The Bluestocking, vol 215
you are not a soul singer cutting short a Vegas residency
Happy Friday!
Over the holidays I finished reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, a title based on the average lifespan. I liked its message—that you can never “clear your decks” to get on with your MASTERPIECE, but instead you need to accept the chaos will never abate.
Oliver reckons you should carve out three to four hours of really good quality work every day, and then not worry too much about getting distracted/having to do chores etc the rest of the time. There is an interesting study in the book about academics, which showed that those of them who made writing a smaller part of their lives often got more done overall, because they could keep up that pace indefinitely. It reminded me that Terry Pratchett, an unarguably prolific author, wrote 400 words a day. The difference between his novelistic output and yours is that he did that every single day.
Anyway, that’s my NY resolution—four good hours a day, to be added to the good intentions pile, along with passing my driving test (I signalled left and tried to turn right this week, still some way to go) and reducing my carbs (file under “but I love the potato like a child”).
Helen
The Autumn of Joan Didion (The Atlantic)
Ultimately Joan Didion’s crime—artistic and personal—is the one of which all of us will eventually be convicted: she got old. Her writing got old, her perspective got old, her bag of tricks didn’t work anymore. Where was the Didion who was a Goldwater girl and a Nixon voter, the Republican at Berkeley, the woman who didn’t care at all about the prevailing literary and political fashions, who went to the supermarket in an old bikini and boarded first-class compartments of international flights in bare feet, and who therefore—because she thought about things always on her own terms—could see things in front of us that we’d been missing all along? How could someone that original turn into another tired espouser of the most doctrinaire New York Review of Books political opinions? How could the woman who crafted sentences so original they made us fall in love with her have turned out decades of prose about which Katie Roiphe can rightly say, “Her words are clichés—her sentences and her rhythms and her tics are clichés because we know them so well”? It’s because she got old.
Caitlin Flanaghan on Joan Didion, from 2012.
Chaser: “I remain grateful for the day I picked up “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and realized that a woman could speak without hedging her bets, without hemming and hawing, without making nice, without poeticisms, without sounding pleasant or sweet, without deference, and even without doubt. It must be hard for a young woman today to imagine the sheer scope of things that women of my generation feared women couldn’t do—but, believe me, writing with authority was one of them.” Zadie Smith on Joan Didion, 2021 (New Yorker).
Bluestocking recommends: Slow Horses, by Mick Herron. I needed an accessible book to stop me doomscrolling, so I figured I would start with a spy novel. This one—the start of the Jackson Lamb series—has been consistently recommended to me by Chris Deerin and others, and now I’m recommending it to you. Page-turner.
Bluestocking recommends: Spring Awakening at the Almeida in north London just extended its (formerly sold-out) run, and I am deeply considering going again, because I loved its nineteenth century teenage angst, interpreted through the medium of 2000s soft-rock angst, which reminded me strongly of my own teenage angst. Upsum: if Green Day did songs about nihilism and botched abortions.
Bluestocking unrecommends: Cabaret at the Playhouse theatre. Beautiful staging and orchestration, but tickets cost a fortune and it’s miscast from top to bottom.
Quick Links
The universe owes us a Desmond Tutu/Dalai Lama road trip movie.
“It’s also very interesting that as this cat breastfeeding video was going viral, Facebook/Meta announced that the top publications on its newsletter product Bulletin have around 5,000-10,000 readers, which is very low for a platform Facebook’s size. But we know what kind of content does well on Facebook. It’s not a newsletter written by Malcolm Gladwell, it’s a 15-minute live video of Taylor Watson slowly revealing the results of her breast augmentation surgery that ends in a punchline that she has chicken breasts taped to her chest.” (Garbage Day)
Talking of Malcolm Gladwell’s newsletter, here is his “Matthew 6 rule” for American philanthropists: you can have a tax break for your donation, or you can have your name on the thing they build with it.
“Asked why he didn't big up Jeremy Corbyn in his speech, Keir Starmer says: ‘I have always cited Attlee, Wilson and Blair because they won’.” The Manchurian Blairite strikes again.
“One of the first Silicon Valley venture capitalists they pitched was Chris Sacca, an early backer of Instagram, Twitter, and Uber. After their presentation, Sacca later recalled, he pulled them aside and said, “Guys, this is super dangerous. Somebody’s going to get raped or murdered, and the blood is gonna be on your hands.” He didn’t invest.” Inside AirBnB’s blackbox unit, which handles rentals gone bad (Bloomberg).
I enjoy playing Wordle. Ignore the haters.
“Get off social media. Don’t ‘take a break’ or explain your reasons: you are not a soul singer cutting short a Vegas residency. Just leave. Alaska Airlines is the best domestic US carrier. If someone is not sure whether they want children, they want children. Never support a cause or idea because the people on the other side are objectionable.” Janan Ganesh’s life advice at 40 (Financial Times).
MC Hammer to the theme of Bullseye. (Via Jonn Elledge, who has a Substack about trains and stuff.)
“Britain’s existential threat is not simply the result of poor governance—an undeniable reality—but of something much deeper: the manifestation of something close to a spiritual crisis.” Tom McTague on the future of Britain (The Atlantic).
“Were race not a spectrum, Rachel Dolezal’s critics should have spotted that she wasn’t ‘really’ black, simply by taking one look at her. It’s precisely because black Americans are a spectrum that it wasn’t obvious. With negligible exceptions, on the other hand, you can unwaveringly identify a person’s sex at a glance, especially if they remove their clothes. Sex is pretty damn binary.” Richard Dawkins explains bimodal distributions to postmodernists (Areo).
Righteous/Wrongteous
There has been some lively Discourse about Stewart Lee’s end of year naughty/nice list (yay antisemitism defenders; boo Tory MPs) in the last few days. Here is a sample of the eclectic nature of his “naughty” list:
Alok Sharma MP
Desmond Swayne MP
Joe Biden
The Taliban
John Cleese
Jimmy Fallon
Nadine Dorries MP
Nica Burns
Spitting Image
Dave Chapelle [sic]
For my money, the list was nowhere near the most remarkable thing about Lee’s newsletter, which was longer than a Dominic Cummings blog and lovingly recorded the time he went to the M4 services in a section devoted to “historic sites” visited in 2021.
Anyway, here is my equivalent 2021 list. Further submissions welcome.
RIGHTEOUS
Newsletters
The plentiful toilets at the Bridge Theatre
People who write columns I agree with
M&S rye sourdough
The Rock
WRONGTEOUS
Broad beans
Restaurants that don’t take bookings
Films over three hours long
All dogs except yours
Al-Shabaab
Hope that clears everything up, see you next time.
Always look forward to The Bluestocking. Thank you Helen, and a happy new year to you x
I discovered your newsletters a few months back and I'm constantly delighted at the content, be it funny or thought provoking. I look forward to them every Friday. More power to you and Happy New Year!