Anne Enright on the McCanns

I thought it would be interesting to read what Anne Enright, recent winner of the Booker prize would have to say about the ‘Maddie’ phenomenon. As the writer of a dark, family tale, I thought she might have interesting things to say about it.

LRB | Anne Enright: Diary

The piece isn’t entirely without interest – her musings on the language the McCann’s have used in their dealings with the press were interesting. In particular, the thuggish looking Gerry McCann’s reliance on corporate-speak. All in all, though, it feels too much like the work of a Daily Telegraph columnist. Middle class, coddled and self referential. Like something Nigella would have written before she discovered food.

Spectacle

Peter Wollen notes,

Visual display is the other side of the spectacle, the side of production rather than consumption or reception.

Guy Debord, the theorist of spectacle, noted how, in modern times, an excess of display has the effect of concealing the truth of the society that produces it, providing the viewer with an unending stream of images that might be best understood, not simply as detached from the real world of things, as Debord implied, but as working to efface any trace of the symbolic, condemning the viewer to a world in which we can see everything but understand nothing – allowing us as viewer-victims, in Debord’s phrase, only ‘a random choice of ephemera’.

I was throwing out some semi-digested content and found the Wollen quotation above. It’s interesting in light of the ‘Person of the Year’ Time Magazine article. This view of spectacle is getting turned on its head. Technology is empowering the consumer – don’t you just love that word! – to produce the images and more widely the content which is sending shockwaves in the world of corporate mass media.

 

Another pit bull with lipstick

An interesting story leading on the OJ memoir.

In her discussion of the release of OJ’s ghost written memoir, If I Did It, Lionel Shriver mentions Juith Regan’s apology for publishing the book. Quite a character, it turns out. Ms Regan.

Judith Regan was fired for inappropriate behaviour (anti semitic rants), supposedly unconnected with the OJ book on 15 December 2006 (NY Times).

According to the notes, Regan was upset with her perceived lack of support from HarperCollins during the O.J. scandal last month (a claim that seems reasonable, given that HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman won “Publisher of the Year” last week for her skill in “distancing” her publishing house from the distasteful event), and allegedly said this: “Of all people, the Jews should know about ganging up, finding common enemies and telling the big lie.” Regan then allegedly said that ICM literary agent Esther Newberg, HarperCollins’ executive editor David Hirshey, HarperCollins’ CEO Jane Friedman and lawyer Jackson constituted “a Jewish cabal against her.”

That’s it? Coming from a woman whose vituperative, graphic outbursts are legendary, that’s all she said? As her lawyer Bert Fields points out (but which was immediately to this writer upon reading):

“She did not make any remarks that a rational person would consider anti-Semitic,” he said. “What she said was that she was being destroyed in the press for something that wasn’t her fault, and that the Jewish people should understand more than anybody else what it is to be the victim of a big lie. If anybody considers that anti-Semitic, they should explain it to me

Eat the Press, Huffington Post, Rachel Sklar, 19 Dec 2006

However, not the kind to take things lying down she sued, makign allegations to the effect that she had been urged to deny an affair with a member of Giuliani’s praetorian guard at the by the boss of Fox News, Roger Ailes. She won a settlement of $10.75 million.

 

The BT family – what does it tell us?

This is what Tim Evans, BT group marketing and brand director, thinks they’re up to with this campaign.

“Adam is going to be the central character of all our consumer television ads from now on. Viewers will see him thrown through life’s highs and lows and watch how BT products and services can help him with various situations. In the first TV ad we will see Adam use wireless broadband on his laptop to score much needed brownie-points with Jane’s kids. In the second, Adam uses his mobile phone to text a message to the home phone to help Joe look cool in front of his little sister Lucy.

“We wanted to connect with people as strongly as some of our great advertising campaigns of the past did… Adam is a guy in his mid-thirties, he’s someone we all feel we could know. We put him in the centre of a wider network of people, a non-nuclear but very real family unit.”

I was thinking about why I’m intrigued by this advert and I’ve decided that it isn’t really the shift from the late 70s wholesome dinner table shennanigans of the Oxo Mum, Dad and two kids to the 00s BT family, navigating relationship undercurrents with ‘cool’ BT technology.

No, it’s the central character’s soppy hairstyle. What IS that about?

 

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