The Bluestocking, vol 174
Dowdy and querulous.
Happy Friday!
And congratulations on making it to the end of January. My parents had their first dose of vaccine on Tuesday (AstraZeneca, though, so my mellow was harshed pretty quickly by the stories coming out of Germany) and there’s only 17 more months of lockdown to go. Things are looking up.
There’s no intro to the newsletter this week because I had to read an embargoed book very speedily for work, so consider this brevity the trade-off for a long piece in a month’s time. The “dragon of chaos” is coming, that’s all I will say.
Helen
PS. My diet of Creme Eggs and Pickled Onion Monster Munch did not find favour with Professor Tim Spector, the guest on this week’s episode of The Spark.
One Great Chart: The Trump Era is Over (via the Axios media newsletter)
The Pandemic Has Erased Entire Categories of Friendship (Atlantic)
The small joys of running into an old co-worker or chatting with the bartender at your local might not be the first thing you think of when imagining the value of friendship—images of more intentional celebrations and comforts, such as birthday parties and movie nights, might come to mind more easily. But Rawlins says that both kinds of interactions meet our fundamental desire to be known and perceived, to have our own humanity reflected back at us. “A culture is only human to the extent that its members confirm each other,” he said, paraphrasing the philosopher Martin Buber. “The people that we see in any number of everyday activities that we say, Hey, how you doing? That’s an affirmation of each other, and this is a comprehensive part of our world that I think has been stopped, to a great extent, in its tracks.”
Sob.
Mike Nichols’s Heartburn (Vulture)
When Heartburn opened in July, a more widespread negative verdict came in. “There must be a side to Carl Bernstein’s behavior of which we have not been made aware either in the book or the movie,” Andrew Sarris wrote, complaining in The Village Voice about the “one-sided sympathy” the film extends to Rachel. In Time, Richard Corliss sighed over the “tunnel-vision point of view of the offended party.” Roger Ebert shrugged and said, “There’s not much in the marriage for him to betray,” noting that Streep seemed “dowdy and querulous,” and Newsweek was certain that Ephron had left out important information about Rachel that would explain why Mark slept with other women, asking, “Is he disgusted by Rachel’s pregnant body? Tired of her cuddly, smart-homebody personality?” Almost every male critic who disliked the movie expressed bafflement that Nichols would take on a subject as minor as domestic unhappiness from a woman’s point of view — “He’s no dum-dum,” wrote Stanley Kauffmann, wondering why he would “waste [his talent] on flimsy material.” The good reviews for the film — and there were several — could not overcome a general perception that Nichols had blown it by making a trifle of a “woman’s picture,” and Heartburn’s box-office performance (it opened in second place but grossed only about $25 million during its run) confirmed it as a failure.
Nora Ephron’s Heartburn—a thinly disguised account of her divorce from Carl “Watergate” Bernstein—is both very funny and an absolutely brutal demolition of a certain kind of male writerly egotism. Imagine throwing that out to an all-male critical establishment. Clearly loads of these guys were aching for the version of the story from Carl’s point of view—their point of view.
Quick Links
“Of course it feels safer to make fun of women; but this generalised sneering is just an updated version of the old mother-in-law jokes, with added self-righteousness.” Hadley Freeman on Soul. (Guardian)
“[Ron] Brownstein pointed out that right-wing outlets like Fox play on fear, ‘feeding that sense that you are under threat, that elites disdain you, and immigrants and minorities are coming to kill you... That is the drug that they offer their audience, and it's increasingly become the message of the Republican party over time.’” I enjoy Brian Stelter’s media newsletter enormously, but we need to acknowledge that leftwing activists (and activist media) do a mirror image of this, hyping up existential threats for clicks.
“By way of a reminder, the past year has seen the toppling of precisely ONE statue in this country, itself long the subject of local contention, and four people will appear at Bristol magistrates court on Monday charged with criminal damage. Try cooling your boots, Robert, before you end up screaming “Why do you hate Britain?” at even the pigeons who befoul our statuary.” Marina Hyde on statue politics.
Great episode of Blocked and Reported (also available on podcast platforms) about “recovered memories”.
A kindly museum curator has made a Spotify playlist of James Baldwin’s record collection. I am very cheered by the thought of him bopping along to Diana Ross.
“Many of us are Jill, or would have been Jill.” This thread by Jane Clare Jones on It’s A Sin is a good introduction to current tensions in the LGBT movement. I haven’t watched the series yet, and I approach it with some trepidation because a couple of friends have queried its depiction of women. (I was uncomfortable with how Matthew Lopez’s post-Aids play The Inheritance had two genders—men and Vanessa Redgrave; whereas Angels in America had a much more rounded cast list.) Also, I’m sure I’ve recommended this before, but the Fifth Column podcast with Andrew Sullivan talking to a group of younger guys about living through the Aids crisis is excellent: he worked on a magazine where they had a list of editors “alive at time of going to press.”
Great opportunity for journalists who want to move into screenwriting, thanks to Watchmen writer Cord Jefferson.
“As I’ve watched redditors over the last few days use wildly inflated GameStop stock to effectively cripple the world’s financial systems, I’ve thought about what 4chan was like during the Occupy Wall Street era.” Ryan Broderick’s newsletter has some good thoughts about the GameStop bizniz.
Pre-order Difficult Women in paperback now!
See you next time!
I just revisited your 2018 interview with Jordon Peterson and it makes me wonder if now 2 years later and after the year long worldwide struggles between government control and ppl needing to feed their families, the rioting in us cities over police brutality, the us election debacle, the collapse of the Italian parliament, Brexit, etc. have you reflected on his interview?