The Bluestocking 387: Cola bottles and Vermeer's sneer

The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm

Happy Friday!

This week, I spent some time in my happy place, viz the Wikipedia pages of minor European royals. Did you know that the current Jacobite heir to the English, Welsh and Scots throne is the 92-year-old Duke of Bavaria, Franz? The next in line is his brother, Max, and then Max’s eldest daughter, who also happens to be married to the hereditary prince of Liechtenstein¹. FINALLY the union of the British and Liechtenstein thrones that we have all been waiting for.

Incidentally, Franz is gay and has been with his partner since 1980, but since he’s the head of a Catholic aristocratic family, they’ve never married.

Helen

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Photo by Europeana on Unsplash

Are you asking enough of your brain? (Substack)

I honestly, genuinely wonder whether a lot of what people call ‘procrastination’ or ‘can’t focus’ or even sometimes ‘feeling burned out’ can be to do with constantly having wading through slop that is much too easy for your brain, that doesn’t give it anything to chew on. Like the way you’d get exhausted if all you had to eat every day was mushed up rusk.

My strong contention is that if you are constantly scrolling that is because your brain is crying out to learn something new, something that is hard enough for you and you’ve been manipulated by the tech companies to feel that you can get that for free from their handheld machines but you can’t, you can’t.

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Naomi Alderman makes the argument that doomscrolling is the zero-calorie soda of learning: tastes the same as real food, but worse, but isn’t nourishing at all.

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Self-plug of the week: ICYMI, here’s my new longread for The Atlantic, reporting from the inaugural Riyadh Comedy Festival (gift link). Until you’ve seen Jimmy Carr do a joke about dildos in a country that has an anti-witchcraft unit, you haven’t lived.

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Picture of the week

I’m enormously cheered by how ghastly this Vermeer self-portrait is. He’s like a cavalier version of the gritted teeth emoji. Heyyyyyyyyyy it’s Vermeer!

The new biography of him sounds good, though—it suggests he was a member of a persecuted religious order, the Remonstrants, and that he painted virtually all his works for one woman to hang in her home in Delft.

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Quick Links

1. Thanks to Matt Muir for this initially confusing but ultimately fun game about mining gems (Gem Getter).

2. “But the most successful podcasts these days are all becoming YouTube shows. Industry analysts say consumption of video podcasts is growing twenty times faster than audio-only ones, and more than half of the world’s top shows now release video versions. YouTube has quietly become the most popular platform for podcasts, and it’s not even close.” Derek Thompson on how everything became television (Substack).

3. “So as the man shouts “Dave Smith for president” (until security ask him to stop) in a club owned by a man who helped the president get elected, you’re thinking: how did the comedians get all this power? And what are they going to do with it?” Andrew Hankinson visits Austin to contemplate the awesome political power of comedians in America (Observer).

4. “Nathan Rimmington had a sudden “hankering for cola bottles” one night so ordered a huge bulk bag online - and ate them over three days. The bag of gelatin sweets contained almost 11,000 calories and the 33-year-old, from Barnsley, said he was so “bunged up” he could not walk or get out of bed.” (BBC)

5. “To open the complete works of Tennyson is to enter the Victorian age itself. There are the emerald-green landscapes, the dewy roses, the pearly-teethed children; the melancholy maidens, the heavy gardens; peasants, at once comic and pathetic, bob and curtsy. Then there is the tea-shop orientalism, the cardboard classicism, the sawdust Arthurianism.” Philip Larkin on Tennyson, in 1969. Contains the incredible assertion that “Tennyson reckoned his best line was “The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm”." (New Statesman)

6. Thanks to The Browser for linking to this set of psych experiments that didn’t replicate—growth mindset, oestrogen-based sexual preferences, power posing. I knew about most of these, but I was sad to see that we have to put “being bilingual makes you smarter” into the Viking longboat and set it on fire (Aethermug).

7. “When asked in a brief phone interview with The Times about his relationship with the A.D.F., Mr. Farage said that his party talks with “all sorts of groups.” He denied speaking against abortion, telling a reporter that she was “talking utter bollocks,” a crude British slang term for nonsense that he repeated six times.” Sometimes the NYT’s incredibly straitlaced prose really hits the spot (gift link).

8. They’ve remade Amadeus! Normally I would be against this, but I love the work of both Joe Barton and Will Sharpe so I am minded to overlook the heresy.

See you next time! If you haven’t bought my book by now, I doubt this link will change your mind.

1. The Bavarian titles can’t be inherited by a woman and thus to go some cousins, one of whom is a stone-cold fox, up there with the Greek royals—blond, gorgeous, intensely Greek names like Olympia, Achileas and Odysseas—and King Frederik of Denmark, who looks like Michael Sheen. Please do not ask me about European royals unless you are prepared for a monologue.

Oh go on, then—who is my favourite European royal, you ask? Probably Princess Martha-Louise of Norway, a self-described clairvoyant who recently married a shaman, Durek, who once posted on Instagram that he was “a hybrid of a space lizard (“reptilian”) and Andromedia (princess from Greek mythology), and I also have ancient spirits from the ancient world”. Netflix made a documentary about them, in which the shaman—who is a Black American—said that the Norwegian royal family were racist to him. Their Meghan Markle is a lot more exciting than our Meghan Markle.