My Favourite Guitarists. Have Away!

I’ve been having an email argument about guitar players with my friend David. He, like me, plays the guitar, and has done so, I think, for rather more than fifty years. He also plays stand-up bass, organ, piano and heaven knows what else, and has received the Order of Australia for his work in choral church music. As a musician, he functions on a far higher level than the amateurish one on which I operate.

Though he is only a few years older than me, David’s musical taste and mine are a generation apart. I love all kinds of music but am basically a rock fan, and though I play a lot of different styles of guitar, rock was my departure point. His taste, I suspect, ranges as widely as my own, but his preference set barely intersects with mine. He’s a jazz lover, and the kind of jazz he loves best is the kind that was popular when his parents were courting. He’s old-fashioned in that way – and in many others too, more power to him.

David is a temperate, courtly gent of becoming humility. It is very hard to argue with him because he won’t argue back. His sweetness and tolerance are thoroughly aggravating, so one is naturally driven to provoke him ever more outrageously. Mainly the effort is futile, but not long ago I found a tiny chink in the shining armour. I told him that no jazz guitarist ever knew how to get a decent sound out of an electric guitar till rock guitarists came along and showed them how.

That fetched him. In reply, I was frostily informed (this is the only portion of our exchange that I plan to quote directly) that he was ‘happy to leave the screams, the bent strings, the fuzz, the waa-waa and the burn-out to others,’ before proceeding to explain to me what jazz guitar was all about. He illustrated his exegesis with the names of famous jazz guitarists, each exemplifying one of the particular virtues he listed.

My riposte was not pacific. I was especially scathing about two offenders, Joe Pass and Howard Roberts, whose crimes against art and the guitar I regard as particularly black. He was, as he always is, gentle and forgiving in reply. Ah, David, if you but knew how those coals of fire burn...

I hadn’t the heart to trouble him further, but I thought it a bit of a shame that, after I’d roughed up his darlings, I gave him no opportunity to belabour mine. I thought at first to do it in an email, listing my favourite guitar players for him to have a go at, but then I thought: why not write a blog post and give everyone a chance to rough them up, and me too in the process if they felt so inclined?

So here it is, folks, Notes from Ceylon’s Top Twenty guitarists, plus a few extras thrown in because, like a certain big-selling brand of artificial snack, once you pop it’s hard to stop. I compiled the list by writing names down as they occurred to me, figuring that the ones I thought of first would be the ones I liked best, or at least the ones that have influenced me most as a guitarist. That didn’t quite work out, but I’ve kept the order, more or less as it came to me. Your opinions, etc, welcome.

😎

Los Lobos

Two for the price of one. These guys, to me, exemplify really good guitar music. David Hidalgo is the virtuoso and sometimes shows off a bit, but he and his southpaw buddy César Rojas are all about playing what suits the song best. There’s rarely a superfluous note; everything fits perfectly together to manifest the music and encourage the listener to embrace it. In addition to guitars both acoustic and electric, they are also capable players on a variety of guitar-like Latin American instruments like the bajo sexto and the charangua, which add an ethnic flavour to Los Lobos’s music that has grown more pronounced over the years. Their other flavours are R&B, country and rock. Fun fact: they once complained that Paul Simon had ripped them off on songwriting credits.

Cliff Gallup

Once upon a time there was Western swing, a forgotten musical form rooted in the blues and now hopelessly confused with country-and-western, which it helped engender. But Western swing also gave rise to another form – rockabilly, whose earliest big stars were Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and, er, Johnny Cash. Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps came along right after those pioneers.

Vincent’s guitar player, Cliff Gallup, was by far the best of the old rockabilly guitarists. His playing was influenced by Western swing as well as the more urbane sounds of jazz, but he could play in just about any style of the day. Rockabilly, though, was the art that he truly made his own. Unusually, he played with all five fingers of his right hand: thumb and index to hold a flatpick, middle and ring fitted with fingerpicks and the little finger reserved for the vibrato bar. Fun fact: When Cliff died in 1988, his widow begged the press not to mention his rocking days with the Blue Caps in the obituaries, but rather that he’d been director of transport and maintenance for the Chesapeake, VA school system.

Neil Young

Maybe it’s just sour grapes, but gratuitous exhibitions of virtuosity often leave me cold. Neil, whose playing on both electric and acoustic often attains the sublime, is as far from being a virtuoso as you can get; just listen to what George Harrison had to say about his lead playing. However, it was precisely Young’s ramshackle but compelling style that encouraged me to pick up the electric guitar; if he could get away with that, I reasoned, anyone could get away with anything. On acoustic, he’s a wholly different creature: his playing is fluent, economical and evocative, carrying a haunting quality that fits his music perfectly. I love his work on both instruments.

Something the people on my list have in common is that, unlike jazz musicians most of the time, they tend to perform music that they wrote themselves. This often makes it impossible to consider their playing as an entity apart from the music as a whole. Neil Young is one of two people whose music helped get me through the worst period of my life (the other is David Bowie) and his music means a great deal to me. He would have been higher on this list if I’d deliberately set out to order it by preference. Fun fact: Neil Young is so analog he used to fit his amps with pedal-operated servos to turn the knobs.

(The particular version of Powderfinger

 I want to share with you

isn’t on YouTube, so please click here.)

Albert Lee

My introduction to Albert Lee was watching him play behind Eric Clapton at Guildford Civic Hall in 1980. I don’t think I’d really heard a chicken-pickin’ guitarist before and when he got to do his party piece at the time, Country Boy, about halfway through the set, I was blown away. Later, after I’d become familiar with the likes of James Burton and had a basis for comparison, I was still hugely impressed. He’s actually an all-rounder and a veteran of the music scene, but that high-energy style of country-rock is his bag. For a guitarist, at least, it’s exciting music to listen to. I said I don’t care much for virtuosity for the sake of virtuosity, but there are exceptions. Fun fact: he can sing too, and this more or less impromptu version of Jimmy Webb’s The Highwayman is ace. Listen from 1:56:00; there’s a slight preamble which is, I think, worth hearing, before he starts.

And then there’s this.

Paco de Lucia

I don’t listen to him as often as I do some other guitarists on this list, but he stands here not just for himself but for an entire musical form, flamenco. My friend and former bandmate Pascal, who plays keyboards and whose missus is Spanish, says flamenco and rockabilly are physically the hardest styles to play, and I agree; I can’t play flamenco at all. De Lucia remains, by general acclaim, Top Flamenco Guitarist; Martin Carthy of Steeleye Span once told me that he’d watched the Guitar Trio – John McLaughlin, Al di Meola and Paco de Lucia – playing live and ‘there was only one guitarist in it.’ I don’t go in much for exhibition matches, but who am I to disagree? Have a look for yourselves and see. Fun fact: it’s a wicked lie that you can’t be a proper flamenco guitarist unless you need to shave three times a day.

Tom Verlaine

If you had those initials, what else would you call your band? Television came out of the New York punk scene that grew up around a club, CBGB's – legendary today though it was a just filthy boîte not much bigger than a coffin. The Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads and Blondie all came out of there. So did Television, which was a punk band who could (i) play and (ii) didn’t care who knew it. I think they only ever made two albums; their first, Marquee Moon, is the classic. The second guitarist, Richard Lloyd, is Verlaine’s ideal foil. Verlaine plays lead guitar, sings (punkily but Romantically) and, of course, wrote all the songs. His is a unique voice on guitar; no-one before or since has sounded quite like him. Fun fact: one of Television’s best songs is about falling into the arms of Venus de Milo.

Joni Mitchell

You never knew Joni Mitchell was a great guitar player? Well, listen to this: she milked the muse by tuning her guitar in strange ways (e.g. CGCEGC, or C#D#G#F#G#C#) and catching the melodies and harmonies that fell out of the instrument as she noodled about on it. She would turn them into songs, record them and play them live. In the early days, this meant this meant long pauses between songs while she retuned; later, it meant a guitar shop behind her on stage, every instrument tuned differently. Heaven knows how she kept track of them.

When you use an alternate tuning, you have to learn the fingerboard all over again. It would be, if you were playing a piano, as if some of the black and white notes suddenly had different values: the one that used to be C is now C#, the one that used to be F is now G. It’s not that hard to do if you stick to a few popular open or alternative tunings – open G or DADGAD, for instance – but imagine doing it for every tuning under the sun. Well, that was Joni. She got a lot of respect from jazz musicians (the Pat Metheny Group once served as her backing band, Jaco and all) but she transcends all musical forms. She is her very own unique amalgam of folk, jazz and Laurel Canyon Sixties hippiedom. Fun fact: she also paints, and her method is the same – slap on some paint, see what it suggests, then slap on some more to enhance the suggestion.

Continued in Part II>>

A Big Let-Down

Home Truths

by David Lodge

There’s a blurb on the back of my Penguin paperback, allegedly from the New Republic: ‘Lodge is pure dazzling style, book after book, in his fusion of form and content.’

Well, that may be true of David Lodge’s other books but it certainly isn’t true of this one, which is pretty transparently adapted from a playscript. Lodge admits this in a foreword, but you don’t need to read that to figure it out. All the action, plot and character in this novella emerge through dialogue. We never get a direct look inside the characters’ minds and the non-dialogue sentences in the text read like stage directions. If that’s a stylistic fusion of form and content, I’m Italo Calvino.

For all that, the book is readable enough, even gripping – stylishly (yes) written, tightly plotted, its four very believable (if rather stock) characters life-changingly affecting one another by their interactions. The excitement and tension rise as one reads on. And then, right at the end, comes the big, big letdown, a huge deus ex machina that dissipates all the carefully cultivated excitement, rendering everything that went before irrelevant and pointless. I really had developed an interest in Lodge’s characters and situation by that point, and the realisation that everyone was going tamely back to Square One without properly working out the consequences of the plot left me disappointed and annoyed.

The big DEM does bear a thematic relation to the action that has gone before, but affects it not a whit except to invalidate it. Chin-stroking readers and reviewers might find something to praise in the symbolic congruence, but not I. This is too much a case of an author painting himself into a corner plot-wise and calling in the cavalry because he doesn’t know what else to do.

Working on the Blockchain Gang

Théâtre D’opéra Spatial: AI-generated artwork by Jason Allen

Some people imagine you can do anything with money. They are, obviously, people with very limited imaginations, but there are so many of them that they manage somehow to keep this absurd idea afloat on the ocean of popular culture.

In the last couple of years, these people have been getting very excited about NFTs – and if you don’t know that stands for ‘non-fungible tokens’, sir or madam, I envy you. A NFT is an image, sound or video file, created either by digitally photographing, recording or filming actual objects or sounds, or else by using one of the many computer programs available to create artificial ones. Whichever the method used, the ultimate product, in ultimate terms, is the same: a string of ones and zeros parked on a server somewhere in cyberspace, or encoded on a passive device like a CD-ROM.

NFTs are putative works of art. In reality, of course, they’re just data, some arrangement of bits and bytes that anyone can copy easily enough, even modify to their taste if they wish. But the original version, though humanly indistinguishable from any copy made of it, is uniquely identified by the data trail it has left behind in cyberspace since its ‘creator’ brought it into being. This purely theoretical uniqueness makes possible the existence of what you might call a digital-art market, which a lot of otherwise intelligent folk are getting awfully excited about.

NFTs appeal to two kinds of people. The first are those who collect art for its investment value, or for the bragging rights that come with ownership of a ‘masterwork’. They may or may not love the work itself; that is secondary. The most important thing about a work of art, for such people, is that they own it. These are the customers who will drive the NFT art market if and when it ever gets going.

The other people to whom NFTs appeal are commercial artists operating at a certain level. They may well be as capable of making ‘fine art’ as the poor fools who toil in hardship and obscurity, driven by their muse to create a thing nobody wants to buy. Their technical prowess may be as great or even greater. But these are bread-and-butter pragmatists who have learnt or come to believe that they do not possess the extraordinary ability (and luck) it takes to impress ordinary people who have never before seen anything like the picture, poem, concerto, movie or whatever it is that they have just produced: that they lack, I mean to say, the genius of a Greco, a Milton, a Rachmaninov or a Kubrick. Still, they know they have more than enough talent to produce something that, while not compellingly original, is still attractive enough to find a buyer. The customer might be someone who likes decoration for its own sake, perhaps, or wants something to hang in their offices or dental surgeries to soothe their clients, or to help sell their brand of vegan sausages or life insurance. Such buyers, too, form a market, even if it isn’t what we snobs normally call the ‘art market’.

Artists operating at this level – known as illustrators, graphic designers, visualizers, copywriters, music suppliers and a plethora of other names, depending on the media they work in – spend most of their time creating art that will pay the rent, put food on the table and so on, rather than the art that they would rather make. Some of them, if they grow prosperous enough to have spare time, will spend that time in self-expression, making art for art’s sake. Most of the time, the works so produced will exhibit no more aesthetic merit than the stuff they churn out during the rest of the week. This, then, is the type of artist – the type that nurses aspirations above his or her creative station – who is most attracted to the concept of NFT art and (in my experience) the first to try to ‘break into the market’ themselves. 

And this leads to a most intriguing paradox, because the type of artist to whom the idea of NFTs most appeals is exactly the kind of artist whose work does not command the kind of interest and reputation that (along with, of course, antiquity) make a work of art valuable. They – we, I suppose, and our name is Legion – are expert fabricators of kitsch, authors of pretty, briefly diverting trifles. Anyone who buys our NFTs is paying good money for something that nobody else is ever going to covet. NFT buyers, remember, aren’t interested in acquiring art for its artistic merit but only for the pecuniary and status value into which that merit can be converted. But if the work – the NFT – has no artistic merit, it has no pecuniary or status value either.

We seem to be in a Catch-22 situation here, folks.

§

To be honest, NFTs and their moneymaking potential fail to enthral me. Like ‘the cloud’, cyberspace, cryptocurrencies and the metaverse, they’re just another vaporous scam set up by crooks to part fools from their money by convincing them that something imaginary exists. Pull the other one, pal, is my usual reaction.

But it seems to me that the NFT delusion, peddled and bought into by the blockchain gang, is closely related to something else that’s been exercising the minds of those who make their living out of producing things that aren’t quite ‘art’ but share the same creative processes and aesthetic conventions. They’ve been palpitating about it a lot on social media lately. A few days ago one of my friends (a photographer) posted about some new ‘photographs’ – art images really – that had been created by an artificial intelligence (AI) program. OMG OMG, went the thread of his remarks, we photographers will soon be out of a job. Another photographer weighed in, pointing out that somebody had to take the original photos, so there would still be a human input. He didn’t explain why, in a world of spy satellites, automated webcams, sea turtles fitted with GoPros and robot telescopes photographing the early-morning light of Creation itself, the photos used by the AI still had to be ones taken by a human being. Another person (an architect) then came on the thread to warn, Jonah-like, that architecture and painting would be next to go. 

At this point I butted in to say that both these redoubts of human uniqueness had already fallen, only to be informed that I was wrong: AutoCAD and Adobe Illustrator and suchlike still require human input. It didn’t seem to occur to these guys that once you have AutoCAD and Illustrator and stuff like that, you’ve already transferred the creative process out of the real world and are working in an analogical space, manipulating ones and zeros rather than pens, brushes and paper. You’re not painting or taking photos, you’re doing mathematics. And how – you being a mathematical ignoramus – are you able to do that? It is always the machine that processes your ones and zeros into an image, or sound, or text. How long did you expect it to be before the human factor in that operation was eliminated altogether?

Well, now it has. But what is it, really, that the AI is producing in the form of these images, words, sounds et cetera? Is it art? And if it is, what makes it so? And then, of course, the Big Question: is it any good?

For the artists who make art for a living rather than under compulsion from their muse, these are haunting, terrifying questions. The obsession and terror come from the thought that – if AI productions can be art, and are good enough to pass for the ‘real’, i.e. human-made, thing – then we’re all going to be out of a job. And that, I think, is why this is the kind of artist who falls for the lure of NFTs. It sounds like a way to infuse value into work that may soon, otherwise, be worthless. Who is going to pay them for their art if an AI can create something equally acceptable for nothing, or next to nothing? All over the world, people who rely on their creative abilities to make a living are wondering how long they can keep on doing so. NFTs sound like one possible solution, and the concept has the art-market snob value of exclusivity built in, so it’s hardly a surprise that the idea tempts many commercial artists. But – as I pointed out earlier – they’d be foolish to fall for the scheme, because they don’t, by definition, have the talent to swing it.

§

On, then, to those terrifying questions about AI-produced ‘art’. 

Let us try to answer them.

The first two are pretty easy. Unless your definition of art is either proprietorial or snobbish – the kind of definition that excludes children’s drawings or images originally produced for commercial purposes – then yes, AI art is art. What makes it art? Well, what makes anything art? Here’s my working rule: any non-natural object designed to engage the emotions through the senses is art. This includes things like cars, shoes, even that hideous gold toilet-paper dispenser on Putin’s yacht. A thing doesn’t have to be good, nor be useless for any practical purpose, nor command fourteen times its reserve price at Sotheby’s, to make it art; if it just makes you want to look at it, or listen to it, or touch it, or whatever, that will do. It’s art.

This, then, brings up the valid but dicey question of intention. The human artist aims to convey some thought or feeling. The AI, as far as we can tell, is just following instructions. Does that make a difference? But then, the effect of an artwork on its audience is rarely exactly the one its maker intended. Does that make a difference?

Stalemate.

So let’s leave it and move on to the big question. Is art produced by AIs any good?

In my opinion, it varies. Recently, I was sent a New Yorker article about an AI that can write poetry in the style of any famous poet. All you have to do is feed the beast a few examples of the poet’s oeuvre and it will produce reams and reams of the Good Stuff. The writer of the article seemed to think it was pretty good. He included a couple of examples of poetry the AI had written in the style of Philip Larkin. Here’s one.

The Invention

Money is a thing you earn by the sweat of your brow

And that’s how it should be.

Or you can steal it, and go to jail;

Or inherit it, and be set for life;

Or win it on the pools, which is luck;

Or marry it, which is what I did.

And that is how it should be, too.

But now this idea’s come up

Of inventing money, just like that.

I ask you, is nothing sacred?

Now, this isn’t gibberish; far from it. And it contains words that you can imagine Philip Larkin using, and captures some of the oddities of his syntax and punctuation, so good work on that. But the idea it expresses is mundane and trivial. The lines evoke no feeling and certainly none of that throat-catching emotion that grips you when you read a line of verse that the poet has got exactly right. And – fucking hell, as Larkin himself might have said – it doesn’t even rhyme. Larkin only wrote about seven or eight poems, out of the hundreds he published, in free verse; and he was a rhymer with a particular style, too. But even if we give the industrious AI a pass on that, The Invention could never be mistaken for anything by Philip Larkin. It can’t even be mistaken for a poem.

I thought I would demonstrate the difference by reproducing an actual Larkin poem (that doesn’t rhyme). I reckon a good choice is Days: far from his best, but about the same length as the impostor. Hope no-one sues me...

Days

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

If you can’t see any real difference between that and The Invention, gentle reader, maybe NFTs really are for you after all.

But there are other AI-produced works that are a lot more like art in that they evoke, through the senses, real ideas and emotions. Some time ago there appeared, in my Facebook feed, an album of ‘photos’ of what looked like a Gothic horror-fantasy-science-fiction story come to life. Many of the people commenting on the photos weren’t sure whether the images were real or created by some kind of photo-manipulation; quite a few of the commenters seemed convinced of the former. And the images are, indeed, shockingly ‘realistic’, though they depict things that certainly do not exist on Earth. 

The album, which you can view in its original form as an imgur.com portfolio, is called The Curious Journeys of A.I. Midleton and it was produced (as the title hints) by a AI program, called Dall-E-2. It works rather like the poetry AI does: you feed it with words; it uses them to search the internet for image files, which it then combines and manipulates to create ‘art’.

Here, though, there was a difference. The person interacting with the AI didn’t just settle for the first images they got; they modified the words, picked out related images, modified again and selected again, and when they’d got something they were reasonably happy with, they worked on it in PhotoShop (or something like that) to make them even more convincing. So this was, if you like, a human-AI collaboration. If it’s art, it’s art that a human being was closely involved in making.

But then, just a few days ago, I learnt from CNN that in faraway Vail, Colorado, an AI-produced work has won first prize at a state art fair. Sadly, the work was not entered by the AI that created it (real world, you see; difficult) but by a computer-game designer named Jason Allen. He used another open-source AI, Midjourney, to ‘commission’ it from. Apparently he spent eighty hours in consultation with the AI over it, but I don’t think he used any image-manipulation software like Adobe Illustrator or PhotoShop. I’ve fooled about with Midjourney myself, just to see what the fuss was about; it seems to be a bit more ‘realistic’ than Dall-E-2 and to require less post-processing. Anyway, the result is a pretty convincing ‘artwork’ that you, if you didn’t know better, would certainly believe was created by a human being.

The controversy over this little affair is already pretty hot. Some people say Allen cheated, or that the picture isn’t art. I don’t know about that; it looks like a picture to me, and the sight of it certainly evokes some kind of feeling, though – for me, at least – no very strong one. But it seems the whole argument is a bit cockeyed, because, once again, the human involved in the creation of the piece was picking and choosing, and combining, what Midjourney offered him until he got the result he wanted. 

So whether it was AI-generated or not, and whether it was art or not, it was finally a human being who decided how the picture should look. Shouldn’t that be enough to quash the controversy? The AI might have created and presented the original images, but the final result was completely dependent on human judgement.

Let’s take that argument one step further. A work of art is never the sole creation of the artist; it is those who experience it through their senses who ultimately dictate whether it is, or is not, to be regarded as art. So even if a one hundred per cent AI-created work does go on exhibition and win first prize at an American country fair, or even fetches a million pounds at Christie’s, there is still an enormous human input involved: that of the viewers, the listeners, the audience. As long as they accept the thing as art, it is art. 

§

Which brings us back to the very understandable anxiety of those of us who produce ‘creative work’ for a living. If these pesky machines get any smarter, we’ll starve.

Well, you know what. The market for work by commercial artists, writers, composers, filmmakers et al has been shrinking in monetary terms for a long time now. The average value of work (measured by what the creator can charge for it) has crashed. The internet certainly has had a lot to do with this; by removing barriers to entry, it has greatly increased the number of people competing for work in the commercial arts, while at the same time generating business-model changes and economies of scale that have put traditional middlemen and gatekeepers – agents, publishers, A&R departments in the music industry – out of work, too. I see no possibility, for a decade or so at least, of this situation changing. The internet, after all, is here to stay, and with it e-commerce and a legion of other inhuman, soul-destroying innovations. Tough.

I think what we are really seeing is the death of the mass market for human-made art. Art-for-a-purpose – advertising, interior decoration, popular entertainment – will henceforth be produced by machines and the human race, as a whole, may well be none the worse for it. But what about the artists? What will happen to them? 

Perhaps they will find themselves in a situation much like that experienced by practitioners of the arts in the ages before mass media and consumerism came to stay. They will, once again, look to individual rather than corporate patronage or the big money of advertising to sustain them. Their egos and the dignity they stand upon will undergo a salutary deflation as they find themselves reduced, once again, to the status of street performers, courtiers or servants. The vast sums a few big names now command will no longer be paid. The absurd, starvation-level fees upon which many commercial artists and writers subsist will cease to be paid at all. Anyone who is not an artist or author by compulsion will stop trying and go and get a boring office or service-industry job instead. In sum, the population of those who think of themselves as artists will fall to maybe a thousandth of what it is now; the market for human-made fine art will shrink to perhaps a hundredth of its present size; and the average income of those who are still in the game will rise, perhaps, tenfold from what it was before the rise of Amazon and its fellow cyberslavedrivers. A lot of us, artists and non-artists alike, may finally come to look upon this as a good thing. The arts, which are in a state of creative prostration for the most part, may even experience a renaissance.

Or maybe not. Predicting the future is a risky business (something the NFT advocates would do well to remember). As for the rights and wrongs of the case, I abhor making ethical judgements about aesthetic matters. I have my tastes and prejudices, but I don’t really feel the need to explain or justify them to anyone. But then, I am lucky enough to be, for the most part, retired from the world of creative commerce; I have less skin in the game than most of the poor guys and gals who are worrying about the ‘AI takeover’ on social media. My advice to them would be to make up their minds: either follow your own muse and prepare to starve for it as van Gogh did, or give up being ‘creative’ and get whatever job you can – and that you can stand. But whatever you do, don’t fall for the NFT scam, because it combines the worst of both worlds: no money (once the pecuniary worthlessness of NFTs becomes common knowledge) and no artistic satisfaction or fame for you, either.

The Guardian’s Shame

‘
‘The country’s worst violence in decades’, apparently.

The Guardian published an article on my country yesterday morning. It’s called ‘“The Family Took Over”: How a Feuding Ruling Dynasty Drove Sri Lanka to Ruin’. Its perpetrator is someone called Hannah Ellis-Petersen who was, apparently, ‘in Colombo’ when she filed it.

It’s a clueless shambles, just like the events it attempts to describe. The author’s principal sources appear to be discarded Rajapaksa creatures like Dilith Jayaweera and Udaya Gammanpila. I suppose it’s at least creditable that she gets them to talk. Of course, they tell their own versions of the story, in which everything is Basil’s or Mahinda’s fault and they come up smelling of roses. Inevitably, so does Gotabaya Rajapaksa. An ‘austere, devout and straight-talking military man’ if you please, rather than an incompetent, corrupt, death-dealing figure who needed to plunge the nation into debt in order to enable a lakhs-strong military, supersonic bombers and kilotons of ordnance to defeat a guerrilla army of five thousand – murdering thousands of civilians in the process – and sell it as a great victory. 

It was quite amazing to read a Guardian article on Sri Lanka that didn’t mention Mullivaikal even once. That might even have been a relief, frankly, but no, wait a minute: it’s much worse than that! Ms Ellis-Petersen writes, concerning the events of 9 and 10 May, that ‘the country’s worst violence in more than three decades took place.’ Holy smoke! She actually forgot Mullivaikal! She forgot the bloody war! Or else she thinks tear gas at Galle Face and a few kleptocrats’ and drug dealers’ empty houses getting torched are worse than 26 years of armed conflict and the deaths of thousands of unarmed civilians on an open beach...

Compared to that solecism, Ms Petersen’s other howlers are trivial. Nivard Cabral, slimeball of the ages, is practically made to sound like a hero. There is not a word about Ranil Wickremasinghe and his efforts to sabotage peaceful regime change and save the Rajapaksas from gaol. All she gets out of him is a single meaningless quote. I suppose that’s all the sorry bugger is good for these days: Ranil ‘Busted Flush’ Wickremasinghe. 

I could go on, but I think you get the picture, so I will end with just one more observation: this story is two months late. It describes the situation in Sri Lanka as it was on, say, May 12. Crap as it is, it might at least have had current-affairs value if it had come out then. Appearing on July 7, it’s a load of worthless arsewipe. The Guardian should be ashamed of itself, and as for the lady who wrote it, she’s in the wrong profession. She should get a job in the public-relations industry with a portfolio of banana-republic governments for clients.

Vaporous

Visitors

Anita Brookner

With that title, and a cover like the one my paperback edition has, it ought to be a ghost story. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be one; the lead character might as well be a ghost, anyway, for all the energy and gumption she shows. 

This is a good novel? Anita Brookner is the modern Jane Austen?

So: widowed lady, seventy or thereabouts, has a houseguest thrust upon her by her rich in-laws. He’s to be the best man at their granddaughter’s wedding. The bride’s father is the family black sheep, largely out of the picture. Her intended is some kind of evangelical Christian pastor, though everyone else in the story appears to be Jewish. The pair of them are the typical uncouth young idiots who are often introduced to spice up a story about boring, rich old people by way of humorous contrast, like the music student and his wife in The Lyre of Orpheus or the rude young hippie couple at a dinner party in Earthly Powers. These two are not nearly as deftly drawn as either of those couples, but they’re being set up for the same kind of comical humiliation as far as I can see. The best man is just a cipher, his only purpose being to cause Boring Old Dear to look back upon, and rue, all the dissatisfactions of her largely colourless life.

Meanwhile there are family quarrels and fits of the vapours, but they’re all shown us through the filtering eyes of our widowed protagonist, whose feelings and reactions are barely animate. There are, of course, a few ‘action scenes’ (parlour set-pieces, really) but most of the novel consists of her inner ruminations.

I don’t know if I’m going to finish this. I'm about two-thirds of the way through and wondering why I’m wasting my time on it when there are so many books I would enjoy reading better. 

Poor Jane Austen. There’s more wit and energy in one of her paragraphs than in this whole novel. A much more appropriate comparison would be Virginia Woolf – whom, needless to say, I thoroughly detest.

The Future

On this last but one day of May, it seems clear to me that Lankans have chosen, or been condemned to suffer, the trauma of state disintegration right to the bitter end, all the way to anarchy and warlordism. Not everyone sees it yet. To me it is patent.

     Even at this late stage of the crisis, everyone is too busy protecting the past to deal with the present, far less prepare for the future. Nobody seems able to abandon their own self-interest or put aside the divisions among us long enough to make an honest, peaceful effort to see us through this calamity. 

      Those in power must surely understand that they have to go before anything can be done. They are standing in the way of Lanka’s recovery. Their last duty should be to ensure that the transition is orderly and peaceful, and with that they should leave, helped on their way, if necessary, by assurances of future safety. But they cling on, exacerbating and prolonging the crisis. In doing so, they guarantee that Sri Lanka will collapse to her very foundations. There will be starvation, violence, warfare, despair. The long-surviving administrative structure of the nation-state will cease to exist. There will be no country at all.

     The collapse is well advanced. For years – no, decades – the institutions of government, administration and public welfare have been hollowed out from within. The current regime completed a job begun in the Fifties. Now public utilities are ceasing to function. Trains and buses run sporadically. Schools and hospitals, too, are barely working. Businesses are doing no trade. The necessities of life are vanishing one by one. 

    The nation-state is dissolving. Whatever state the people of Lanka next create will have to be built from scratch, for there will be nothing left of the elaborate modern polity the British left us. All squandered now.

     There is a part of me that insists it is necessary. The nation-state that had been Ceylon and later became Sri Lanka was tainted with inequality, communalism and injustice from its very conception. The elite quarrels over constitutional reform in the 1920s were already infused with them. Even before Independence, Ceylon’s very first Parliament disenfranchised the ‘Indian’ Tamils. It took less than ten years from the grant of independence to the first ethnic-supremacist government and the beginning of systematic persecution of minorities by the state. Only two years more to the first of many ethnic pogroms. If the state of Sri Lanka has to cease to exist to put an end to all this hatred and violence between the peoples of the island, perhaps that is just. We can build another.

    But surely it could be done with less trauma? Somehow install a caretaker government in which all stakeholders are represented, give it the powers it needs for a strictly limited period, impose the necessary economic reforms and start to solicit foreign help? Institute a truth and reconciliation commission, hold inquiries, bring everything out into the open? Air the dirty linen, but then declare a general amnesty? Call a constituent assembly and build a new country, just as the South Africans did after apartheid?

    I honestly cannot see it happening. Far more likely is an attempt to patch up the current state and keep it going. That attempt will fail, and chaos will ensue.

     Whatever the solution for the people of this country finally turns out to be, it seems obvious to me that we have a long way to go – years, perhaps generations – before we find it. Those whose purposes and agendas the dying state served are doing and will do their best to prolong its life; they cannot see that it is doomed. Because of their grim resistance to the inevitable, the old state will die by violence – maybe in one last bloody paroxysm, more likely in a squalid death by a thousand cuts. In the meantime, inflation, famine, plague, death for Lanka’s people.

    There is no guarantee that things ever will get back to ‘normal’. Normal went away months ago and it isn’t coming back. We may eventually restore some kind of normality – a new normal as people like to say – but it will look nothing like this. I pray it will look better.

Belated Bollocks

If you’ve ever received a birthday greeting from me on social media, chances are it contained a personalized verse, image or video, in addition to (or in place of) the actual words ‘happy birthday’. I do this because I want to show the person I'm greeting that I care enough for them to make a bit of an effort, even though I didn’t remember their birthday till Facebook reminded me.

These days, though, I have begun ignoring that little Facebook reminder: ‘So-and-so’s birthday is today...’ So and so what?

To greet a person on their birthday used to be a sign that they were special to you. Family. Close friends. Childhood friends you never lost touch with, even though they are now far away. Folk for whom the effort of writing and posting a letter or a greeting card, or making a long-distance phone call (expensive), or sending a telegram (even more expensive) was worth it. When you got a birthday wish from someone, in those times, you could be sure it meant something.

(Of course, there have always been the greetings people send to teachers and other gaolers, to bosses, patrons, clients and debtors. Unfelt warmth, extorted felicitation, flattery driven by the fear of a beating, of losing a job, a promotion or a contract. The saddest and most worthless birthday greetings of all, but luckily we don't need to talk about them any more in this post.)

Let’s get back to the twenty-first century, and the practice of private citizens putting their birthdays on Facebook. I never could understand why anybody would do that. Who could be so insecure that they yearn for birthday wishes from strangers and minor acquaintances? ‘Happy birthday’, in some cases, from people they’ve never even met in real life?

Who knows? Anyway, some of us do it. We put our birthdays on Facebook. And FB, which is nothing but a computer program, duly reminds our online ‘friends’ when the date comes round. Then in come the greetings – dutiful, effortless, insincere: sent in the time it takes to type thirteen letters and a space, forgotten before the sender has even scrolled down to the next post.

Pretty pathetic, no? But some of us can’t even manage that. We can’t spare the minimal engagement required to post a two-word greeting on our friends’ actual birthdays. Maybe we don’t visit FB that often. Maybe we have so many online ‘friends’ we can’t keep track. Whatever the reason, we don’t notice the Facebook notification till a day or two have passed. Oopsie.

But wait, there’s a fix! Just wish the person, whom you didn’t care for enough to remember their birthday, a ‘happy belated’. Don’t be shy, everyone does it. Quick, quick – you can still jam yourself into the Elevator of Appreciation before the doors slide shut. Earn a few brownie points for your ‘friendship’, that’s what it’s there for. Hell, it’s probably a bit more sincere than a greeting on the actual day, because there’s at least a drop of feeling involved. No actual affection for the birthday girl or boy – don’t be silly – but fear of looking bad on social media.

That, dear reader, is what ‘happy belated birthday’ means. The grammatical error I complained of in a Facebook post yesterday (and no, it wasn't my birthday) is nothing compared to the hypocrisy and insincerity of a ‘belated’ online birthday wish. All you do, when you send one, is tell the world how little the person you’re greeting actually means to you. And that realization – however belatedly it sinks in – may mean the end of whatever vestigial relationship you two actually had.