Sleeping Beauties, by David Byrne review: 'a rattle-bag project'
David Byrne’s exploration of ‘why good ideas go dormant and how they wake up’ is undermined by its off-putting tone, writes Stuart Kelly
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Alanis Morissette, the Canadian singer, once sang “Isn’t it ironic?”, while listing things that were not in fact ironic but merely unfortunate. David Byrne’s new book, for a musician, is strangely tone-deaf. In fact, it might have been a far more successful project had it been available as, for example, a five-by-15-minute series like Radio Three’s The Essay. There is a sense of dictation about the book, of which more anon. But the real conundrum is the rattle-bag nature of the project. Why are his thoughts on The Great Gatsby given a slender two pages and a paragraph, yet Caravaggio gets 15? Why does lichen get four-and-a-half pages but black holes are allowed 15? It seems as if the guiding principle is just a gallimaufry of things that interest him, from Gaudí to antiseptics and viroids to Kafka.
That is not to say that there are not a lot of interesting things in the book; merely that is seems almost capricious. He does write in the acknowledgments that he “brought in” a dramaturge, Lizzie Stern, to “organize” the material, as well as thanking fact-checkers who ensured he “was not swayed by his own biases or misinformation”. Maybe musicians, being more collaborative, are happier with such outsourcing.
Byrne does try to give a coherence to this, summarised in the subtitle: “Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up”. The “sleeping beauty” idea was coined by Anthony van Raan, a researcher in scientometrics at Leiden University. A better phrase might be the sociology of ideas, as it analyses the depth and duration of non-circulation, as measured in academic citation, and how impactful any “rediscovery” is. Byrne is clever enough to realise there is a difference between quantitative and qualitative measurements; something which is even more pronounced in the arts than the sciences and relies of subjective evidence such as prizes or peer-reviews as much as volume of sales or indeed market values. These metrics, if left unscrutinised, make McDonald’s a better restaurant than Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. The book is sometimes not immune to such judgments: a Caravaggio being sold for $170 million dollars is impressive, but does Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn selling for $195 million dollars make it better?
Byrne outlines six ways in which “sleeping beauties” can be awakened. It might be a particularly influential critique or creative champion, such as Mendelssohn’s championing of Bach. It might be that technology now facilitates the proving of a theorem, as with plate tectonics. “Accidents” covers quite a range – purpureal fever and handwashing, Mendel’s genetics; whereas “Economics” only has one: the solar panel, which was invented in 1906 but only became practicable much later. But economics does crop up again in the section on catastrophes as a spur to revising ideas, with Minsky and the non-rational analysis of financial crashes and the madcap story of the acceptance of vaccination. Finally we have cultural changes, which is about as broad as one can get, a kind of intellectual “none of the above”, moving from the anarchist Kropotkin to the painter Janet Sobel.
The introduction slightly nuances this with the (accurate) assertion that things can be forgotten because of a panoply of reasons, not limited to money, racism, sexism, biases, classism and many others. It’s possible to see this cultural shift in, for example, what gets played on Radio 3: Florence Price, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the Chevalier de St George and Ethel Smyth get far more airtime than 20 years ago, and no bad thing. I don’t actually care if they aren’t household names like Einaudi or Howard Goodall. My delight is sufficient for myself.
As I intimated, the tone is off-putting. In the Chapter on Mendel we get Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns realising Mendel got there first, and others seeing the credit and saying “Hey, who is this Mendel guy?” In 2002, Mendel was exhumed in order to sequence his DNA, which elicits a “Yow”. There are a lot of exclamation marks – “This might sound boring – one chord! – but Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue is modal, as is much of the Talking Heads record Remains in Light” - we see what you did there – “There’s a lot you can do with one chord!” There’s even the bemused “!?”, not to mention the down with the kids demotic: re. Caravaggio, “Why was he such a crazy asshole?” Those questions marks become like avalanches. “Who should we believe? Should we ignore critics, regardless of whether they are denigrating or praising? When should we trust critics and when should we ignore them…? Why do we give them so much power? Is the crowd better than the expert? Should we all be critics? Are we all online experts now?” (Answers came there none).
Do we need critics? Well, if it means that you don’t give the impression that Melville gave up after Moby-Dick – he actually wrote masterpieces like Bartleby the Scrivener and The Confidence Man: His Masquerade – a dash of expertise might not go amiss. The enthusiasm in this book is overshadowed by the quibblesome nature of it all. Here’s a sleeping beauty of my own: Banvard’s Folly by Paul Collins: an utterly wonderful book comprising “Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck”.
Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up, by David Byrne, Canongate, £26
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