Skip to main content

Learning To Be Serious: 'No One Is Talking About This'

 


Take things seriously doesn't mean being serious about them all of the time. 

In contrast, considering the entire world to be an exercise in irony reduces everything to the purported laugh, the trolling or the rise.  Its ultimate expression is deeply political: the real is so subordinate to the virtual that a country can be ruled from a phone. Real pain is inflicted entirely gratuitously in the name of  slogans, memes and the most prosaic bigotry. 

'Every day we were seeing new evidence that suggested it was the portal that had allowed the dictator to rise to power. This was humiliating. It would be like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian." 

Yet the portal (Lockwood's term for the internet) is also the means of growth and development and escape for many.

The virtual also has in itself a certain beauty. 

No One Is Talking About This conveys the lapidary sheen that comes from the perfect melding of substance and style. 

"The neurologist stood out from the others. Her skin had the gentle green cast of a Madonna balanced on a single fish-shaped foot in a grotto, with sea light reflecting on the long upward thought of her forehead. Compositionally, she appeared to be made of 14 percent classical music ..." 

The novel has the poetic ability to convey a huge amount in few words. It is the very best expression of the opportunities of the portal; akin to reading a succession of aperçu expressed with the precision of a haiku. 

"Everything tangled in the string of everything else. Now when her cat vomited, she thought she heard the word praxis."

The opening sections are scrolling in novelistic form conveying, hilariously, the pernicious 'shared sense of humour' for which the first rule is that "I do not ask why would you do that?'

Yet as the novel proceeds the real world intrudes in such an unexpected way that the portal knows nothing and no-one on the portal can talk about it.

What emerges is need to drop the irony and the distance. 

To reflect emotion. Not to just emote.

On the surface the novel is a quick, easy read. Yet, again and again, passages need to be read over for the full meaning to emerge. Partly because the construction is so clever; sometimes because the observation is so telling and illuminating, but mostly because the book is dazzling in its ability to channel the form and subvert the substance of what passes for on-line expression. 

Incidentally, this piece was mostly written on an iPhone. 

Apparently, so was much of the novel. 




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Best Films of 2024

  My Letterboxd account confidently provided a detailed thematic breakdown of the 225 films viewed this year: Quite what to make of this is somewhat less clear. Either I broke the algorithm or my ideal film is a low key, droll, genre hopping, weird, relationship drama with philosophical pretensions. Which might actually stand as a description of my favourite film of the year.  Certainly, on review, 2024 turns out, slightly surprisingly, to have been a strong year. So even before reaching the top 10 there are another ten films very worthy of note: On Becoming A Guinea Fowl   The Dead Don't Hurt   Green Border    The Outrun   Good One Showing Up   The Holdovers   Femme   The Settlers   Blackbird, Blackbird, Blackberry   Then the top ten in traditional reverse order: 10.  Janet Planet  Wonderfully understated, subtle examination of our perception of connection to others seen most profoundly in the determination of a teen...

Anni Albers: Sculpting With Thread

Wandering around this kaleidoscopic  exhibition  at the Tate put me in mind of so many other artists that I began to wonder whether Albers was a conduit for their influence or whether I was simply engaged in a procession of imagined serendipity. It may seem strange to begin with a sculptor given that Albers primarily worked with textiles but I was constantly reminded of Brancusi. The wonder of Brancusi is that he aims to reveal and develop the inherent nature of the material whether stone, wood or metal. The form that he finds is therefore perfectly suited to the stuff with which he is working. What is striking with Albers is that she does exactly this with the techniques applied to different types of material. Development In Rose (one of my favourite pieces in the exhibition) is made from linen and the impurities and imperfections in the thread are used in essence as highlights. The slightly muted colour also captures the often slightly faded nature of t...

Pourquoi J'Aime 'Les Amants'

It has Jeanne Moreau. It has the most exquisite andante from Brahms String Sextet. It has extended sequences that involve both Jeanne Moreau and the (exquisite) andante from Brahms string sextet. It  is directed by one of the most fabulous French film makers, Louis Malle, and probably ranks alongside Smiles Of A Summer Night as amongst the most swooning meditations on romantic love (albeit on this occasion without Russian roulette). Did I mention, it has Jeanne Moreau. It has a sequence in which a very a la mode Parisienne wakes up with a groomed daschund already in the crook of her arm. It has the most extraordinary sequence of laughter in any film in which the laughter is both such a release and a realisation of how much laughter has simply been missing for so long that it is delirious and painful in equal measure. It is a beautifully observed portrait of Paris and the provinces with all the droll superficiality that implies. But above all it is the utte...