Why the Royal Opera’s New Tristan Should be Applauded, not Booed
Last night I attended the premier of the Royal Opera’s new production of Tristan und Isolde, conducted by Antonio Pappano and directed by Christof Loy. As has become routine with this most conservative of audiences, the production team was loudly, yobbishly booed.
First, it implies that Loy and his team have been less than honest in their approach to the production, that they are charlatans or impostors. But there’s nothing to support this view at all. You may disagree with their interpretation – for example you may think that Tristan is a tragic love story – but that doesn’t invalidate it.
Second, in contrast with Loy, Pappano received a standing ovation for his conducting, those cheering him conveniently overlooking that he is Artistic Director and that Loy was his own choice as director (which he acknowledges in the programme). Not only Pappano, but also Nina Stemme – the production’s Isolde – are on record as being of one mind on how Tristan should be approached from a ‘non-heroic’ point of view. So the booing of the director doesn’t make any sense. If you’re going to boo, boo the entire creative leadership of the project. (Stemme deservedly received a thunderous ovation.)
The conservative elements of the audience seem to want an entirely literal interpretation of Wagner’s stage directions, but that approach was comprehensively cast aside by his own grandson, Wieland, at Bayreuth in the 1960s. Literalism is dead, and long may it remain so.
The genius of Wagner’s work is that it can survive truly awful productions, and Loy’s is very far from that. In fact, pace the morons who booed, it is insightful and sheds new light on some important aspects of the work.
Tristan is the by far the most compact and consistent of Wagner’s works. It was conceived and composed over a comparatively short period of time, and its philosophical underpinnings are miles from the confusion of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer that plagues the Ring. It is a work of startling modernity, even to today’s ears. It is endlessly young, and as such requires a modern response. It is our duty not to allow it to become a museum piece.
John Deathridge has argued convincingly that Tristan is not a love story, but a death story. I repeat: it is not about love, but the longing for release from the torment of love. It is not about the social mores of the 19th century like some Jane Austen novel. It has universal and timeless relevance. This deserves to be brought out by the production. Strapping Tristan into some heroic plastic armour and slapping a Cornish castle on a painted backdrop are not a noble aim for a modern production.
Can we possibly imagine that if Wagner were alive today that he would have insisted on preserving his work unchanged? Wagner was more radical than perhaps any other composer in history – especially in his use of the most cutting-edge stagecraft available – and would surely have tried to bring his opera as up to date as it could possibly be. To suggest a literal interpretation is to go against the spirit of Wagner himself.
Loy’s production is minimal in the extreme. The stage is laid out exactly the same for each act. It is divided into two sections – upstage and downstage – that are separated by a large red velvet curtain. Nearly all of the singing occurs on a steeply raked grey platform downstage. Upstage, behind the curtain, there is what looks like a banqueting hall, with simple tables, chairs and candelabras. The outside world is only hinted at with large arched windows being sketched in. The walls of this part of the stage are entirely white. It is very strongly reminiscent of the designs for the Dogme film Festen.
The chorus remains in the rear half of the stage – i.e. behind the curtain – and characters only move into the front half when they enter the ‘onstage’ action. In fact, for long periods the curtain is shut, and when it is open the figures in the background are often frozen in place, as if ‘day’ has entirely stopped.
Far from being contrary modernism, this is Loy’s way of highlighting the divide between the world of day – the world that Tristan is tired of – and the world of night, the world of Tristan’s and Isolde’s love. Das Wunderreich der Nacht (roughly: “the wonder-realm of night”), as Tristan calls it.
Behind the curtain – in the world of day, where Tristan is expected to play the part of the Hero – it is boastful, egotistical, male, false. In Tristan’s world of night – in front of the curtain, where Tristan can be himself – there is only the truth of his love for Isolde and the torment it brings.
The curtain is not without unwelcome side effects. At the ‘Insight Evening’ for Tristan put on by the Royal Opera Education Department, Pappano’s musical assistant David Syrus remarked that they were having some trouble with it from an acoustic point of view (Loy didn’t look thrilled that Syrus had revealed the existence of the curtain), and this came out in particular at the start of Act III during the extended cor anglais solo which sounded like it was given from the rather cramped wings, rendering the sound rather boxy and too close to us. Consequently the joyous alarm that goes up when the shepherd sights Isolde’s ship was similarly lacking in resonance and visceral thrill.
There was also a detail which I wasn’t certain I picked up correctly: it looked as though Loy was suggesting that Brangäne failed to give the lovers enough warning of Melot’s arrival because she was having sex with Kurwenal. (Not that they give a shit; they are by that stage “consecrated to death” as Wagner has it.) An interesting idea, but the problem was that it wasn’t possible to be sure what was going on and at least half the house must have been unable to see it at all. Though how right Loy was to have Brangäne issue her warning from behind the curtain, from the world of day.
Loy’s conception of Tristan is as a high-functioning depressive. At the opening of Act III, Tristan – sung with incredibly delicacy by Ben Heppner – is slouched in his seat, mentally dead. His existential angst is the longing for death, for annihilation, oblivion.
Heppner’s performance is open to criticism, and I think most critics will say that the role – in particular in Act II – stretched him beyond his limits. His voice cracked several times – unintentionally – under the pressure of how quietly he was trying to sing. I’ve never heard an opera singer sing so quietly, and it wasn’t by accident: he did it with Pappano’s full support. For much of Acts II and III, the orchestra were often on the very edge of audibility. Heppner reserved the heldentenor voice for the moments that Tristan is playing the hero. Thrilling as Heppner’s voice is in full cry, it belongs to the world of day. In his performance, Tristan’s true voice is muted, almost internal.
This is brave singing indeed. Never has Tristan seemed more vulnerable, more on the edge of sanity. Where most tenors have Tristan tipping into madness only when on the edge of death in Act III, Heppner has him there from the very beginning. His arrogance in the face of Brangäne’s message from Isolde is mere show.
Stemme was a revelation as Isolde, her voice holding up under the intense strain of the first two acts, giving a luminous account of the part and a near ideal rendition of the Liebestod. Most important though was her acting, which was vital to Loy’s conception. Isolde is at times wrathful, haughty, sarcastic, tender, crazed, wildly in love, seductive and longing for death. To bring all these elements of the role through is an extraordinary achievement, especially when combined with vocal beauty, clear diction and highly disciplined rhythm.
Loy’s production is not just brave in stripping the staging back to the essentials – as I said before, this follows in the great tradition of Wieland Wagner’s post-war productions at Bayreuth – but also in small details.
I’ll highlight one here, from the opening of Act II. Isolde and Brangäne argue about whether the light that warns Tristan to stay away should be extinguished. Here the light is one of the candelabras from the banqueting hall. There are three candles. When Isolde puts out the light she actually only extinguishes two of the candles, and is burnt by the second of these. A telling detail: she is not yet sure of herself, and day (the light represents the last gleaming of day in their night-world) is still a part of her world. She longs for Tristan, yet an extended debate about their love is shortly to follow. Only once they have abandoned themselves to the night is the day banished. And so it is that Loy has Tristan extinguish the final candle as their argument concludes and they embark on the beautiful, ethereal duet O sink herneider. In a production of such restraint, these details are crucial.
Tristan is almost impossible to stage, so radical is its pared down dramaturgy, so challenging is the music to both audiences and performers alike. Loy and Pappano have given us a deeply intelligent and thrilling rendition of it with a brilliant cast (I’ve not mentioned how outstanding Michael Volle was as Kurwenal or how insightful John Tomlinson was as King Mark), perhaps the best Tristan cast assembled on stage in London for a generation or more. It is a triumph of thought, of singing, of orchestral playing and of staging. It deserves to be applauded and remembered. Keep your boos to yourselves.
The Wire, Season Five
This morning I finished my second complete viewing of The Wire, and I’m more strongly convinced than ever that it is the best TV ever made.
Enough has been written about how great the show is, and if you haven’t watched it, I urge you to do so immediately. It’s available from iTunes or on DVD.
What I want to write about here are some of the specific issues raised by the fifth and final season.
For me, although I’ve done so in the past, a ranking of the first four of seasons is pointless. Each of them is different, and each of them is brilliant. Taken together, they form an astonishingly moving and powerful picture of a modern city on the edge of collapse. They do it without ever resorting to the kind of flashy – or convenient – plot lines of a show like CSI. Much is left to us to imagine, and the hallmark of the show is ambiguity. Who are the good guys? Are drug dealers – like Bodie for example – necessarily evil? Are senior policemen to blame for the obsession with statistics rather than quality police work, or is it the politicians? Is it even the politicians, or is it us, the voters, who cannot see the system in the round?
For all of these reasons, The Wire is the most important piece of television I’ve ever seen.
But season 5 is nowhere near this level of quality. On the first viewing, it was a tremendous disappointment, and that feeling is only reinforced on the second go-round.
The BBC have now finished their screening of the complete show, so it seems reasonable to discuss details of the plot here. If you haven’t finished watching it yet, I should warn you that there are heavy plot spoilers in what follows. Seriously, don’t read the rest if you don’t know how the series ends.
I think it comes down to this. In the final season, the show relinquishes ambiguity and makes clear who the bad guys are. We are given at least one character – Gus Haynes, the city editor of the Baltimore Sun newspaper – who is wholly good. We are given at least four characters who are wholly bad – Scott Templeton, the Sun reporter who manufactures portions of the serial killer story, his two editors, and the Republican governor of Maryland, the last of whom we never see on screen.
None of these four characters is allowed to show why they behave the way they do. In Templeton’s case, it is overweening ambition and self-regard that makes him force the story. At no time is there ever an honest motive behind his deception. This sets him apart from McNulty and Freamon (who I’ll come to in a bit) who cross the line in the name of a perverted sense of justice. McNulty even gives voice to this plot flaw in the final episode when he confronts Templeton: “I know why I did it, but fuck if I can figure out what it gets you in the end”.
This weakness in the story inevitably comes across in the acting too. We are shown the same basic scene over and over again as Templeton petulantly reacts to Haynes’s rigour by snatching his keys and notebook and heading out of the office, leaving his swivel chair spinning. Templeton’s frustration is not justified, and so Simon can’t give him words to express it.
The Templeton problem is made worse because of the comparison with two entirely good characters: Haynes and Mike Fletcher, the young journalist who follows Bubbles around. Early on in the season, Haynes is shown waking up in the middle of the night and calling in to the paper to check that he got some minor stat the right way around in a piece he edited. He’s the uncompromisingly correct journalist. He serves his readers and the memory of his great, honest predecessors, and will not bend on anything. He has no flaws, beyond an admirable propensity to tell the management to go fuck itself.
Fletcher is a much more minor character, but again he’s given a preachy storyline. Having followed Bubbles around, he writes a highly personal story, but is reticent to publish it unless Bubbles gives his consent, much to Haynes’s approval, even though Bubbles knew that the story was the plan all along. There’s nothing wrong with this behaviour at all: it’s the right thing to do. But it feels so clunky next to Templeton’s transgressions that it feels unnecessary. Yes, there are ethical journalists, we get it, but we don’t need them to be saints. Frankly, to any British viewers of the show, the idea of a golden age of scrupulously honest journalists telling it straight is a ridiculous idea in the first place.
The problem is made still worse by the fact that we know that Templeton is making quotes and stories up all along. With what little ambiguity is left after the convenient quotes in his opening day story, we are left in no doubt at all once he manufactures a quote from Nerese Campbell on how Daniels has been sticking the knife into Burrell. We know for certain that he’s full of shit.
Templeton’s two editors are slimy, self-satisfied and amoral chasers of a Pulitzer prize, which they duly win. They are explicitly told by Haynes and the police that Templeton is a liar but they carry on regardless. Time and again, they ignore good journalistic practice for the sake of their own glory. Again, Haynes spells this out, when he explains that they’ll be gone from the Sun as soon as the prize is in their hands. While they’re at it, they let experienced reporters go in order to keep their own high-salaried jobs.
The governor is less of an issue, perhaps, but the problems Carcetti faces with funding the schools and his inability to provide adequate funding for the police are a direct result of his snub. It’s this funding gap that leads McNulty and Freamon to take the course they do.
I can’t think of a character in the preceding four series who is painted in these black and white terms. To take just one example of characters who would be painted as completely evil in any other show, Avon Barksdale and Russell “Stringer” Bell, as we are shown, are part of the drugs trade because that’s the position they’ve been forced into by their background, and it’s their only realistic chance of autonomy in their lives. They have a kind of code – one that falls apart in the denouement of season 3 – and a kind of honour. They do right by their people.
None of this is true of Templeton or the editors.
It’s perhaps idle to speculate about why this flaw exists, but I believe it’s linked to the fact that the show’s creator, David Simon, was once a Sun journalist (he makes a very brief cameo appearance in the final episode typing away at a computer). Simon’s recent pronouncements on the newspaper industry show that he is a believer in the golden age, and has a strong view of why the newspapers have come to be so weak.
Such opinion is to be expected from a longtime newspaper man, of course. But it doesn’t have a place, unless given a counterweight, in The Wire.
It doesn’t matter whether we agree with his analysis of the newspaper industry or not. His handling of the drugs business, one of the most controversial public policy issues of the day, is balanced. He does not demonise drug dealers, and he does not laud cops. In season 1 there are as many useless mope cops as there are decent ones. For every Wee-Bey there’s a D’Angelo.
He even examines the legalisation option in season 3 with ‘Hamsterdam’. But he shows us that, while it has positive aspects such as cleaned up corners, the legalisation area itself is a vision of hell. There are no easy answers, that’s what he seems to be saying. Maybe we’re stuck with the drug problem. There are people who want to get high, and there are people who will help them do so for a price. Given that fact, how is society to proceed? There are no answers in The Wire, except possibly that the war on drugs can never be won. As Carver says in a memorable line “this ain’t no war; wars end”.
Weak as the newspaper element of season 5 is, the gigantic flaw in the season is McNulty’s phantom serial killer storyline. It’s bad enough when it starts – quite abruptly, at the end of the second episode – but gets significantly worse when Freamon joins the conspiracy after a couple of minutes’ thought. He previously sat out years and years in the pawn shop unit wasting his detective’s talents, and all of a sudden he can’t hack it any more in major crimes and helps McNulty go even further over the top.
Apart from it being out of character because of his patience – think of Lester calmly looking over his half-moons with a worldly disapproval, a shot we see repeatedly throughout the series – it’s also far too dumb a thing for him to do. Lester, above all, is canny and understands how to build a careful case based on highly technical evidence. All of a sudden he’s willing to throw all of that away to make a case that he knows will be torn apart by a competent litigator, and for what?
As with Templeton and the key-clutching flounce, we’re also treated to multiple repetitions of Bunk Moreland giving Jimmy the ‘think about what you’re doing, motherfucker’ speech. Bunk is one of my favourite characters in the entire show, and it’s painful to watch him being given such flimsy material.
The difference with this storyline compared to the Templeton one is that McNulty and Freamon act out of genuine frustration. They know there’s a case to be made against Marlo, and they do the only thing they can think of to make it, even if it is completely flawed.
McNulty in particular is given a wildly incredible set of stories in season 5. He’s back on the drink again and screwing it up with Beadie, then inside an episode he’s apologetic and off the sauce even at his own “wake” at Kavanagh’s. He’s gone from being told that he doesn’t understand the implications of his fraudulent case to suddenly trying to put the breaks on it when he sees Keema and others wasting their time with his “bullshit”.
As with Freamon, McNulty is too smart not to have seen that this was the inevitable outcome of his actions. Certainly he’s been blind to consequences in his personal and professional life, but he’s never actually made it more difficult for real police to do police work.
I’ve been very critical of the season, and I think I’ve shown how I’m justified in doing so. But it’s not all bad and, even as a flawed season it is still way better than most other shows ever made. A few things save it from disaster, many of them just the little touches you come to expect from The Wire, like the FBI profile of McNulty’s make-believe serial killer that is a perfect character summary of McNulty himself. But for me the highlight of the season is in the trajectories of two characters: Duquan and Bubbles.
To me, Bubbles is the most important character in The Wire. His story affected me more than any other, from pity at his beatings in season four, to genuine horror when he attempted to hang himself after Sherrod’s accidental death, to joy as he finally walks up the staircase from his sister’s basement to share a meal with her. I think that one shot of perhaps three or four seconds in the final montage is worth everything.
Bubbles is at exactly the middle of the problem that Baltimore faces. He’s a victim of the system that has failed the city. He’s not innocent – far from it – but he’s in the position he’s in because it’s the only alternative he’s been given. That he finds a way to get clean and enjoy the semblance of a normal life is testimony to the humanity of the show, and of the characters who are trying to make a difference, no matter how small, to the lives of the victims. What hope there is in the show lies here.
Duquan is the most sympathetic of the children who appear from season four onwards. His relationship with Pryzbylewski is beautifully muted and free of schmaltz. It’s the kind of sympathy that we feel ourselves as we walk past a homeless person, or someone else we imagine ourselves helping.
The summing up at the end of season five shows us that life in Baltimore is a cycle. Michael is the new Omar, Valchek is the new Burrell, Fletcher is the new Haynes and, most affecting of all, Dukie is the new Bubbles. As our heart lifts at Bubbles ascending to normalcy, it breaks as we see Dukie injecting himself at the stables. His shy smile stays with us as we watch him resign himself to a life of scrapping and scraping his way to his next fix.
For all the faults of the final season, these two characters redeem it and round out the entire show. It’s difficult to imagine ever seeing anything as good on our screens. It’s just such a shame that the writers gave us two such comparatively weak storylines as the fake serial killer and Templeton’s creative journalism. They leave an unpleasant stain on an otherwise exemplary piece of drama.
Here’s How the MPs’ Expenses System Should Work
It should be fairly obvious by now that the MPs’ expenses scandal is both a genuine and big story. In my opinion – for what it’s worth – it’s the biggest political story since Thatcher’s resignation in 1990.
The problem isn’t one that can be solved by simply paying a few of the questionable expenses claims back. Parliament needs to demonstrate that it understands the depth of public’s outrage and its desire for a fully open, accountable and honest legislature.
Here is how I think the system should work.
First, it’s clear that the majority of MPs have a need to be resident in two places: their constituency and in London in order to attend Parliamentary sessions. Their primary home should not be one they can designate; it should always be the one in their constituency.
Second, an MP who has a second income of any kind – salary, investments, rent received, whatever – should be ineligible to receive expenses. If they dedicate their life to being an MP, that’s fine. Second incomes are a blight on Parliament. First of all because they raise a clear conflict of interest, but also because they reduce the amount of time that an MP can dedicate to looking out for their constituents. MPs with second incomes should forfeit their parliamentary pay at 50 pence in the pound for each pound they earn outside parliament. So, if they earn £100,000 outside of parliament, their MP’s salary should be reduced by £50,000.
Third, Parliament should pass a law requiring MPs to have only one income after the general election after next. In the interim, none of the remaining provisions I mention would apply to an MP with a second income.
Fourth, Parliament should establish a pool of housing for MPs in the capital and apartments should be allocated by an independent committee that assesses each MP’s need. Furniture and fittings should be provided by the state and repairs undertaken in the same way. MPs should not be able to make a profit out of the way they use their expenses. MPs whose constituency is within a one hour train journey from Westminster should not be eligible for a pooled apartment. MPs should be free to opt out of this arrangement if they wish, but would not be allowed to claim any of the expense of doing so back.
Fifth, all MPs should receive an Oyster card valid for travel anywhere in London for the period of their tenure. They should also receive a standard class season ticket so that they can travel to and from their constituency by train without incurring expenses. Again, these benefits should not be available to MPs with a second income.
Sixth: MPs’ pay should increase every year at the same rate as the minimum wage.
Seventh: MPs should not be allowed to employ a member of their family or of the family of any other MP as an assistant or researcher or in any other capacity unless they are unpaid.
Eighth: Parliament should pay an MP’s assistants and researchers directly, so there would be no need to submit an expenses claim for them.
There are no grounds on which conscientious, hardworking and honest MPs could object to these proposals. And, frankly, who cares about the others?
The familiar, tired counterargument is that without large salaries and expenses, we’ll put the “best people” off becoming MPs. But, by that argument, we’ve already got the best. In which case, they’ll have no problem whatsoever adjusting their lavish lifestyles so that they can better appreciate the lives of the ordinary people they represent.
How Twitter Can Sort Out the #fixreplies #fail
Twitter changed the way that the @reply facility works overnight (UK time). Users are not happy, me among them. I can’t think how many people I now follow who I discovered through this mechanism. I’ve even met up with some of them face to face as a result of conversations started exclusively through Twitter. This is why Twitter is awesome and Facebook is not.
I feel like the electricity company has suddenly decided to change the current in my supply without telling me first.
They say that the setting is confusing and that only 2% of people use it. All I know is that every single person I’ve introduced to Twitter has found it baffling until they’ve turned the setting on. It’s not even the default option so, presumably, the 2% of people who do use it know that they’re doing so and want it that way.
Let’s also not forget that it was us – the early Twitter adopters – who invented the @reply mechanism in the first place. It’s our feature!
Here’s what Twitter have to do to sort it out:
- Restore the ability to set the value
- Restore it to its former value it for all users (the 2%) who had it on
- Consider moving it to some other tab in settings to make it clearer
- Consult on how to make that work
- Apologise for making the change in such a hamfisted way
- Let us get on with using Twitter in whatever way we see fit
If you haven’t already, join me in protesting by using the #fixreplies hashtag in a tweet.
Why Charles Arthur Should Read Things Before Slagging Them Off
Yesterday, my friend Shane Richmond sent me a draft of a blog post to comment on as he does from time to time. I thought it was excellent. Later, he published it on his Telegraph blog. It’s about how David Simon, creator of The Wire is an ‘amateur’ TV producer, in the sense that he didn’t train or do formal study to be one, and how he should be more willing to accept amateur journalism as a result. Simon writes about his early, somewhat fumbling, TV experiences on Homicide: Life on the Street at some length in a note in the UK edition of his brilliant book Homicide (which I reviewed on 26 Books last year).
Shane’s post got tweeted around on Twitter quite a bit and then, a few hours late to the party, super-troll Charles Arthur – technology editor at the Guardian – chipped in with what seemed to be a total misreading of Shane’s post.
Now, of course, David Simon is, in the strictest sense, a professional TV producer, which is to say that he gets paid to do it. But in another sense, he is indeed an ‘amateur’. Shane spells out what he means by using that word about half-way through his post:
But what puzzles me is Simon’s antipathy to the notion of amateur journalists. After all, he’s an amateur television producer. He wasn’t trained in the medium, didn’t work his way up from being a tea boy. Nor did his co-writer and co-producer Ed Burns. Burns was a policeman and teacher. Together they used their experience to craft a television show which explored the worlds in which they had worked. Their backgrounds were far more important than their training in the medium.
Here’s the timeline as far as I can reconstruct it (Twitter post times are adjusted for BST – the API reports them at GMT + 0, while BST is GMT + 1).
- 12:51: Shane publishes the post
- 21:21: Charles responds to someone retweeting it: “if @shanerichmond doesn’t know that David Simon has done utterly amazing journalism in his books, it’s his loss, not Simon’s.” – original tweet.
- 21:23 Shane replies: “@charlesarthur You haven’t read the post have you? – original tweet.
- 22:19 Tim Duckett says : “@shanerichmond @charlesarthur You two aren’t at it again are you? Do we have to send you both up to bed early?” – original tweet
- 22:21 Astonishingly, Charles reveals that he hasn’t actually read Shane’s post despite the fact that the original tweet he responded to contained a link to it. – “@shanerichmond send me a url, I’ll read it.” – original tweet.
- 22:38 Charles finally gets around to reading the post he’s been slagging off, and tweets the first part of his response: “Calling David Simon an “amateur” producer shows an astonishing ignorance of his earlier TV work, eg. Homicide; The Corner….” – original tweet.
- 22:39 Quickly followed by the second part: “…and on other points, the arguments aren’t complete. Is free is the best model, why don’t free papers suck up all adverts from paid ones?” – original tweet.
- Friday, 11:00 Charles responds to MJDodd (note that here, Charles has silently withdrawn his original accusation that Shane said David Simon was an amateur journalist, which was before he’d read Shane’s post): “@MJDodd yes, calling David Simon on The Wire an “amateur producer” indicates a quite astonishing level of lack of research.” – original tweet.
- Write something every day. Establish a discipline of writing at a particular time. No excuses. Do not edit as you go, because editing is inherently a critical activity. Just write. Don’t worry if each bit of writing stands alone or whether it fits into something else. Do not plan in advance. This helps to establish the discipline of writing. Once you get started, you’re over the biggest hurdle.
- Do not worry about the tools you use to write. If you’re not at your computer (and that’s where you normally write), just break out a pen and notebook. Crap pen? Shitty paper? Never mind. Just write.
- Read voraciously. Try to analyse what you’re reading as you go. Think about the structure. Think about why some things work and why others don’t. What is it that makes your favourite writing work? Why is other work not as effective?
- Try to write about what you read – say why you like something or why you dislike it
- Finish reading books you are not enjoying so that you know what you don’t like (and why) as well as what you do
- Come back to things you’ve written a few weeks ago (but no sooner) and be ruthlessley critical of your work. Don’t just throw it away – make sure you know why you think it works or why you think it doesn’t. Rewrite it to address some of the weaknesses. If you always turn out stuff that you really like, ask yourself if you’re being critical enough of yourself. If you never turn out stuff you like, ask yourself if you’re being too critical
- Learn to feel allergic to cliché – learn to identify it and to abhor it in your own writing
- Learn what the passive voice is and try to eliminate it
- Carry a notebook and pen with you at all times and make notes as things occur to you. Don’t feel the need to polish anything, just get it out of your head and onto the paper. Use these notes when you sit down to your daily writing session
- Don’t take any advice as gospel (even this bit)
- Every writer is different. Don’t be a cargo cultist and imitate the practices of a famous author. Do what works for you. Kafka wasted most of his spare time and then spent the small hours producing a small amount of (brilliant) prose. Replicating that schedule will not mean that you produce writing of Kafka’s calibre (in fact nothing will)
- You can’t get good at something just by reading
- The Art of Fiction by David Lodge
- How Fiction Works by James Wood
- The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera
Before I get into this further, I have some interests to declare. A couple of weeks ago, I got so annoyed at the way Charles was gloating over the Telegraph’s embarrassment over their Twitterfall experiment that I tweeted the following:
I’m astonished at the arrogance, hubris, and all-round cuntishness of Guardian journalists. @charlesarthur, for instance.
That tweet was picked up by Private Eye and erroneously attributed to the Telegraph’s Assistant Editor, Justin Williams. If you want a full run-down of the argument between Shane and Charles, have a look at Malcom Coles’ post That Shane Richmond / Charles Arthur Twackdown in full…
Another interest to declare. The Telegraph was a client of the web agency I used to work for; we built their blogging platform for them. Later I did some contracting for them. On the other hand, I loathe the Telegraph’s politics and am a regular Guardian reader.
And one final interest. I’m close friends with Shane. I first met him in January 2006. He wasted no time in telling me that The Wire was the best show on TV and got me hooked on it there and then. Since then we have watched episodes of The Wire together, listened to podcasts about it in the car and talked about it almost every time we see each other. He’s also urged me to watch Simon’s earlier series for HBO, The Corner (I haven’t done so yet). We also watched several episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street together, finding it very disappointing and only a pale shadow of his later work, although to be fair, Simon didn’t have any real say in how the show was made. So, while I’m naturally sympathetic to Shane’s argument because he’s my friend, I also know how deeply he has thought about The Wire. Anyone who has read his blog knows how long he’s been making the opposite case to David Simon on newspapers – I’m not going to go into that side of his argument here.
If you want more than my word for how much research Shane has done into The Wire and David Simon’s career, then let me point you in the direction of a few of his posts and articles.
First of all is this article from the Telegraph of 22nd May 2007 (which, according to this post is almost a year before Charles even started watching the show). Shane’s article contains one of my favourite quotes about The Wire:
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who love The Wire and those who haven’t seen it. Yet.
Then there’s his review of Raphael Alvarez’s The Wire, Truth be Told over on 26 Books from June 2007.
It’s also worth checking out Shane’s post on David Simon’s the ‘bible’ for the first season of The Wire.
I think that takes care of Charles’s claim that Shane’s research is faulty.
Now let’s look at Charles’s objection to Shane’s use of the word ‘amateur’. As Shane spells out in the paragraph I quoted above, and the fact that he placed the word ‘amateur’ in quotes in the title of his post, he’s not using the word literally. He understands that Simon gets paid for his work. He understands and acknowledges that he is supremely good at being a TV producer. He says in his Telegraph article that The Wire is the best show ever on TV, so we can assume that he thinks he’s better than all of the professional – i.e. career – TV producers out there.
Clearly, Shane uses the word ‘amateur’ in its original French sense. As Wikipedia puts it:
Translated from its French origin to the English “lover of”, the term “amateur” reflects a voluntary motivation to work as a result of personal passion for a particular activity. Among the thousands of amateurs who have made important contributions to science and technology are Thomas Edison, Charles Darwin, and Gregor Mendel.
Edison, Darwin and Mendel are exalted company indeed. Describing someone as an amateur in the sense that Shane does is the exact opposite of an insult. It’s the highest compliment you can pay. Simon makes shows like The Wire because of his passion. Getting paid is a bonus.
Charles has form in confusing the meanings of words in the heat of an argument. During the Twackdown, he seemed unable to accept that he’d misused the word “eavesdrop”. Characteristic of the troll, he aggressively suggests that Shane doesn’t understand the meaning of the word – “Buy a bigger dictionary” – before later making the lame excuse that he was a bit tired in a comment on the Twackdown post.
When David Simon says that The Wire would be “something that Euripides might recgonise” you can trust that he’s actually read Euripides. Not so with Charles Arthur when he slags off a post. You also can’t expect Charles to accept when he’s wrong, unlike Shane. When challenged, Charles just ups the trolling ante.
It’s legitimate to take issue with Shane’s argument about the future of newspapers – assuming you’ve actually read the post of course – but you can’t accuse him of a lack of research or ignorance about David Simon’s work both in print and on TV, or that he misused the word ‘amateur’. I hope Charles will accept that and apologise. Maybe he should also consider reading things before slagging them off.
Sexism and Other Prejudices in the Technology World
I thought long and hard about whether to respond to Milo Yiannopoulos’s post about women in the technology industry. Mainly because I find his argument repulsive and I don’t want to draw attention to it. On the other hand, I get no traffic anyway, and there is a very clear argument to make in reply.
Here’s a snippet from a transcript of a panel discussion that he seems to have invited himself into:
Milo: Finds this discussion patronising to women. There are reasons which have nothing to do with prejudice why women are not more involved in the tech scene. Do we need to change the game? [...] No! We shouldn’t be apologising for having fewer women in a sector in which men naturally perform better
His argument boils down to “men and women are different, men are better at tech, deal with it”. This is bullshit. Here’s why.
Milo seems to think that technology is a pure meritocracy, and that we can therefore say that because there are fewer women in tech we can draw the conclusion that women are not as good at it as men. But this argument doesn’t fly.
While women are under-represented, there are also comparatively few people from ethnic minorities in programming jobs in the UK. However there are quite a lot of people from ethnic minorities working in more lowly (i.e. less well paid) technology jobs like first line support and so on.
Are we therefore to draw the conclusion that white people are genetically best suited to be programmers? Of course not. Descrimination is there at every level of tech, just as it is with so many other walks of life. Programmers in the UK are overwhelmingly white, male and under forty.
Over the course of my career, I’ve had discussions with colleagues about whether a candidate is “too old”, has “good enough English” (which is code for “white”) and more. I’ve had people ask me “did she have big tits?” after interviewing a woman for a development or project management job. I’ve been told that a candidate is “interesting”, with a coy little wink, which is code for “gay”. I’ve seen pats on the bum, “morning, beautiful” and other clearly sexist acts. These things have come from senior people as often as not. They are normally laughed off as being nothing harmful, just a bit of fun. If women can’t take them then “they don’t fit in”. These prejudices are there and they need to be attacked.
We also need to constantly remind ourselves that technology is, on the whole, quite shit. Large-scale software development is still incredibly hard and huge numbers, perhaps even the majority, of projects fail. We have no laurels to rest on. The technology industry needs to change, and increased diversity can only be a good thing.
Of course this is only my experience – nearly 20 years of it now – but I’ve worked with brilliant female developers as well as crap ones, just as I’ve worked with both brilliant and crap male developers. Brilliant developers are *very* rare, and the difference is not in the chromosomes.
It’s not that long since we debated whether “allowing” women into the Vienna Philharmonic would change the orchestra’s distinctive sound (it didn’t), or whether women were capable of running a marathon (they are). These barriers have been torn down and exposed for the simple sexism they were. The same needs to happen in the tech industry, and the sooner it happens, the better.
An Open Letter to Flavio Briatore and the Board of QPR
Dear Mr Briatore,
I’m not a lifelong QPR fan, but I’ve held a season ticket for several years, and for much of that time, the football has been dreadful. The facilities are no better: my seat has an obstructed view of the goal and the seats in front of me cut into my knees like razors. I’ve been to hundreds of games at Loftus Road, and I’ve travelled to Leeds, Manchester, Barnsley, Sheffield, Brentford, Southend, Gillingham, Swindon, Bristol and plenty of other places to support my team, often standing in the rain, more often than not seeing us get beaten. In the course of all this, I have spent thousands of pounds on tickets, travel, overpriced and low quality pies, access to the QPR World website, replica kit, car stickers, scarves, hats, gloves, mugs and matchday programmes.
Here’s what you might find difficult to understand: I loved it.
When, eighteen months ago, you and Mr Ecclestone announced that you would be buying QPR, I was cautiously optimistic. Here were people who were pragmatists, with a track record of success in sport, and a proven ability to turn also-rans into champions. I thought it was just what QPR needed if we (notice how I say ‘we’ – it’s my club too) were to ever get out of the stagnant position we were in. I could not have been more wrong.
Your decision to dismiss Paolo Sousa is the last straw and, as a result, I have taken the difficult decision to not renew my season ticket and to not attend any games next season. Let me be clear: I am, unlike many QPR fans, in the fortunate position of being easily able afford to buy the season ticket, I’m just choosing not to buy it because of your actions.
I’ve taken this decision because I believe it is the only message you will understand. Appeals to your sense of fairness, to the spirit of the club, to the faith shown by the supporters, all these things have no effect on you. What you will understand is empty seats, unsold tickets and a dodgy-looking P&L.
You’ve already suffered the embarrassment of seeing your new luxury seating area completely empty during recent games – seats you put in at the expense of long-time QPR fans with families. Now, I suspect will suffer the further indignity of seeing large parts of the stadium being empty as well.
In stark contrast to your own behaviour towards the various managers you’ve hired and fired in the last year and a half, I have publicly supported you and tried to make a case for what you say you are trying to achieve. But you have failed, because you have, with incredible arrogance, decided that the way to run a football club is whatever way you think is best, without any regard for the way other successful clubs are run. As a result, you have made the club into a laughing stock.
You act like a dictator, which is fine as far as it goes, but you forget that all dictators stand or fall on one thing: whether they can make the trains run on time. You are running a service that makes the bad old days of British Rail look like a model of efficiency.
None of this is helped by the way you refuse to address the fans directly, or to answer legitimate questions about the way the club is being run. That’s fine if everything is going well – people will put up with it – but not when things are going badly, or when your decisions consistently make things worse.
Let me be absolutely clear: my decision is based not on performances on the pitch. I’ve seen enough diabolical football at Loftus Road to put up with pretty much anything. No, I’ve taken this step entirely because of your highhanded behaviour towards fans, managers and players. I’d prefer it if we were rid of you and your friends, even if it meant us going back to the stone-age.
So: I will not spend one penny on QPR tickets or merchandise for the whole of the 2009-10 season, even if we make it to the playoffs or a cup final, and I will decide in April 2010 whether to extend my boycott for a further year. I urge all QPR fans to do the same.
Yours sincerely,
James Higgs
How the Newspaper Industry today is like the Soviet Union, circa 1989
As child growing up in the 70s and 80s, the Soviet Union appeared to be a highly organised and terrifying thing. Its people thought with one mind, and acted with one will. It was indestructible. Today, this idea seems demented.
Looking back at it now, the seeds of its destruction were sown in the early Brezhnev era. It just took a long time for the internal contradictions of their economic and political model to make the whole thing unsustainable.
Leading Soviet thinkers of the time – and it tells its own story that Yuri Andropov, one of the hardest of hardliners, was one of them – thought that the answer was reform. Eventually, after the hiatus of Chernenko’s brief period as General Secretary, Gorbachev emerged as the leader who everyone thought had the vision to bring about the changes that were needed.
Thanks to Gorby, the West’s Russian vocabulary extended from ‘Da’ and ‘Niet’ to include the words ‘glasnost’ (openness) and ‘perestroika’ (restructuring). Whereas Stalin, had he been alive, would almost certainly have thought the solution was an intensification of repression, and a retreat to the core values of the movement, Gorbachev thought that he could prop up the system by making it more like the West.
We know today that the Soviet Union collapsed six years after Gorbachev came to power, mainly as a result of the fact that glasnost could not be reconciled with keeping people like Andrei Sakharov and Nathan Sharansky prisoner, or maintaining the ‘anti-fascist protection barrier’ – what Westerners called ‘the wall’ – and the blatantly obvious fact that Soviet shops were empty and its people starving.
We will never know if it could have survived longer had the hardliners had their way, for example if the 1991 coup had been successful, or if someone other than Gorbachev had come to power in 1985. But what we do know is that genuine hardliners like Andropov – a man who’d been head of the KGB for years before he became General Secretary – thought that modernisation was the only way to survive.
With that lengthy exposition out of the way, let’s consider how this situation is directly analogous to the newspaper business of today.
At the start of this decade, the emerging consensus was that the newspaper industry had to modernise itself to adapt to the emergence of the internet: careful reform was the order of the day. Sales of physical papers were starting to slow, and requiring people to pay to access the content online wasn’t working. Even registration-walls (which should really be called spam-walls) were enough to make people look elsewhere. Fewer and fewer people were coming into contact with newspaper content.
The industry was faced with two options: retrench or modernise. It’s not clear exactly what they could have done to retrench. Probably, it would have involved cutting the number of sections in the paper and saving cost in order to bring the core content to a reduced readership. This wasn’t seen as viable because enough people could see that the internet was going to win eventually anyway. Retrenchment would have meant a very quick decline, and it was becoming obvious that, at some point in the reasonably near future, physical newspapers were going to cease to exist.
Which left just one option: modernise. And modernisation meant the internet.
Just as Gorbachev thought he was being daring by introducing small reforms, so the newspapers trumpeted their new clothes. A comment form here, a web-first story there. And it looked like it was working. As the pay- and registration-walls gradually came down, newspaper websites started to see huge growth in traffic, especially when they learned the dark arts of search engine optimisation (SEO).
But what they didn’t see, or at least ignored at the time, was the inherent lack of logic in this approach. They didn’t appreciate the fundamental differences between their old model, where they had control of every inch of the product, and the new one, where they could only expect to be a small part of a user’s daily experience of the web. Many newspaper websites have terms and conditions that explicitly forbid ‘deep linking’ without written permission, which is the equivalent of asking people round to dinner and then turning all the lights off and hiding in the airing cupboard.
The key word is there in that previous paragraph: users. Newspaper readers are not users. Newspapers had got very good at putting together a package of roughly accurate potted summaries of the previous day’s happenings, information that a single person could not possibly have put together for themselves. Today’s users are completely different. The time when people went to a site to see what was new has surely gone for ever. It is now possible to imagine, in the very near future, a service that can select relevant content as well as, or even better than, a newspaper’s editorial team can now.
Today, we are able to read expert, in-depth and free coverage of events on blogs and other sites that often far surpasses newspaper coverage for detail, quality and accuracy. If you follow a non-Premiership football team, for example, there’s nothing in the mainstream press for you except for the very biggest stories, which you will probably already know more about than the paper does by the time they print it or put it on their website.
If you’re remotely interested in technology, newspapers will have nothing of interest for you at all. These days they’re all abuzz about Twitter, but anyone with an interest in social media has known about it and used it – literally – for years.
Even breaking news – an area that traditional media organisations used to excel in – has gone. Of all the breaking news I heard in the last year, all but one story come to my attention via Twitter. Did you know there was an earthquake in Carlifornia on Monday, at around 6:30 UK time? I did, because I was using Twitter. Follow-up reports kept coming in every few minutes, so there was no need even to look for follow-up stories online. The same is true for the plane crashing in the Hudson, the first picture of which was on Twitpic. News organisations have become the middleman, when there’s no barrier to people getting news direct from the source.
One possibility no one thought of in the Soviet Union of 1985 was a truly radical approach to modernisation. What if they had seen the inevitability of collapse and made policies to accelerate it, even to embrace it? To out-west the west? It was unthinkable then, because the fundamental aim was to preserve Soviet Power (although of course the Soviets, in the word’s literal meaning of “local workers’ committee”, actually had no power at all). But any programme of reform that resulted in the end of Soviet Power was unacceptable to them, which is how they came to think there were only two options. The point of the CPSU was to preserve the CPSU.
Today, you see the equivalent of glasnost on newspaper websites across the world. The LA Times tried a wiki, the Telegraph are using Twitterfall, the Guardian have created an ‘open’ API, and so on. But the internal logic is that the content that people care about is coming from elsewhere, and the newspapers’ opening themselves to it will only hasten their decline. The recent calls for the reintroduction of paywalls are the newspaper equivalent of the 1991 coup, which was the hardliners’ attempt to deny reality.
As with the Soviet Union, it will be economic issues that are blamed for the collapse of the newspaper industry. But the recession, and the attendant collapse of print advertising revenues have only had the effect of speeding up the inevitable.
There will be no “iPhone killer”
All you ever hear from the mobile phone manufacturers and pundits these days is speculation about what phone will “kill” the iPhone. I think this is evidence that they are thinking in a way that will be guarantee that they will be also-rans for as long as Apple make a mobile telephony device (and I think they’ll be doing that for a *long* time).
It shows that they’re asking the wrong question. The flurry of new touchscreen devices – the BlackBerry Storm, the LG Incite (tagline: “Windows Mobile at its most intuitive”, which is kind of like saying “shit at its least smelly”) and so on – show that the boards of mobile phone companies have, in effect, told their R&D teams to create an iPhone clone.
And there’s the problem. You can’t clone the iPhone, because Apple have done such an amazing job on the design, usability and functionality that, if you’re in the market for a touchscreen phone, you’re probably going to automatically choose an iPhone. And that’s before you’ve had a play with your friend’s iPhone. I’ve never owned any other device that has made my friends *laugh* when they see how awesome it is.
There are still a few things that might hold you back: years of hearing that Macs aren’t as good as PCs (just pop into your local Apple Store if you want to find out how wrong-headed that is), the price of the monthly contract, and maybe not wanting to be on O2 due to coverage issues in your area (or AT&T or whoever the carrier is in your country). And you may just not want to be a sheep. But once the exclusive deals expire, surely the iPhone will be available on all networks and most of those concerns will go away.
But there are still a huge number of people who are not in the market for an iPhone at all. People who don’t want such a large phone, who don’t want email, or an iPod on their phone, or a mobile gaming device, who probably don’t even need a camera, and who will probably never download apps. Although the iPhone has been a massive success – when very few predicted it would be – it still only has a fraction of the market for handsets.
I boldly predict that the next big-selling phone will be designed by people who look at the iPhone and ask: “who isn’t going to want one of these?”, “why?”, and “how can we build them a phone they *do* want?” Until then, Apple will continue to eat the establish players’ lunch.
Update: fixed silly typo
Creative Writing
I was recently asked to give some advice about getting started with writing. Which is ironic, because I have struggled to get started myself. What I have done is to read and seek a lot of advice, and so that’s what I passed on. Here it is, for what it’s worth.
Anyway, easily the best guide to writing in my view is Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. My creative writing teacher said to me “I think if you read Strunk and White, went to bed, woke up the next morning, had a cup of coffee and a cigarette, you’d be a better writer.” It doesn’t really say anything about creative writing, but rather shows you how to evaluate prose.
I’ve also seen loads of recommendations for The Artist’s Way but in my opinion most of it is crap (largely because it gets all religious on your ass).
Then there are a few books that have helped me to be a better reader. Better reading cannot make you a worse writer, although it will probably not make you a better one either. Here’s a short list:
But above all, remember the line from Woody Allen’s Hannah and her Sisters: “you wanna write? Write.”
