Bob’s Bad Hair Day

24 November 2009
Colin Burrow

Deep in our collective memories are those 1970s album covers, you know the ones: a dwarf in one corner, a strong man in eyeshadow in another, and somewhere in the middle of it all, but still in the shadows and probably in a leotard, is the artist formerly known as Bob, George, or whoever it was. Their spirit lives on in Bob Dylan’s Christmas video.

Bob, well he’s always been a cussed so-and-so, and part of the game of being Bob is to do whatever your fans really don’t want, and then watch them twisting themselves around so that they can still love you in spite of it all. You go electric, you do Victoria’s Secret commercials, you grow a beard (more than once, in several different styles), you do a retro-radio show on cheesy themes, and you say 1956 as ‘nineteen hundred and fifty six’ like you’re a subway driver from the Bronx aspiring to work for the British MovieTone News. Your fans decide that, yeah, ‘nineteen hundred and fifty six’ is how it always ought to have been anyway. You do the ultimate dreadfuls: the Christian thing, an album with Johnny Cash. You do a pastiche of Bill Nighy in Love Actually and call it a Christmas album.

Bob is the ultimate bad boyfriend, always so cool because he’s so completely uncool, and always desperately desirable because he’s never what you want him to be. So to the true Bobbista this video is just great. For a horrible moment you think the dude on the squeeze-box at the beginning is Bob in his final metamorphosis (he’s got that Bob head angle, looking upwards and kind of quizzical, like a dog who’s not quite sure if he’s going to bite you or jump over your shoulder), but then you get a glimpse of Bob side-on. Yes, it’s really Bob. You think, cool, Bob hasn’t turned into an accordion artist. Cooler: he hasn’t died. (Part of being a Bobbista is turning on the radio in the morning and thinking ‘Will it be today? And will they show Renaldo and Clara on the telly? And will I really watch it again?’)

Then you realise something’s very wrong. Bob is wearing a straight-haired wig. STRAIGHT HAIR. But it’s those curls Bob, didn’t you know, that are what we’ve always really loved about you. Going straight, that really is the ultimate betrayal. But then you start to think, isn’t he actually quite sexy in that hat? And maybe the hair makes him younger, brings out the old androgynous charm. Then you find yourself thinking that you’d really like to be with him in that Disneyfied Christmas McMansion prancing around with the yuppified descendants of those weight-lifters from those 1970s album covers, and yes, why not, swinging from a chandelier while singing: ‘Must be Santa, Must be Santa’. Ah Bob, you’ve done it again. You’ve made me pollute my own mind and love myself for doing it.

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The Crying of Lot 49

24 November 2009
Jon Day

Riding a bicycle round London for ten hours a day is grindingly difficult. A bike courier is paid £2-£3 per job (with a 10 per cent bonus for working a full week if you’re lucky), income can be fickle, and a slow week spent standing in the rain is no fun at all. Though it varies dramatically, couriers cover distances averaging around 300 miles a week. Couriers are obliged to deliver whatever a client wants delivered as quickly as the client requires; if you can’t get from pick-up to destination within 40 minutes, you don’t get paid. Covering London from (roughly) Wapping to Knightsbridge and Camden to Elephant and Castle, you see a lot of the city, a lot of weather, and a great many post-rooms.

Bicycle couriers are generally taxed as self-employed subcontractors. Theoretically, couriers work for themselves, on a job by job basis, and are subsequently afforded no contractual protection. If you fall ill or get knocked off (a depressingly regular occurrence; studies have shown that cycle couriering is significantly more dangerous than most other trades), then you’re on your own. No job security, no sick pay, maybe a sympathetic word from your controllers but that’s about it. Though there have been attempts at unionisation, they seem doomed to fail in an industry that relies so much on a transient labour force.

The most a courier can hope for when injured is the assistance of the London Courier Emergency Fund, a grassroots organisation which pays out small amounts to riders injured on the job. The LCEF is funded entirely by couriers and their friends. Like whaling, the job generates a strong communal network, but this network is completely informal, structured around races, drinking and comradeship rather than institutional legal protection. Because of this, any attempt to overturn the state of the industry through direct action is doomed to failure: striking is met with swift dismissal, whole fleets are sacked and replaced overnight. Average rates of pay have remained much the same for the last ten years, and it is difficult to see how they could be increased, even merely in line with inflation.

I’m not unsympathetic to Roy Mayall et al, but can’t help rejoicing in postal strikes as sending more work the way of the courier. A guaranteed income (at least for the time being), sick pay (albeit restricted) and, most important, the right to strike are privileges denied to the thousands of London bicycle couriers who ensure that while postmen strike, letters still get delivered.

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Shining

23 November 2009
Alex Abramovich

It’s strange to find the New York Times Book Review devoting three full pages to yet another round of the Gordon Lish/Raymond Carver spat, previously addressed (at length) in, for example, The New Yorker, Slate and the New York Times’s own Sunday magazine. Stranger still to see it come down so heavily against Lish, one of the more accomplished editors of the 20th century.

The byline is also odd: Stephen King – who was once praised (by the same publication) for his masterful reworking of the ‘evil-car motif’. Really? I don’t mean to pick on King. But King, reviewing Carol Sklenicka’s new biography of Carver, does pick on Lish, who is singled out for his ‘heavy hand’, for ‘the strangely elitist view he seems to have held of Carver’s writing’, and for his ‘baleful’ and ‘heartbreaking’ influence on Carver’s stories. When his own first novel was accepted for publication in 1973, King says, he was

young, drunk, trying to support a wife and two children, writing at night, hoping for a break. The break came, but until reading Sklenicka’s book, I thought it was the $2500 advance Doubleday paid me for Carrie. Now I realise it may have been not winding up with Gordon Lish as my editor.

Matthew Price’s review of Sklenicka’s book in Bookforum was more even-handed:

The Lish-edited collections included in the Library of America edition are now canonical… With his powerful instinct for etching heartache, Carver would have written worthy stories with or without his editor. Whether we would be reading that work in an edition designed for the ages is another question, one that’s as unanswerable as it is provocative.

But what seems to stick in King’s craw is that Lish’s edits of Carver’s stories go out of their way to avoid the answerable. For King, the original of one Carver story ‘ends on a note of hard-won hope’, whereas Lish’s edit robs it of its ‘epiphany’. It’s ‘a total rewrite’, a ‘cheat’. Elsewhere, a baker gives ‘bereaved parents coffee and hot rolls. They take this communion together and talk until morning.’ According to King, Lish’s edit of that scene – which makes the baker out to be a good deal more nefarious, in a way you might have thought King would have appreciated – lacked the ‘symmetry’ and ‘heart’ (King’s italics) of Carver’s original.

Let’s leave aside the fact that, in his letters to Lish (which pull strongly at King’s heartstrings), Carver tended towards the melodramatic: ‘I don’t want to sound melodramatic here, but I’ve come back from the grave here to start writing stories once more.’ Let’s forget that the New York Times Magazine article which kicked this whole thing into gear quoted Carver quoting Ezra Pound on the collaborative process: ‘It’s immensely important that great poems be written, but it makes not a jot of difference who writes them.’ Let’s say, instead, that where King is sentimental, Lish looks at sentimentality and sees the enemies of feeling.

Going by this review, you’d think that Carver’s stories should have looked more like their endlessly unfortunate MFA imitations, and that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which is based on one of King’s early novels, should have looked more like this:

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Rectification

23 November 2009
Glen Newey

Philosophical theories of justice generally assign an important role to rectification, the putting right of past wrongs. Thierry Henry’s handball in France’s World Cup qualifier against Ireland last Wednesday has offered a mass exercise in rectificatory justice, with many in the Republic calling for the game to be replayed. The Irish know what they’re talking about, having recently had to take the Lisbon Treaty referendum to a replay in order to get the right result. FIFA has spoilsportingly turned down the Irish FA’s pleas. The iniquity is blatant.

But why stop with the Henry handball? Why not rectify other instances of footballing injustice? English readers will need, in fact want, no reminding of the anguish of Maradona’s ‘hand of God’ goal for Argentina against England in the 1986 World Cup. That one should obviously be replayed. This time our boys would surely have a much better chance, now that Diego’s a recovering coke and hamburger addict and a tub of lard to boot.

And then there’s the collateral damage from footballing injustice, such as England’s defeat by West Germany in the 1970 tournament. The Wessies’ winning strike always looked a bit suspect, with Gerd Müller’s leg well up. The point, though, was that Harold Wilson’s Labour government crashed to a shock defeat in the general election a mere four days later, a loss widely put down to the feel-bad factor following the game. They should rerun that election, too.

Finally, there’s possibly the biggest miscarriage of sporting justice of all time: England’s World Cup ‘win’ against West Germany in 1966. Not the goal they always show on the telly, but the one they never show, because it wasn’t really a goal (England’s ‘third’). Yes, I know that Geoff Hurst stuck another one in the onion bag before the final whistle, but that was only because the Germans were streaming forward in a vain bid to cancel out the previous non-goal. So the 1966 final is ripe for a re-run. There is the slight snag that some players will have to be got not just out of retirement, but out of the ground. No matter. They could be replaced by cardboard cut-outs, or some of the surviving substitutes. It should be a great spectacle, as long as God doesn’t stick his oar in again.

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Wise Distinctions

20 November 2009
Judith Butler

I was glad to see in today’s press that it was decided to separate the question of what sex Caster Semenya really is from the questions of whether she could keep her medal or compete in women’s sports. It seemed to me that the drive to publish the results of the sex determination tests was always sensationalist and intrusive, and that it missed the important points at issue in this situation. Yesterday’s decision by the IAAF goes part of the way to honour the complexity and vulnerability of the person here, but also to affirm the way her gender is bound up with cultural and familial modes of belonging and recognition. In fact, I wonder why we feel compelled to determine sex in a definite way, given that sex can be ambiguous (and is for at least 10 per cent of the population, and much more if you take ‘psychological factors’ into account), and the standards that we use to ‘determine’ it are clearly shifting and not always consistent with one another (chromosomal, hormonal, anatomical, to name a few). In fact, the negotiated agreement with Semenya is not based on the ‘facts’ of sex, but on a consensus achieved among the various parties to the case about how to proceed. Let’s applaud this distinction.

After all, the question of whether she should be allowed to keep her medal or to participate in women’s athletics is different from the question of what sex she really is – and should remain so. More »

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Come Back Karl

20 November 2009
Bernard Porter

Amid all this celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago, I’m left wondering whether I was the only one to have jumped the other way at the time. It turned me into a Marxist. All my adult life before then I had thought that Marx had been wrong, for example in predicting that capitalism would need to get redder in tooth and claw before it was undermined by its internal contradictions. The Russian Revolution however had not occurred in the most advanced capitalist country, which is why, by my way of thinking, it could only be kept alive by tyranny – a premature baby in an incubator was the metaphor I liked to use. In the West it had been shown that enlightened capitalist societies could smooth away their own roughest edges, by taking on board social democracy, the welfare state, decolonisation and the like. All this seemed to put the kibosh on the old man’s gloomy prognostication of capitalism’s needing to get worse before it exploded, releasing us into a brave new socialist world that not even Marx could describe in detail (consistently with his belief that it was the material base that determined intellectual superstructures), and that I, for one, was not at all confident that I would come to like. Happy days. More »

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Tales of Diplomacy: The Great Wall

19 November 2009
Eliot Weinberger

Richard Nixon, visiting the Great Wall of China in 1972, said: ‘I think you would have to conclude that this is a great wall.’

Ronald Reagan, visiting the Wall in 1984, said: ‘What can you say except it’s awe-inspiring? It is one of the great wonders of the world.’ Asked if he would like to build his own Great Wall, Reagan drew a circle in the air and said: ‘Around the White House.’

Bill Clinton, visiting the Wall in 1998, said: ‘So if we had a couple of hours, we could walk 10 kilometres, and we’d hit the steepest incline, and we’d all be in very good shape when we finished. Or we’d be finished. It was a good workout. It was great.’

George W. Bush, visiting the Wall in 2002, signed the guest book and said: ‘Let’s go home.’ He made no other comments.

Barack Obama, visiting the Wall on Wednesday, said: ‘It’s majestic. It’s magical. It reminds you of the sweep of history, and that our time here on Earth is not that long, so we better make the best of it.’ During Obama’s visit, the Starbucks and KFC at the base of the Wall were closed.

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On Tiptoe

19 November 2009
Joshua Kurlantzick

During his first visit to China, Barack Obama reportedly addressed a range of contentious issues with his hosts, in private: Iran, North Korea, climate change, the yuan and its impact on the global financial crisis. But, whether in public or in private, the US president tiptoed very lightly when talking about China’s human rights record. At a town hall meeting in Shanghai with young Chinese, Obama deflected the chance to criticise Beijing’s censorship of the internet, for example, talking only about universal rights in the vaguest terms. At a scripted ‘press conference’ – neither he nor the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, actually took any questions – Obama walked the same line, telling Hu that the US is committed to universal rights, but refusing to mention any of China’s specific failings. More »

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Prophetic Deer

18 November 2009
Joanna Biggs
Tahar Rahim as Malik El Djebena

Tahar Rahim as Malik El Djebena

Jacques Audiard’s new film, A Prophet (which won the Grand Prix at Cannes and best film at the London Film Festival), is a prison thriller, yes, but an odd one. In the best scene our hero, Malik, is handcuffed in a car, being taken by a rival gang through the countryside near Marseille to the beach for negotiations (he’s on day release). The rival gang’s leader, Lattrache, isn’t sure of him: why is an Arab working for the Corsicans? Unsatisfactory answers bring Lattrache’s gun closer to Malik’s neck. Lattrache asks about a friend of his who died in prison (at our hero’s hands) – does Malik know anything about it? Who did it? Just as Malik is on the point of incriminating himself, he shouts ‘Animal!’ and a deer crashes into the windscreen. The camera follows the spinning body in slow motion as it arcs to the ground. Lattrache can’t believe it: ‘Are you a prophet or what?’

In Anne Carson’s poem ‘Deer (not a play)’, published in the LRB in 2007,  the deer really is a sort of prophet. We are in the English countryside, and Jimi Hendrix is chatting to his limo driver on the way to Heathrow. This deer ‘can see/310/degrees around every lick’.

‘What is it about deer?’ the limo driver says.

‘…’ Jimi says, quite rightly.

The deer come from nowhere to change everything. They are meant to be mysteries. Or lunch (these are French gangs, after all): after Lattrache and his men uncuff our hero, they turn their guns on the deer and put its corpse in the boot instead of Malik’s. At the coast, with the rival gangs reconciled and ready to do some business about a casino, Lattrache’s mother washes Malik’s bloody shirt (it will not come clean) and Lattrache washes the side of venison in the sea and hangs it to dry on a hook.

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How to Be French

17 November 2009
Jeremy Harding

Last Thursday Nicolas Sarkozy gave a long speech at La Chapelle-en-Vercors. It was supposed to be in support of farming, but Sarkozy turned on his heel at the cowshed and launched into a lively exposition of French identity, republican identity, and the identity of everything and nothing. That’s a winning formula. Or it was in 2007 when he campaigned for the presidency on the same combination. It’s probably an opener for the regional elections in March 2010. Sarkozy may well be drawing a pension by the time anyone can say what this great piece of oratory about culture and values really adds up to. Is it worth the struggle? For those who don’t want to find out the hard way, here’s a 17-point résumé:

1. You’re really French when you grasp that the Girondins and the Jacobins were two sides of the same coin.

2. Yes, coins. Watch carefully while I spin another: heads is Christianity, tails the Enlightenment. Or wait, maybe I won’t spin it, I’ll just trouser it. Now I’m a rich man. France is rich in both traditions. Surely you see this.

3. We are not ambivalent, this is not French.

4. Oof! Identity and difference, diversity and singularity: the same and the other. It’s puzzled cleverer men than me for centuries. Black people are welcome in France. More »

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