Ronald Searle's 'Look Back in Anger', 1956

So it’s finally changed, and after only fifty-something years.  From an interview with British playwright, Polly Denham (Weekend Australian, January 23-24)

. . . a focus on the middle classes is the defining feature of a trend in British theatre.”That was part of the impetus for writing [That Face]: people in pearls watching plays about people doing skag in outer Leeds. Theatre is meant to be a culture of self-examination.”

Seems the French regard the good ol’ shiny wrapper round a paperback as a bit daring, to judge from a piece in Le Figaro. Can this one really be an example of what worries them? (It’s the 2009 winner, Trois femmes puissantes by Marie Ndiaye.)

Are they “behind” us with other forms of in-yer-face promotion?

Dr Phillips, (whom God preserve, of New Jersey) sends us their summary of a piece from Scientific American (sub required for full article).

Key Concepts:

* A new type of service industry has emerged to meet the needs of the millions who play online fantasy games such as World of Warcraft.
* Players called gold farmers amass game “currency” to sell to other players for a fee.
* This controversial practice violates the rules of play but has become a means for hundreds of thousands of developing world players to earn a wage comparable to that of factory workers.

What strikes the good doctor is the parallel between this remarkable trade and the practice of religion. Both require a mass of believers and a group of exploiters like the wily mob in mediaeval times  (typified by Chaucer’s Pardoner) who sold indulgences and saints’ relics. Myself, I’d go for a relic, that way you at least get a bit of bone, albeit from a pig. Indulgences you take on trust, and what if you went directly to hell, no hanging about, wouldn’t you spit?

If you stick around and pay attention, what you’re disposed to say will eventually get said better by someone else.  (Accepting this is another of the pleasures of aging.)  This is Leon Wieseltier, talking about how Marxism once appealed to him.

The intellectual sophistication of the tradition seemed incontrovertible; and I was not yet familiar with the stylistic cunning of apologetics and polemics, modern or medieval, which can spin into existence a vast and intoxicating literature without ever examining its own foundations. I was a liberal, but an infirm one–infirm liberalism being the liberalism that fails to engage its enemies on the left as ferociously as its enemies on the right. It is hard for a young man to walk away from the satisfactions of radicalism, in the way that it is hard for a young man, say, to understand Middlemarch. So I read widely in the Marxist tradition, despite my belief in the inadequacy of a materialist view of life and the absurdity of the idea that justice may be established by means of a dictatorship. I half-wanted to fall under its spell, to find a small place in its saga.

That captures exactly a few years in which I tried to understand Brecht and the Brecht-cult in theatre studies.  The more I read of Brecht, the more I came to hate the man and to understand that, like any commissar, he would say or do anything, licensed by the belief that what was good for Brecht was good for the down-trodden. ( My views of the work are more nuanced, but don’t belong here.)

The lure of a ‘humane’ Marxism operated strongly on my generation, anti-capitalist, anti-liberal as we were – and ignorant of both. When I eventually came across Leszek Kolakowski, the great critic of Marxism, whose recent death is the occasion of Wieseltier’s piece, I had already come to my senses. I wonder if Kolakowski is read by those in our English Departments – both in schools and universities – who peddle ‘Marxist’ approaches to literature? Or are they too busy spinning ‘into existence a vast and intoxicating literature without ever examining its own foundations’?

More about Zerstreutheit. It’s a special and pernicious kind of distraction which William James thought the direct opposite of attention.

Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.

James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt, Vol. 1, pp. 403-404.

OK, I confess: I got that from Wikipedia (art. ‘Attention’)

Here’s someone pretty far gone:

Ich kenne einen Kollegen, der so zerstreut ist, da? er in einer Dreht?r f?nfmal im Kreis l?uft, bis ihm einf?llt, ob er rein oder raus wollte.

I have a colleague who’s so distracted [zerstreut] that he goes five times round in a revolving door before it comes to him whether he wants to go in or out.

_ Robert Lembke

Does English ‘distraction’ capture the semi-pathological quality of this condition? Everyone is distracted from time to time, whereas what we’re talking about here is an endemic scatteredness, a more-or-less constant, habitual flickering between objects of attention.

Prince Charles has been invited to appear on Dr Who, and according to some reports, turned it down. “Miserable swine” said Russell T. Davies, the executive producer and lead writer on the show. The charitable interpret this phrase as a reference to “the Prince’s favourite radio program” – the Goon Show – in which it’s a running gag.

Could be. Then again there does seem to be a feeling around that when the tribunes of the people speak, royals ought to jump. Remember the “rage” when the Queen failed to react to Princess Diana’s death by wailing and keening and rending her garments in Trafalgar Square? The tribunes on that occasion were the editors of the tabloid press. Never mind ‘the Arab street’, knock ‘em in the Old Kent Road.

Then there was the concert to celebrate the Queen’s Golden Jubilee at whose conclusion she shared the stage with a bunch of sweaty rockers. According to Fintan O’Toole (Granta, 79, Autumn 2002) this marks a turning point in the history of the monarchy. Formerly an object of deference, he argues, the Queen has now been re-branded as “a living legend, a fading icon of popular culture”.

You can be the sacred bearer of a nation’s destiny, the anointed embodiment of an immemorial fusion of blood and soil, the spiritual head of the official Protestant church. Or you can appear on stage with Ozzy Osbourne, who bites the heads off live bats. You cannot do both.

Well actually you can. Actually one picks and chooses: the late Princess – notoriously – did so, working the press for her own advantage. In this she proved herself right royal, for that’s royals have done since there was a press to work. Victoria knew what she was about when she knighted Henry Irving.

A naive illusion, this, the pop people supposing they control the controllers, and encouraged by habits of interpretation that have filtered down from ‘cultural criticism’. The world is a text; we do texts – hey, we can do the world. So after the so-called race riots on Sydney’s Cronulla beach a couple of years back, one writer decided that the Australian flag had now been ‘re-coded’ as signifying yobbish racism. Wouldn’t that surprise them down at Rotary? ‘Re-coded’, ‘re-branded’ used in passive constructions, Prince Charles in a cameo, monarchs as pop icons, the flag as fascist banner; these, if anything unequivocal, are signs of absence of mind, of a childish determination to impose one’s wishes on the world.

So as the Daily Mail might say, Put your dummy back in, Russell T.