April 2020 – Plenty of Taste

Culture as class performance

April 28, 2020April 28, 2020charlesfosterLeave a comment

From Normal People by Sally Rooney:

“He knows that a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured. When someone mentioned the austerity protests that night in the Stag’s Head, Sadie threw her hands up and said: Not politics, please! Connell’s initial assessment of the reading was not disproven. It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money.”

[page 221]

Other articles which have used the same quote:
Nathan Goldman, The Baffler
Lonesome Reader
Maks Bookshop Cafe
A Purple Onion
Eats Reads Rambles

What’s in a name?

April 12, 2020April 12, 2020charlesfosterLeave a comment

I’m not the Charles Foster who wrote the Story of the Bible.

I’m not the Charles Foster who writes about living as a badger or a fox.

I’m not the Charles Foster who was on Death Row in Florida for 35 years.

I’m not even the Charlie Foster who was the “second second assistant director” on The Sopranos.

And now I’ve just found yet another namesake. The Wikipedia front page for Easter Sunday 2020 has yet another chap with my name as today’s featured picture. A governor of Ohio and US Treasury Secretary no less. Fame at last.

Just puntastic

April 10, 2020April 10, 2020charlesfosterLeave a comment

Back in the days when The Guardian had a separate pullout Media section (on Mondays, if I recall correctly) there was an occasional feature called I Wrote That: A (very) occasional series in praise of the sub-editors’ craft. This was launched on 14 February 2000 with an interview with the Scottish Sun sports sub-editor, Paul Hickson, after he came up with a classic headline which has since found its way into any number of books and online articles dealing with headline writing. The headline appeared on a report on the Scottish Cup defeat of the mighty Celtic FC by the Third Division part-timers of Inverness Caledonian Thistle, topped with the line “Super Caley Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious”.

As Hickson explained in the article, this was an adaptation of a headline which allegedly appeared in the 1960s in a Liverpool paper, “Super Calli Scores a Hat Trick, QPR Atrocious”, although no one has actually tracked the original down.

This week saw an Irish Daily Star front page which would surely be a contender for another entry in the Guardian’s “occasional” feature. To head a report on how the Gardai are getting extra powers to stop people setting off to enjoy the current good weather in their holiday homes, an anonymous sub came up with the great line, “Go Out Your Back and Tan”. In doing this he or she has referenced a well-known (in Ireland) song “Come Out, Ye Black and Tans” which has enjoyed a couple of unrelated boosts to its popularity over the last year. The first was a parody version written for a TV ad for Bradys Ham, “Come Out, Ye Other Hams”. The second was its use by Steve Coogan appearing as an Alan Partridge impersonator in an episode of This Time with Alan Partridge, the “TV moment of the year”, according to RTE News. When Sinn Fein used the same tune in a TV ad, and some of the party supporters sang it at the recent General Election count, the irony quotient went up to 11.

Great stuff. And here, just for the record, is Paul Hickson’s original effort from twenty years ago, in a picture I found on the Troll Football website.