The Bluestocking, vol 196
How did you meet John?
Happy Friday!
I had lots of great responses to last week’s intro about hating Twitter, the best of which was maybe the Bluestockinger who wrote that Twitter is for people who think they’re too good for LinkedIn, and her answer was therefore to use it exactly like LinkedIn (i.e. to post professional updates and nothing else). This seems pretty sane.
On which note, today’s newsletter contains 20 links salvaged from four years of Likes, as I deleted them. Come for molerat pregnancy, stay for Queen Susan of the Albanians.
Helen
PS. As well as my interview with the van Tullekens (below), this week I also published a longish read on Bristol’s Statue Wars. The Colston statue was basically a giant neg to a recently erected statue of Edmund Burke.
What It’s Like To Have a Thinner Twin (The Atlantic)
Helen Lewis: Talking to my family about food sounds like my actual nightmare. Why did you decide to do it?
Xand van Tulleken: Sometimes, if you have a [podcast] producer with you, it allows you to have a conversation that would otherwise be a nightmare. Secretly, our producer was our referee and the both of us in the conversation were like: “Do you see how he is now? Do you get it?”
Lewis: Maybe all the world’s problems could be solved if more people were given a podcast.
Xand: That is the direction we’re going in.
As trailed last week, my interview with the van Tullekens about ultra-processed foods, twin dynamics and obesity genes. Their podcast is here.
The Magic Mountain Will Consume You (Unherd)
Never quite letting go of my phone, I drifted in and out of the 796-page novel. Der Zauberg, in German, is about a man called Hans Castorp who spends seven years in a sanatorium, without really doing very much, on the eve of the First World War. It is a strange thing — a Zeitroman or “time-novel” — about the dissolution of time both in the passing of an age and in the loss of one man’s ability to experience its flow in the way he’s used to.
I didn’t enjoy it. I was consumed by it. I was so used to doing the consuming, quickly and easily — Netflix, Sally Rooney — that being consumed was an uncomfortable, odd, experience. I almost couldn’t read it: I’d become so used to skim-reading feeds — and so used to the kind of extractive get-to-the-point reading of novels with nut graph-like points about what they are supposed to represent — that I’d forgotten the experience of a totalising work of art.
Ben Judah on reading an absolute whopper of a Thomas Mann novel during lockdown.
You Keep Discovering Another Little Thing (Rolling Stone)
[Paul] McCartney: I always think everyone’s heard all the stories. As you get older, you think, “Am I just repeating all my stories?” But I rationalize, well, there’s only one answer to the question, “How did you meet John?” I can’t make another meeting up. I can maybe try and explain how we met in a slightly different way. But I’ll still talk to someone and they say, ‘What? You dreamed ‘Yesterday’?” And so I’ll tell the story again, but it’s like, “You sure you haven’t heard this?”
But not everyone has. As we go on and the young people come onboard, there’s a lot of stuff they haven’t heard.
Read anything about the Beatles and you’ll discover that Paul was no pushover—he was artistically driven, as well as the most commercially minded. But what makes me think he’s a mensch is his generosity of spirit. Most icons would hate being asked repeatedly about their brief, incandescent, unrepeatable level of fame 50 years ago. (“Aren’t you here to talk about my new album?”) But Paul seems at peace with the demands of being a living legend.
Huge Content Dump from my Likes
Just a man absolutely owning himself with a teaspoon of cinnamon.
How Life Looks Through My Whale Eyes (New York Times)
There Are Two Ways Into A Theatre (Chris Addison)
Jeremy Hardy sings Hallelujah in the style of George Formby.
Apart from anything else, why is there a seal in this?
What swans would look like without feathers.
“Each time a naked mole-rat queen gets pregnant and gives birth, her spinal column stretches a little and makes her slightly longer, so she can fit more babies in there next time.” If you think that’s bad, wait until you get to the coprophilia.
Dialogue advice from Goldman and Olivier.
“She should know.” What’s the hackiest way to transition into a nut graf?
“The date is October 29, 2018, and Britain faces its darkest hour. On the battlefields of Europe, our Armed Forces have been humiliated.” Classic Dominic Sandbrook dystopia from 2011.
I want to land in Greenland. Once.
One of my top five all-time favourite tweets.
“Theory: The final scene of virtually every movie would be improved by the inclusion of Cher’s ‘Super Trouper.’ Exhibit A: TITANIC (1997) dir. James Cameron.” (Not wrong.)
“Yet in the accidental deal of a lifetime, the flat that Del [Boy] purchased in 1992 would be worth £850,000 today.” (Tides of History)
Kenneth Williams presents an item on Tomorrow’s World.
Marina Amral’s recoloured photograph of Queen Victoria and her extended family at a wedding in Coburg, 1894. Check out those shoulderpads.
Unexpectedly Great/Horrible Wikipedia Entries
Sir Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de Wiart, a war hero who “tore off his own fingers when a doctor declined to amputate them”. The definitely real martial arts expert Frank Dux. The French soldier Tarrare, the hungriest man in history.
(Submissions welcome.)
Bluestocking Recommends: Anything Goes at the Barbican. Some Like It Hot is one of my favourite films, and there’s a similar joyful, queer insouciance about this production of the 1930s musical, with Broadway star Sutton Foster, a scene-stealing Robert Lindsay, and a very small dog. The tickets are expensive but you could sit at the back of the circle and still enjoy it, I think.
Rating: 0/40 winks from Jonathan, i.e. five stars.
That’s all for this edition. Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Just hit reply.