Bad Language

Le Monde reports French educationalists are soul-searching over French students' poor showing in an international TOEFL league table. France ranked 69th out of 109 countries in prowess at speaking, reading and understanding English. And, even worse, these were the 'better' ones, those who were trying to get into university in an English-speaking country. It must surely irk former Education Xavier Darcos, whose quixotic long-term plan was to produce bilingual students (in the main speaking English as a second language) by the end of their schooling. Le Monde wonders if the problem might not lie with the educational system at all:

Y aurait-il dans l'ADN gaulois un gène qui empêcherait de parler, voire de comprendre l'anglais ? A l'heure où la génétique aide à comprendre les dégénérescences et autres blocages, on aimerait qu'elle nous explique pourquoi les Français restent irrémédiablement imperméables à la langue de Shakespeare. A moins que le vrai problème ne soit notre système éducatif et que les étudiants qui remontent la moyenne ne fassent partie des 170 000 jeunes favorisés qui partent chaque année en séjour linguistique à l'étranger ?

Is there a gene in the Gaulish DNA that could prevent one from speaking, even understanding English? Now that genetics helps explain degeneration and other mental blocks, maybe it can tell us if the French are irremediably impermeable to the language of Shakespeare. At least it might tell us that the real problem is not our educational system and that the students that raise the average are not among those privileged 170,000 young people who leave to study English abroad each year?

It's a typically French pre-occupation to search for the rot in the educational system rather than elsewhere, and by way of a rather strained syllogism, if the fault lies not there, it must lie in the constitution of the average Frenchman or woman. The answer is rather simpler and has little to do with schooling or education. There's nothing particularly unusual in French teenagers being unable to speak English well upon leaving school - English speakers rarely master a foreign language through school alone. But of course, France being France, coming so far down the table behind smaller, less prestigious countries rankles. And if the Netherlands or Sweden or Norway can command so many good English-speakers, why can't France?

The problem though has little to do with education, or even teaching. Scandinavian and other smaller countries usually speak languages unique to themselves or only one or two others. So the need to speak a lingua franca (and these days that is, for better or worse, English) is more pressing. People from small countries are also usually more outward-looking than those from larger ones, and only Germany in this test scored highly as a big country. Finally, children in countries where English is understood and spoken widely, such as Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Finland and Portugal, learn relatively little from teachers, few of whom are native speakers in any case. They learn at home, through direct, daily exposure to English; in those countries American films and TV programmes are subtitled rather than dubbed. In France, the vast majority of imported product goes out in version française.

A language is only as good as how useful it is to you, and if one relies on artificial situations concocted in a classroom isolated from the language as it is genuinely spoken, the necessity to learn is weakened and inhibition built up. It's ridiculous to say that French people are genetically or culturally indisposed to learning English; I know many that speak good English, and it usually follows on from an interest in Anglophone culture, be it film, music, literature, fashion or sport. And, needless to say, in none of these is this interest at the expense of an interest in their own native culture. If France wants to get serious about its citizens learning English (and the way the world is going, it's probably in its best interests to) it should break with its isolationist linguistic protectionism. Ban imported film and television being dubbed into French and make people watch them in the original language with subtitles. It's a harsh measure but after only a few years the difference would be noticeable, and France would even be spared the feared deluge of 'Anglo-Saxon' culture. But that's unlikely to happen and, in 30 years' time France will still be plodding along with middling English and wondering why the linguistic gods cursed them with a genetic inability to learn.

Les étudiants français toujours aussi nuls en anglais - Société - Le Monde.fr

Only on the Internet

It's not only fluff we post here; sometimes we go for the hardcore ephemera that is so ephemeral one barely notices it ephemerating before one's very eyes. It's like Marty McFly in those photographs that he always manages to have on him as he zips and back and forth to the future.

First up today is Keggers of Yore, a photo-blog devoted to the festivities enjoyed by past generations of American (and, no doubt, Canadian) college students and hangers-on before they faced reality, conquered their five-beers-a-week alcoholic hell, sharpened their straight edge, made a fortune selling mousepads or organic yak's milk to gullible yuppies, or became Secretary for Defense. A surprisingly large number of these photographs can bear the simple caption: 'in happier times.'

There is also the Slanket, which is nowhere near as weird as it should be, now that is has featured on an episode of 30 Rock. This ingenious variation on an old favourite is a big hit with the monks of Chartreuse, the Ku-Klux Klan, Obi-Wan Kinobi and Masonic lodges in wintry northern climes among many other key demographics.

From the Emerald Isle comes a brave stab at at mounting an Áine Chambers-esque bid for Internet Meme Stardom. The trick, not surprisingly, involves clowns, coffins, funerals and pre-Y2K web-design. I would try and analyse it as it clearly means something but it's not as if I wasted my time in college studying art history.

And though this has been around for a few months now, here's the latest piece of annoying self-referentialism from hipsters, for whom fashion clearly never sits still for one minute. Die hipsters die!

Hat tips to Octavia, Cormac and Jim, without whom none of this would have been possible.

After You...Non, Pleeze After You

From Instructions for British Servicemen in France 1944, a great little book issued to every Tommy before the Normandy landings and now reissued by the Bodleian library:

'The French are more polite than most of us. Be sure to address people as 'Monsieur', 'Madame' or 'Mademoiselle.''

From a brochure issued by the Paris Chamber of Commerce to businesses anticipating increased foreign trade during the Rugby World Cup:

'The Anglo-Saxons, as well as being largely amiable, are also notable for their politeness.'

Curiously the 'Anglo-Saxons' comprise the Scots, Irish and Welsh but not the Americans or Canadians, who are afforded their own rubric. I wonder have manners changed that drastically in the past sixty years?

The Distasteful Experience of Being Exposed to an mp3some

An Irish friend of mine returned from a trip to New York late last year disgusted with a sight he saw in a fashionable bar in Williamsburg: a DJ working exclusively off mp3s on their laptop. Now in Paris it seems that every second 'DJ' is packing nothing heavier than a MacBook when they go out mixing; it took many years for mixing with CDs to get even remotely respectable - and even now it is usually accepted only as a bit of back-up for a well-stocked bag of vinyl - but mixing with equipment that scarcely justifies any of the traditional demands of DJing is alarmingly widespread.

In the Bottle Shop the other night this development reached its nadir when not one but three people turned up with a MacBook each to 'collaborate'. So, gathered around the mixing decks - which may have begun their inexorable slide towards ultimate redundancy, were three youngsters with computers, pretending that they were Richie Hawtin. Of course the music was much the same as played by any other DJ in the Bottle Shop - meaning it was a decent enough selection, if hardly too imaginative - but most of the other DJs do have the quirky habit of bringing old-fashioned black discs with a wee hole in the middle.

I know that I will be accused of being snobbish here but I don't think it is too much to ask that folks with what they take to be a fantastic collection of audio files to confine their broadcasting of them to their homesteads. I listen to mostly mp3s these days (though I still buy CDs), mainly because the cramped quarters of Parisian apartments have discouraged me from bringing my not-exactly-immense collection of vinyl over from Dublin, but I wouldn't dream of turning up to a bar with my laptop to offer to 'spin some tunes'. Not least because I could do it with a few carefully-chosen playlists stocked on my iPod, which has twice the hard-drive space as my old G4. But if a DJ flicks through their iPod to pick the music people will not be too impressed. Some people imagine though that plonking their computer down on a bar table makes them look like Orbital or Paul Oakenfold, while all the time 'programming' tracks by The Strokes and Franz Ferdinand. When one realises that one or more DJs are getting paid to play songs using equipment and applications that are already used by the bar to play music at other times of the day, well, that's just cheating. You may as well just sit in the corner, with your Nano hooked up to the PA and shuffle away.

The cheating is more acute still when the effort of putting together a vinyl collection is considered. Most DJing occupies, in my opinion, a place a few rungs below real creative activities but there is still a venerable craft exercised by many DJs as well a strong sense of curiosity and adventure. Good DJs travel hundreds of miles to get hold of that track that they could never find on vinyl (though they might already own it on CD or mp3), they reinvest huge amounts of their DJing pay into their collection, they haul back-breakingly heavy bags from bar to bar to club and they are forever on the look out for new or obscure tracks that might set them apart from their peers. And the best DJs never take themselves too serious. They are part of a music culture that owning 12,000 music files on a hard drive will never qualify you to enter. Now it appears that they might be on the way out because some geek with a shiny iBook wants to play the same tunes they hear on MTV2 in a vain effort to get laid. I'm quite serene about the effect of the file-sharing phenomenon - the music industry had had it coming to them for years, and it has allowed bands to reach new markets that they would never before have had access to - but this is one consequence that is certainly deleterious. A real involvement in music is much further than a click away.

British Vegetarians Free to Eat Shit Food Again

The company that so charmingly calls itself 'Masterfoods' has announced that it is to return to making vegetarian-friendly chocolate bars, following outcries from British vegetarians and, I kid you not, forty MPs that signed a petition calling on Mars bars to be reunited with the UK's lettuce munchers.

I was, for eight years in my youth, a vegetarian, until I copped on in my mid-twenties and with a renewed sense of adventure started trying anything that was put in front of me. So I know all about rennet, gelatine, finings and all those other hidden animal by-products that provide pitfalls for the diligent vegetarian (though I think many of them relish the challenge of examining the small-print on the packaging every time they shop, just as the more puritanical of religious folk rejoice in the existence of the world's carnal pleasures for giving them something to rail against). It is this culinary puritanism that is the most unpleasant and depressing thing about vegetarianism, people who avoid eating meat are depriving themselves of culture, while at the same time giving themselves a nice, uncostly, consumer-driven political cause to espouse. Vegetarians who claim to love food are like those people that call themselves film buffs but can't bring themselves to watch a black and white film.

I know that there are many vegetarians that do qualify, at least in a partial sense, as gourmands, and my own years of vegetarianism introduced me to a range of fruit and vegetables that, as an Irish male, I would probably have otherwise avoided with a forty-foot pole, but such vegetarians are very much in the minority. Why else is there a thriving trade in frozen and processed food that comes emblazoned with the imprimatur of the Vegetarian Society? Veggies getting hot and bothered about not being able to eat Mars bars or Snickers is further proof of this; if you can cut meat, fish and poultry out of your diet with an unstintingly pedantic application of your 'ideals' should it not be too difficult to avoid eating industrially-produced chocolate, that given the scant amount of cocoa solids contained therein, barely merits the word 'chocolate' anyway? Real foodies eat meat and vegetables. Live a little folks. The only good reasons for abstaining from any type of food or drink are ones of health. Vegetarianism is not one of them.

Persian The Thought

Seanachie is a big fan of Iranian culture, or at least that small part of it with which he is acquainted, such as the films of Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen and Samira Makhmahlbaf, Abol-Fazl Jalili and Jafar Panahi; the poetry of Furough Farrokhzad and Ahmad Shamlou, and the excellent comic-book work of Marjane Satrapi. The latter in particular has been instrumental in increasing awareness among Westerners of the country that goes beyond the familiar clichés of crazed fundamentalist ayatollahs and defiant anti-Western rhetoric. What has been most remarkable about the Iranian diaspora over the past twenty years, spread as it is around the Middle East, North America, France and Britain, is both its success in business, academe and other fields but also its resolute opposition to the Islamic regime back home. And that opposition is mirrored in many sectors back in Iran, where it is a good deal trickier, to be measured almost week-by-week against variations in the political climate.

Now, however one thing has succeeded in uniting both the Islamic establishment in Iran and the more liberal diaspora: the new film 300, due to be released in Europe next week, which tells the story of the Battle of Thermopylae fought in 480BC by the Spartans against the Persians, led by the celebrated Xerxes. The Iranians on both sides complain of historical inaccuracies and misrepresentation of ancient Persian culture, while the Iranian government condemn an 'act of terror' directed at them by the West. While there may be be an undercurrent of historical bias in the fiction based on a comic book by Sin City creator Frank Miller, I doubt that most people involved in the film even considered that the ancient Persians had any relation to modern Iran. To view the film as an piece of Imperialist propaganda is misguided, to say the least. But one can understand the frustration of Iranians, who, as well as seeing their country and culture constantly smeared by ignorant Westerners (and disgraced by the madmen in control in Teheran), should also see their ancient civilization unrecognised. Even if disputing the facts of a battle that took place two and a half millenia ago is a bit sensitive. My favourite act of dissension by Iranian bloggers is the 'Google-bombing' devised by Canadian-based Pendar Yousefi, which plans to divert Google searches about the film to websites that offer other perspectives on Persian culture and art. Enlightening even a hundred lazy Westerners will be a job well done. The Iranians will get redress of sorts with the release later this year of the film adaptation of Satrapi's Persepolis, which from the film stills alone looks like it is going to be great.

If You're Irish Come Out and Get Hammered

The BBC reports that the Irish are the biggest binge drinkers in Europe, which will not come as a surprise to anyone, nor will the news that our nearest rivals are the British, the Finns and the Danes. I'm not pointing any fingers here as I'm no more shy of tippling than any one else but once again I will enjoy spending St. Patrick's Day a long way from Dublin.

What particularly riles me though is the way that the Irish believe their own bullshit and stereotypes, swallowing the myth that the Irish have been heavy drinkers since time immemorial. According to the Gill and MacMillan Encyclopaedia of Ireland, published a few years back, as late as 1968, 52% of Irish adults were teetotal, and I would well believe it, as there are many non-drinkers on both sides of my family and my grandfather's pub was never a money-spinner in the years before his death in 1956. One might point out that such abstinence itself dated only from the great temperance drives of Father Mathew and others in the late nineteenth century, but most countries in Europe drank far more back then than they do today.

The increase in alcohol consumption coincided with the rise in popularity of the likes of Guinness and Jameson abroad and with the corresponding popularity with Ireland's most regrettable export, the Irish Pub, which has allowed the Irish to be damned with faint praise by well-intentioned folk everywhere from Chile to Japan. There is nothing terribly imaginative in pointing out the plastic nature of Irish culture and the Irish's willingness to play along with it (ask most Irish people from what year 'The Fields of Athenry' dates and you can be sure that very few will answer you '1978'), but it is striking how few genuinely Irish beers and spirits there are to begin with, and how few of those are actually Irish-owned. There are scarcely any independent Irish brewers other than the PorterHouse group since the Dublin Brewing Company went to the wall and the Cooley Distillery is the only one not owned by Pernod Ricard. Not only is aggressive advertising fuelling the national stereotype - and its real-life realisation - but it is only on the strength of a handful of products.

The phone-ins will continue to deplore the current situation but there is little that can be done to change it; true, the Vintners' Federations should be faced down (I've always found 'vintner' a rather grand name for a businessman that serves his wine in an airplane bottle) but people will still drink - its merely another expression of Irish people's deranged thirst for consumption, the sort that has allowed huge debts to be built up in the country and which has allowed Irish businesses to charge comedy prices for rubbish services that wouldn't be tolerated in the poorer home countries of many of our recent immigrants. Ireland will only ease off the pints when the next recession comes. Until then the boozing is here to stay but hopefully we might all tire of the 'hail fellow well met when hammered' stereotype.

Brit National Anthem Disrespected by Some - Shock!

The Ireland-England rugby game took place last Saturday but the Irish media, obviously embittered at its inability to foresee a civilised reception of the Bruddish national anthem, has since decided to do a post-mortem on those unsporting types that dared to slag the Brits off the minute their national dirge floated across the airwaves. Apparently some wag in 'rugby great' Peter Clohessy's Limerick boozer had the idea to play the Wolfe Tones' 'God Save Ireland' while the lads in white were beating out their submission to their monarch live on screen. Those present at the time seemed to be sufficiently amused (and Seanachie would see it as a typically provincial, but funny joke). But, since a bit of bad publicity for 'the Claw' is unwelcome, Clohessy has vowed to discipline those staff members with a sense of humour. A similar thing happened in Seanachie's homestead of Ballymote, Co. Sligo, whose local website deplores one pub that dared to turn the volume down as 'Gawd Loves a Queen' was played. I can guess what pub it was but I am not really disturbed that the reaction was a muting of the dirge in question; to be honest, I would have expected a bit of lusty jeering.

These acts of insubordination are, no doubt, boorish in the extreme but the Irish have long been that way to each other without having had the opportunity to be so on such a mediatised scale towards the British. I fail to see the big story here as it is obvious that the fabled event of 'God Gave the Queen' being played at Croker did not spark off a renewed wave of anglophobia. But there was no real surprise there. Barring a few unfortunate exceptions, English people are generously welcomed in Ireland these days, and the perception of the Irish in England has seen a corresponding improvement. That does not, however, mean that we should be forbidden from engaging in a bit of banter whenever it need be; I have yet to start cheering for England in football and my English friends accept this with resigned laughter, but that does not translate into racism or an insult to our neighbours. The Irish should not be forced into apologising for their past any more than the English should be, and in any case, the foreigners at the brunt of most hostility and disgraceful abuse in Ireland these days are certainly not English. I will leave you all with Langerland's very funny 'What did the Brits ever do for us?'. Or does that make me a racist too? (I wish to point out that neither Seanachie nor Underachievement plc. endorses criticism of the British crown, the Windsor (né Hanover) family nor any or its dependencies by reproduction of this cartoon).

Anthemic

No postings in the past few days, even the Croke Park/God Save the Queen 'controversy' didn't tempt me into the ring. I found the story a bit fatuous, especially as the Irish rugby fraternity has rarely been home to hardcore Republicans. It was to be expected that Republican Sinn Féin would muster a gaggle of protesters but I don't really see what the problem was there. This issue was decided long ago when the GAA voted to allow football and rugby into Croker; they debated it then and the outcome was that having the British monarchy's anthem played at a rugby match was not going to unduly bother them, especially with the prospect of two and a half million euros to soften the blow. The incident would have been a lot more fraught had the match been a soccer international - rugby fans are such polite sorts that it would be hard to imagine them booing anybody's national anthem - but I still think that God Save the Queen would have been respected by the Irish soccer crowd, though this respect would have been leavened by an appropriate amount of slagging too.

Anyway both Amhran na bhFiann and God Save the Queen are god-awful dirges when examined from a musical point of view and the previous should be replaced (not because of its violent lyrics - listen to the Marseillaise or dozens of other anthems for that matter) but because it is a drearily unmotivating piece of music. And, no Ireland's Call is not a suitable replacement (only the rugby shower could concoct a palliative as dull and unimaginative as this one), nor is The Fields of Athenry, a piece of plastic Paddywhackery that best symbolises the Irish people's loss of any remaining connection with genuine Irish culture. But given what passes for 'Civic' songwriting in Ireland these days any possible replacement would no doubt be something like John Waters and Tommy Moran's composition which will represent Ireland at this year's Eurovision. This piece of pan-European piffle demonstrates how truly toothless the Castlerea autodidact really is. When Slovenia gained its independence in 1991 it chose for its national anthem a verse of 'Zdravljica', a celebrated poem by national poet, the 19th century Romantic, France Prešeren, which begins with the most generous line: 'God's blessing on all nations'. The verse had already been set to music by Stanko Premerl, there presumably being no Slovene equivalent of Phil Coulter. It is a national anthem to envy, one that bears comparison with the best, such as the Marseillais, Brazil's and the Russian/former Soviet one. Ireland's choice would no doubt be selected by a Louis Walsh-chaired phone-in contest. It really doesn't bear thinking about. Better the devil you know.

Did Someone Say Scrotum?

Every so often things happen in the US that have good, sensible Americans crouching in strained embarrassment, such as the recent objections, led by 'conservative' crackpot librarian Dana Nilsson, of Durango, Colorado, to the use of the word 'scrotum' in the Newbery Medal-winning children's book The Higher Power of Lucky, by the much more level-headed librarian Susan Patron. Ms Nilsson believes that words such as scrotum have no place in 'quality literature'; I wonder what she would have made of Joyce's use of 'bilvalve' as imagery for the female pudendum (later stolen by Saul Bellow). I first learned the word 'scrotum' from one Billy Connolly, when I was about ten, though I admit I was not really part of the target audience. Last chicken in Sainsbury's was how Connolly introduced it to us, and for a couple of years we probably pronounced it only with a rolled Scots 'r'. I can understand how 10-year-olds should be protected from certain words, but is scrotum really so nefarious? And Dana Nilsson might be a bit shocked to discover that many kids that age already know what penises and vaginas are, without having had abusive experiences.

Just in...

Those living in Anglophonia will sneer at this (but hey, I'm not British, I live in France and I've never set foot in England [the last is true by the way]) but I have only just discovered Armando Iannucci's fantastic political satire The Thick of It. A Yes, Minister for the Blair years, it is cutting and depressingly credible in a way that Rory Bremner, God Bless him, could only dream about. A cross between Alan Partridge (where Iannucci cut his teeth) and The Office, the series strips away the shrouds of government with impunity, and gives the greatest explication of the Blair/Campbell axis of evil yet proffered. Unfortunately the lead actor Chris Langham, who won a BAFTA for his part, has since been convicted on charges of child pornography, thereby hindering the recording of a third series (the first two were only three episodes each). Great as Langham was the series should survive well enough without him, considering how dispensable his character was for the entire two series. Peter Capaldi's demonic Campbellesque spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker could carry a whole decade of programmes on his own.

Labellous

Generic tags in any branch of the arts are ad hoc most of the time and as often as not they are unsuited to the job that they do but nowhere is this so much the case as with music. The great Marxist critic Theodor Adorno in his book The Culture Industry back in the 1930s, declaimed the recent coining of the term 'classical music', which he termed 'barbarous'. Adorno believed that there was only 'serious' and 'light' music in the world. Which is not all different from what Kurt Cobain said sixty years or so later when he dismissed the term 'alternative' music; as far as Kurt was concerned, the only acceptable 'alternative' music was an alternative to bad music. Adorno did not care much for popular music, or at least not the type that was beginning to be mass-produced by the still-young recording industry. I have read many desperate rationalisations of Adorno's views by cultural studies academics, terrified at their very field of study being called into question by one of their heroes; these poor folk point out that Adorno died in the late 60s and may not have had the opportunity to listen to the Beatles to change his mind. And people always point out that his dislike of jazz was based on exposure to the worst type of white-boy swing jazz. It is irrelevant what Adorno might have thought of 'A Day In The Life' or 'A Love Supreme'; the core of his argument, that our music literacy and capacity for musical understanding has been irremediably damaged by mass culture, holds true.

But back to the tags, those labels that people put on popular music. Rock n' Roll is the one we all remember but has long lost its roll, and rock has split up into subgenres of heavy metal, speedcore, grunge, trash metal and so on. 'Alternative' and 'indie', redolent as they are of spotty male students with bad dress sense and dubious personal hygiene, has always been a turn-off for me - or at least since I answered to the description above. 'Electroclash' is a newer one, which is not bad but it makes it a bummer looking for 'London Calling' on your iTunes. In fact it is iTunes that brings the whole labelling of music genres into question; if you've got hundreds of different genres on your iPod or iTunes, as many people do because the tags and files come from all different sources, it is almost impossible to ever hear songs again if you shuffle genres. Because computers, seeing the world in 0s and 1s, do not really care too much for the difference between Merengue and Salsa. Just that insulting, blanket term 'World' works (surely a modern counterpart for Adorno's barbarous 'classical' music). Music will eventually be rationalised to the hilt by official terms such as iTunes official terminology: 'Alternative & Punk', 'Electronica & Dance', 'HipHop & Rap' etc. And no matter how fresh the term might once have been, it never sounds right to describe the music it purports to. I used to know a wealthy Californian girl who opined that Björk was the 'most punk-rock singer there was'. Whatever you're having yourself.