Complacent philistinism
For some reason which I can't now recall I was looking at reviews on amazon.co.uk of Edmund de Waal's 'The Hare with Amber Eyes' and was taken aback to find these gems:
'Fortunately Google is a great leveller. I didn't even know a vitrine was a glass display cabinet. I thought it was some kind of toilet but figured out that wouldn't be the best place to store your valuables.'
Oh come on! 1) Didn't you have something called a dictionary in the days before Google or indeed the internet? Certainly I did (in my early 20s I remember learning such fab words as 'salubrious' and 'enervating' as a result). 2) Are you so shameless as to broadcast your ignorance? Actually, you sound rather proud of this, as if it is somehow shameful to know what a 'vitrine' is.
'There is a layer (or patina as de Waal would say) of pretentiousness that becomes irritating and I found myself wincing every time he referred affectedly to his `vagabonding'. He protests his sincerity too much -or is perhaps forestalling criticism - with his agonising about how to tell the story, claiming that he doesn't want to reduce the lives of these people to some kind of twee anecdotes or sepia-tinged nostalgia. Better to have left out the navel-gazing and let the reader decide whether he had done them justice or not.'
'Pretentious'? Are you in the habit of labelling someone pretentious every time they don't pull a word out of the common pool of shop-worn names which 'everyone' uses. If you're doing so, you're at best blinding yourself to the potential riches of expression in the English language, and at worst, by appealing to the philistine spirit of those who read your review, encouraging the suffocation of such expression.
'Unless you care about over privileged people with too much money buying useless bits of art and having affairs then stay well away.'
OK, so there's something called 'useful' art. Where does the 'Mona Lisa' fit into this? or Tchaikovsky's ballets? or Keats's Odes?
'Fortunately Google is a great leveller. I didn't even know a vitrine was a glass display cabinet. I thought it was some kind of toilet but figured out that wouldn't be the best place to store your valuables.'
Oh come on! 1) Didn't you have something called a dictionary in the days before Google or indeed the internet? Certainly I did (in my early 20s I remember learning such fab words as 'salubrious' and 'enervating' as a result). 2) Are you so shameless as to broadcast your ignorance? Actually, you sound rather proud of this, as if it is somehow shameful to know what a 'vitrine' is.
'There is a layer (or patina as de Waal would say) of pretentiousness that becomes irritating and I found myself wincing every time he referred affectedly to his `vagabonding'. He protests his sincerity too much -or is perhaps forestalling criticism - with his agonising about how to tell the story, claiming that he doesn't want to reduce the lives of these people to some kind of twee anecdotes or sepia-tinged nostalgia. Better to have left out the navel-gazing and let the reader decide whether he had done them justice or not.'
'Pretentious'? Are you in the habit of labelling someone pretentious every time they don't pull a word out of the common pool of shop-worn names which 'everyone' uses. If you're doing so, you're at best blinding yourself to the potential riches of expression in the English language, and at worst, by appealing to the philistine spirit of those who read your review, encouraging the suffocation of such expression.
'Unless you care about over privileged people with too much money buying useless bits of art and having affairs then stay well away.'
OK, so there's something called 'useful' art. Where does the 'Mona Lisa' fit into this? or Tchaikovsky's ballets? or Keats's Odes?
posted by Pierre at 3:01 AM
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