The Oldie magazine continues its reposting of Auberon Waugh’s “Rage” columns from its early issues. The latest relates to his thoughts on “Yoof” culture of the 1990s. Here’s a sample:
Nothing will be solved by giving them more money, nor is there anything to be gained by reducing newspapers and television programmes to their level: they have no money to spend, and no prospects of earning any while they remain in their juvenile state. Perhaps the worst thing of all is to set up training colleges, like the one proposed by the 50-year-old teenager Paul McCartney, to teach them how to make rock music. When half-witted advertisers and philanthropists stop throwing money at it, they will realise that the youth culture is as bankrupt of ideas as it is of money.
He would not be happy if he had lived to see BBC3.
Literary Review the magazine Auberon founded with the help of Naim Attallah and edited afterwards has reviewed Attallah’s edition of Auberon’s writings–A Scribbler in Soho. The review is by Christopher Hart who writes:
A Scribbler in Soho includes many of his finest ‘From the Pulpit’ pieces, which he wrote as editor of Literary Review, musing on the pitfalls of the writer’s life. He disliked both modern poetry and modern poets: ‘vain, empty, conceited, dishonest, dirty, often flea-ridden and infected by venereal disease, greedy, parasitical, drunken, untruthful, arrogant … all these repulsive qualities, and also irresistibly attractive to women’. Poets were at least banned from the private members’ club he set up, The Academy, the most brilliant and exclusive such institution in London, if not the civilised world.
