The title comes from the book by Schopenhauer, who wrote in the Preface: "These additional writings, that are subsidiary to my more ... systematic works, consist partly of a few essays on a wide variety of special topics and partly of isolated ideas on an even greater range of subjects." Many topics originally discussed on this page are now discussed on other pages, and it's now concerned purely with dross of different levels of non-accomplishment. Here can be found all my TV criticism, which amounts to very little. I've better things to do with my time.

Bold print and faint print
Some Mediocrity Celebrity Worshippers: 1. Razia Iqbal
2 . Will Gompertz
3 . Michael Savage
What is a mediocrity?
Richard Booth, Private Eye and Edgeways Books

Bold print and faint print

Bold print is well established, but I see the need to use faint print or very faint print for some purposes - for writing about the world of Big Brother, celebrities, game show presenters, so many other presenters and other TV dross, supermodels - just call them 'models.' These and others are given so much publicity that the least I can do is give them none at all, and if on the rarest of rare occasions I do mention them, as here, to use faint print or very faint print, reserving normal print for people who deserve it and for real achievement. I use faint print too for people who have no connection with celebrities, the excesses of the media, but for mediocrities - the word is used here in a restricted way. I use faint print sparingly on this page, not consistently. I use it for the first occurrence of a name, or for a few, just enough to show some of its uses.

Some mediocrity celebrity worshippers

1. Razia Iqbal

I don't own a TV, I've never owned a TV and I never will own a TV. Visits to other houses give me a tantalizing glimpse of what I'm missing by not owning 'The Great Educator.' I'd concede that I may be missing some good programmes as well as dross.

'News at Ten,' as well as showing the desperate and grotesque state of the world shows too the desperate and grotesque state of the media, such as the BBC itself. On one occasion, before a businessman could say a few straightforward words, he was shown as moving with jerky movements from place to place in the room where he was filmed. Jokey camera effects are becoming obligatory. The BBC has some very good correspondents, but Razia Iqbal, the BBC's 'arts correspondent' [now ex-arts correspondent] wasn't amongst them. Her reports were gems - the sort you find in tacky rings costing 20p or so.

Against all the odds - the trashy cult of celebrity, of 'big names,' 'top stories,' bureaucracy, mental stagnation, indifference, stupidity - there are still writers, artists, publishers, booksellers, editors, critics, gallery owners and even, perhaps, arts administrators with a concern for excellence. Their finances are often precarious, their future prospects are precarious, they may well receive next to no recognition in the wider world.

Razia Iqbal took the easy way, which has advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages:

A good income, much, much higher than the income of most of the people with genuine artistic commitment.
Labour-saving. No need to think. Just use pre-existing phrases such as 'A-list celebrities.'

Disadvantage:

Not having the satisfaction, surely, of real achievement, or any achievement at all, the feeling, surely, of hollowness, the feeling that all contributions are instantly forgettable, negligible, without any individuality (due to dependence on labour-saving phrases.)

* Some of Razia Iqbal's characteristic comments:

Drooling over 'A-list celebrities ' at the premiere of the film 'The Golden Compass.'

'Despite celebrity endorsement from the likes of Noel Kidman...' (on the fashion designer Karl Lagersfeld.)

A report on Annie Leibovitz (described by Razia Iqbal as a 'celebrity photographer') was embarrassingly bad even by her standards, with multiple mentions of the celebrity word.

When she reported on the promotion of the arts in Folkestone, Kent, the report was almost completely concerned not with the arts in question, with any artistic qualities but with economic regeneration. The same arguments have been made for 'super-casinoes,' their supposed benefits for the economic regeneration of an area. Developers are generally no more interested in the arts than in super-casinoes, but for the time being at least, the arts have more prestige.

Comments on the painter Francis Bacon by Razia Iqbal and others:

Ian Chilvers 'Characteristically his paintings show single figures in isolation or despair, set in a bleak, sometimes cage-like space, and at times accompanied by hunks of raw meat: 'we are all meat, we are potential carcasses,' he said in 1966.'

Peter Fuller 'Bacon is an artist of persuasive power and undeniable ability; but he has used his expressive skills to denigrate and degrade. He presents one aspect of the human condition as necessary and universal truth.'

David Sylvester 'The paintings are a huge affirmation that human vulnerability is countered by human vitality. They are a shout of defiance in the face of death.'

From the Times Obituary 'the sense he gave of the ultimate seriousness of art.'

Razia Iqbal: 'Many of his paintings are owned by celebrities.' (I'm relying on memory here. The 'many' may have been 'some.')

A comment of mine on Razia Iqbal: 'The sense she gives of the ultimate frivolity and unimportance of art, regarded as an agent of economic regeneration, as a source of gossip and as a status symbol for 'celebrities.' She has a consuming interest in A-list celebrities. She was surely an F-list arts correspondent.'

On Razia Iqbal's obsession with money as well as celebrities, from the Web site 'Open Democracy.'

http://opendemocracy.net/blog/tony_curzon_price/rowling

'But however much Razia Iqbal started in any of these directions, there was one direction that kept pulling her back: Rowling's [my faint print] huge wealth. First we had to be told that having sold millions of books, she was very wealthy; then, a few minutes later, that "Rowling never needs to write again" [for a living], and then, a few minutes later, Rowling was asked whether she was motivated by guilt, "since she has so much"...'

But I'm not suggesting that in other respects she's off-putting. She does seem to be a pleasant enough person.

This fixation on 'celebrities' has the most severe consequences for many, many gifted, interesting, outstanding people. It leads to far fewer opportunities for unknowns to make their mark - and make a living - in literature, the theatre and other arts. The fixation denies to published writers the recognition they deserve - and the money they deserve.

2. Will Gompertz is someone I know very little about. I know that he was appointed the BBC's 'Arts Editor.' Razia Iqbal obviously felt that she was well qualified for the job but wasn't successful and I can understand why - the reasons, of course, have nothing to do with artistic values or anything in the least important, but this is how I see it. No matter how trivial, fatuous or ridiculous the matter is, Razia Iqbal takes it utterly seriously and reports it with high seriousness. There are signs that Will Gompertz has just as deluded a view of what's important but he has this advantage over Razia Iqbal - he's far more of a motivator, his leaden prose has wings. When he addresses the camera, it's as if he's saying 'you haven't lived until you've seen, heard, read this [fatuous and unimportant piece of dross.]' I haven't heard him use the phrase, but he seems to be telling us 'This is a MUST-SEE' production or whatever it may be.

3. . Michael Savage, writing about Beethoven's 5th Symphony in 'The Independent,' under the heading 'Da-da-da-dum! Beethoven sales soar.' '200 years on, the work is enjoying a revival after an unlikely pair of celebrity conductors directed Ludwig van Beethoven's masterpiece during the BBC's reality television series, Maestro.' I've no idea who this 'unlikely pair of celebrity conductors' are who conducted Beethoven's 5th and I'm only mildly curious. The pair called Ant and Dec?

Masterpiece! Why do these people have to be so predictable? I wouldn't have expected a mention of some other masterly works of Beethoven, such as the Eroica Symphony or the 7th Symphony or the Choral Symphony, let alone any of the late piano sonatas or any of the late quartets - just some slight attempt to deflect the notion that here's someone who doesn't know what he's talking about.If the subject was Mozart, it's likely that Savage would be writing about 'Mozart's Masterpiece, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik' or 'Bach's Masterpiece the Air on a G string, as used in the Hamlet adverts.' 'Dvorak's Masterpiece' would be 'the movement from the New World Symphony, as used in the Hovis advertisement.' We have in his piece too that absolutely decisive criterion of importance, soaring sales. Beethoven himself thought that his Quartet in C sharp minor was his best work, not his 5th Symphony. As it has never enjoyed soaring sales and never will, it won't be of any interest at all to Savage.

What is a mediocrity?

I don't use the word in its usual sense. Strictly, I should use the word 'mediocrity (2)' to show that I'm using what I call a second meaning. Mediocrity (2) is used in an attempt to be scrupulously fair, to take note of complexities, complications, paradoxes, to express the fact that very often, our information is incomplete, to give 'the benefit of the doubt.' In the technical terms of Linkage Theory, {resolution}:- /mediocrity/.

I think that Razia Iqbal was a mediocre arts critic on the basis of the evidence I have, that she's a mediocrity (2), a mediocrity only in a restricted sense, although, since her job was that of an arts critic, the restricted sense is very important. I don't claim that she's a mediocrity (1), a mediocrity in the usual sense. My knowledge is too limited to claim that.

In the section above, I criticize the diseased world of Big Brother and the rest. I don't claim that people who love the programme are necessarily mediocrities, either (1) or (2). Big Brother is popular viewing for the British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. No matter what our view of the politics, the armed forces of a democracy who are carrying out their task with such courage and professionalism are entitled not to grudging respect but wholehearted respect and support. In the Second World War, the 'mediocrities' of peace time showed such courage in depth-charged submarines, in burning aircraft and burning tanks, amongst minefields, in the bombed cities, in all the theatres of war. They shouldn't be described as mediocrities in the established meaning.

Richard Booth, Private Eye and Edgeways Books

A letter cancelling my subscription (revised in a few places):

'I've subscribed to Private Eye for many years. I've cancelled my subscription now. Bookworm's attack on Richard Booth of Hay-on-Wye was vindictive. This was low-level gossip, smirking, smug and unscrupulous. Richard Booth wasn't and isn't a mediocrity. What he's achieved is remarkable, outstanding - the creation, against all the odds, including bankruptcy, of the first of the Book Towns, but much more besides. In a degraded culture based on celebrity-worship and the distortions of the media (including your own distortions) he has caused no harm and done a great deal of good. To call him 'Bokassa' is ridiculous, demeaning and insulting. The Kingdom of Hay, the Hay passport, the 'Hay-on-Wye navy' (a single boat on the River Wye) are no evidence of megalomania but a combination of tongue-in-cheek cheekiness and deadly serious protest against deadening uniformity. He's exceptionally interesting and a sworn enemy of bureaucrats and commercialisation. Is his justified protest against the commercialisation of the Hay-on-Wye Festival something to be held up to ridicule?

'The unspeakable Bookworm refers to so-called 'grand gestures' and claims that Richard Booth 'lacks the energy to follow them up nowadays.' Richard Booth had a life-threatening brain tumour. He's worked very hard for a very long time. He's earned the right to take things easier many times over.

Yours, with revulsion,

Paul Hurt.'

Well before Bookworm's attack, I'd become more and more disillusioned and disappointed. The inventiveness of 'Private Eye' was still very impressive. The vigour it still showed was directed far more often against minor bureaucrats and politicians than in any attacks on the state of literature and the media. Here, it had become soft-centred.

The Web site of Edgeways Books has superb comment on the decline of Private Eye. I'd recommend it wholeheartedly.

From http://www.edgewaysbooks.com/

Eyewash

'A magazine that doesn't see the simple foulness of Celebrity Big Brother has just joined the misery it exists to satirise. There are other things to read in the world.'

From

http://www.edgewaysbooks.com/eyewash/Whats_Wrong_1.pdf

'What Bookworm has taken to doing in default is weak: merely doing what he rest of the paper does, picking on those weaker than himself, the easy targets...' [I would qualify this. Not all Bookworm's targets are weaker than Bookworm. Richard Booth is in no way a weaker person than Bookworm.]

See also the pages on 'Private Eye' which can be reached from:

http://www.edgewaysbooks.com/Eyewash.html

and the pages of incisive comment which can be reached from:

http://www.edgewaysbooks.com/columns.html and

http://www.edgewaysbooks.com/magazine.html

The Brynmill Press is the publishing side of Edgeways Books. See the further comment below, in the section Linkage isolation: atheism.