My name in lights. Well, nearly.

I'm pleased to have had a letter published in the Guardian's review section today. It's here, and the article to which it refers is here. Here's the full text of the letter, before the Graun edited it:

"Do we like [Gill's Petra drawings] any less knowing...that...Gill was habitually abusing his two elder daughters?" asks Fiona MacCarthy. Well, I certainly hope so. Let me reframe that question: "Does the knowledge that these are a rapist's portraits of his victim, who also happens to be his daughter, change the way we feel about it?" Are these pictures really still "delicious"?
Sex offenders, by the way, are not motivated by an "overbalance of tendresse". Like other emotionally manipulative people, though, they are often expert at fooling the naive, which makes their behaviour easier to commit and to get away with.

Don't misunderstand me - many forms of transgression are terrific and productive and thrilling in Art and in life. Work of incontestible value has been created by some vile people, too; you could start with Wagner and make a list a mile long. But "impossible to view without a frisson, those delicate, delicious portraits of the teenage Petra"? A "frisson", for goodness sake, like it's just a bit of added spice. For all I know, Petra's still alive, although she must be very ancient if so. She wasn't raped by her father in order to give your viewing experience added flavour, she was raped by her father because he was scum.

Homosexuality is often quoted as the archetypal transgressive behaviour, and the changes in its legal status are testament to the inappropriateness of mistaking "illegal" for "bad". This is not the same thing, though. Even many of those stupid enough to believe that homosexuality is in some sense unnatural, let alone immoral, must, I hope, understand the whole "consenting adults" thing, and why if I call this a crime, it is in a different sense from that in which homosexuality used to be one.

So should we destroy Gill's works? Of course not; see reference to Wagner, above, and no, you don't have to be as good as W. for the argument to apply. And NO, an "it's art" defense does not apply to child pornography. I can recognise, having said that, that the Petra pictures could be seen as occupying something of a grey area in that regard; more thought required, perhaps.

What I do know is that, knowing what they are, I don't want the Petra pictures on my wall.

Anyway - my name's in the paper today!

My Cat Drinks the Blood of the Censorious

The easiest comment to make about this would surely be the timeworn truism that some people have no sense of humour, although that's perhaps not much comfort. Instead, I suggest finding solace in the fact that idiocy is its own punishment.
She had to take her sign down, but the person who made the complaint has to live their whole life as a tedious waste of oxygen who has nothing to offer but to make the world a little greyer. Without question a fender-less eunuch, and a knobshiner to boot. Man, woman or other.
For goodness sake, when did people start to expect to live their lives without ever being offended? (I am in the uncomfortable position of being indebted to Christopher Hitchens to some extent on this one. A rather wonderful conversation between him and Stephen Fry on the theme of blasphemy is available as a podcast - I'll find a link to it at some point soon. Anyway, Hitchens makes this point.) And since when did the population, as a general trend, decide to indulge such nonentities, rather than telling them where to go, and to think about what it really means to live in a world with other people in it while they're out there? It's no good expecting me to tolerate your millenialist death cult if you won't tolerate my laughing at you.

"There's some rum thoughts going on inside that lad's head" said Mr. Ravenscroft.

Well, a day so hot and humid that you can't sit still for more than a couple of minutes or you find yourself in a puddle. After that it makes perfect sense, of course, to go running in the still-oppressive evening heat. Or pace running, even. I'm glad to say that the afterglow is rather lovely, in fact, because otherwise there wouldn't have been a lot to recommend it. "Ah!" you say, "surely the point of running is the challenge, and without suffering there is no challenge?"

No. The point of running is that moment when you suddenly feel like you're flying, because the ground is just shooting by under your feet and you could go on like that for ever and ever and you aren't flying because you're almost part of the ground but there's no suffering and no effort at all. And that happens more often than you might think. Bloody hard work a lot of the rest of the time, though.

The last couple of times out I've been listening to a Julian Cope playlist on shuffle while I run; I had feared that this wouldn't work too well, and that I'd get too much Autogeddon turgidity and not enough Jehovahkill transcendence, but quite the opposite, in fact. Plus when you're listening to someone singing "to penetrate the diamond the pituitary gland gets torn off its axis and leaves" it's hard to think that what you're doing might be construed as daft.

Speaking of the Archdrude, on a recent perusal of his website (http://www.headheritage.co.uk/) I discovered what has instantly become one of my all time favourite insults. It is this:
"fender-less eunuch".
I hope I need say no more, but for me this just gets funnier and cleverer the more I think about it; there's a whole world-view wrapped up in that. The recipient, incidentally, was a charming radical Muslim who had been explaining how we in the West needed to "fix our women". Because they dress like whores, that sort of thing. Now, I think this epithet works exceptionally well when applied to this sort of "clerical knobshiner", as Copey also, exquisitely, refers to him, but need surely not be restricted to this use. If Julian Cope didn't exist it would be impossible to invent him.

Don't Tar Me With Your Brush

This is my blog, where I can rant if I want to. So...

On Radio Four last Sunday I heard a program about faith schools, their advocates and their opponents (23/07/06, Sunday Best - A Class Apart). One man interviewed was the Reverend Steve Chalk, who runs a religious charity which is taking over the running of Enfield Academy and other schools. I was quite warming to his apparent broadmindedness until he was explaining how very broad the education in schools needs to be, how indoctrination needed to be avoided, by incorporating, alongside teaching about Christianity, teaching about Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism..."and that other great faith, Secular Humanism."

Right! Lets go through this, once again, for the hard of thinking. The absence of faith is not the same thing as another kind of faith. Positions which do not start from the premise that there is a God are not equivalent to those that do. To not assert a thing is not the same as to assert a thing. The difference between a non-theist position and a theist one is really quite easy to fathom - it's right there in the language, so there's just no excuse for this twisting of that language in order to assert that the lack of faith is just a special kind of faith.

So let's just think about what "faith" means here. Whenever I try to boil it down, what I am left with is that it is all about believing something for which there is no evidence, or which contradicts the evidence, or which is otherwise impossible. I really can't bring myself to see this as in any sense a virtue.

Theists often try to defend their position against reason by asserting the presence of faith in other modes of thought, and generalising from there. The deterministic nature of Marxism is an example commonly given. The fallacy of this, though, is that identifying an error in one mode of thinking, which is also present in another, does not indicate that it is not an error. Furthermore, to identify aspects of faith in one aggressively antireligious system is not a demonstration that all modes of thought not including a God work the same way.

Which brings me back to the reverend's vocabulary - not all atheistic thought should really be classified as Secular Humanism. However, Secular Humanism as a very specific philosophy is not followed by more than a few intellectuals, as compared with the teeming millions in the theist yoke. Yet Mr Chalk describes it as a "great faith". This is a common trick which works by encouraging people to group all atheist thought together under one umbrella, the easier to disparage it.

Does all this matter? Well, it does to me. In a country and at a time when faith schools are such an issue, it matters greatly that even apparently moderate advocates of faith schools can't help but display their religious chauvinism wrapped in doublespeak.