Thursday 25^th August 2016. London in hot weather. World of Shorts. And it is mainly men who go for shorts, too. Of the couples I see out today, it’s often the case that he is in shorts, but she is in trousers.

***

Notes on fragile masculinity. I buy some Boots No 7 moisturiser, and go for the version ‘For Men’. I do so because the box assures me it is specially made to accommodate stubble. When I get home, I realise it differs from the version for women in a more obvious way. The distaff moisturiser comes in a glass pot, which one simply opens up and dips one’s finger into. The men’s one, however, comes in a squat black pump with a spout. One has to push down hard on the spout until the moisturiser puts in an appearance. It is the most strenuous part of my daily routine. I feel like going on Dragon’s Den and pitching a moisturiser for men like me. Working title: Sissy No 7.

***

At the Thameslink section of Kentish Town station, I spot a security pass left on the platform. It looks like a fairly heavy duty one, with a thick magnetic base and a photo. The owner is a trader at Goldman Sachs. I’m about to hand it to the staff at the barriers, when I remember how long it’s taken for me in the past to retrieve possessions lost on the tube. Sometimes several weeks, including a trip to that great cave of abandoned umbrellas, the Baker Street Lost Property office.

The next day, propelled by the vanity which underscores so many good turns, I Google the trader’s name and call him at the Goldman Sachs office in Fleet Street. He says he does indeed want the pass back, and as soon as possible, and is very grateful. I tell him I’ll drop it off at his reception.

This proves to be slightly harder that I’d envisioned. To paraphrase Lord of the Rings, one does not simply walk into Goldman Sachs. They are one of those international corporations who exist in such a lofty world, they do not even announce their presence on the street. You have to know whose anonymous plate glass doors those are on Fleet Street, the ones with a security guard on the outside, standing on the street, as well as two further guards on the inside. And that’s before you even get near the reception desk. Such security is highly styled, too: large young men in large black suits, topped off with those earpieces with little coiled cables vanishing into the collar. It’s fair to say that when I arrive, I am viewed with suspicion.

I state my intention to the man on the street, doing my utmost to assure him that I am not some anti-capitalist activist, despite my slightly interesting hair. I am not trying to do a Michael Moore. Or, more recently, a Russell Brand. The guard is not convinced.

‘You can’t just… drop…  something off here.’

But then I tell him that my package, such as it is, is merely one of their own passes, at which he lets me through the revolving doors. Then the two other security men standing inside challenge me, and I have to start my story again.

The receptionist gets a third version of my tale. She won’t let me leave the pass with her either, and insists on picking up the phone and trying to call the trader in question, to get him to come down. This takes some minutes before she says, ‘He isn’t available’. By this point I’m getting flustered, and am determined not to go away still clutching the wretched thing. So I grab a scrap of paper from my bag, write out my contact details, and give it to her along with the pass. She takes it from me with an expression of pure reluctance, as if I’d just handed her a pair of my underpants. But she does take it, and the pass, and I leave.

I had hoped to feel a wave of sainthood from this episode, but instead I just feel vaguely punished.

***

Saturday 27^th August 2016. Mum in town for the day. We visit the exhibition Missoni Art Colour at the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey. En route to the Museum, we get a little lost navigating the endless building works between London Bridge station and Guy’s Hospital. Many hoped-for shortcuts are closed off by the ubiquitous men in hard hats.

When passing such sites, my hope is always that the construction is for the public good, rather the private greed. Yet too often one looks up past the rising number of beggars sitting on the pavement – the other worrying side of London – to see a sign for luxury apartments. The redundancy of the word ‘luxury’ presumably lost on the developers. In Highgate, council letters alerting residents to disruptive planning permissions are becoming more frequent. Invariably, these are for private basement extensions. I’m so tempted to write in the comments, ‘Please ask the owner if the phrase, ‘I have enough’ has ever troubled their consciousness.’

At the Missoni show, the centrepiece is a display of decades of Missoni clothes, on some fifty or so mannequins, arranged on the steps of a pyramid. A number of them remind me of the Redford film of The Great Gatsby; a 1970s take on the 1920s.

Around the manniquins hang a selection of Ottavio Missoni’s abstract wall hangings, which are rather like the patchwork quilts Mum specialises in. Plenty of brightly coloured zigzags and stripes on show, as per the Missoni reputation. There’s also a small collection of postwar abstract paintings, by way of illustrating the label’s influences. One canvas stands out, ‘Spatial Structure in Tension’ (1952) by Nino Di Salvatore, a harmonious pattern of intersecting geometric shapes. Brightly coloured, of course.

Unusually, the museum allows photographs to be taken, and we regret not bringing our own devices. We are the only ones not taking photos. The shop sells a tote bag with the motto, ‘I Knit So I Won’t Kill People’.

Then to the new Tate Modern extension, Switch House. The main TM building has accordingly been renamed Boiler House. Switch House dwarves the original building, and includes a viewing platform at the top, where one can look down on the Tate Members bar. And indeed, right into the flats of the neighbouring tower blocks to the south. The north view across the Thames is stunning, however, with St Paul’s directly ahead.

We finish off with the BP Portrait Award at the NPG, which is packed. The usual prominence of family members and friends as subject matter, which I always find touching. We both like Karina In Her Raincoat, by Brian Sayers, where the coat dominates the frame. It should have won.

***

Monday 29^th August 2016. To the Museum of London for the exhibition Fire! Fire!, which marks the anniversary of the Great Fire of London. It’s an extensive and spacious display, and is very much aimed at families. Lots for children to do: flaps to lift, buttons to press, clothes to dress up in, and at the end a set of wooden building blocks on a large table, with which to rebuild the razed capital. The children I see seem particularly drawn to the blocks, which I find cheering. How I miss that childhood capacity to happily build and make things, solid things, from blocks to Lego. Resentment was reserved for tidying one’s room, or writing thank you letters, or going to bed early. Never for making things.

I suppose my creative play these days is writing. The trouble is I subscribe to the Dorothy Parker quote, only enjoying writing when it’s finished, and resenting it when I’m doing it.

***

Evening: to the Barbican to see the film David Brent – Life on the Road. I was such an admirer of Mr Gervais’s series The Office. I loved how it took the TV sitcom format into a new phase, playing with the trend for docu-soaps and reality TV, while updating the eternal comedic themes of delusion and embarrassment. It was also one of the few British comedies to be successfully adapted in the US. Americans do social awkwardness too, just on a wider frequency: a more open and expressive kind of cringing. And of course, they do it through a lot more episodes.

Well, sadly, the golden touch of Ricky Gervais has manifestly dimmed. This belated big screen spin-off featuring the main character from the British Office isn’t a patch on either of the two TV series. Admittedly, there’s one or two funny moments, and Gervais’s performance is still entertaining enough – I love how his jaw hangs open when he’s annoyed. But the overall impression is that the character has simply run out of mileage.

It doesn’t help that none of the other characters from The Office are here: no Tim, Dawn or Gareth, not even a cameo from Stephen Merchant. Perhaps this was a deliberate move to resist the current vogue for reuniting old cast members as if they were rock bands (Cold Feet being the latest TV series to do this). Regardless, this new film proves that The Office was a classic because of the ensemble, not just the frontman.

***

Wednesday 31^st August 2016. Filming in Meard Street for some sort of documentary. I say a few words about dandyism in front of Sebastian Horsley’s old flat. Barima Edusei is with me, having invited me along when I bumped into him on the tube the other day. GQ and River Island are apparently involved, though I get the sense that my existence is as baffling to them as theirs is to me. Still, I use my phrase about a dandy being in ‘a subculture of one’, which I’m reasonably proud of.

Later on I’m back in the British Library reading an essay by Michael Bracewell. He uses the word ‘dandy’ to describe the singer with The Fall, Mark E Smith. Much as I admire his music, the unremarkably-dressed Mr Smith wouldn’t be in my own list of examples of dandies. Still, it shows how elastic the term can be.

***

Friday 2^nd September 2016. Dennis Cooper has commented on the documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story. I remember that at the time the ‘hoax’ was exposed, he shrugged and said something along the lines of ‘sometimes it’s okay to be fooled’. This was very good of him, given he was one of the writers used as stepping-stones for LeRoy / Laura Albert’s rise to literary fame.

In his blog though, he’s changed his tune: ‘I really hated [Author]. It’s a totally superficial whitewash that treats Laura Albert like she’s some kind of kooky folk hero instead of as the psychopathic, destructive user that she is. I regret allowing the director to interview me for it.’ (from the P.S. section of denniscooperblog.com, entry dated 29 August 2016).

I don’t think Author is a whitewash entirely: there’s several times when Ms Albert goes on the defensive, at the cost to her credibility. Her compulsion to record all her private phone calls is hardly a loveably ‘kooky’ trait either. But I’m fascinated with the way this shows how documentaries seduce the viewer into swallowing one version of the truth, one which its own interviewees might disagree with.

The analytical rule about asking ‘who gets to speak’ should also include ‘who gets to speak, but wishes they hadn’t?’

***

Saturday 3^rd September 2016. My 45^th birthday. I have a tradition of spending my birthday going somewhere I’ve not been before. Some location I’ve always meant to visit, but never got around to. Birthdays do come around, as much as we’d like them not to. So I mollify the unpleasant reminder that one is even older, with a celebration of still being alive at all. If your eyes still work, give them new sights to look at. If your legs still work, walk to somewhere you’ve never been before. Above all, give thanks.

 

Today I get around to visiting Ruislip Lido. Which is really a large lake which was once a reservoir, with woodlands at one end and a beach at the other. Except the beach is more of a huge artificial sandpit doing an impersonation of a beach. The water is usually not clean enough to swim in, as indicated by a red flag outside the beach café. Children can still splash about on land, though: the beach has a large area of playground equipment, with a couple of water jets in the shape of animals.

I have breakfast in the café, then take a journey on the Ruislip Lido Railway, ‘Britain’s Longest 12 Gauge Railway’. It travels through the woods and around to the other side of the lake, ending at the Turntable Tea Room near the main road. The Tea Room has its own toy railway that whizzes around the walks. So I step off a small train to meet an even smaller one.

There’s something spooky yet attractive about cafes built to serve miniature railways: I think of the one at Dungeness, where Derek Jarman would go for fish and chips.

***

Afternoon: to Somerset House with Atalanta K, Debbie Smith and Soirai, for the exhibition Bjork – Digital.

The Bjork exhibition is a good example of first rate content hampered by its presentation.  Visitors are herded from room to room on a timed basis, and are told to put on virtual reality headsets at each stage. All very well, except that sometimes the headsets don’t work, or they flicker on and off, or it’s not clear how to use them. Too bad if this happens, as one is soon marshaled out into the next room, and can’t come back to try again.

In one of the rooms, I stand with the VR headset on for a full minute looking at a square oblong which doesn’t seem to be doing much. It’s only then that I realise this is actually the menu screen of the software. I have to turn my head around within the digital world to see Bjork standing behind me, singing away while rendered as a glittering CGI moth goddess. I do my best to move around and enjoy the show, but am a little hampered by fears of throttling myself with the cable.

It also doesn’t help that two rooms of ‘interactive’ instruments are just sitting there, without captions or instructions of any kind. As it is, I don’t want to ‘interact’ musically with Bjork anyway. Too much like audience participation. Or Tom Sawyer and the white fence.

The best exhibits are ‘Black Lake’, where one doesn’t have to wear headsets at all. A split-screen video of the singer is projected across two opposite walls of a black room, with a surround-sound audio track encouraging you to approach different walls at different times. The other highlight is ‘Stonemilker’, where the VR world is a real Icelandic beach. You can turn fully around on the beach, and look up and down. Bjork splits into several clones of herself while dancing around you on the shingle.

Despite the Digital title of the show, the attached gift shop mainly sells Bjork’s back catalogue on vinyl. I haven’t succumbed to buying one of the new post-digital (and affordable) turntables just yet; I like the convenience of iTunes too much. But only on vinyl does one truly see that Bjork’s album sleeves are artworks in their own right.

***

Evening: My plans for a vegetarian meal for Team Bjork take a knock when the Coach and Horses in Greek Street closes its kitchen unexpectedly. We try Mildred’s in Lexington St, but it’s rammed full. To make things worse, it is now pouring with rain. I have my linen trousers drenched in Lexington Street when a passing car hits a puddle.

But things improve. Debbie takes a chance on Jane-Tira, a Thai street food place at 28 Brewer Street, which turns out to be perfect. Not too packed, friendly staff, delicious food. And my trousers dry quickly, barely leaving a mark. Either London rainwater is cleaner than one thinks, or my suit really is like the one in The Man In The White Suit.

Afterwards, a short spell in The Friendly Society (pleasant kitschy night spot, but too busy), then to the Curzon Soho downstairs bar for a quiet after dinner drink. It must be one of the few places in central London where one can go on a Saturday night and (a) sit down, (b) get a drink without queuing, and (c) hear oneself think. As long as it’s before 11pm.

A present from Debbie and Atalanta: Carl Wilson’s book Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste. The title is after the Celine Dion album. Looks fun, and might well be useful for my MA research into taste, kitsch and camp.

***

Sunday 4^th September 2016. To Strawberry Hill House near Twickenham, with Fenella Hitchcock. Another one of those day trips on my To Do list. The visit necessitates a train from Waterloo into Zone 5, taking thirty minutes or so. Then a short walk through some immaculately tidy suburban streets, and past St Mary’s University, which looks more like a modern upper school.

Again, I’m driven by ideas of taste. Strawberry Hill was the Georgian home of Horace Walpole, author of The Castle of Otranto, which he had remodelled into an ostentatious Gothic Revival palace. The visit comes with a pocket guide that rather neatly quotes Walpole’s own guide, but then augments his text with modern postscripts. Most of the time, the commentary is about what objects and paintings used to be there, until a grand auction in the 19^th century. But the architecture and restored décor is more than enough for a visit, with cathedral-like fireplaces and ceilings, trompe l’oeil wallpaper, and best of all the crimson damask walls in the long, red and gold Gallery.

***

Monday 5^th September 2016. I finish Nutshell, the new novel by Ian McEwan. It’s a high concept work, doubly so. Not only is it a tale told from the point of view of an unborn foetus, but the tale in question is a contemporary retelling of Hamlet. Gertrude becomes the pregnant ‘Trudy’, while bad uncle Claude becomes Claude the ruthless London property developer.

One of the archer pleasures of the book is that the foetal narrator has an impossibly educated and snobbish voice, commenting with expert knowledge on the quality of the wine he ingests in utero, via Trudy. The only jarring moment is when one passage betrays the author’s position on the issue of today’s students. The narrator views them as obsessed with fluid identities and un-fluid offensiveness, and goes into an extended rant that only makes sense if it’s the author, rather than his character:

‘A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young… They’re on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities… If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black… Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me, I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room… Let poverty go begging and climate change braise in hell. If my college does not validate me, I’ll press my face into the vice chancellor’s lapels and weep. Then demand his resignation… Feeling is queen. Unless she identifies as king.’

All very witty and topical. He’s entitled to his stance, of course, but I wish that Mr McEwan hadn’t come down on the side of the Grumpy Old Novelists. Too easy, too obvious. Regardless, whatever one’s position on the matter, this section demonstrably smacks of a lack of research, and that is not like Mr McEwan at all. If Nutshell was a debut novel from an unknown author, I suspect the publisher would recommend cutting this section altogether.

But that’s my only reservation. Elsewhere, I like his summation of reasons to stay alive to the end of the 21^st century, viewing the world as one great gripping narrative:

‘Will its nine billion heroes scrape through without a nuclear exchange? Might Islam dip a feverish extremity in the cooling pond of reformation?’

It’s as good a message for turning 45 as any. Wanting to find out what happens next.

Tags: author, bjork, david brent life on the road, dennis cooper, Fashion and Textile Museum, ian mcewan, JT LeRoy, Missoni Art Colour, museum of london, ruislip lido, somerset house, tate modern

Tuesday 8th March 2016. Starting research on the next essay, which is due at the end of spring. I’ve decided to properly examine the connection between Menippean satire and selected contemporary US fiction, after taking the cue from Margaret Atwood’s review of Eggers’s The Circle (see earlier diary). I had something of a Eureka moment when finding an article which equated literary camp in the Firbank style (one of my pet subjects) with the Menippean genre. I think the former can be more usefully viewed as a sub-genre of the latter. They both use a similar approach – they both draw attention to surfaces, and in a playful way.

* * *

Thursday 10th March 2016. MA class at Birkbeck. This week we do David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion, his last book of stories. Some of it I find hard going, particularly his long, drawn-out sentences with endless clauses. Vonnegut’s advice to ‘pity the reader’ didn’t apply to DFW. The story about suicide, ‘Good Old Neon’ now has an unavoidable autobiographical side to it. Funny how Wallace satirised brand culture so much, yet he became such a recognisable brand himself, with the long hair, the Lennon glasses, and the Axl Rose bandana. It’s certainly a distinctive look for a novelist.

I watch the news of the US presidential campaigns, and I wonder how much of Donald Trump’s success is down to his strong look, too. I think about him and Boris Johnson, and wonder if it’s to do with funny blond hair and a sense of being from a different planet. People are now bombarded with so many images every day, only the odd-looking can truly leave an impression. Weirdness is now a platform in itself. In which case perhaps now is the best time to launch some sort of new public career for myself (not politics, though).

* * *

Friday 11th March 2016. To the Leicester Square Odeon, for one of the smaller screens hidden at the back of a branch of Costa. This is where all the new films in London go when they’ve been out for a while, just before they come out on DVD.

(going by adverts, DVDs are still being made and sold, despite the closure of many entertainment shops, and the rise of Netflix. The new poster for the Carol DVD advises you to buy it at Sainsbury’s).

Along with the Prince Charles and the Odeon Panton Street, the smaller section of the Leicester Square Odeon is a Last Chance Saloon for those who like cinemas. I’m keen to mop up the rest of this year’s Oscar-winning films, so I’m here to see The Danish Girl, for which Alicia Vikander won Best Supporting Actress. Justifiably so: she’s one of the best things about the film. She plays Gerda Wegener, a real-life bohemian painter in 1920s Copenhagen, whose husband Einar underwent one of the first examples of sex reassignment surgery, and became Lili Elbe. Though, as it’s been pointed out by those who know the full story, the film isn’t always faithful to the facts. The cause of Elbe’s death, for one, is rewritten to suit the film’s narrative arc.

There’s a promising scene early on, where Gerda is working at her canvas, with a cigarette holder clenched in her mouth. Despite this she is still able to deliver a lecture to her nervous male sitter on the importance of the female gaze. Ms Vikander’s performance in scenes like this is one of liveliness, individuality, humour and nuance. Mr Redmayne, meanwhile, goes through Elbe’s changes from husband to woman with one unchanging emotion: Pained Martyrdom. He means well, but does the acting equivalent of walking on eggshells, not so much overly mannered as overly self-conscious. I wonder if he was hampered by realising that the wider climate of trans issues has changed, that people want to see more trans actors in such roles, and that this whole film now feels curiously out of date. One working trans actor, Rebecca Root, has a small part in the film as a nurse. But even she has said in interviews that she hopes The Danish Girl will be the last major film about trans lives without a trans person in the lead. It’s an issue that isn’t going away.

This week also saw the public coming-out by the Matrix co-director Lilly Wachowski (after some odious doorstepping by the UK Daily Mail). Her co-directing sister Lana Wachowski transitioned a few years ago, and is listed in the Danish Girl credits for helping Eddie R with his performance. The trans journalist Paris Lees and the trans pioneer April Ashley were similarly brought on board. But of course, performance advice is not the same as writing the script or directing the whole film. April Ashley has since commented that Eddie R’s performance verges on a dated, pantomime idea of femininity: he ‘should not be dropping his eyelashes every two minutes’.

I’m convinced The Danish Girl will become as out-of-date as those early attempts by Hollywood to depict gay characters, such as the 1960s film The Children’s Hour. Back then, a pro-gay narrative could only be put before a mainstream audience if it meant scenes of emotional agony, tearful admission and an untimely death. Then as now, the road to compromise is paved with good intentions.

The film’s director is Tom Hooper, of The King’s Speech fame, which also rewrote history. But like The King’s Speech I have to admit The Danish Girl still works as a lavish and visually engaging costume drama. It does look wonderful, with its locations shot from very carefully composed angles, the better to resemble the paintings in the story.

* * *

Saturday 12th March 2016. To the Tate Modern for the exhibition Performing for the Camera. This has rather an ambitious brief: the relationship between photography and performance, from the invention of the camera to the present day. Even narrowing it down to images by artists must have been a headache. By its own nature it can only be a series of examples. The final room is so inevitable it curates itself: new artists who use selfies on Instagram to construct little fictional narratives. Cindy Sherman did the ‘fictional selfie’ thing much earlier, of course, and it’s good to see she’s given her due here. But it goes back to the 1920s too, with Claude Cahun’s androgynous self-portraits, and Duchamp in his drag persona, an image which made the cover of Mark Booth’s 80s book, Camp. Bowie was on the back.

I like the Yves Klein jumping-into-space photo, here presented with the two images it cunningly combined – one with Klein jumping above a gang of men holding a safety net, and one with an empty street. The join is utterly invisible, a 1960 version of Photoshop. It blurs the lines between illusion, hoax, and art. Elsewhere, Ai Weiwei drops a Han Dynasty vase, in three horrifying stages.

There’s lots of 80s Warhol here too. A 1986 copy of NME shows Warhol and Debbie Harry sitting with a home computer, for some reason (is one needed?). I love AW’s photo of Keith Haring body-painting Grace Jones. This is also a neat reference to the exhibition’s photos of Yves Klein’s 60s ‘happenings’, where women would roll around in paint as part of a public performance, while a string quartet played. Actually, going by this exhibition, 90% of 1960s happenings seemed to involve nudity.

The whole exhibition radiates with the idea that performing for the camera is essentially a fun thing to do, even when it’s art. The camera click still has the essence of novelty, whatever the age. For all Klein’s trickery, the creation of a posed photo is magic enough.

Tags: birkbeck, David Foster Wallace, donald trump, performing for the camera, tate modern, the danish girl

Sunday 31st January 2016. I leaf through the Sunday Times in the Barbican Cinema Café. There’s a column by Katie Glass which typically makes me want to set fire to things. Still, the fact I read it through, and deem it worthy of comment here, suggests that to touch a reader’s nerve is still a connection of a kind. It’s called ‘trolling’ online, of course, but newspaper columnists have been doing it for decades.

Ms Glass’s subject today is her belief that going to university is a waste of time, though she’s at pains to reveal that she nevertheless holds a First in BA English. This is because of the news this week that several of the big UK firms are no longer insisting on a degree as a requirement for skilled employment. I received my own degree certificate in the post the other day, so the cliché about them not being worth the paper they’re written on rather sprang to mind.

True enough, Ms Glass goes for the cliché: ‘we know that these pieces of paper mean nothing’. Universities, she says, do not contain ‘the brightest minds’ so much as ‘those who went to the right schools and are good at passing exams’. She believes what really matters is ‘passion, commitment and hard work’. As if passing exams and delivering essays on time don’t require those things as well.

All she really learned, she says, was that ‘having an outrageous opinion could be rewarded, and later turned into a job’. Well, quite.

Being a professional wind-up merchant is now the quickest route to a media career. As long as you don’t mind being hated by strangers, you’ve got it made. There’s one young British writer who does this, Milo Yiannopoulos, who’s now starting to pop up more and more often on TV. What worries me is not so much his views as his appearance: thick bleached hair in a side parting, suits and ties, and a haughty camp voice. Someone on Twitter has already made the comparison. I suppose it’s another catcall to add to the list.

* * *

Tuesday 2nd February 2016. To the ICA for the film Youth, starring Michael Caine. It’s a very unabashed arthouse film, about an elderly composer staying at an Alpine spa hotel. The director seems content to line up a series of visually striking tableaux that may not always make sense, but which can be justified through their sheer originality. When the singer Paloma Faith pops up as a parody of herself, complete with a loud pop video sequence, it is impossible to judge where the film will go next. Paul Dano’s character soon turns up at the hotel dressed as Hitler, for no good reason, but no one is in the least surprised. It’s that sort of film.

Remote hotels are always good for a cinematic aesthetic: I think of The Shining of old, but also The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Lobster. Rachel Weisz, who is in both The Lobster and Youth, now seems to have an Arty Hotel Film career ahead of her. Mr Caine is very introspective and gentle in the composer role; he uses the same softer, middle class English accent he had in Hannah and Her Sisters.

* * *

Thursday 4th February 2016. This week’s MA seminar is on Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle. I give a short presentation on Margaret Atwood’s review for the New York Review of Books. She picks up on the significance of its names, and cites their various literary associations. For instance, the villain is called Tom, which Atwood links to both Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby and Tom Riddle – aka Voldermort – in the Harry Potter books. It’s difficult to think of many literary critics making such casual leaps of genre, but challenging genre always was Atwood’s bag. Like many of her own novels, The Circle can be reliably defined as science-fiction or speculative fiction, though again Ms A avoids such terms. Instead, she opts for classifying the book as an ‘entertainment’ (which to me suggests The Arabian Nights). She also puts the phrase ‘literary fiction’ within two telling inverted commas of her own, as if holding the words at arm’s length.

A term she does like, however, is ‘Menippean satire’, which she also applies to The Circle. I hadn’t come across it before. It’s a classical reference, after the Greek writer Menippus, denoting a playful, humorous satire of ideas and attitudes rather than a vicious attack on people themselves. The prime example is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Circle is more tongue-in-cheek with its ideas than with its style, though. In one scene, the heroine is summoned to a disciplinary meeting at work, solely because she had not been keeping up with her social media, and so missed the invite to a co-worker’s party. Thus Jane Austen is updated for the Facebook era.

Late evening: to the DocHouse screen in the Curzon Bloomsbury, for a French documentary on last year’s Charlie Hebdo killings, Je Suis Charlie. The original title is L’humour à mort, which I suppose could also be translated as Dead Funny. The film concentrates on the perspectives of the magazine staff, and includes archive interviews on the subject of mocking Islam, from the murdered cartoonists themselves. One staffer was protected by the office dog: she jumped on her master’s face after witnessing the head shots doled out to the cartoonists.

* * *

Friday 5th February 2016. Evening: To the plush Wallace Collection in Manchester Square, for an event called ‘Look Out’. It’s curated by the artist Sadie Lee, as part of London’s LGBTQI History Month events. The toilets have been rebranded as queer-friendly – a row of lockable cubicles. All the cubicles have a single temporary sign: a hybid Ladies / Gents figure, with half a skirt. I catch a performance by the drag queen Virgin Xtravaganza in one of the smaller galleries – the nervous attendants asking the audience to stand away from all the ornate cabinets and gilded furniture. Debbie Smith DJ’s in another room, surrounded by Boucher’s opulent paintings of scantily-clad goddesses. She plays ‘Je T’aime’, an apt soundtrack for finding French naughtiness in London. The Serge Gainsbourg record was recorded in nearby Marble Arch.

I go to the Great Gallery to watch David McAlmont’s band Fingersnap. He punctuates the songs with potted lectures on the paintings, having lately taken a degree in Art History at Birkbeck; I used to bump into him in the college corridors. Frans Hals’s Laughing Cavalier is on the wall immediately stage right. Growing up, I always thought of it as London’s Mona Lisa, such was its regular appearance in The Beano. Another much-aired masterpiece, Fragonard’s The Swing, is in a room nearby. An attendant tells me how it’s used in the Disney film Frozen. At which point, I hear a version of ‘Let It Go’, as tastefully arranged by the Jolly Pops Wind Orchestra, who are serenading the main courtyard tonight. Their repertoire also includes Katy Perry’s ‘Firework’, and Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’. It’s quite an evening.

* * *

Saturday 6th February 2016. To the Tate Modern for Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture. By a neat coincidence, a huge Calder mobile makes an appearance in The Circle. A character explains that ‘This one used to hang in the French parliament. Something like that.’ I knew about Calder’s abstract mobiles, here with their floating gongs, monochrome leaf shapes and coloured discs. What I didn’t know about was his delightful wire sculptures of faces, figures and circus acrobats, from the 1920s. The Tate hangs them so that one can enjoy their projected shadows on the wall behind. One figure is of Josephine Baker, with breasts of steel abstract spirals. She really did get about.

Tags: alexander calder, dave eggers, je suis charlie, margaret atwood, tate modern, the circle, wallace collection, youth