The Bluestocking, vol 228

trapped in a doorway talking to his shoulder-boil

Happy Friday!

Substack has recently rolled out some new features, including its own stock image library, so from now on expect to see some excellent photographs of millennials in co-working spaces/lightbulbs to signify “ideas”/women laughing alone with foodstuffs.

Helen

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Photo by Edgar Soto on Unsplash

Put On The Diamonds (Harper’s)

“A psychiatrist who interviewed a group of men imprisoned for murder and other violent crimes asked each of them why he had done it. In almost all cases the answer was “He dissed me.” On the other hand, I have a cousin, a doctor, who feels humiliated if he’s shortchanged in a grocery store. His wife, too: if another woman is wearing the same dress at a party, she feels humiliated. . .

Then there is the testimony of Primo Levi in his concentration-camp memoir, Survival in Auschwitz. Levi tells us that given the massive amount of death and destruction going on all around him, it was somewhat remarkable that the humiliation of humiliations, the one that remained ever fresh in his mind for the rest of his life, was the moment when a Kapo, finding nothing to wipe his greasy hand on, turned to Levi and wiped it on his shoulder. That was the moment when Levi understood viscerally what it meant to be seen as a thing.”

Superb Vivian Gornick essay on humiliation in art and life, named after a casually chilling line from Daniel Deronda.

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Tilda Swinton as Woolf’s Orlando

Julian Barnes: My book is probably offensive to most Christians in the world (Sunday Times, £)

Spend ten minutes with anyone in publishing and the talk will turn to “cancel culture” — whether it’s real or a moral panic, and whether the climate is more censorious or merely censorious about different things. Barnes’s long career has left him well placed to observe changing tastes and shifting taboos. Which of his books has provoked the biggest backlash? He says that Metroland, his first novel, was banned in apartheid South Africa, which made him very proud. “I thought, ‘This is terrific. I probably would only have sold 100 copies, but now I have the badge.’”

I interviewed Julian Barnes ahead of the publication of his new novel, Elizabeth Finch, which deals with both Julian the Apostate and a public shaming. Sadly cut for space reasons was the story about how he gives Hermione Lee notes on all her works (and she reads his). He once left a comment on her Virginia Woolf biography manuscript that said: “Remind me to never, ever, ever read Orlando.”

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Quick Links

1. “When I held him I could feel his pulsing heart, his warm body. And very soon, when I said, ‘Willy’, he responded with a little caw. For the first time since my children finished school my writing day was changed, brightened in unexpected ways.” Paul Theroux on his pet goose is very moving (LRB, 2019).

2. I discovered that piece—and the Gornick essay—through my colleague Conor’s Substack, The Best of Journalism. You have to pay for that one, but you can get his other newsletter, Up For Debate, free with an Atlantic subscription. The recent edition on Lia Thomas was well worth reading. Kudos to him for venturing into that territory as an American journalist.

3. Eleanor Halls on how the music industry enables vulnerable stars to become, and stay, broken. (Pass the Aux)

4. “On the other hand, the image of a scorned gay giant with micro-wiener dressed as Peter the Great and trapped in a doorway talking to his shoulder-boil is pretty dynamic stuff.” Matt Taibbi counting up the metaphors in a single Thomas Friedman column on Putin is hysterical. (Substack)

5. In a subscriber-only newsletter for the Atlantic, David French has written how a new wave of women writers are dissenting from “sex positivity”—he mentions Christine Emba, whose book Rethinking Sex is on my To Read list. He could also have mentioned Louise Perry, whose The Case Against The Sexual Revolution is out this summer. I wrote about the fact that sex-positivity can become a cover for coercion into rubbish sex for the Atlantic last year. The New Prudes are assembling.

6. “This latest row highlights one of the serious problems with the way Westminster deals with legislation. Its focus is almost entirely upon the principles at stake, rather than the impact of the way the laws are drafted. This means that if someone raises concerns about the unintended consequences of a proposed bill, their critics will engage with them not on the point of detail they are concerned about, but on the overall principle.” Isabel Hardman on the LGBT conversion therapy debacle, and its echoes of the Bedroom Tax debacle. (Spectator)

7. “[Tuberculosis] was seen not as an acquired disease but as an illness intrinsic to the inherent disposition of the sufferer. It is not too far a stretch, after all, to link a waifish aesthete and a wasting disease (French dandy and aesthetic provocateur Théophile Gautier said that in his youth, ‘I could not have accepted as a lyrical poet anyone weighing more than ninety-nine pounds’).” John Self on TB in literature. There’s a book in How Tuberculosis Shaped The World, I reckon. (The Critic)

8. Claudia Goldin released an analysis on women in the US workforce during the pandemic, and it’s tentatively cheering: “The real story of women during the pandemic is that they remained in the labor force and stayed on their jobs, as much as they could.” I don’t think Goldin’s research contradicts the majority of what I wrote in 2020 about pandemic effects—“much of the deepest economic impact and personal pain was experienced by women,” she writes, and later, “the absolute time demands on mothers were extraordinary.” But her work is a useful qualification to the specific fear that mothers would be driven out of the workforce en masse, which would affect their incomes now, and pensions later. (Goldin also revisits one of my big fears, that a desire for flexibility might be seen as lack of commitment: “If, in the ‘new normal,’ men go to the office five days a week and women go to the office three days a week and work from home two days, women won’t be part-timers in terms of hours, but they will be part-timers in terms of face-time and colleague-time in the office. Women will do the client-facing meetings on Zoom, and men will go to Zürich to close the deal. The work enclave may be useful in the short run, but, like its part-time hours equivalent, it may not come with the same bonuses, pay increases, and promotions.”)

See you next time!