Much like Shibli’s novel, social media is all about minor details – a tool with which we document, record and share the minutiae, albeit often trivial, of life. It has become one of our most important sources of information. Entire wars and other major events are documented through social media posts. It is particularly valuable in a place like Gaza that is often cut off from the wider world. Social media has become its own purveyor of narratives, allowing users to piece together details, specific instances to make sense of the world around them. [read full column]
It is telling that Yellowface, R. F. Kuang’s satirical swipe at the politics of racial impersonation, begins at Yale. In recent years, elite American universities been the site of a spate of scandals in which a prominent figure is revealed to have declared a racial identity to which they can stake no viable claim. These unseemly affairs sometimes crop up in the visual arts, media, and NGOs too, but there’s little evidence people make fraudulent claims of this kind beyond these ivory towers. After all, in most spaces of work or leisure, there is little capital – even of the more amorphous social or cultural variety — to be gained from pretending not to be white. [read full column]
People, especially those who read regularly, are acquiring new knowledge, new vocabulary, new reaches of cultural reference all the time. Imposing a static level of understanding is the melancholy work of educationalists with a superstitious fear of exclusion. In any debate about what terminology is acceptable, there will always be moments of embarrassment when somebody objects to a particular word that others had happily understood. The recent Twitter debate included people objecting to the word 'erudite' itself as being alienating to the general reader. [read full column]
Sleepless Nights is a collection of half-true memory vignettes written by Elizabeth Hardwick. It is also a book that I have been carrying around with me everywhere lately, returning to it almost ritualistically. On the first page, Hardwick writes: ‘If only we knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself.’ I keep the book with me to reread this and other parts, all of which deal with remembering scattered fragments and trying to make something of it. Hardwick calls it being ‘borne backward to the bricks and stuffs’ of the past. [read full column]
The Argentinean writer Alberto Manguel, a close friend of Borges, argues that ‘“Why?”, in its many variations, is a question far more important in its asking than in the expectation of an answer. The very fact of uttering it opens numberless possibilities, can do away with preconceptions, summons up endless fruitful doubts.’ Curiosity requires a willingness to embrace negative capability and to be mired in skepticism, but the results of individual questioning — even if the process remains unanswered — is the entrance into a reality more expansive in infinite potential than that offered by mere certainty. Such an ethos isn't that of our current discourse (maybe it never was), for curiosity is a skill like any other, but today its teaching isn't given pride of place. [read full column]
I’m not the first person to think of the biographer as a sort of detective. Google turns up four articles with the same title as this column. In one, Walter Lippmann biographer Ronald Steel writes that ‘what had begun as an exercise in exposition became a detective story with the subject both my client and my quarry.’ In another, Henri Matisse biographer Hilary Spurling addresses the French lack of interest in biography: they ‘see it as grubby and Anglo-Saxon’, she says, like ‘being a private detective or a nosy parker.’ [read full column]
The Surrealists claimed that automatic writing can unjam the jammed mind. If done correctly, it should release creativity from the constraints of reason and reveal how random coincidences are actually linked in a metaphysical way. The practice can serve as a cosmic connector of dots, it seems. This particular method is also part of a larger scheme, one that Breton calls the ‘private conspiracy’. The idea is that the artist is a prisoner and logic is the prison. According to Breton, an artist must always conspire to get out of that mental jail. Automatism is one way of breaking free. [read full column]
The new Nero exhibition at the British Museum makes its stakes clear at the entrance: this will be a reevaluation of the mostly negative ‘myths’ surrounding the history of the much-maligned last of the Julio-Claudians. There is a paradox at heart here: British Museum blockbuster exhibitions must make money for the cash-strapped institution and also satisfy a broad range of knowledge in the viewing public. Difficulty usually isn’t in the cards. [read full column]
Anna Kavan was a pale, frail Englishwoman whose greatest pleasure in life was race car driving along the French Riviera, while high on heroin. She famously referred to her syringes as bazookas. After a failed marriage in Burma and a name-change, she took up with a group of race car drivers in the south of France in the 1930s. They treated the sport more like Russian roulette than a competitive sport. It was around this time that she picked up her lifelong drug habit. When Kavan was found dead at her house in Notting Hill, the police said that they found enough heroin there to ‘kill the whole street’. [read full column]
Everyday life is my new escapist fantasy. I recently started reading Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet books, day-to-day epics which now feel like portals to delicious normality. They centre on tasks like cleaning up after a party or packing the car to go visit your sister: ‘He was back again, standing in the bedroom doorway, waiting with exaggerated patience for her to shut her suitcase,’ Howard writes of someone’s annoying husband. Her characters are immersed in the mundane actions that make up their lives — and after a year of not being allowed to throw proper parties or visit my sister, I’m loving being immersed in them too. [read full column]