Jonathon Green

John Lennon, in his notorious 1970 interview with Jan Wenner, said that ‘nothing happened in the ‘60s except that we all dressed up’. It was classic Lennon - blatant exaggeration which undeniably contained a kernel of truth. Despite all the noise and heat of the 1960s the fundamental structure of society remained unchanged. Indeed, contemporary British society is even more unequal and socially divided than back then. Jonathon Green’s book, however, borrows Lennon’s quote for its title but reframes it to more positive effect. In his view, if the 1960s was a sort of glorified fancy dress party, it was a necessary and liberating one after the decades of sacrifice, austerity and conformity which preceded it.

When did the ‘60s start? Not on January 1st 1960, that’s for sure. For Green preparations for the ‘60s blowout began in the ‘50s with the Beats, Angry Young Men and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and it was all over by the early ‘70s, but the festivities were in full swing from about 1965 to 1971; these were the years of the counter-culture and an analysis of the British manifestation of this forms the heart of the book.

The counter-culture or underground or alternative society was easy to recognise but difficult to define. It took its immediate inspiration from America but Green traces its lineage through the upper class rebels of Bloomsbury, Dada, Surrealism and 19th Century Romantics like Shelley. As he makes clear, it was more an attitude and style than a coherent ideology: sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and ‘revolution in the head’. A cultural rather than political alternative to mainstream society it constituted a sort of psychedelic parallel universe with its own newspapers (IT and Oz), institutions (the London Free School, the Antiuniversity and the drug counselling service Release, founded in 1967 and still going strong today), and it’s own hierarchies and leaders (John Hopkins, Richard Neville and Mick Farren). If it was an alternative society it was certainly a very small one, London-centric and overwhelmingly middle class. The 1960s was essentially the revolt of privileged youth; dropping out not being an option for those who were never in to begin with. Behind the revolutionary rhetoric lay considerable entrepreneurial energy and the pioneering vegetarian restaurants, fringe theatres and arts centres of the counter-culture gradually proliferated and became mainstream.

I was fascinated by the mutual antipathy between the hippies and ‘freaks’ of the counter-culture and the more conventional politicos of the New Left. IT published articles attacking the student rebels of the London School of Economics as ‘boring’ and ‘bureaucratic’; and also, rather astonishingly in retrospect, an editorial following the anti-Vietnam War March in March 1968, denouncing the leaders of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (to be fair, many counter-culture figures did take part in the march). The politicos, in their turn, regarded the hippies as self-indulgent and superficial.

Freedom might have been a keyword for both sides but, for the hippies, a socialist state in which every worker was guaranteed a job in a factory was no kind of freedom at all. For them the personal was political and commitment to changing the world demonstrated by lifestyle rather than by spouting ideology. The hippies, in other words, represented a revolutionary form of libertarianism. This can be reduced to the caricature of ‘ I just want to do my own thing, man’, but in a Britain still haunted by the ghost of Queen Victoria, their concern with sexual freedom and personal liberty was by no means trivial.

Ultimately, for all their alleged self-indulgence and superficiality, the hippies were vindicated. The political revolution remained a pipe dream; the cultural and social revolution, albeit in severely compromised form, actually happened. This is where the rather unlikely hero of the book emerges - 1960s Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins. Certainly no hippie, he nonetheless played a pivotal role in liberalising law reforms relating to homosexuality, abortion and censorship. I was rather taken aback by Green’s description of the somewhat staid and sober Jenkins as a ‘visionary’; on reflection, given the far-reaching nature of the changes he enabled, it might well be justified. He was certainly the most liberal and progressive Home Secretary in British history.

Books about the 1960s tend to divide between cosy pop culture nostalgia and serious social history. All Dressed Up is emphatically in the latter category; impressively comprehensive it puts the events and movements of the period in a longer historical perspective. Green writes with the instinctive sympathy of the insider - he wrote for the underground press in its later years - while never oblivious to the failings of the counter-culture: its rampant sexism, frequent intellectual incoherence and banality, and infantilising wish-fulfilment.

The counter-culture may have been over by the early ‘70s but the radicalism of the previous decade continued with the Gay Liberation movement, feminism and environmentalism. Green is surely correct that the most important and enduring legacy of the 1960s is greater personal liberty; the freedom to live your own life in your own way unconstrained by an externally imposed notion of morality. 21st century Britain, if more unequal, is certainly more liberal than it was in the 1960s. So much that was marginal or considered extreme then is now accepted and part of the legislature. Not that I mean to sound complacent; the right-wing backlash against the new freedoms began almost before the freedoms themselves and is currently being pursued with great vigour.

This history of the 1960s has a curious history of its own. It was published in August 1998 - a sequel to Days in the Life, Green’s excellent oral history of the ‘60s - and promptly withdrawn two weeks later as a result of two libel actions. A paperback edition, with the litigious section dutifully excised, followed a year later but this is also now out of print. It’s a pity as All Dressed Up is one of the most perceptive books I’ve ever read on this subject; happily, secondhand copies are still easily available at sensible prices.… (més)

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Title: Slang
Series: A Very Short Introduction
Author: Jonathon Green
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Non-Fiction
Pages: 135
Words: 40K

Synopsis:

From Kobo.com

Slang, however one judges it, shows us at our most human. It is used widely and often, typically associated with the writers of noir fiction, teenagers, and rappers, but also found in the works of Shakespeare and Dickens. It has been recorded since at least 1500 AD, and today's vocabulary, taken from every major English-speaking country, runs to over 125,000 slang words and phrases. This Very Short Introduction takes readers on a wide-ranging tour of this fascinating sub-set of the English language. It considers the meaning and origins of the word 'slang' itself, the ideas that a make a word 'slang', the long-running themes that run through slang, and the history of slang's many dictionaries.

My Thoughts:

This book was totally bogus, esteemed dudes and dudettes. And if I was a stoner I could probably write this whole review in some sort of slang, but sadly, being somewhat educated and not a complete idiot, I choose to use proper grammar and form.

Green is a lexicographer. For those who don't know what a lexicographer is, like me before I was enlightened with this book, it is, simply put, someone who puts dictionaries together. I must say, I have NEVER seen so many uses of the word lexicographer, lexi or lexis in a book before. Because of this fact, Green's focus on Slang is more about documenting it rather than defining it. Nailing down when a slang word was first used is more important to him than anything.

While he does claim to not exactly define what Slang is, he sure does a lot of defining what it isn't. Did you know that jargon is business oriented terms that only apply within certain fields? A lot of the terms in surveying, for instance, would be considered jargon. Then you have cant, which is what criminals use to baffle the police. Neither of these instances are slang though, so don't even THINK about calling them that or Green will call you mean names.

I usually like to include a quote that stood out to me from these VSI books. So here is this one's contribution to the cause:

If ‘slang’ embodies our innate rebelliousness (the undying, if not always expressed, desire to say ‘no’) then how can it not reject the strait-jacket. We are moving away from top-down diktats—in language as elsewhere. If we must define then I suggest that the words we term slang are seen simply as representatives of that subset of English spoken in the context of certain themes, by certain people, in certain circumstances.` page 154

Talk about really nailing down specifics, eh? I noticed this passage because of the philosophical nature of it, the more so because I totally agree with the broken nature of man and his contrariness and saying “no” even when it can harm him.

Overall, this was a bit hard to get through, as Green used a lot of words, terms and ideas that are not readily known by the lay person. Just like previous VSI books, this was barely an introduction to the uninformed but an introduction by someone who doesn't know how to communicate knowledge very well.

★★★☆☆… (més)