Maybe it’s a form of intellectual self abuse! I’m unsure. On the other hand it could be a form of intellectual self harm. The hot sweaty pretentions of the teenage years, which someone in a position of authority would have warned you against – but never fully followed up on.
Only I sometimes just can’t stop even though deep within my bones I know there is something deeply wrong. I just keep doing it to myself. I’ve been doing it for years even though I know I shouldn’t. Please forgive me: this afternoon I bought a copy of the summer books edition of The Times Literary Supplement (TLS.)
I only bought this piece of print media because it offered a job lot of ‘TLS critics choose their summer reading.’ Thinking there might be an interesting recommendation from the likes of Mary Beard or Margaret Drabble which I could read over the next few weeks even though I’ve got so many piles of books hanging around coolly in this flat that I could open a library.
And yet only after I had paid at the desk, got the rather thin limp paper home (for the TLS has not changed it’s structure and format in decades), did I realise as I was flicking though the inky pages that I had made the same mistake I’ve been making for years. I just don’t recognise the culture or idea of culture represented in this paper. It always signifies a blank space. It’s as if the TLS invokes a blindness to my reading. The pages just become blank.
The TLS has the habit of shutting me out. The sense that a door is slammed in my face. It’s as if the culture it represents exists somewhere else in the past. It feels like the TLS does not represent a culture of a lived experience, not just mine, but in the case of material reality, the lived experience of anyone else. It feels like it’s not interested in anything art, writing or living has to say about the world we inhabit.
To be blunt, from this point of view, there’s nothing very modern or innovative about the TLS. The paper comes at you as if it were a sleepy summer in Oxford or Cambridge between the wars. And even though the Supplement is not written in a high brow French/American theoretical style, it all sounds rather chummy. Leaving me thinking that the editorial staff have never really lived, or had, a long hot sweaty bohemian summer in their lives – the kind of summer where they have truly lived.
There’s no real life here in the pages of the TLS, and can only wonder if someone somewhere is ever going to kick hard some editorial life and existence into the stuffy pages of this paper, or whether it’s just time to let this old fashioned idea of our culture die before it has to suffer the indignity of just failing of old age and cultural irrelevance. For it’s just far too expensive to buy a piece of irrelevant print media in which our present culture will never anthropologically recognise itself.
The fact is I think we deserve better than this week’s offering. It could be possible, with the right editorial adjustments, The TLS could be saved from the cultural cemetery of irrelevance, but for now I think we need to keep a defibrillator near by just incase the TLS tries to leave us, and a writer such as myself slaps a DNR notice on it’s medical charts.
Put all together my qualms about the cultural representation reproduced through the TLS, does bag a wider question about the nature of a culture to which I do connect – after all I can’t keep putting myself through this cultural self abuse forever contemplating this micro narrow insignificance of an older privileged literate culture. In which a more wider ranging answer emerges out The TLS wasteland – in theory it could be a social class issue.
As it happens, as I was wrestling with these ideas which The TLS throws in a signifying arc back at me, Film Four was showing on the evening I bought this summer reading edition of The TLS, Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting. A film which in the shadow of what I’ve already discussed in relation to The TLS, represents another culture which I also do not recognise but understand a lot more than the hermetically sealed world of TLS editorial. Meaning what we find here within this film, and especially more so in Irvine Welsh’s novel of the same name, is a open organic cultural representation of a lived experience. An interpretation of a culture and a life which carries anthropological weight. A culture which in its own dusty nature The TLS would refuse to even admit existed closeted as it is within the mouldy office chair of a past academic life.
It’s a culture which lives and breathes unapologetically within its own sleaze. A culture built out of a language and dialect which has never been spoken within the offices of The TLS. Where the The TLS repels and pushes you away, Trainspotting pulls you in showing you a life lived, regardless of how picaresque this culture is. It shows you the lives of these people, their anger, their love, their friendship, their need to sit on the edge of everything because sitting on the edge of everything is all they have.
Yes they have routes out if they need them. Mark Renton disappears off at the end of Trainspotting to Amsterdam. Diane, when we catch up with her in the second film T2, has become a successful Edinburgh lawyer – while the others are caught in a haunting of lives patterned when they were younger. They don’t seem to have noticed that the world around them has changed.
And yet what makes me glad as I watch this film is that within the pre-internet age there is no documentary record of the younger man who sat in a cinema and watched Trainspotting twenty-nine years ago. Even then he still connected to this idea of an organic anthropological culture, more so than the narrow culture written down in The TLS, he knew there was an alternative, a way out of the canonical culture which was being fed to him, by both the media and an education system which never thought certain people had a chance, let alone that they were capable of coming to a conclusion that print media such as The TLS was nothing more than an anachronism of an idea which masqueraded as culture.
This wasn’t the only time I’ve come across this paradigm over the year which tends to repeat loudly in opposition to the dryness of The TLS. Channel E4’s Skins represented another foray into an organic culture of anthropological lived experience, in essence a slightly younger Bristolian variation of the culture which underlines Trainspotting. And as I write these lines I’m once more about to take vengeance on The TLS and it’s very musty and narrow definition of culture by watching the final two episodes of BBC’s What It Feels Like For A Girl. A contemporary series which deep down I thought would have given us a state of the nation debate, lead by the Wilburforce Whitehouse’s who would have wagged their fingers in admonishment while tut-tuting their distain.
Yet to my surprise nothing of the sort has happened. Even if it is the story of a human being and a lived experience , which few of of us will ever pass through, even if it is presented as a phenomenology of becoming. Unfiltered in autobiographical terms through the Nottingham prose dialect of Paris Lee’s original book. Even if one can argue that it does show show in theory that education can lead to better places, even if that place is a space of identification with ones own gender and social class – the fact is Educating Rita fulfils the same theme – and yet the work of Paris Lee’s is about as far from The TLS you’ll ever get. It breathes with a life and lived experience which you will never find within the pages of The TLS. Meaning that writer’s such as Welsh and Lee’s provide the ground work narrative of an organic lived experience culture, where The TLS had nothing to offer other than a stagnancy which will never be cleaned out of its system.
It’s for this very reason there are those of us who made our minds up to stop intellectually abusing ourselves many moons ago., and walk away from the kind of stagnancy which The TLS represents, to look for a more vibrant meaningful organic culture we can engage with at every liminal level. We want life and not just the heavy academic overspill of redundant culture’s which have no meanings for us.
This can only then produce one effect: I’m never going to buy another copy of The Times Literary Supplement ever again.
Nick Ingram
Leave a Reply