The Bluestocking 384: Wendys and Beatles

Flat 48v Harrison Motorway Lake Gary

Happy Friday!

I moved on from New York, to Ohio and then Tennessee. As I drove out of the John Glenn airport in Columbus on Saturday, I remembered how much I love deep America, outside the big cities. It’s just so . . . expansive. So unconcerned with elite taste.

I love the interstate font. I love the roadside diners. I love the aircon. (If I could import any American staple to Britain, it would be aircon. If I could import any British staple to America, it would be the pedestrianised town centre.)

sir, this is a bizarrely morbid Wendy’s

That said, I had a huge amount of fun in New York. Please enjoy these photos from the Atlantic book party, taken by Jill Krementz, whose opening gambit to me was, “I used to be married to Vonnegut.” (It’s true.) And here is a bonus one of me vamping with the US edition of The Genius Myth:

this however, was not taken by someone who used to be married to Vonnegut, but top podcaster Jesse Singal. unless there’s something he’s not telling us

After Ohio, it was onwards to Tennessee, where I had to text Jonn Elledge and tell him that somehow I was staying his version of paradise, also known as the old railway station, home of the original Choo Choo, the first proper rail link between the North and the South, which opened in the late 1800s:

It’s such a shame that America got out of the business of building railways, because the country does stations so well—Penn in New York is soaring (above ground at least) and so is Union Station in DC. Even the roof here in little ole Chattanooga is a minor work of art:

That said, I’m ready to come home. The political temperature is scalding—one of my interviewees told me that she’d Googled me beforehand, to see if I had political views that she just couldn’t face sharing space with.

Helen

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Janice Turner in Maidan Square

Life, Interrupted in Ukraine (The Times, £)

Stop anyone in Kyiv — and I mean anyone — and they will have suffered profound loss. Next morning, driving to Maidan Square, the photographer Julia Kochetova is telling me about a funeral, the latest of dozens she has helped organised, when my translator, Kateryna Malofieieva, asks her advice. Her friend’s brother died in an occupied region and, since his body is not yet released, the family can’t apply for a cemetery plot, now in short supply. Julia advises cremation, because it’s easier to find space in a nice columbarium. These women in their thirties are experts in the intricacies of death.

In Maidan Square it is clear why. A graveyard can only pack in so many bodies, but here the density of the dead is infinite. Each Ukrainian flag bears a name and date. There are untold thousands, because casualty figures are never released. Sometimes they are corralled into battalions or units, but most are haphazardly placed. The memorial goes on and on, and I’m poleaxed by the photos of young men like my sons with open, merry faces, or older guys, the dads who look too grizzled for war. Some from the earliest days are already faded. Julia points out a young female medic: “I took that picture.” Over 50 friends have asked her to photograph them before they were deployed, so they’ll look their best in Maidan Square.

*

For quite a few of my projects over the last few years, I’ve ended up reading about my subjects’ lives during the Second World War, and it’s always a minor shock to remember that the conflict lasted for six years—and very few people escaped without a personal tragedy. The Mitfords lost Tom in Asia, because he didn’t want to fight against Germany in Europe. Barbara Castle lost the older man she was having an affair with; he wouldn’t rest his stomach ulcer because he felt editing Tribune during the war was too important. How do you keep going, day after day, living in such uncertainty, with death always on the horizon?

When Janice told me she was going to Ukraine, she said this was the question that most intrigued her. In this piece, she gives the answer: immense fortitude, dark humour, routine chores and a sense of national pride. But also, maybe, therapy and pills.

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On stage in 1964

Bluestocking recommends: John & Paul by Ian Leslie

I finally finished this book in various regional airports, having started it a while ago before life got in the way. I quoted from Ian’s brilliant essay on the under-rating of Paul McCartney liberally on my tour for The Genius Myth, and one of the joys of this book is that Ian is a sneaky Paul partisan, but makes a conscious effort to understand and contextualise the meaner and more troubled John (who took to trashing Paul after the Beatles split up, creating much of the anti-Paul mythology). Much of John’s later bitterness seems to have been curdled by the realisation that he needed Paul, probably more than Paul needed him.

I knew these two were close, but not really how close—they shared bedrooms on tour long after they could have afforded not to, and in their LSD era, by which time John was already married with a kid, they used to drop acid and stare into each other’s eyes until they felt their individual selves dissolving. Ian is very delicate about this, but my read is that John would have slept with Paul if he had the chance—it would have made him feel more in control of his feelings—but Paul was too straight to be up for it.

I also really dig how Ian explains the musical choices that both men made. Some of these songs are as familiar to me as my own face in the mirror, but I still learned a huge amount from this book. (Ian and I once had a long discussion about whether it would be physically possible to play the “harpischord solo”—actually a normal piano at 120 percent speed—in the middle of In My Life. Any harpischord owners, please write in.) I also felt the profound jealousy that, as a writer, you get from reading something really good.

John & Paul is also good on the gendered nature of the Beatles’ success. They borrowed heavily from girl groups. Their screaming stadium audiences were heavily female. The girls loved Paul’s feminine “mince-pies eyes.” Here’s Ian on “She Loves You”:

“She Loves You” is infused with the spirit of girl groups. One of the appealing things about girl groups is that they are groups of girls. The singer and her backing vocalists are addressing not just a lover, or a heartless universe, but also each other, and part of what moves the listener is this sense of friends talking to friends: testifying, affirming, consoling. What these girls talk about, mostly, is boys. Discussing relationships was seen, back then, and may still be seen now, as a distinctively female activity – girl talk – and dismissed as gossip by men who prefer, or say they prefer, to talk work, or politics, or sport. Well, John and Paul never had much time for sports, and they loved talking to girls.

At some point, though, The Beatles were reclaimed by Serious Male Critics, and they have been taken more seriously ever since.

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Quick Links

1. “A friend of mine, QuoProQuid on Twitter, had a really good point about how school shootings have become routine and not really as newsworthy as before. The type of person just seeking to make an impact on history, or get their name known, has migrated more towards going after public figures, because the security is lighter than at school. And as we saw with Trump and Luigi, they get a lot more coverage than a school shooting.” Bleak (Read Max, Substack).

2. Very hard to read this as anything other than: poor countries were increasing their chances of a medal by running athletes with unfair physical advantages (Guardian).

3. “The fallout from [the Kirk shooting] has shown plainly that the trans rights movement in the west, at least the liberal programme of legal reform and cultural representation pursued for the past decade, is as dead as Kirk.” (Substack.) I think Shon Faye is brave in writing this reflection on what the trans movement got wrong in the last decade, but I can feel underneath the shadow of another argument that would be even braver to make—that some of the nonbinary and self-styled queer people who’ve attached themselves to the movement have not helped at all, in either their concrete demands or their style of politics. And many of them will be in vanilla hetero marriages within the decade.

4. “Back in 2010, HR workers made up less than 1 per cent of the total workforce of the UK. Now they are 1.45 per cent of the workforce and they outnumber doctors, those working in the police and all forms of lawyers.” And yet complex tribunals are increasing. Curious. (Sunday Times, £)

5. “Flat 48v Harrison Motorway Lake Gary EH4 5LQ”. John Finnemore on an AI to generate fake English place names was delightful (Substack).

6. “Russia’s president refused to use a cell phone and rarely used the internet. Instead, he conducted meetings through the glow of a large screen monitor, perched on a stand rolled in on wheels. The grim-faced officials flickering onto the screen, many of whom had spent decades in his close company, often were not aware from which of the country’s 11 time zones their commander in chief was calling.” The inside story of why Putin decided to arrest the WSJ’s Evan Gerschkovich (Politico).

7. I wrote about the Your Party split—and the competing priorities between the Gaza Left and the Gender Left (The Atlantic, gift link).

See you next time! You don’t have to buy my book if you don’t want to.