The Bluestocking, vol 121: Boomers and bohemians
Happy Friday!
This week, I wrote about baby boomers, in a piece which argued that they are not greedy or self-interested, or at least not more so than any other group, but their sheer size and influence is distorting politics. As ever, I'm fascinated by subjects which provoke raw emotion: dry pensions policy turns into an argument about who deserves what, who's ungrateful, who works hardest etc. David Willetts, in the piece, talks about getting angry letters in neat copperplate on Basildon Bond stationery. Instead I got, er, emails calling me a "stupid liberal C***". Nice to see Boomers are moving with the times.
Helen
Requiem, by Clive James
No life, and no future. The press was piling it on by then, and steadily the intrusiveness got worse. It became known that she was trying to lessen the effects by getting a few media figures on her side. It was manipulation, but what else does a marionette dream of except pulling strings? So I thought I knew what it was about when she sent me an invitation to lunch at Kensington Palace. I thought there would be at least half a dozen of us there to receive the gentle suggestion that a few supportive words would not come amiss. (Even for my generation, words like “supportive” are losing their inverted commas by now: her unashamed use of me-speak has influenced the language.) But after I was shown up the staircase to the sitting room I found myself alone. When she came into the room, it was as if that first conversation in Cannes had been frozen by the pause button and now the button had been touched again to re-start the tape. “Sorry there aren’t any film stars,” she said. “There’s just me. Hope you don’t get bored.” The cahoots were back.
There are eleventy billion Clive James pieces I could post, but I've chosen this one because it shows his incredible craft. It took me until about the fifteenth paragraph to realise the stylistic trick here: every paragraph begins with the word "no". That makes the ending incredibly powerful:
"No, I never saw her again. Neither will anyone now. Not even once. Never even once again.
No, I can still see her. She’s leaving the Caprice, heading for the back door, because a Range Rover full of photographers has just pulled up in the street outside. She’s turning her head. She’s smiling. Has she forgotten something? Is she coming back?
No."
There are very few journalists who attempt this kind of high-wire prose style, and for good reason. You need an editor who trusts you, never mind the skill and patience and drive to try it in the first place. You need to commit to it, and never show that the words have been tailored to the over-riding conceit, or it will just look cheap and forced. (Janet Malcolm, with pieces like Forty-One False Starts, is the only other writer I can think of who could get away with it.) You can see her the influence of reading and writing poetry on James; although I'd argue if anything this piece is more like great drama: a motif that you don't notice at first, which builds over time, and then allows the writer to stick a landing which feels both unexpected and perfectly inevitable.
Also, eesh, I think I'm being pretty fancy when I do a profile sliced up into time periods or 'acts'. I have a lot way to go.
The Bourgeois and the Bohemian Virtues
A playwright can craft a superb play while sleeping until 11.30am, drinking a bottle of wine a night, showing up late to every meeting with his agent, and living with two girlfriends in an untidy flat. But to actually stage his superb play successfully you need the bourgeois virtues. You need people to rehearse and show up at the right times; you need someone to organise and publicise the whole thing, to print tickets and book the venue and make sure the insurance policies are correct. You need people to tidy up carefully after the show and remember to hang up the costumes in the right place. And on a broader level a playwright can only flourish in an educated society, a society that can design and build and maintain theatres, a civilised society where people have been taught and enabled to appreciate drama, where study and hard work and sacrifice have created enough prosperity, enough surplus wealth, to enable people to have leisure time.
This really made me think. Is art made by one type of person, and does that affect the stories we tell?
Five Books: Self Help
There’s a writer called James Hollis, whose work I really like, who says that sometimes the right question to ask yourself – about a major life-choice for example – is not: ‘Will this choice make me happy or sad?’ but: ‘Will it enlarge me or diminish me?’ I’ve often found that when you phrase the question this way, you do know the answer. You can’t actually know whether choices relating to relationships or careers are ultimately going to ‘cash out’ in success or happiness. But I think we do have a good instinct as to whether a given option is the growth-oriented choice or not.
Five Books is a great website where people, er, recommend five books on a given topic. This is friend of the newsletter Oliver Burkeman on self-help, a category of book which attracts both absolute charlatans and genuinely insightful thinkers. As Oliver points out, what the Greeks called philosophy was sometimes a form of self-help: Stoicism is literally about how to conduct yourself in the world. I love the sound of all of his five choices, and Seculosity particularly intrigues me.
Quick Links
I make a point of keeping up with my one-time sparring partner Jordan Peterson, and I am intrigued by his latest commercial venture, a social network where you can sign up to see his posts for $120/yr.
Can we take a minute to appreciate that British politics's "eminence grise", "master strategist" (copyright all newspapers) is writing blogs with posts like "On the referendum #34: BATSIGNAL!! DON’T LET CORBYN-STURGEON CHEAT A SECOND REFERENDUM WITH MILLIONS OF FOREIGN VOTES". I haven't seen so much bolding and italicisation outside of a Facebook conspiracy theory group. In a crowded field, my favourite bit is how he nobly resists quoting eg Bayesian mathematics, Bismarck, Sun Tzu etc all the way to the end, and then suddenly can't hold it in any more with a PPS. "The foundation problem with the EU was best summarised by the brilliant physicist David Deutsch, the man who extended Alan Turing’s 1936 paper on computation into the realm of quantum mechanics." Come on. Who had David Deutsch in the sweepstake? No one? OK, I will accept "Gell Man" or at a pinch, "some physicist, probably".
What happens when you swap the Batman and Catwoman character models.
Guest non-gif: possibly my favourite diagram from Peterson's Maps of Meaning.
See you next time! Buy my book!