOR

Greg Djerejian agrees: starting an insurgency in Iran is a dangerous notion. Some fiery words in the comments section.

Meanwhile, I'm keeping an eye out for more news of the French intifada that some bloggers and commentators insist has already broken out. There's a connection here, don't you think? I mean, in so far as it's easy to make rash statements and predictions without supplying much in the way of evidence. If civil war really does break out in France, as some people seem to think (and hope) it will, I'll be following the headlines along with everyone else. I don't have some obsession with saying it can't happen; I don't have a second home in Provence that I'm worried about losing. I just want to be sure that what I'm reading is based on a grasp of reality. One of the prime lessons I've learnt in the past couple of years is that certain people who command an audience in the ether don't have a clue what they are talking about.

If you have a moment, the Economist has a balanced survey of what ails the French economy. I also just listened in to an interview with the Paris editor in case she's seen any barricades on rue de Rivoli. Not just yet, is the answer, although she is worried about the Le Pen effect.

TECHNICAL UPDATE

Apologies if any of you are still having problems viewing this site. Blogger James Higham has given me some code for my template, but I'm reluctant to stick my head under the bonnet just yet in case I wreck the whole thing. I've also been told the narrow columns some are seeing may be caused by people leaving the "favourites" sidebar open.  Everything looks fine on my home computers, so I'm at a bit of a loss.

NOTEBOOK

When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect - we even demand - that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on the car radio as we drive to work and expect "news" to have occurred since the morning newspaper went to press. Returning in the evening, we expect our house not only to shelter us, to keep us warm in winter and cool in summer, but to relax us, to dignify us, to encompass us with soft music and interesting hobbies, to be a playground, a theatre, and a bar. We expect our two-week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless. We expect a far-away atmosphere if we go to a near-by place; and we expect everything to be relaxing, sanitary and Americanized if we go to a far-away place. We expect new heroes every season, a literary masterpiece every month, a dramatic spectacular every week, a rare sensation every night.

Daniel Boorstin, The Image.

BROWN IS, ER, BEAUTIFUL

I don't normally expect all that much from articles about mixed-race Britons - a subject close to my heart - but Anna Kessel's Observer story on football turned out to be an exception:

You have only to look at England's World Cup squad this summer. Six out of seven of the players described as "black'"were mixed race, but this was not mentioned on TV or in the written press. Mixed-race people account for about 1.4 per cent of Britain's population, so for mixed-race footballers to make up 26 per cent of England's elite is a huge achievement.

It's fair to say that Stan Collymore doesn't have a particularly shining reputation, yet he delivers the most thoughtful observation about a sense of belonging, or the lack of it:

Show me two rooms, one with black footballers, one with white footballers, and I would pick a room on my own.

Not at all a gloomy piece, though, even on the discussion of that awful word "half-caste". I did a Sunday Times interview with the American author Lise Funderburg on this subject a decade ago, when she published Black, White, Other, and even then I was struck by how much more relaxed everyone had become about the identity issue. The sense of stigma that my generation grew up with is withering away. As is the unspoken pressure to sign up to one identity or another. My kids are totally unflustered by it all. Sometimes I wonder if that's because they lead too sheltered a life, but on the whole I think they've got it just about right.

[Via Pickled Politics.] Pootergeek offers own take in The Age of Beige.

EXPLAINING FRANCE

An e-mail on that post about American views of France and the so-called European "death-spiral":

The banlieues are among the most multi-ethnic areas of French cities. There was nothing in the recent riots that suggests an intifada on the Seine. If anything, I would say that they were more marked by adherence to a French version of American urban culture than anything Islamically inspired.

France is, bizarrely, often cited as both a demonstration of (and a warning against) excessive multiculturalism and as ridiculously strict on assimilation (often in the same article). Reading articles about Europe's immigration troubles seem to suggest that we're damned if we do and damned if we don't.

One final and slightly unrelated point, the focus on immigration is not a European thing but an old European thing. The former Communist bloc states have far lower birthrates than most of western Europe and are currently
suffering something of a brain drain, with the young and reasonably well-educated moving to Western Europe. I think the mix of net emigration and, in some cases, an already declining population roposes are a more worrying demographic problem than Western Europe's flat-lining.

Some more background on the French model in this Brookings essay.

DIFFERENT SHADES OF POVERTY

Not that it's just black and brown faces at the bottom of the ladder. In a new book on the globalized economy, Der Spiegel journalist Gabor Steingart considers the rise of the Euro-underclass:

The main thing that sets the modern poor apart from the industrial age pauper is a sheer lack of interest in education. Today's proletariat has little education and no interest in obtaining more. Back in the early days of industrialization, the poor joined worker associations that often doubled as educational associations. The modern member of the underclass, by contrast, has completely shunned personal betterment.

[Via A&LD]

PS: "White trash" is the term used elsewhere in the piece. Isn't it about time we phased it out, or is it still OK to be gratutiously offensive towards the wrong sort of citizen?

TECHNICAL

A few people have e-mailed to say the lay-out of this blog looks odd on their browsers - text columns are too narrow, and some items in the margin aren't loading.  I can't tell what the problem is, as everything seems fine on my laptop. If anyone else has any suggestions, could they let me know?  My on-going wireless trouble is slowing me down too. The router I bought the other day hasn't made much difference, unfortunately.