The Bluestocking, vol 116: Artists are here to disturb the peace
Happy Friday!
And behold the wonder of the cover for DIFFICULT WOMEN, which is now available for pre-order.
Feel free to buy one for yourself, another for your best friend, and the Kindle version for your worst enemy.
I don't exactly know why, but this newsletter has ended up as an absolute EPIC. Call it value for money.
Helen
John McDonnell: Labour's Next Leader Should Be Female
"You can't argue that these are the same as the Thirties, but I understand where you’re coming from because it is about this unleashing of forces that you lose control of and can take a dangerous strait. Harold Laski at the end of the Second World War was the chair of the Labour Party – Marxist I think, actually – he said fascism in this country won’t come through a dictator in uniform with medals all over his chest marching about. The danger is conservative authoritarianism where there is an erosion of all those rights, rules, regulations, institutions that protect our democracy and I think that is the fear that we have."
Alastair Campbell interviews John McDonnell. One of the many things which fascinates me about the current political situation is that in 2015, it was deemed to be Jeremy Corbyn's "turn" to run for the Labour leadership from the left. One of the reasons Corbyn made it on the ballot is that he is less . . . abrasive than McDonnell.
But for my money, McDonnell is a more interesting politician. Having done several events with him at Labour conference, and the Marr programme on the BBC, my main takeaway is that he is Always Hustling. He really WANTS to be chancellor, and he exudes enthusiasm for the job in a way that Corbyn, quite obviously, doesn't.
He's also more clever and intellectually curious than Corbyn (no private school and gap year for him; he left school early and took his qualifications at night school). He has been better at reassuring the security services that the Labour leadership is not now unquestioningly pro-Russian (see: the Skripal case). He has been better at reassuring the Jewish community that Labour believes it has an anti-semitism problem and will tackle it. He will make his case to hostile audiences (see: being interviewed by Bad Al Campbell.) He has followed the big leftwing policy debates (universal basic income, the four-day week) and consulted with interesting thinkers.
And yet no one is chanting, Oh Jo-ohn McDonnell. I would pay decent money to hear his secret, innermost thoughts about Jeremy Corbyn.
How Derren Brown Remade Mind Reading For Sceptics
Brown is starting to plan a follow-up to “Happy,” which he thinks may focus on the tension between our relationships with other people and our need for self-realization. Whether listening to a partner vent frustrations or performing mentalism for a theatre full of strangers, the secret, he believes, is to take the focus off ourselves and make the moment about the other person or people. “Emerson made the comment ‘My giant goes with me wherever I go,’ ” Brown said. “I really love that image of this sort of big lumbering giant standing behind us. Not just because I have one myself but because everyone has one. And it is the things that we feel separate us, our own insecurities, that generally turn out to be the things that connect us, because they’re the very things that we share. Which is how a psychic can so easily sound like she knows about you, or an author can essentially be writing about himself, but it feels as if he’s writing about you.”
This New Yorker profile about Derren Brown is pleasingly aware that most of what he does is old-fashioned magic tricks, dressed up in a very "now" gloss of neuro-linguistic programming etc. That doesn't ruin what he does for me: I would much rather see a great magician than have to accept a load of hand-wavy claims about psychology. I also found the end, after he visits a "real" psychic, quite sweet. ("My rational, sort of cosmopolitan version may give me a snooty feeling of superiority sometimes over somebody’s more suburban version, which is just very unpleasant of me. It’s easy to be amused by, or put in brackets, somebody’s attempts at transcendence that are different from our own, but we’re all trying to find that thing that’s bigger than ourselves.")
I remember reading Jane Goldman's oddly brilliant companion to The X Files, where she explained all the phenomena the show deals with, like UFOs and secret government programs. There's a chapter on psychics, which explains that of course there is something attractive about going to see someone who seems to be interested in you, tells you with authority that life isn't all bad, and has the time to listen to your problems without judgement. After all, "rational cosmopolitans" get this from expensive therapists.
I picked the quote above, though, because it's why I decided to write about my own life in Difficult Women, even though a) it will make the reviews more painful as people will essentially be reviewing me; b) writing personally is more often expected of women than men, and that is also presumed to narrow their appeal. Still, though, we crave connection. It touches something inside us.
At home, I have a scratchy printout of this quotation from James Baldwin, which is pretty much my writing manifesto:
“Art has to be a kind of confession. I don’t mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too — the terms with which they are connected to other people.
This has happened to every one of us, I’m sure. You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that they are alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.
Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to them from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true for everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace. They have to disturb the peace. Otherwise, chaos.”
(I could read James Baldwin talk about writing all day long.)
Restoring the Sex and Rage to Jane Austen
The pressure to sand the sharp edges of her plots into “You go girl” fairy tales is also wrong. These are not books about “empowered” women, even though many of the female characters are eloquent, clever, and resourceful. Most of the “happy” endings crumble under scrutiny. Only Elizabeth Bennet really gets it all, as Darcy is a magical combination of hot, rich, morally upright, not boring, not drunk—and not two decades her senior. Austen’s other heroines often profess to be happy, but cracks are visible in their facade. Will Marianne Dashwood really learn to love Colonel Brandon, a much older man who “still sought the constitutional safeguard of a flannel waistcoat”? Or is she, like Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice, pragmatically settling for a home and family because spinsterhood is so unappealing?
Oh look it's ME.
WeWTF
"Why has it taken so long for people to realize that? We’ve had three weeks of a disaster, and people are still talking about the IPO like it’s something the company can still accomplish some day. Why?
CNBC wants to be friends with Jamie Dimon and Masayoshi Son. It’s hard to believe that the prom queen is addicted to diet pills and a heroin addict. The fall from grace here has been so dramatic and yet so fucking obvious.
Is this a case of self-delusion? Did Adam Neumann believe his own story?
I don’t know. I speak from some experience as a CEO in the ’90s in the internet days: If you tell a 30-year-old male he’s Jesus Christ, he’s inclined to believe you."
Those of you who know me IRL will know that I have Strong Thoughts about WeWorks. (Related: I spend three days a week in one.) This interview about its troubles tickled me.
In Defence of Fiction
Nor does it seem at all surprising to me that we should, in 2019, have this hypersensitivity to language, given that it is something we carry about our person, in our mouths and our minds. It’s right there, within our grasp, and we can effect change upon it, sometimes radical change. Whereas many more material issues—precisely economic inequality, criminal justice reform, immigration policy, and war—prove frighteningly intractable. Language becomes the convenient battlefield. And language is also, literally, the “containment.” The terms we choose—or the terms we are offered—behave as containers for our ideas, necessarily shaping and determining the form of what it is we think, or think we think.
Zadie Smith has been mining a rich seam lately, by writing curiously and empathetically about the limits of modern identity politics.
Quick links:
Sarah Ditum reviews a new biography of Simone de Beauvoir, which outlines how badly Big Moan got served by her first English translator. (Extra nerdiness is available from Toril Moi explaning why the second translation was't much cop, either).
Regular readers will know that one of my beeves with political journalism is the "neutral amplifier" model, which consists simply of repeating what someone has told you, possibly anonymously. There are occasions where you might need to do that, but too often such quotes are stripped of context and scepticism. That has reached a crisis point under this administration, because Boris Johnson's political comms team has a relationship with the truth much like BJ's relationship with his various women, ie extremely strained. So there is an inherent problem with reprinting, as James Forsyth has done here, messages from Dominic Cummings without any surrounding commentary. Is this even what Cummings believes? Or is it the line he's spinning? Political journalists are the people we rely on to tell us those key facts. And because this quote is anonymous, there is no way to look for consistency with previous utterances, and no way to hold the speaker accountable later. Jill Rutter's blog on the subject is good: "The Johnson administration has made parallel briefing a cornerstone of its strategy. Boris bouncy (usually) in public, Cummings (we assume) orchestrating sabre-rattling and threats from “number 10 sources”. The journalists who report those words are being co-opted into their strategy."
"The 2019 election is a test for Canadian progressives: style or substance. The Liberal government of Justin Trudeau is the most successful progressive government in the world. It instituted a carbon tax and legalized marijuana. Last year, for the first time, Canada settled more refugees than any other country. Because of higher government benefits, child poverty is at its lowest level in history. Economic growth this year reached 3 percent. That is what Trudeau has done. He also appeared in brownface at an Aladdin-themed costume party in 2001 at the age of 29." Great piece on the two types of leftwing politics in 2019.
Department of Why Didn't I Know This Before I: chess masters lose a lot of weight playing tournaments. So much that it's a problem.
Department of Why Didn't I Know This Before II: you can get paid to shout at people about why they don't keep a diary and are late for stuff, if you call yourself a dominatrix life coach.
David Runciman reviews David Cameron's memoir.
No guest gif this week, it's already too long. Instead, have this revolving deep fake. We are in soooo much trouble.
Until next time. And I really can't stress this enough: BUY MY BOOK.