DIARY
MIRIAM GROSS By far the most crowded area at Tate Modern, on the occasions that I've been there, is the darkened room displaying Sam Taylor-Wood's enormous video of a naked man performing a grotesque dance, his Willy flapping and flopping hither and thith- er. Naturally enough, everyone is transfixed by this apparition, particularly children. I have never believed in Freud's theory of penis envy, but watching little girls of four and five gazing intensely at this artwork did make me feel rather uneasy. Would they show it on television before 9 p.m.?
Iwas looking in a French dictionary the other day to check the spelling of the splendid word `blablater' [to blabber on, waffle on], when an even more amusing French verb, on the same page, caught my eye: blairer. Here's the Collins dictionary definition: je ne peux pas le blairer 'he gives me the creeps', 'I can't stand or bear him'. My French is not very wonderful, but I can just about construct a simple sentence: .le ne peux pas blairer Blair, parce qu'il blab- late toujours.
academic books are not usually sent to the offices of literary editors, but the other day a promising one arrived on my desk: Enid Blyton and the Mystery of Children's Literature would surely, I thought, be of interest to the general reader — particularly in the present climate of Potter-mania and ought to be sent out for review. Then I looked at the chapter headings: 'Noddy: Discursive Threads and Intersexuality', was one; another, 'Sexism or Subversion? Querying Gender Relations in the Famous Five and Malory Towers'. This caused great mirth in my office. But of course it seems funny and outlandish only to people out- side the academic world. Inside it, this kind of thing is not just very familiar but com- pletely routine — the language of everyday discourse, as they would call it.
Imet several schoolteachers recently (respectable middle-aged women, not bearded radicals) who still strongly believe that grammar should not be taught in schools because it stifles creativity and free- dom of expression. When I expressed the view that grammar was as important at school as creativity, they immediately marked me down as a right-wing bigot with no understanding of children. Don't these teachers realise that grammar aids freedom of expression and creativity while ignorance of it leads to inarticulacy, unemployability and, yes, hooliganism? Not for nothing are our best schools (or almost all of them) called 'grammar' schools. Ihave driven from Bayswater to Canary Wharf and back almost daily for the past 12 years and I consider myself to be a leading expert (and leading bore) on the subject of London traffic jams. My extensive researches have revealed that 90 per cent of London's congestion is caused by roadworks. Holes in the road surrounded by cones are some- times left unattended for weeks, even months; sometimes they double as refuse dumps. There have been long periods when the whole length of the Embankment has been more or less stationary because of one small, abandoned roadwork. More often than not motorists stuck at one end of a traffic jam don't even know what has caused it; they simply assume that there are too many cars on the roads. If Ken Livingstone wants to transform London, he should for- get about congestion charges and impose, instead, huge fines on companies that don't co-ordinate and complete roadworks as fast as humanly possible.
Ihave often been puzzled by the fact that very huge books frequently get respectful reviews, while slimmer ones are regularly taken apart and pitilessly analysed. But with the onset of cynicism, I realise that the explanation is simple: reviewers don't read these large tomes in their entirety and therefore can't risk finding fault with them in case their criticisms don't apply to the parts of the book they haven't reached. By I know where you live.' praising them, they hope their dereliction of duty won't be exposed.
Al newspapers, serious or otherwise, now adorn nearly every page, especially their front page, with pictures of beautiful women, rather in the way that sexy models are draped across cars at motor shows. Indeed, an arts editor on one of our most high-minded broadsheets told me recently that he had had instructions from on high always to include at least one item about a pretty female — even at the expense of more important news involving less glam- orous people — so that she could provide the main picture for his page. Book publish- ers, too, openly admit that they are more likely to accept manuscripts — non-fiction as well as fiction — from attractive women, because publicity photographs of them will sell copies. And many of the pop groups who performed at the recent Hyde Park concert were chosen, I read, on the basis of their looks rather than their talent. In other words, a small class of people in our society enjoys great advantages and privileges pure- ly as a result of an accident of birth. Isn't it time New Labour intervened?
Much has been written recently about a new literary genre, 'chick lit' — the spate of confessional, chatty novels, inspired by Brid- get Jones, about not-so-young girls desper- ately in search of Mr Right. Of these, India Knight's My Life on a Plate stands out, and not only because it is the funniest and sharpest. No one, as far as I have seen amid all the hype and reviews, has pointed out that this book doesn't just 'take Bridget Jones one stage further', into the territory of married life, motherhood and domestic chores, but it actually goes in the opposite direction: it's about wantonly driving away Mr Right (or as near to Mr Right as one will ever get) for no better reason than boredom with the routines of marriage and domestici- ty. The heroine ends up an apparently happy single woman: Reader, I unmarried him.
Aa rather grand party a few weeks ago, I was talking to Sir Vidia Naipaul, the cultur- al scourge of New Labour; standing a few yards away was a very famous Conservative ex-prime minister. 'I shall do my best to avoid talking to that person,' Sir Vidia con- fided. 'Is it to do with their politics?' I inquired. 'Not at all, I admire their politics very much,' Sir Vidia explained. 'I just don't want to enter their orbit of vanity.' It occurred to me later that deciding whose orbit of vanity one would least like to be sucked into would make a very good parlour game — and not just about politicians.
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