English self-deprecation
Oct. 7th, 2005 09:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus[Poll #584989]
In Venice I interviewed a highly successful illustrator. He also happened to be an Englishman. In the course of our interview he told me three highly self-deprecating things:
1. His life wasn't glamourous at all.
2. He couldn't draw.
3. He understood nothing about the world.
But when I actually went back and listened more carefully, I realised that his self-deprecation concealed some rather different messages:
1.His life wasn't glamourous. He ought to be paid more to appear at conferences, stay in the best hotels, and fly first class.
2.He couldn't draw. His brain moved so quickly that his hand couldn't keep up with the stream of ideas.
3.He didn't understand the world. The world had gone mad.
I did a Google search on "English self-deprecation".
First of all I found Minette Marin saying (in the Daily Telegraph, in 1999):
"To me, as an American on my father's side, one of the most unattractive aspects of Englishness has always been false modesty. It's called self-deprecation, but springs from a deep sense of superiority (not unjustified, and all the more annoying for that) and it was traditionally both a ruse to placate inferiors and a game to tease equals - a national form of self-aggrandisement and exclusion. These days the self-deprecation with which the English accept their marginalisation in their own country may not be quite in the grand old English manner. But it is deeply insincere for all that. Those contemporary English liberals and intellectuals who cry stinking fish in their own backyard, and celebrate every ethnic identity but their own, do so out of the same deep sense of superiority as their forebears, but it is today a superiority which they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge to themselves; that would be racism, and indeed it is. And that is why the hypocrisy of English self-deprecation is greater than ever before, and why it is accompanied by a new bad faith and a new subliminal guilt. It is dishonest and patronising; respect to others depends on truth to oneself. I believe it may be this which has distorted contemporary discussions of ethnicity, race and identity. It is understandable that these questions should provoke so much anxiety and confusion; they are painful and intractable subjects. But no good purpose can be served by dangerous and dishonest self-deprecation, which others will take only too literally, with disastrous results; that is one aspect of Englishness, at least, that the English must renounce, at the end of the 20th century."
This is clearly an attack on self-deprecation from the right, a call for the masters to remain masters and to rule unashamedly, rather than cede, be marginalised in their own homeland (presumably by Johnny Foreigner), or celebrate the Other.
This relationship between self-deprecation and appreciation of the Other appeared in the next thing I looked at, a piece about travel journalism by Elaine Wolff. She compares Joseph Rosendo, American producer and host of Travelscope, with Cash Peters, a British travel journalist:
"There's a little Marco Polo in all of us, and [American] Rosendo views his programs and eponymous publication as a way to encourage conscientous travel. "Try to impact the destination as little as possible," he says. "Try to get into where these people are coming from; try to mirror them instead of imposing your views of what this society should be like on them."
"Oh, my gosh. I wish I were so virtuous," [Englishman] Cash Peters says, laughing, in the heavy English accent (Ringo Starr-like in its heavy nasality and muddled vowels) familiar to fans of NPR's Marketplace and the Savvy Traveler. While filming his new Travel Channel series, Stranded with Cash Peters, the host spent time tempting the confirmed Luddites of the South Pacific's Tanna Island with radio and other wonders of Western civilization. "I tried several times: 'Wouldn't you just like to sit in a car?'" he recalls. "I couldn't understand why they wouldn't wear trousers. It really was the most phenomenal experience. There are people in the world that genuinely don't share your enthusiasm for progress."
"That charming English self-deprecation aside, Peters' curiosity about other people - about "the other" in all its forms - drives the show," Wolff assures us. But here Cash Peters' "self-deprecation" is in fact a statement that he refuses to meet 'the Other' on its own terms, and considers his own civilisation more advanced. In other words, he's using self-deprecation in quite the opposite way than the one described by Minette Marin, with the opposite result on his relationship with 'the Other'. She would presumably approve of his refusal to embrace Rosendo's wishy-washy left-wing relativism. Self-deprecation here is clearly a way of saying "I'm better, and I won't change". The statement "I wish I were so virtuous" actually means "I have no intention of being a Goody Twoshoes like Rosendo". Click radio buttons 1,3 and 4 above.
Next I found an interesting passage about D.H. Lawrence, an old hero of mine. Ryan McCarthy wrote:
"What runs through Lawrence's body of work like a vein of thought is his sense that England stands at the edge of demise. Scott's rhetorical question burns through him: "Breathes there a man with soul so dead?" Lawrence's perception drives him to answer in the affirmative, on behalf of every man in England — the land of the "darkness that doesn't speak" (II 250). He feels the "strange germ" (253) of the English way closing in around him. Yet he is undeniably an Englishman. Where does that place him among the sugar-sprinklers of complacency, those men he derides so vehemently? A better question might be to ask where it places us. This presents a complicated dilemma, since Lawrence's conclusions seem so sudden and arbitrary. In the case of "On Coming Home," his imagery brings us the scene. We are to imagine an "absentness," a "soft, vague . . . curious stillness" that makes everything seem "dead, muffled" (252). Lawrence compares the feeling to that of being placed in the smallest of many boxes that fit inside each other-a "shut-in-edness" (253). Those of us who do not share Lawrence's acute power of perception gain its result when the language drives our minds to a claustrophobic state. What he hopes we see, despite the English ego that he observes, is a fear in his kinsmen, a sad way of self-deprecation. They are self-contained and self-protecting, and the land to which Scott refers becomes for the Englishmen a "crystal bubble" of isolation (252). Lawrence concludes "On Coming Home" condemning the half-hidden English self-deprecation, saying, "Men have no business on their knees"."
This made me think about another of my English heroes, David Bowie, and his relationship with self-deprecation. Listen to this short clip of a Bowie interview from the 70s, for instance, and then listen to comedian John Shuttleworth's put-down, and the audience's reaction:
David Bowie clip (mp3 file)
It seems that Bowie is being fairly realistic in his balanced self-assessment. "I'm not very reliable as an artist. Sometimes I'm bloody awful... and sometimes I'm incredible." So why does that make him "a pretentious git"? Is there a "fuck you" hidden in the too-easy confession of unreliability, as if he's dismissing reliability as boring and unartistic? There's certainly no earnest promise to improve the consistency of his quality control. This is an apology without an apology, like so much self-deprecation. But I suspect that if Bowie had limited his statement to the two negatives, the bits I think are most arrogant;
a) I'm not very reliable.
b) Sometimes I'm bloody awful.
nobody English would have complained. It's these bits they don't like:
c) I'm an artist.
d) Sometimes I'm incredible.
It's interesting that Bowie went to live in America shortly after giving this interview, and has never returned. Attitudes to self are very different in America. There, it's not only acceptable to hype and trumpet yourself, it's expected. People who don't do it are shooting themselves in the foot.
One thing I've noticed about my own life is that in England I "couldn't get ahead". To this day, when I get offers to write books, stage art shows, teach, write journalism and so on, they come from Japan and America, not Britain. It still rankles that I was never offered a Peel session when I was working in the UK—which meant that I basically couldn't get onto the map of indie there, let alone the map of the mainstream—while someone like Dave Gedge seemed to live at Maida Vale, his life an endless BBC session. What did Dave Gedge have that I didn't? Talent... or self-deprecation?
I look up Amazon customer reviews for Gedge compilations and there, sure enough, the term is quick to appear. Twice in the same paragraph, in fact:
"David Gedge writes romantic songs. Not Barry-White-silk-sheets romantic, nor Jacques-Brel-gauloise romantic, and definitely not boy-band-xmas-single romantic. Gedge's songs are a kind of realistic romanticism - he can turn a one-night stand into a self-deprecating tale of regret and recrimination (Interstate 5), he can capture that story of a relationship which never really takes off, but does just enough to survive until someone calls time (I'm from Further North than You). He has a very English self-deprecation (even though many of the tracks on this album are tales from America, where it was recorded), and he is fascinated with the mundane but telling exchanges which more often mark a relationship than the big bust-ups and make-ups."
The most self-deprecating blogger I know—and someone who did, I believe, play a Peel session—is Rhodri Marsden.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rhodri and I read each other's blogs with a sort of fascinated horror. We've agreed to incarnate each other's utter opposites, although we share some readers who somehow find it in themselves to love us both. As Rhodri's hilarious anecdotes of self-deprecation (tales of how he was beaten up by little girls at Piccadilly Circus tube station and so on) accumulated, I formed a picture in my mind of someone as ineffectual as his LJ icon, a plump, balding clown holding up a placard that says "I give up!" But when I finally met Rhodri, at a gig we played together at Bush Hall, I found him rather brusque and burly, a bit of a bruiser. He gave me the lion's share of the concert fees, but seemed curiously keen that his act rather than mine should top the bill. Rhodri had a bit of a secret rock star ego, and having a rock star ego, it seemed, was far from incompatible with telling humiliating stories about yourself.
I wondered if my "couldn't get ahead" problem with England was due to the fact that I don't do this self-deprecation thing. Am I a boast? To find out, I went back to my very first UK music press interviews. What kind of impression had I made on the writers?
The adjective used most frequently about me is "quiet". Others are well-spoken, nervous, earnest, enthusiastic, optimistic, modest. I'm described as "talking with the slightly gauche, self-mocking air of the academic, quoting proudly, fidgeting constantly". I seem ill-at-ease with the idea of being interviewed at all: "'The language one explains things in is disgusting,' he spits. 'It's self-indulgence.'" Re-reading those interviews, I can see quite clearly why I failed in Britain. It's because (like everybody in my family) I'm a teacher. Britain has always underpaid teachers.
Well, since I'm really an academic, perhaps it's appropriate that my final stop on the journey towards understanding the enigma of self-deprecation should be a piece of research into Cultural Psychology, Beyond Self-Presentation: Evidence for Self-Criticism Among Japanese by Heine, Takata and Lehman. They report their finding that "whereas Canadians were reluctant to conclude that they had performed worse than their average classmate, Japanese were hesitant to conclude that they had performed better... The present findings are important because past self-enhancement studies were conducted via questionnaire, and the possibility remained that the greater self-enhancement exhibited by North Americans was due to false bravado, and, likewise, the greater self-criticism exhibited by Japanese was owing to feigned modesty... This study provides further evidence that Japanese tend to search for their weaknesses and shortcomings in an apparent effort to correct them. Self-enhancing motivations, routinely found within North American research, are elusive within a Japanese context. In contrast to motivations to find out what is good about themselves, Japanese appear more motivated to discover where they are not doing good enough. This cultural practice of self-criticism appears to serve Japanese in their quest to achieve connection and interpersonal harmony with others."
So next time you hear an English person doing the self-deprecation thing, ask yourself whether he's "searching for weaknesses and shortcomings in an apparent effort to correct them"... or doing that weirdly static, invertedly arrogant thing: boasting about inadequacies. If he's a potential lover or husband, remember that his winning annoucement that he's "a bit crap in bed, actually" means that you may never have another orgasm during intercourse, and that he won't be taking notes when you try to tell him how.
In Venice I interviewed a highly successful illustrator. He also happened to be an Englishman. In the course of our interview he told me three highly self-deprecating things:
1. His life wasn't glamourous at all.
2. He couldn't draw.
3. He understood nothing about the world.
But when I actually went back and listened more carefully, I realised that his self-deprecation concealed some rather different messages:
1.
2.
3.
I did a Google search on "English self-deprecation".
First of all I found Minette Marin saying (in the Daily Telegraph, in 1999):
"To me, as an American on my father's side, one of the most unattractive aspects of Englishness has always been false modesty. It's called self-deprecation, but springs from a deep sense of superiority (not unjustified, and all the more annoying for that) and it was traditionally both a ruse to placate inferiors and a game to tease equals - a national form of self-aggrandisement and exclusion. These days the self-deprecation with which the English accept their marginalisation in their own country may not be quite in the grand old English manner. But it is deeply insincere for all that. Those contemporary English liberals and intellectuals who cry stinking fish in their own backyard, and celebrate every ethnic identity but their own, do so out of the same deep sense of superiority as their forebears, but it is today a superiority which they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge to themselves; that would be racism, and indeed it is. And that is why the hypocrisy of English self-deprecation is greater than ever before, and why it is accompanied by a new bad faith and a new subliminal guilt. It is dishonest and patronising; respect to others depends on truth to oneself. I believe it may be this which has distorted contemporary discussions of ethnicity, race and identity. It is understandable that these questions should provoke so much anxiety and confusion; they are painful and intractable subjects. But no good purpose can be served by dangerous and dishonest self-deprecation, which others will take only too literally, with disastrous results; that is one aspect of Englishness, at least, that the English must renounce, at the end of the 20th century."
This is clearly an attack on self-deprecation from the right, a call for the masters to remain masters and to rule unashamedly, rather than cede, be marginalised in their own homeland (presumably by Johnny Foreigner), or celebrate the Other.
This relationship between self-deprecation and appreciation of the Other appeared in the next thing I looked at, a piece about travel journalism by Elaine Wolff. She compares Joseph Rosendo, American producer and host of Travelscope, with Cash Peters, a British travel journalist:
"There's a little Marco Polo in all of us, and [American] Rosendo views his programs and eponymous publication as a way to encourage conscientous travel. "Try to impact the destination as little as possible," he says. "Try to get into where these people are coming from; try to mirror them instead of imposing your views of what this society should be like on them."
"Oh, my gosh. I wish I were so virtuous," [Englishman] Cash Peters says, laughing, in the heavy English accent (Ringo Starr-like in its heavy nasality and muddled vowels) familiar to fans of NPR's Marketplace and the Savvy Traveler. While filming his new Travel Channel series, Stranded with Cash Peters, the host spent time tempting the confirmed Luddites of the South Pacific's Tanna Island with radio and other wonders of Western civilization. "I tried several times: 'Wouldn't you just like to sit in a car?'" he recalls. "I couldn't understand why they wouldn't wear trousers. It really was the most phenomenal experience. There are people in the world that genuinely don't share your enthusiasm for progress."
"That charming English self-deprecation aside, Peters' curiosity about other people - about "the other" in all its forms - drives the show," Wolff assures us. But here Cash Peters' "self-deprecation" is in fact a statement that he refuses to meet 'the Other' on its own terms, and considers his own civilisation more advanced. In other words, he's using self-deprecation in quite the opposite way than the one described by Minette Marin, with the opposite result on his relationship with 'the Other'. She would presumably approve of his refusal to embrace Rosendo's wishy-washy left-wing relativism. Self-deprecation here is clearly a way of saying "I'm better, and I won't change". The statement "I wish I were so virtuous" actually means "I have no intention of being a Goody Twoshoes like Rosendo". Click radio buttons 1,3 and 4 above.
Next I found an interesting passage about D.H. Lawrence, an old hero of mine. Ryan McCarthy wrote:
"What runs through Lawrence's body of work like a vein of thought is his sense that England stands at the edge of demise. Scott's rhetorical question burns through him: "Breathes there a man with soul so dead?" Lawrence's perception drives him to answer in the affirmative, on behalf of every man in England — the land of the "darkness that doesn't speak" (II 250). He feels the "strange germ" (253) of the English way closing in around him. Yet he is undeniably an Englishman. Where does that place him among the sugar-sprinklers of complacency, those men he derides so vehemently? A better question might be to ask where it places us. This presents a complicated dilemma, since Lawrence's conclusions seem so sudden and arbitrary. In the case of "On Coming Home," his imagery brings us the scene. We are to imagine an "absentness," a "soft, vague . . . curious stillness" that makes everything seem "dead, muffled" (252). Lawrence compares the feeling to that of being placed in the smallest of many boxes that fit inside each other-a "shut-in-edness" (253). Those of us who do not share Lawrence's acute power of perception gain its result when the language drives our minds to a claustrophobic state. What he hopes we see, despite the English ego that he observes, is a fear in his kinsmen, a sad way of self-deprecation. They are self-contained and self-protecting, and the land to which Scott refers becomes for the Englishmen a "crystal bubble" of isolation (252). Lawrence concludes "On Coming Home" condemning the half-hidden English self-deprecation, saying, "Men have no business on their knees"."This made me think about another of my English heroes, David Bowie, and his relationship with self-deprecation. Listen to this short clip of a Bowie interview from the 70s, for instance, and then listen to comedian John Shuttleworth's put-down, and the audience's reaction:
David Bowie clip (mp3 file)
It seems that Bowie is being fairly realistic in his balanced self-assessment. "I'm not very reliable as an artist. Sometimes I'm bloody awful... and sometimes I'm incredible." So why does that make him "a pretentious git"? Is there a "fuck you" hidden in the too-easy confession of unreliability, as if he's dismissing reliability as boring and unartistic? There's certainly no earnest promise to improve the consistency of his quality control. This is an apology without an apology, like so much self-deprecation. But I suspect that if Bowie had limited his statement to the two negatives, the bits I think are most arrogant;
a) I'm not very reliable.
b) Sometimes I'm bloody awful.
nobody English would have complained. It's these bits they don't like:
c) I'm an artist.
d) Sometimes I'm incredible.
It's interesting that Bowie went to live in America shortly after giving this interview, and has never returned. Attitudes to self are very different in America. There, it's not only acceptable to hype and trumpet yourself, it's expected. People who don't do it are shooting themselves in the foot.
One thing I've noticed about my own life is that in England I "couldn't get ahead". To this day, when I get offers to write books, stage art shows, teach, write journalism and so on, they come from Japan and America, not Britain. It still rankles that I was never offered a Peel session when I was working in the UK—which meant that I basically couldn't get onto the map of indie there, let alone the map of the mainstream—while someone like Dave Gedge seemed to live at Maida Vale, his life an endless BBC session. What did Dave Gedge have that I didn't? Talent... or self-deprecation?
I look up Amazon customer reviews for Gedge compilations and there, sure enough, the term is quick to appear. Twice in the same paragraph, in fact:
"David Gedge writes romantic songs. Not Barry-White-silk-sheets romantic, nor Jacques-Brel-gauloise romantic, and definitely not boy-band-xmas-single romantic. Gedge's songs are a kind of realistic romanticism - he can turn a one-night stand into a self-deprecating tale of regret and recrimination (Interstate 5), he can capture that story of a relationship which never really takes off, but does just enough to survive until someone calls time (I'm from Further North than You). He has a very English self-deprecation (even though many of the tracks on this album are tales from America, where it was recorded), and he is fascinated with the mundane but telling exchanges which more often mark a relationship than the big bust-ups and make-ups."
The most self-deprecating blogger I know—and someone who did, I believe, play a Peel session—is Rhodri Marsden.
rhodri and I read each other's blogs with a sort of fascinated horror. We've agreed to incarnate each other's utter opposites, although we share some readers who somehow find it in themselves to love us both. As Rhodri's hilarious anecdotes of self-deprecation (tales of how he was beaten up by little girls at Piccadilly Circus tube station and so on) accumulated, I formed a picture in my mind of someone as ineffectual as his LJ icon, a plump, balding clown holding up a placard that says "I give up!" But when I finally met Rhodri, at a gig we played together at Bush Hall, I found him rather brusque and burly, a bit of a bruiser. He gave me the lion's share of the concert fees, but seemed curiously keen that his act rather than mine should top the bill. Rhodri had a bit of a secret rock star ego, and having a rock star ego, it seemed, was far from incompatible with telling humiliating stories about yourself.I wondered if my "couldn't get ahead" problem with England was due to the fact that I don't do this self-deprecation thing. Am I a boast? To find out, I went back to my very first UK music press interviews. What kind of impression had I made on the writers?
The adjective used most frequently about me is "quiet". Others are well-spoken, nervous, earnest, enthusiastic, optimistic, modest. I'm described as "talking with the slightly gauche, self-mocking air of the academic, quoting proudly, fidgeting constantly". I seem ill-at-ease with the idea of being interviewed at all: "'The language one explains things in is disgusting,' he spits. 'It's self-indulgence.'" Re-reading those interviews, I can see quite clearly why I failed in Britain. It's because (like everybody in my family) I'm a teacher. Britain has always underpaid teachers.
Well, since I'm really an academic, perhaps it's appropriate that my final stop on the journey towards understanding the enigma of self-deprecation should be a piece of research into Cultural Psychology, Beyond Self-Presentation: Evidence for Self-Criticism Among Japanese by Heine, Takata and Lehman. They report their finding that "whereas Canadians were reluctant to conclude that they had performed worse than their average classmate, Japanese were hesitant to conclude that they had performed better... The present findings are important because past self-enhancement studies were conducted via questionnaire, and the possibility remained that the greater self-enhancement exhibited by North Americans was due to false bravado, and, likewise, the greater self-criticism exhibited by Japanese was owing to feigned modesty... This study provides further evidence that Japanese tend to search for their weaknesses and shortcomings in an apparent effort to correct them. Self-enhancing motivations, routinely found within North American research, are elusive within a Japanese context. In contrast to motivations to find out what is good about themselves, Japanese appear more motivated to discover where they are not doing good enough. This cultural practice of self-criticism appears to serve Japanese in their quest to achieve connection and interpersonal harmony with others."
So next time you hear an English person doing the self-deprecation thing, ask yourself whether he's "searching for weaknesses and shortcomings in an apparent effort to correct them"... or doing that weirdly static, invertedly arrogant thing: boasting about inadequacies. If he's a potential lover or husband, remember that his winning annoucement that he's "a bit crap in bed, actually" means that you may never have another orgasm during intercourse, and that he won't be taking notes when you try to tell him how.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 07:39 am (UTC)Is it even possible to make a truly self-deprecatory statement, or is the very form always a veiled boast? If one were truly humble, after all, one might not draw attention to oneself in such a way - in the same sense as Borges story in which Judas is the true Jesus, having taken on the heavier task (of course, it might be a question of practical importance in which an admission would be necessary - 'I'm a bit crap at making seatbelts, actually').
So in that sense, at least in some cases, the boast is inherent in the form because it makes a virtue of necessity. I may not be happy that I actually am crap at X, something which I value but which I truly believe I'm incompetent at, either because I have other priorities, or (the more interesting possibility) because I know so much about X that I understand my own limitations much better than someone who knows less; but given the fact that I am, what are my possibilities?
Boasting is rarely endearing, but given the choice I'd prefer mine veiled rather than open. But perhaps that's another manifestation of an English-originating concept of 'tastefulness' as opposed to 'vulgarity'.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 07:40 am (UTC)Should be "Peters's..".
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 07:48 am (UTC)An Englishman boards an English Airways jet, and buckles himself in. They take off, and the Captain comes on the PA. "Good afternoon, I'm your captain," he says, "and I'm a bit crap at flying, actually." Then the hostess comes down the aisle with snacks and drinks. "Do you want the ham or the cheese sandwich? They both a bit crap, to be honest," she says. The American sitting next to the Englishman leans over and says "The service on this plane is terrible, why don't you complain?" "Oh, I'm a bit crap at complaining," says the Englishman.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 07:50 am (UTC)It seems, as the US becomes more and more self-absorbed, Canadian politicians and writers and citizens are realizing that we are really needing to realize how much we have right, instead of merely criticizing ourselves all over the place "in the grand old English manner."
It's an interesting listen for a Canadian in America, perhaps not so much for anyone without a bit of vested interest in Canada. Developing a national identity is like being an angsty teenager.
All that aside, it really seems that Angrael is turning into a great celebration of social stagnation and autoxenophobia (fear of others at home) and ... it's a bit sad. But hopefully it won't be too contagious.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 08:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 08:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 08:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 08:48 am (UTC)I always think this self-deprecation thing is especially sad when its observed manifesting in children, who should be incredibly proud of their achievements and be able to take pleasure in what they can do. Sadly the evil demon flipside of 'self-deprecation' is 'being seen to be a dreadful show-off' - something which in Britain, it would appear, is seen as horribly crass and inappropriate and - dare I say it - a little bit 'too American'.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 08:53 am (UTC)A self-deprecator writes...
Date: 2005-10-07 09:16 am (UTC)I'm bad at a few small things. I make a decent cup of tea, but I'm lost with the fruit teas and herbal infusions my partner and her friends seem to enjoy. Without milk even! With honey instead of sugar! I explain time and time again that the results will be some dreadful rainwater, yet still they insist, and yet again I end up tipping the things down the sink when they've left.
I can't judge the quality of them because I don't like them, and so I've no appreciation of what makes one better than some other. So I've no means of improving. Of course, I can improve by studying the feedback I'm given, but that is a pretty poor barometer compared to ones own innate sensibilities.
It sounds silly, doesn't it? - but I apply similar criteria to whatever task I'm undertaking.
"A bit crap in bed, actually?" -- well, far be it from me to blow my own trumpet, but...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 09:23 am (UTC)I'm not sure that Rhodri's decision to be the final act might in part be because English audiences generally expect an evening in a music venue to end with a band rather than a solo performer. The poor souls get confused if you depart from this tradition.
Synchronicity II
Date: 2005-10-07 09:25 am (UTC)I was also thinking about a discussion I had with 3 Korean colleagues today, about differences between (to over-generalise for a moment) the British (English?) and US mindset. I am now wondering whether I wasn't being inversely boastful when I attributed my compatriots tendency towards modesty to the very desire for social cohesion that Momus discusses above. I wanted it to be true, I suppose, as it's something I love about Korean society, but now I'm not so sure.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 09:26 am (UTC)Btw, I recently saw an article that tied into this distinction, claiming that the key difference between England and America is that England has eccentrics where America has exhibitionists (http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110007099).
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 09:37 am (UTC)– The notion that the English are inherently self-depracating just isn't true. Inner city pubs on Friday and Saturday nights are not full of people standing at the bar saying "no, after you, really, no, I was here first but you look thirstier than me." There is misguided, swaggering bravado everywhere you look. I imagine that the majority of English people that
– There was an interesting exchange the other day on a friend's blog about how she, as an American, was taught throughout school that their nation is the best in the world. Any lessons that we had concerning our own country tending to focus on the fact that we used to be the best in the world.
– Self depracation, to my mind, isn't inherently a bad thing. Unless it ends up screwing up your life. But I don't think that I'm self depracating on my blog; all I do is choose to make public various incidents which make me look stupid, or erroneous of judgement. We all have these moments. Suppressing them is perfectly normal, but it seems that telling people about them is disarming. That doesn't mean that I don't think that I'm a great musician, or a great writer; I know that my destiny is to blast my talentless scumbag rivals out of the water. But when I don't know what someone is talking about, I'll say so. When someone uses a word I don't understand the meaning of, I ask them. Although I'm loath to make this a trawl through my own personality – how un-English would that be? – I'd say that my close friends probably like me because I'm prepared to admit my failures. Last night I stood outside a venue in Kings Cross, telling one of my friends about the bizarre anxiety I'm going through at the moment, a constant feeling of fear. We laughed about it. I like that. And in turn I'd much rather hang out with people who take a moment to reveal their own inadequacies, or perhaps consider whether someone else might deserve something before they do.
– I found him rather brusque and burly, a bit of a bruiser.
Sorry about that, Nick. Doesn't sound like me. The burly I can understand. The brusque I might put down to me actually being quite shy, and you being quite unapproachable. The bruiser... you make it sound like we stood backstage, having an intense exchange about who would headline, with you cowering in the corner as my chubby shadow fell menacingly across your eyepatch. Of course, what actually happened was that we had a polite email exchange in February, which ended:
R: If you're happy playing after us, and you want to, I'm absolutely fine with that. Just tell me.
M: Given all that you've said, I don't mind playing first, actually, so I get people's ears while they're still fresh.
– As to not getting ahead... the only people who do get ahead over here – and anywhere – are the pushy ones, the ones who are willing to barge their way through, to scam their way into opportunities. Perhaps you didn't make it over here because you were younger, you talked the talk, but you didn't have anything to back it up. Now, you've worn people down, you've assembed a big catalogue of great work, you're reaping the rewards. I think that's a far better way to achieve success, don't you?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 09:39 am (UTC)Nick knows this, of course, but my consideration for English audiences doesn't fit in with the "rock star ego" thing, ha.
What happened in the event, of course, was that Momus was great and went down really well, and then we went on and played a bit of a damp squib. But hey, who could have predicted that?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 09:44 am (UTC)"The English are just wankers. But we were *colonised* by wankers".
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 09:51 am (UTC)But actually my suspicion about Rhodri is that he's a clever infiltrator. You can tell from his name that he's really Welsh, and therefore, like me, a Celt and a teacher. But he's "passing" in English society by being "more English than the English". And it's working: he's getting journalism gigs with publications which wouldn't give me the time of day. Infidel!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 09:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 09:55 am (UTC)But this is EXACTLY what I'm talking about – we were ropey that night, for whatever reason. If we had been brilliant, I'd have said so. If we weren't, I say so. What's the point in pretending? That's not self-depracation, is it?
As for the Welsh thing, well, I'm 1/2 Welsh, but never lived there. And the Welsh don't exactly have a name for themselves as crusading high-flyers, do they.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 09:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 09:59 am (UTC)Actually I think it was very remiss of me to leave class entirely out of an analysis of something English. And your point about "we used to be the best in the world" raises another omission: the dreaded "post-colonial guilt" angle. But that's another PhD.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 10:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 10:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 11:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-07 11:23 am (UTC)http://beautifulposes.blogspot.com