On general knowledge

An old blog from a few years ago, when the hobgoblin Pob-lookalike Michael Gove was merely Education Secretary.

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I listened recently to a quiz programme on BBC Radio 4 called The Third Degree in which two teams of undergraduates and dons from the same university competed to answer questions set by the chairman, a stand-up comedian.

One round involved the teams choosing between 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' questions based on a chosen subject. So, for instance, the choice when it came to 'Jordan' might range from questions about Petra and 'the rose-red city half as old as time' (in John Burgon's fine line) and the 'glamour model' who has published more books than she'll ever read. The former representing (in the producer's imagination) a highbrow factoid, the latter something we're all expected to know about.

The ostensibly highbrow questions were without exception middlebrow, while the lowbrow questions were all to do with celebrity in one form or another, because 'lowbrow' no longer refers to popular culture in the broadest sense, but to a particularly garish and shallow manifestation of populism. The undergraduates failed consistently on all the 'highbrow' questions (not knowing, for instance, that Dedalus was the father of Icarus, or that Prufrock measured out his life in coffee spoons, or that ... but you get the idea.)

The dons fared better, as one might expect, on the allegedly highbrow items but (equally predictably) less so when it came to the lowbrow options, with condescending jeers from the audience every time they revealed their ignorance about the doings of Justin Bieber and the cast of Eastenders.

Introducing another round, the chairman elicited easy laughter from the audience when he said that the answers to the next question should be in Latin. The question was about the Canonical hours, the division of the day into periods of prayer - Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers and Compline. These are certainly less well-known than they once were as our society no longer centres around acts of Christian worship, although I happen to know them because they formed part of my haphazard education and I can't for a moment imagine what it must be like not to have this knowledge as part of my cultural baggage, at least when it comes to solving crossword clues, playing Scrabble or feeling annoyed by radio programmes. That the Canonical hours are now seen as a backwater of general knowledge is not surprising - what is surprising and worrying is the derision directed at those of us who happen to know them. What's going on? What's gone wrong?

Forty years ago a minimum 'O' level in Latin was necessary for anyone wishing to study for a Humanities degree at any university. I'm not saying this was a Good Thing, or a Bad Thing, but it was certainly a Thing. And accompanying that sort of education (or, if you must call it schooling, schooling) came a whole bunch of other stuff which broadly speaking equipped the learner with a packed lumber-room of information, some utile, some arcane, all worth knowing, or so we used to think, for its own sake.

There has been, in my lifetime and quite recently, a paradigm shift. What was once valued for its own sake as general knowledge (about geography and history and science and literature and so on) has been almost entirely supplanted by the new currency of common knowledge. What was once worth knowing has now been supplanted by trivial stuff that everyone is expected to know. At the same time there have never been so many formats in which a lack of general knowledge can be showcased and, weirdly, rewarded. What happens now (at least in practically all television and radio competitions that endeavour to assess various kinds of knowledge) is that anyone with a reasonable level of general knowledge is likely to be derided as a geek or nerd or whatever the discriminatory term is, while the competitor who knows Lady Gaga's real name or Who Killed J.R. is rewarded.

Some years ago at a conference I was genially derided by a colleague for chatting to, without recognising, a man called Sven Goran-Erikson (who was at the time manager of the England football team and, to be sure, quite famous). My colleague was amused by what he saw as my other-worldly ignorance. Yet if (in a purely hypothetical situation) he had failed in my company to identify (say) President Roosevelt or Franz Kafka or Sylvia Plath or Noam Chomsky, I'd have pitied the poor fool but would certainly not have mocked him, as he mocked me, not least because I happen to have better manners than he does. 

What's happening today is the commodification of ignorance - the fact that the stupid and docile (and I hasten to include myself in their number when it comes to any subject outside my general knowledge, which is to say most subjects) are now able to win approval, among their peers and in the media, by being part of a notional majority who share a common knowledge but lack, and are consequently encouraged to be sceptical about, the value and utility of general knowledge - of knowledge for its own sake. Call it the Clarkson Paradox after the overbearing and culturally-barren television presenter.

Michael Gove, our Minister for Education, embodies the Clarkson Paradox in his desire for the cultivation of hard facts, but in doing so is trying to have his cake and eat it - to make general knowledge and common knowledge the same thing. This is not ever likely to happen as the horse has bolted and the cat is out of the bag. It is in any case notoriously difficult to settle on what is worth knowing in our national narrative, and therefore what knowledge to impart and how to assess that knowledge. Gove's reactionary approach is to re-introduce rote-learning, and he has been roundly condemned by teachers' unions for this. I think there's a place for memorisation in education as it happens, though not necessarily for testing the results, but this will get me on to a favourite hobby horse - that the arts in general and literature in particular should certainly feature prominently on the national curriculum, be subjects for compulsory study and understanding but never, ever be the subject of examination. Some things shouldn't be tested, simply experienced and if possible enjoyed. Everybody knows that - it's common knowledge.

Favourite snatches (5)

Cyril Connolly once challenged W. H. Auden to write a poem that would make him cry. The result was The Fall of Rome, which you'll probably know. The last time I read something that made me feel as though I had something in my eye it was this poem by W. S. Graham, about his father.


To Alexander Graham

Lying asleep walking
Last night I met my father
Who seemed pleased to see me.
He wanted to speak. I saw
His mouth saying something
But the dream had no sound.

We were surrounded by
Laid-up paddle steamers
In The Old Quay in Greenock.
I smelt the tar and the ropes.

It seemed that I was standing
Beside the big iron cannon
The tugs used to tie up to
When I was a boy. I turned
To see Dad standing just
Across the causeway under
That one lamp they keep on.

He recognised me immediately.
I could see that. He was
The handsome, same age
With his good brows as when
He would take me on Sundays
Saying we’ll go for a walk.

Dad, what am I doing here?
What is it I am doing now?
Are you proud of me?
Going away, I knew
You wanted to tell me something.

You stopped and almost turned back
To say something. My father,
I try to be the best
In you you give me always.

Lying asleep turning
Round in the quay-lit dark
It was my father standing
As real as life. I smelt
The quay’s tar and the ropes.

I think he wanted to speak.
But the dream had no sound.
I think I must have loved him.



W. S. Graham, “To Alexander Graham” from Collected Poems 1942-1977 (London: Faber, 1979). 
Copyright The Estate of W. S. Graham.



'That one lamp they keep on' is a favourite line. What could be simpler? More moving?

Mick McManus, RIP

Mick McManus died last month, aged 93.

He was a fixture of my childhood Saturday afternoons, when I would watch televised wrestling with my grandmother for forty minutes before the football results came on and she switched off. She disliked all other sports, but all-in wresting was a guilty pleasure of hers. McManus was her favourite. He resembled the actor Ian Hendry and, in later years, the tubby comedian Terry Scott. With his died black hair, black trunks and unhealthy-looking body he was always cast as the bad guy, "The Man You Love to Hate", the one who broke all the rules while the referee's back was turned. His catch-phrase, a very good one by any standards, was "Not the ears! Not the ears!"

They were all terrific entertainers, those 1970s teatime wresters - Jackie 'Mr T.V.' Pallo from Islington, the lumbering Giant Haystacks, the soft-hearted crowd-pleaser Big Daddy (whose real name, we all knew, was Shirley Crabtree) and the terrifying, masked weirdo Kendo Nagasaki. The latter was unmasked by Big Daddy in 1975, a bizarre moment you can watch here. (Any cultural anthropologists out there will need a pen and paper.) McManus was a consistently reliable, no-nonsense performer, his trademark short range forearm jabs culminating in the finishing move of a Boston Crab. 'A dreadful man' said my grandmother, approvingly. 

The ITV commentator was Kent Walton, who was good at his job in the same way the disc jockey Alan 'Fluff' Freeman was good at doing the chart countdown - they both made it seem to matter. Walton's top lip was permanently malformed from long years of close-up ringside microphone wrangling at rowdy venues in Croydon, Birkenhead, Belfast and Gravesend.

After retiring from what Walton liked to call 'the grunt 'n' grapple game' McManus ran a pub in South London and became an expert in antique porcelain. He will be missed.

The International Necronautical Society

The novelist Tom McCarthy is co-founder, with the philosopher Simon Critchley, of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a high-minded organisation given to issuing manifestos, holding press conferences, expelling dissident members and so on. It is McCarthy says, 'devoted to mind-bending projects that would do for death what the Surrealists had done for sex.' If that doesn't snag your interest nothing will.

The INS appears to be dormant at the moment, but we all need to keep our eyes and ears open. Take a look: http://www.necronauts.org

The INS at work, at play

On pornography

I learned today that a new pornographic application has already been developed for Google Glass, the innovative gadget thingummy which enables the wearer to see stuff before his very eye.

Whenever a new visual medium or technology emerges, whatever its ostensible use, there's an immediate secondary exploitation by opportunistic pornographers. I expect within hours of the first daguerrotype there were filthy postcards being hawked to tourists in the Tuilleries; the second VT recording was a Russ Meyer bootleg; the second email attachment showed a naked IT nerd sporting a 'come-on ladeez' look, and so on. Pornography seems to be waiting to pounce on and exploit any technology that trades in images, so it comes as no surprise that Google Glass has already been co-opted by mucky film-makers to expand their global empire. We can expect any day now a frightening medical report that links GG pornography and teenage cataracts.

One medium that I thought could never be appropriated for lewd display was the magic lantern, that innocent pre-cinematic entertainment of the last quarter of the 19th century. I was wrong.

Ban this filth!

It seems that between the wars (when moving pictures had almost entirely displaced public magic lantern shows) there were still two markets for the manufacturers of the projectors and the slides. One was the nursery (see above), a setting in which magic lanterns or their descendants still make the odd appearance, although Spongebob Squarepants has taken over from Scenes of the Raj. The other was in private men-only clubs where (in smoke-filled rooms amid much connoisseurial chuckling) sexually explicit images were projected as part of the evening's entertainment.

It's a murky area and there's little archive material relating to what was by all accounts a substantial underground industry, linked to What-the-Butler-Saw machines and similar titillating technologies. But one might imagine, based on the sums of money involved in what one has to refer to as 'the industry', that it's an established driving-force in cultural history. This Google Glass application is simply the latest, and not the last, in a very long line of libidinal exploitation. Hey ho.

Prototype Google Glass?

Word aversion - a version.

In a recent post on Language Log, the University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Liberman defined the concept (new to me) of Word Aversion:

A feeling of intense, irrational distaste for the sound or sight of a particular word or phrase, not because its use is regarded as etymologically or logically or grammatically wrong, nor because it's felt to be over-used or redundant or trendy or non-standard, but simply because the word itself somehow feels unpleasant or even disgusting.

Common words that people are particularly averse to apparently include not just the obvious ones like puss and ooze and scab but also squab, cornucopia, panties, navel, brainchild, crud, slacks and fudge.

I suppose this is a pretext to mention my own particular hatred for the word whilst. But don't get me started.

More rules for writers

If a rule has an exception it can't be a rule, and the expression 'the exception proves the rule' is almost never used correctly because 'prove' does not mean 'demonstrate beyond question' but 'test to the point of destruction' - as in a proving-ground, or 'the proof of the pudding'. If there's an exception to the rule  then the rule is invalidated, and no longer a rule

This is the case with grammar, which Chomsky once described as 'a set of complicated rules to which there are exceptions.' In other words there are no rules of grammar, complicated or otherwise. So what are there?

Grammar is better seen as any frequently-occurring pattern of words that usage settles on. And these are culturally determined, not naturally inherent to any language. Patterns, not rules, are acquired early in our development and finessed in maturity. The top dressing of what non-linguists think of as grammar is just that - a superficial (if, to be sure, important) addition to the long-acquired (or innate, as Chomsky argued) deep structures of the language. To be sure the patterns of grammar are vital, and without them communications would be much harder (although I expect we'd soon compensate in the search for clarity) - but they are not rules.

Correct grammar is hard to define but quite easy to recognise, at least to those of us who are at ease with it. Bad grammar is also easy to recognise, at least by those of us alert to it. Take this startlingly illiterate blurb from the back cover of a new collection of Stan Barstow's short stories (Parthian Press, an imprint of the Library of Wales)

A classic selection of the best of Stan Barstow's stories covering the last five decades of British life.

A group of young tearaways on a night out that begins with horse-play and ends in tragedy; the loneliness of a drunken miner's wife; a war-shocked ex-sailor forced beyond endurance, a widower is brought to grief by a woman outside his real understanding, a factory worker finding his way through the physical world of his marriage - real and involving, Barstow's stories are urgent slices of life, men and women struggling and succeeding to come to terms with The Likes of Us.

This is beyond wrong, although I'm intrigued by 'slices of men and women'. What's alarming is that Barstow (a very good writer indeed) should be so poorly served by the publishers who employ whoever is paid to write this awful stuff - presumably somebody in the Parthian marketing department. The Library of Wales should be ashamed of itself, but libraries, like publishers, have no shame. What's equally alarming is that the person who concocted this atrocious blurb has no idea how wrong they are - they imagine it's punchy and persuasive copy rather than something the cat's sicked up.

Enough already. The subject of this blog is rules for writers, so here are some, from William Safire of the New York Times. He has plenty of chortling fun with the exceptions that prove the rules:

Remember to never split an infinitive.

The passive voice should never be used.

Do not put statements in the negative form.

Verbs have to agree with their subjects.

Proofread carefully to see if you words out.

If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.

A writer must not shift your point of view.

And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.)

Don't overuse exclamation marks!!

Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.

Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.

If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.

Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.

Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.

Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.

Always pick on the correct idiom.

The adverb always follows the verb.

Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.