The Bluestocking, vol 140
Are you an other-dimensional being?
It’s Friday.
What a week. I’ve been proud to work at the Atlantic, which published an astonishing statement from General James Mattis, who was Trump’s “adult in the room” for several years before realising that was a meaningless title, clearly. I would also recommend the magazine cover story for summer, by Anne Applebaum, about the puzzle of why people collaborate (or rather, the puzzle of why a few people don’t).
Elsewhere, I thought this piece by Yomi Adegoke about not having to perform black pain online was very good.
My guest on The Spark this week was Pragya Agarwal, whose book Sway is about unconscious bias: it was interesting to put racist and sexist assumptions into the context of other ‘faulty thinking shortcuts”.
Helen
PS. A quick request. Has anyone read anything good on the creative partnership of OutKast’s Andre 3000 and Big Boi? They are as interesting as Lennon/McCartney and I would love to think that someone has written The Big Piece about them. I went looking on Amazon, and found that their unauthorised biography was written by a man who describes himself as “author of the Richard Nottingham books, historical mysteries set in Leeds in the 1730s”. So at least I’m not quite the whitest OutKast superfan out there.
The Amnesty (The London Magazine)
(PERSON A) Do you think having an amnesty is a good idea?
‘Amnesty’ comes from the same stem as ‘amnesia’, which strikes me as odd in this case as once all this is out it’s not like it’s going to be forgotten? Like, we’ll receive a notice of receipt and a thank you and then we’ll forget about the inconvenience and the fact that most men – but not all men – are unworthy of being called human.
When I got to the office, I decided to start filling out this form. You’ve given us a lot of pages.
I started thinking about the two on the train. I couldn’t get them out of my head. I stared them both down on the tube, that homogenous landscape they formed. They all dress the same.
Two men sitting next to each other at one end of the carriage. There are four main categories: boys, young men, men, old men. One was very young, not boyish, but certainly below twenty and was wearing knee-length shorts and a short-sleeved top, both in matching silk or chiffon, pure cream. His hair was also dyed darker than suited his complexion. He wore leather slip-on shoes, which encased his feet like rounded slippers. He looked uncomfortable, perhaps regretting having so much flesh on show, and he must have been cold, thick hairs were fuzzing the line of his arms and his legs.
Who first discovered that seeing a peak of a man’s stomach evoked a warm feeling in women? That the more of the stomach he felt a woman see, the more he wanted to give it away? Most keep it completely covered, others are more daring, using mesh or lace. When did that accidental thrill become expected, asked for, demanded, sought out, thought out, manipulated, used for a certain power against us women?
Fiction in the newsletter! And provocative fiction at that.
Lionel Shriver Is Looking For Trouble (New Yorker)
Shriver is relentlessly contrarian, not only in her political positions—she is a pro-Brexit, anti-woke, #MeToo-skeptical Democrat—but in most aspects of life. She eats only one meal a day: dinner, usually around midnight, often featuring “burn your face off” quantities of chili pepper. She dislikes babies. Before moving to England, in 1999, she elected to live in Belfast for a dozen years during the Troubles. She and Williams leave London every summer, but not for the beach: they have a place in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, with no air-conditioning.
A new Ariel Levy profile is always a treat, and I’m fascinated by Lionel Shriver, who is a bundle of contradictions. The only one of her novels that this profile makes me feel like reading, oddly, is The Post-Birthday World, which “tracks two realities: one in which the protagonist, Irina, has a passionate affair with a snooker player (starting when they stumble into having dinner together on his birthday), and one in which Irina withstands temptation. Shriver renders her characters’ emotions with exquisite specificity and empathy. Irina’s irresolute yearning, in both scenarios, is agonizing and yet oddly reassuring. The message of the book is: It doesn’t matter. Whatever decision you make will have its rewards and its costs, and you will sometimes be tormented by the alternative, because to be human is to doubt.”
Vanity Is The Enemy
I met Ottessa Moshfegh at her 1920s East Hollywood apartment, where she generously showed me, a stranger, her work space and her home. A Croatian-Iranian witchdoctor from Newton, Massachusetts, Moshfegh is living the entire realization of a self, a life of serous writing since the age of 15. She laughingly tells me in her kitchen that at the crux of breakdown several years ago, she volunteered as a test patient at the Hypnosis Motivation Institute in Tarzana and received 12 free sessions with a recent graduate. Since unplugging herself from the brainwash of polarizing dialectics imposed by fascists, she claims to have “the KKK and terrorists living inside her vagina.”
She is the least couched author I’ve ever met — too honest to negotiate her sentiments in the politics of present day. Fire burns in her brown eyes, one of which is reptilian and flashing, the other ancient redwood and water in space.
[..]
We met on December 1st, 2016. We drove in my truck with my dog to a restaurant near her home where we sat at a quiet table outside. We ordered a whole fish, scallops, linguine con le vongole, asparagus, arugula salad, two glasses of wine for the witchdoctor, and several coffees for me. We had both taken a Valium.
Hat-tip to John Self for this interview with Ottessa Moshfegh by a man she then married. (Ian McEwan also did this with an interviewer. Other examples gratefully received.) Again, I feel like my journalistic style has been found wanting because it never includes exchanges like this:
Are you an other-dimensional being?
Yes, I am.
Quick Links
“How do you manage work and home? I’m lucky. Angelo is a stay-at-home dad.” Sky’s political editor Beth Rigby on her job. I’m glad she mentioned this, because no one yet knows how to solve the puzzle of those “greedy” jobs, where you need to be able to drop everything at a minute’s notice, without having someone else at home full-time.
Is COVID-19 so dangerous because it attacks blood vessels?
Spare me from woke prawnographers. (That said, AVN got such backlash for its BLM bandwagon-jumping that it has pledged to stop using “interracial” as a category.) As I wrote in Difficult Women, it’s nuts that the prawn industry (sorry but I have to make this email SFW) has always treated mixed race relationships like some extraordinary taboo.
The NHS Has Quietly Changed Its Trans Guidance (Spectator). I hope the full story of “puberty blockers” will be told one day, because it’s hard to think of a more vivid parable about how people with good intentions (wanting to help children in distress) can end up doing potentially dangerous things (putting those same children on experimental drugs) and silencing all critics by implying they must be motivated by bad faith. I’m glad that the NHS is now being honest about the situation: some children benefit from delaying puberty, but that comes with side-effects which should be openly discussed with them and their parents.
“After leaving the meditation center, the first evidence he saw was a gas station, and people coming in and out wearing shorts, a scene so characteristic of northern Vermont that he was deeply reassured.” This 33-year-old Buddhist man went into a retreat in mid-March and so got all his coronavirus news in one go, which is probably the optimum way to do it.
The National Geographic has done a special issue on 75 years since the end of WWII, talking to survivors from all sides.
Of all the police videos I have seen this week, I found this one the most disturbing: not the violence, but the numb lack of empathy it must require to walk past a bleeding 70-something man, lying on the ground, bleeding from his ears. Too many American police officers are unfit, clearly not trained in conflict de-escalation and are carrying military-style equipment. The Atlantic published this piece on how to fix the US police; from it, I learned that forces don’t even keep proper data on their use of force. Some of the suggestions have echoes here, for example “overcriminalization. . . there are so many laws that violations are ubiquitous. If everyone is a criminal, officers have almost unfettered discretion to pick and choose which laws to enforce and whom to stop, frisk, search, or arrest.” Anyone who has seen a procession of “drunk and disorderlys” at a magistrates court will know that a country “cannot arrest its way out of addiction”.
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