a blistering middle-class assault

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Hello. Once again (to be read in ponderous voice), it is Hay Festival time – when the literate middle classes sweep upon a small, picturesque town to hear writers talk about being writers… either “a Woodstock of the mind”, as Clinton called it, or possibly “more like a Glastonbury of the brow” (© Ms Baroque)… If it weren’t for the weather (not that it’s much cop e’en now) I’d even suggest that they have it in middle March.

Anyway, I do find it a bit puzzling, the way all any bestselling author or pundit has to do is save up some tepid soundbite for this week and there it is, splashed all over the more literary newspapers as if it were – well – news. We had Sebastian Faulks saying something (I don’t know what, okay) about James Bond. (Good headline, though: “Ah, Mr Faulks, we’ve been expecting you…”)*

There was something about Salman Rushdie being Very Boring Indeed about Indian Art. There are lots of snippets about novelists I’m only vaguely aware of; last year I remember reading a few heartsinking first-hand accounts of people’s rainsoaked forays into that back of this or that crowded tent, making obeisance to some media-savvy intelligentsik, thinking, why why why???

And now we have Hanif Kureishi in a “blistering attack” on, of all things, creative writing courses. Oh, and he teaches in one. Give me a break. He says something really fatuous: he says, “One of the things you notice is that when you switch on the television and a student has gone mad with a machine gun on a campus in America, it’s always a writing student.” Get that? Always.

Then, that after he’s taught them they’re better writers but unhappier. This makes me think that perhaps, for people like him, writing is a higher calling, whereas for his students it is only a substitute for the loony bin. Is that unfair? He says that “the creative writing departments are the new mental hospitals.”

Really. And then:

“He said that he was impelled to start teaching writing by the example of his children, who have tennis lessons, piano lessons and the like. He became convinced that teaching a skill was an honourable calling: ‘I felt if I knew something, I should pass it on’.”**

Somehow, none of this is sounding like the “blistering attack,” the “slam” that the Guardian is trying to make out. But neither does it sound even interesting, let alone inspiring. It’s more, sort of, languid, a bit lazy, a bit… sort of self-congratulatory, given that Kureishi himself is “giving something back” by teaching in these self-same “mental hospitals”. He hasn’t exactly come out and said they’re worthless, has he; he’s happy to get paid to do it.

Who are these people who think it’s interesting? Are they the middle-aged, middle-management parents of creative writing students, all now frantically ringing their offspring to make sure they’re “feeling all right”? Are they other writers, sniggering up their sleeves because they’ve got a royalty cheque in the post, unlike the misquided writing students? Are they bemused secretaries assuming there must be something in it? University deans? Publishers? Whatever – it all seems just depressingly, complacently, you know. Middlebrow. (God I fling that word around a lot.)

& I’m embarrassed that I even thought it was worth a rant.

* No, how embarrassing. Bloody hell, I do sometimes read things through properly! This turns out to be nothing whasoever to do with Hay. Faulks has written a new James Bond novel, hugely hyped apparently, and published on the very day (gosh!) of Fleming’s centenary. One thing I like to collect is where you misread something, usually in my case lettering on buildings, etc, but look at this sentence. “The very unconventional author credit – ‘Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming’ – suggests the contemporary novelist is somehow channelling the writing of his dead predecessor.” I misread it, of course, as “channelling the writing of his dead word processor.”

Birdsong – cheap, sentimental and completely unrealistic. It wore its research so much on its sleeve that the research WAS the sleeve. So sue me.
** Not sure if this sentiment would apply to all forms of knowledge, or even professions. This could form the basis of a very amusing parlour game.

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