Harry Mount agrees with Sir Tom Stoppard (blog passim) about our relationship to books, asking in today's Telegraph, 'How did the British mind shrink to this?'
I've got university-educated friends who don't read newspapers or difficult books, and never even watch the news on telly. And it's not as if they've completely replaced the printed page with online pages, or moving images for that matter. In fact, they still buy quite a lot of magazines – but they are picture-dominated celebrity magazines; and their reading barely goes beyond the 30-word caption beneath the photo of an overweight celebrity exiting a cupcake shop in Greenwich Village.
I suspect we all have friends like this - intelligent people who are just no longer interested in or curious about the world around them. Maybe they're too comfortable? I don't know.
I do know that I was bought Paul Weller's Wake Up The Nation as a father's day gift (I've followed the career of Mr Weller since 1977, more or less).
It's 'a parade-worthy triumph' according to the BBC's Chris Lo; Alexis Petridis in the Guardian says it is 'shocking and thrilling'. The Daily Telegraph's Andrew Perry says: 'Weller's new album's relentless vigour is exhausting but he strikes gold all over again.' The Independent gives it five stars, and Danny Baker says it is 'his materpiece', apparently. 'Essentially,' says the NME, 'he doesn't give a fuck.' (This being, to the NME, the highest expression of the art, outweighing all other considerations, such as melody, rhythm and general quality.)
The Monday Books verdict: an unlistenable, cacophonous, discordant, jangling chow-row, with meaningless lyrics and pompous sleeve notes.
Mark Steyn would frown at us even having an opinion (and he's probably right, sadly).
Mark Steyn would frown at us even having an opinion (and he's probably right, sadly).
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3 comments:
Its very sad. I know intelligent people, many of them University educated, that have no interest in social affairs, world events or anything that would require a sustained level of concentration and active engagement. Rather than read a book or watch say Newsnight they would prefer to watch Big Brother or read a celebrity magazine.
You should give the Weller album another listen - I thought like you at first but it has grown on me.
I like that NME review by the way - for a man who doesn't give a f*** he's been doing an awful lot of press interviews etc!
Actually, anon, ignoring the ludicrous lyrics, I quite like Wake Up The Nation and No Tears To Cry, the former of which sounds like it would have been at home on Sound Affects, the latter a Scott Walker-does-Northern Soul rip off.
But the rest is (to my ears) just unlistenable, even if I had the time or inclination these days!
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