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?

Richard Heeks, a scholar in the field of development informatics, has a piece worth reading on the economics of gold-farming. Another form of wealth transfer from the rich to the developing worlds.

New forms, old (psychological) content? People are suckers for the intangible, more specifically, symbolic systems of reward and status. One example, Louis XIV’s construction of Versailles, with its mandarin protocols, rituals and titles. While the French nobles competed over the position of turd-carrier to the Sun King they weren’t about to go all Frondist on him. Napoleon worked a similar trick with his medals and uniforms for the revolutionary army.

Two older books by Johan Huizinga would bear re-reading in the context. The Waning of the Middle Ages and Homo Ludens were much read in the 1960s, a decade keen on theories of play.

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’?

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.

Only ‘semi-pathological’ however: I believe distraction as a symptom is different from the common state of consciousness I’m trying to talk about, although, between the two forms, there will be obvious overlaps and fuzzy boundaries and so on. Plain old stress-induced high anxiety, for instance, makes it much harder to pay attention, and if sustained, borders on the pathological. But I think, if I read James correctly, that this scattered state is a normal feature of the mind, and that we bounce in and out of it as we do states of concentration. We zone out.

So far so normal. It becomes a curse when a particular form of the self encounters a particular kind of culture, to be more precise, when a self ruled entirely by its own immediate need for gratification inhabits a culture which offers multiple, easily-available sources of that commodity: when the poorly-educated kid, who hasn’t learnt to pay attention, surfs the Web. I don’t mean kids from lousy schools; I mean kids from any school who’ve missed out on one of the most important things education can do.

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts clich? about “teaching you how to think” is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

David Foster Wallace, commencement address at Kenyon College, 2005. Edited version in The Wall St Journal.

DFW saw ‘attention’ as possible only when someone becomes able to override the self’s constant whining and nagging, its tendency to construct the world as a device for gratifying or frustrating its needs. It’s one of the master-themes in George Eliot.

The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.

If you want to inspect a group of people in which egoism rules, and who seem often to be confused, dazed and scatterbrained, you can do no better than an average class of undergraduates. Small group discussion is one of the shibboleths of higher education in this country. It has its value, but also, less often recognised, its limitations and inbuilt deficiciencies. One of these is that so many students simply don’t pay attention to one another.

I used to run an exercise like this. Students were paired off. Each person had then to talk to the other on a given topic – useful ones were ‘cats’ and ‘garlic’, about which everyone has something to say – for two minutes by the clock. The listener’s job was to understand what was said, not to question it or to put forward views of their own. If in doubt, listeners could ask when the minute was over. When listeners were fully satisfied that they could repeat back accurately what they had heard, the roles were reversed. Listeners were then asked to report to the wider group.

Some students found it very difficult to listen without interrupting. Most found it even more difficult to confine themselves to understanding and kept wanting to opine. Understandly – wasn’t opining what their whole education experience had encouraged them to believe was their role?

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.

It is, it is. (Oh thanks say the Wallacians out there, but cut me some aging slack here).

I am trying hard to resist just adding a few paltry adjectives to the cairn on the web. But Infinite Jest is one of those books that make you want while reading it to button-hole people and quote at them, quote something from practically every page, quote whole pages, a pre-critical gushing love affair.

As at 22nd October in the O.N.AN.-ite Year of the Dependable Adult Undergarment, the first appearance of Madame Psychosis with her midnight radio show, which tonight features reading from the come-all-ye brochure of the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed (“Bell-shaped steatopygiacs, in your special slacks”) as at, therefore, a mere p 190 I have become addicted.

Amongst the many obits online (Google and take your pick) the one that made me desperately want to read Wallace was by Scott McLemee, especially this bit:

In one of his last published writings (how terrible it feels to put it that way) David Foster Wallace referred to ‘the sound of our U.S. culture right now’ as Total Noise: ‘a culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I’m not alone in finding too much to even absorb, much less to try to make sense of or organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value. Such basic absorption, organization, and triage used to be what was required of an educated adult, a.k.a. an informed citizen – at least that’s what I got taught. Suffice it here to say that the requirements now seem different…. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help. That?s about as clearly as I can put it.?

He went on to mention, all too briefly, his hope that there might be ‘a model for what free, informed adulthood might look like in the context of Total Noise: not just the intelligence to discern one’s own error or stupidity, but the humility to address it, absorb it, and move on and out therefrom, bravely, toward the next revealed error.’

I have been thinking off and on for a long time, not all that productively, about Matthew Arnold’s account of Zerstreutheit (‘being-scattered-ness’ maybe) and how much worse things have become since he wrote and how in particular, to adopt Wallace’s term, the Noise menaces the manic and introverted. Against this background I found what Wallace had to say compellingly accurate and brave. Reading even 190 pages of Infinite Jest shows how deliberately exposed he was to the Noise. I don’t know enough about Wallace and I am old-fashioned about these matters, so I’m not going to connect the dots here but it looks to me as if Wallace’s creative work was, like Samuel Beckett’s, heroic. He resembles Beckett as well in the love and admiration he inspired in those who knew him.