Who's Afraid of the Fourth Man?
Feb. 26th, 2006 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
f4f3This isn't what I was expecting to be blogging about tonight. I expected to be talking about my Caledonian odyssey this weekend (Drumna-fucking-drochit?) or the kicking we gave the Bastard English or possibly the Guardian giving page one space to a racist and religious diatribe from one of our greatest living postcard illustrators, and probably I will, but I read yesterday's Guardian Review over dinner, and something caught my eye.
In the Guardian Book club column, John Banville writes entertainlingly about his decision to write a novel based on Antony Blunt. At one point he writes:
"Like so many of my generation I have been, and indeed, still am, fascinated by the Cambridge spies."
And I stopped, and crinkled up my brow. I'm not fascinated by the Cambridge spies. I'm not vaguely interested by the Cambridge spies. I don't, if truth be told, really give a shit about the Cambridge spies. Nobody I know gives a shit about the Cambridge spies, and nobody I've ever spoken to seems to give a shit either. I've always thought I was immune from the Oxbridge chip on my shoulder. I didn't go there, nobody else I know did either, and it never seemed even an option to worry about from my point of view. But I do wonder that somone could say that "So many of his generation" did care. I tend to regard myself as pretty mundane, in that my interests and fascinations are pretty reflective of everyone else's, but I seem to have a blind spot here.
So, knowing that some of my F's out there did go to Oxbridge, is anyone out there fascinated by this? Am I in this particular way less than mundane? Or is it an example of the lensing affect caused by so many of our opinion formers coming from such a closeted background?
In the Guardian Book club column, John Banville writes entertainlingly about his decision to write a novel based on Antony Blunt. At one point he writes:
"Like so many of my generation I have been, and indeed, still am, fascinated by the Cambridge spies."
And I stopped, and crinkled up my brow. I'm not fascinated by the Cambridge spies. I'm not vaguely interested by the Cambridge spies. I don't, if truth be told, really give a shit about the Cambridge spies. Nobody I know gives a shit about the Cambridge spies, and nobody I've ever spoken to seems to give a shit either. I've always thought I was immune from the Oxbridge chip on my shoulder. I didn't go there, nobody else I know did either, and it never seemed even an option to worry about from my point of view. But I do wonder that somone could say that "So many of his generation" did care. I tend to regard myself as pretty mundane, in that my interests and fascinations are pretty reflective of everyone else's, but I seem to have a blind spot here.
So, knowing that some of my F's out there did go to Oxbridge, is anyone out there fascinated by this? Am I in this particular way less than mundane? Or is it an example of the lensing affect caused by so many of our opinion formers coming from such a closeted background?
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Date: 2006-02-28 02:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-28 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-28 02:18 pm (UTC)