Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

I can recommend doing two half-things at once that add up to something worthwhile. Watching football isn't enough on its own and rarely lasts more than 10 minutes but coupled with playing Be My Baby, the Best of the Ronettes, when simply listening to a record doesn't always constitute 100% employment, it makes for something to do.
I am naturally sympathetic to most underdogs and admired the plucky Iranians' display against an unimpressive Portugal without needing a commentator to tell me what was happening. I'm happy enough to make my own mind up and not wait for Alan Shearer to tell me what to think. And, as for beleaguered underdogs, I wasn't as quick as some to condemn the Paraguayan referee, as if somehow his Paraguayan-ness contributed to his difficulties, for not sending off Ronaldo.
I've been out there, having to decide whether to give a batsman out lbw. I've no idea. I can't remember what happened exactly. He looks like a good batsman to me. Probably not out, then.
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Of course The Ronettes. I entirely 'get it' with pop music like that, the word cloud of which would demonstrate 'baby' to be a very prominent word. Surely this is the music to return to from our younger days and any time mis-spent listening to Barclay James Harvest needs to be written off and not fretted about.
I have no chance of discriminating between contemporary artists because I'm not part of the demographic it's designed for and so - and it's been like this for a while - I am in the same position as my father was when he saw Hawkwind doing Silver Machine on TOTP, a piece I was very taken with at the time, and completely non-plussed.
All of which is a circuitous preamble to probably one last word on Matthew Klam, whose book of stories I haven't finished yet but will, who is so lauded among the American fiction writers of his generation. He is perfectly readable and enjoyable enough but reading him might have brought forward the ordering of William Trevor's Last Stories as a necessary restorative.
Klam brings to mind recent books like David Szalay's All That Man Is, examining a vacuum in masculinity, not necessarily limited to American men, where fulfilment ought to be. Serial attempts at 'love', usually misconstrued as physical atrraction and thus inevitably not lasting, a superficial concern for lifestyle, disposable income and often a resultant self-loathing seem to be the male answer to the more sizeable canon of specifically women's literature. And why not.
Perhaps such books have only arrived where writers like Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Andre Dubus and Richard Russo had been leading and if it's tempting to make Hemingway the grandaddy of them all, there might well be precursors to him. There usually are.
It makes for grim reflections if we think that Martin Amis, inheriting some of it from his father but finessing it further, is not the only British writer to smuggle such themes into English books but that, beneath the French-ness, the glorious literary sophistication and more sensitive persona, it might be what Julian Barnes is doing.
So it's not surprising that, pace Barnes, much of my preferred reading is that which takes on broader themes than the limitations of gender. It's a pity it came to this pretty pass. Has it become so difficult to be a man that it has become a major pre-occupation.
Graham Swift seems to deal with it, Ian McEwan is not so much called Ian Macabre these days and Sebastian Faulks does it well. And if Sarah Waters or Jeanette Winterson, like Virginia Woolf, have an ostensibly feminist position, there's more to them than that.
But I'm betting without Elizabeth Bishop, of course, consummate as a writer, whose gender, sexuality or birthright informed rather than infected her poems and who wouldn't allow her poems to be included in women only anthologies.
That's more like it.
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Despite the ongoing debate about whether the TLS is really worth my time and money, it keeps surviving the chop in the same way that Derek Pringle was never anywhere near being the natural successor to Ian Botham but compiled a fair number of England appearances because there was usually somebody injured. It's The Listener that I'll never be able to replace even though it's been a long time gone.
The TLS keeps on doing just enough, not least in its attempts to maintain that difficult balance between common sense liberalism and mandatory political correctness. They recently brought to light a questionnaire called Inclusivity in Publishing, a measure put in place to ensure proper representation for authors of all backgrounds in the publishing industry. Like they say, anti-elitism must surely be a good thing on the face of it but it is a standard contradiction in liberalism.
Discrimination has come to be thought of as a bad thing and when it is discrimination simply on the grounds of race, gender, ethnicity, left-handedness, admiring the work of Pink Floyd or sexuality, etcetera, of course it is (although the Pink Floyd question isn't settled yet). But I discriminate all the time when I form the opinion that Elizabeth Bishop is a great poet and Paatiene Strong not quite so good.
That's elitism. The poetry world especially runs on competitions (endlessly), prizes and editors preferring some poems over others. And if it is still a world overseen by people who went to a certain sort of university, they are statistically more likely to give preference to work by people who also did.
I sometimes think I'd have been better off, and possibly happier, as a plumber or carpenter. Decent enough money, always in demand and some job satisfaction in a job well done.
Rather than investigate authors for potential offences of privilege, it might be better to engender more respect for honourable tradespeople and not assume that having a book published is any mark of distinction.
It is the narrowness of their idea of 'inclusivity' that makes the iniatives of such do-gooders so depressing and it is a good thing the TLS does in highlighting such practices for those who didn't know. I'm glad they do.