The Bluestocking, vol 162
Pericles built the Parthenon, not the Emirates Cable Car.
Happy Friday!
I was still awake at 11.30pm last night, having just finished an episode of Lovecraft Country, so I watched Donald Trump’s “press conference” live. The BBC News channel carried it in full, presumably to give the anchor time to pop to the loo. The president didn’t take any questions, just read out a rambling list of grievances in a flat monotone. At one point, he started to complain about how a burst pipe in a Georgia ballot station was holding up the count. And I thought . . . really, that’s what you’ve got — plumbing?
As he slouched off, someone shouted: “Are you a sore loser?” and I wondered idly if his personal physician had been giving him horse drugs to keep him peppy through the last days of the campaign, which had now worn off.
While we all wait for the presidential election results, a short commercial break. Looking for the perfect passive-aggressive Christmas present? Why not buy your loved ones a copy of Difficult Women? Or perhaps buy one for yourself and think of it as a gift to me, if you’ve enjoyed these newsletters all year.
Here’s Melanie Reid in The Times: “Whoever said feminists lack a sense of humour has not read enough Lewis… Her book isn’t at all a conventional history. It’s a collection of powerful personal essays on the gnarly issues that women continue to face… I read Difficult Women with gratitude. It’s an authoritative benchmark of modern feminism, written by someone on top of her game… Hooray for a great book by a clever, clear-sighted, straight-talking, difficult young woman.”
Buy from Hive | Amazon | Bookshop
As mentioned above, I’ve been enjoying Lovecraft Country, which is on Now TV and Sky. It’s a trippy horror series from Jordan Peele and JJ Abrams, and the first episode features a montage with voiceover from James Baldwin (archive material, I should add, they haven’t used a ouija board).
The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix is also great. I’m on episode 4 and I love the visual style, the performance from the child actor, and the unexpected characterisations. It also makes chess games work as television, which is unexpected. As a bonus it turns out Jonathan was captain of the chess club at school (cough nerd cough) so he has enjoyed saying things like, “oh yes, the Silician Defence, a favourite of Kasparov”. If you were also captain of the chess club at school, a demographic I suspect is over-represented among Bluestocking readers, think of the joy this would bring to your family.
The only inexplicable bit of the series is the casting of the kid from Love Actually as the other chess prodigy, wearing what is presumably supposed to be a cool cowboy outfit, but which instead makes him look like he ran out of clean clothes and had to raid the dressing-up box.
Weirdly, the other thing I watched this week was the first episode of Life on Mars, which is from 2006, to see how it held up. It’s still a beautiful concept, beautifully written, but a) how did anyone pretend the premise was “time traveller or coma?” when the fact he’s in a coma is not so much telegraphed as trump-tweeted; b) Windows 98 now looks as outdated as those huge Nasa mainframes from the 1970s; c) its attitude to policing looks prelapsarian.
The uncomfortable undertone of Life on Mars was always “they’re awful, but you like them”. The 70s coppers are unashamedly sexist — “you look whiter than a ginger bird’s arse”, telling the lone WPC to strip, etc etc — and we are supposed to feel nostalgic for the time when you didn’t need a warrant to kick down a rapist’s door. But it’s fascinating that some authentic 1970s bigotry was off-limits, at least in the first episode. DCI Gene Hunt wouldn’t be so lovable if we saw his squad using racial epithets, for example. (Read Michael Fuller’s memoir from this period for what it was like to be a black police officer at this time, never mind a suspect; or Kevin Maxwell’s Forced Out for a contemporary take.)
Of course, the 1970s coppers do “go on a journey”, helped by John Simm’s guidance. But it’s interesting how fundamentally conservative the premise of the show looks today. American television networks are having a reckoning with the whole idea of “cop shows”, following the Black Lives Matter protests, and questioning their cheeky-chappy way of letting police brutality off the hook if the wrong ‘un really deserved it. I’m not sure you could make Life on Mars today without expecting questions about its hankering for a time you could rough up a suspect if you felt he deserved it.
Mind you, The Wire’s first series aired in 2002, showing that you could write a police drama which also showed the lives of the people at the sharp end of policing. Maybe Life on Mars felt a bit uncomfortable, even when it first aired? I don’t remember much about 2006. (I don’t remember much about 2020, in fairness.) Write back if you do.
tfw you remember you can’t do an american accent
Lord of Misrule (TLS)
[Tom] Bower is wrong to suggest that Johnson is seeking to emulate the heroes of ancient Greece. Johnson states grandly that “every skill and every pursuit and every practical effort or undertaking seems to aim at some good, says old Aristotle, my all-time hero. And that goal is happiness”. But Johnson’s notion of happiness seems a much thinner thing than Aristotle’s life of honour and virtue. It is more akin to pleasure, and insufficient to provide a rich, flexible or satisfying purpose to his political life. Again, Johnson often compares himself to Pericles on the grounds that they both enjoy good speeches, democratic engagement, big infrastructure and fame. But Pericles built the Parthenon, not the Emirates Cable Car. And if, like Johnson, he had made and lost a £1,000 bet, he would have wanted to pay it, and be known to have paid it (rather than sending Max Hastings an envelope with a note saying “cheque enclosed” with no cheque).
Rory Stewart reviews Boris Johnson.
Are You Having Any Fun? (Vox)
In theory, my pandemic experience has been full of pleasant low-arousal activities that I would have once considered fun. I baked cakes and read books and streamed a lot of British murder content, and eventually, it all felt the same. And at the same time, it began to dawn on me that the “pause” that had begun in March was in fact my life.
“Isn’t that … what you did before?” my boyfriend asked, which is insulting but also not untrue. But the difference is that it all used to be fun. It is possible this is a symptom of low-grade depression, but on the other hand, it is also possible that I am right. “Everything you used to turn to that was fun for you is either not available, or it’s in such a different form that you’re still getting used to it,” says Marybeth Stalp, a sociologist at the University of Northern Iowa. “And if you are having fun, how long is it before guilt sets in?”
I tweaked the headline on this Vox piece because it reminded me of something actually pleasurable, ie listening to Elaine Stritch. But oh wow, did this line resonate: “My office is my sofa and weekends are weekdays and I am not efficient at work but I am never not slowly working.”
Random Frasier Content Because It’s Been That Kind of Week
What are KACL paying him that he can afford this apartment?
Quick Links
I had completely forgotten that a couple of years ago I recorded some segments for an in-game radio programme for Watch Dogs: Legion. Now you can drive round a dystopia while I hector you about fascism. (I’m against it, FYI. ) There’s a clip here.
“A college class had two teaching assistants: one male and one female. At the end of the semester, the students scored the male TA higher on course evaluations, while the female TA got five times as many negative reviews. There’s just one problem: They were the same person.” (UFL)
Bad times for the word “Latinx”, beloved by people on Twitter, but used by only 2 per cent of Latino/Latina people to describe themselves.
Amazing.
Curfew in Barcelona last night. The juxtaposition of the man on the piano playing “Eternal Flame” by The Bangles and the scene unfolding behind them is quite something.One final joke for the history nerds . . .
