The Bluestocking, vol 127: Witty And Unpretentious
Happy Friday!
Less than a week until Difficult Women is released, and to my great relief the reviews have been positive. The only real criticism is that it's too chatty, which reminded me of the genesis of Wendy Cope's great poem, "Serious Concerns", as explained by the Guardian:
"She is witty and unpretentious, which is both her strength and her limitation," wrote Robert O'Brien in the Spectator, an assessment that so infuriated Cope she dashed off a reply called "Serious Concerns", which gave her the title for her second volume:
"I'm going to try and overcome my limitation -
Away with sloth!
Now should I work at being less witty? Or more pretentious?
Or both?"
The next book will be dry as dust, I promise. Anyway, you can read an extract here. This week's newsletter is a Fiesta Of Me, sorry.
Helen
Tom Stoppard's Theatre of Memory
Watching this new production in London’s Wyndham’s Theatre, itself an architectural relic of Victorian imperial confidence, adds further ironies. Wyndham’s—now faded and crumbling, like much of London’s West End—opened in late 1899, as does Leopoldstadt. In Vienna, the Merz and Jakobovicz families inhabit a universe as secure and solid as Wyndham’s must have seemed: a Europe where empires kept each other in check, industrial economies prospered and expanded, social reforms were coming slowly but steadily. The businessman Hermann Merz, played by a compellingly fragile Adrian Scarborough, aspires to be the first “Christian of Jewish descent” to join Vienna’s Jockey Club. Only the mathematician Ludwig Jakobovicz dreams of a purer, prouder Jewish identity—and a Jewish homeland.
Kate Maltby is brilliant on Leopoldstadt, and I agree with her on both its strengths and weaknesses.
Netflix's Next in Fashion Shows Reality TV Doesn't Have To Be Cruel
When Big Brother first launched in 2000, its cruelty felt unusual, and the program led the way in exploiting Britain’s fault lines of race, sex, and class. (One early contestant, Jade Goody, was attacked for being low-class, called stupid and fat, reviled for being racist, then pitied for developing cervical cancer. She died in 2009, leaving two small boys motherless.) But the show’s very success rendered it obsolete. It popularized a tone that has pervaded public life. Everywhere now feels like Big Brother—what is Twitter, if not angry people trapped together, desperate for any distraction? And the TV genre’s endless ability to create fresh hate-figures has an obvious human cost.
Oh look, it's me, retconning the eight hours I spent on my sofa watching Next In Fashion into productive research.
In Britain, Even Jails Have A Class System
Lewis: You said you were one of the few people in Wandsworth who didn’t have an iPhone. What was that like?
Atkins: Someone in the cell above me kept dragging a chair, so there was this vibration. It gave me Pavlovian twitches for my phone.I kept reaching for my pocket to get the phone—and prison clothes don’t have pockets. You think, How can I survive without it? for three weeks, then you stop.
Lewis: You studied for a psychology degree with all that extra time.
Atkins: I got so much more done than I do now, with Twitter and texting your mates. I still don't recommend it. People kept saying, ‘It sounds like a great writer’s retreat.’
Chris Atkins got a five year sentence for tax fraud over a film he made about the media. He was sent to Wandsworth, one of Britain's grimmer prisons (tough competition). The book he wrote about the experience, A Bit Of A Stretch, is both funny and desperately sad. We've created warehouses full of men, many illiterate, many with mental health problems, where they are locked in their cells with nothing to do for 22 hours a day because of cuts to officer numbers, and we expect that this will somehow turn them into productive rehabilitated members of society. It's one of the most shocking pieces of policy, a terrible waste of lives (and money).
The Medical Consequences of Bound Feet
Cummings’s hip-fracture study had a nearly unheard-of 95 percent participation rate, and about 15 percent of the women he studied had bound feet. That amounted to millions of women stuck at home, unable to engage in everyday activities such as grocery shopping, because they had such difficulty walking—never mind squatting while waiting for the bus or carrying shopping bags while managing canes and crutches. In his study, Cummings concluded that older Chinese women were less prone to hip fractures than American women in part because the former squatted much more often, which builds bone density and strengthens hips. Older Chinese women with bound feet, though, had a completely different story. “The way these women avoided injury,” he said, “was by not doing anything.”
As a kid, I remember seeing a pair of "lotus shoes" in the Science Museum and being fascinated and repulsed by them. Then I read Jung Chang's Wild Swans, and her description of her grandmother trying to travel across China on the train with bound feet. Humanity has done some absolutely appalling things to women to limit their freedom. If you haven't ever seen unwrapped bound feet before, this book shows them. How these women lived on broken arches and crumpled toes is astounding.
Guest gif: "Explain your fashion ethos?"
Quick links
This Back to the Future deepfake with Tom Holland and Robert Downey Jr is spooky.
How Rothko's murals were restored with light. (Thank you to the Bluestocking reader who sent me this piece!)
"Every evening, Mel Brooks leaves his home in Santa Monica, gets in his car and stares down Los Angeles’ notorious rush-hour traffic to go to Carl Reiner’s house in Beverly Hills. There, the two comedy icons do what they like to do most these days: chat, eat dinner together and watch the long-running quiz show Jeopardy!" Hadley says she likes interviewing older people much more than young ones, and you can tell.
A playwright who only wants critics of colour to review her. Thoughtful discussion of the pros and cons of this.
Brendan O'Neill, busted.
Patricia Routledge performs Noel Coward's "I've Been To A Marvellous Party"