The Bluestocking, vol 242

weird dreams about octopuses

Happy Friday!

I couldn’t be less thrilled about the prospect of the upcoming heatwave, since I live (and work) in a house with skylights in the living room, aka a greenhouse. My happiest moment of the week was watching Patriots at the Almeida, Peter Morgan’s technically adept but oddly emotionless play about the rise of Putin, and walking into the air-conditioned auditorium. My god, it felt good.

The play was also immensely enlivened by the fact that at the end, as Tom Hollander’s Boris Berezovsky tied a noose around a chandelier, a loud whisper issued from the row behind: KILL YOURSELF, KILL YOURSELF. It came from a very famous playwright, and now I’m intrigued to know if he does the same during e.g. Hamlet’s soliloquy. NO IT’S NOT NOBLER IN THE MIND.

Helen

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Jane Austen, Girlboss (The Atlantic)

There are good reasons that we have collectively settled on the current approach to Austen—and to period drama more generally. We want the brand recognition of classics, but we want to see characters with modern sensibilities and emotions navigate these alien worlds. We want the work’s politics to be modern, too, alert to diversity and inclusion. But that can leave other political dimensions uninterrogated: One of the most inexplicable decisions in this Persuasion is to take a minor character who becomes a mistress in the novel and rewrite her as a respectable wife. (Apparently, 2022 is more conservative than 1817 in its idea of a tidy ending.) Being gauche and unclassy is still signaled by showing too much cleavage, as if having large breasts is itself a sign of bad manners. And though the characters are anachronistically diverse in racial terms, the actors are also—this time entirely correctly, in historical terms—much thinner than today’s average American.

This didn’t make it into the final piece, but I would like to know when the meeting was which decided the Georgian era was primarily an Instagram Aesthetic: clipped box hedges and tiered silver cake stands, periwigs and peacocks, pale Cotswold stone and sugar icing, printed wallpaper and people going “hmph!”

Patient Zero for this aesthetic was probably Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette, a solid 123 minutes of Kirsten Dunst wiggling into silk stockings and giggling over cupcakes:

Snacks seem to feature heavily in the aesthetic

… although Bridgerton is also keeping the millenial pink flame alive:

In ten years, this aggressively stylised fondant-fancy style will look as dated as the 20th century presumption that Shakespeare was best performed in booming upper-class English accents against painted backcloths.

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Bluestocking recommends: If you are one of the three remaining people in the world who hasn’t seen Top Gun: Maverick, get yourself to the nearest air-conditioned cinema immediately. Truly, a dispatch from the land irony forgot, with flight sequences that are a million times better for not being entirely reliant on CGI.

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Quick Links

1. “[Ted] Sarandos’ response marked a tone shift at Netflix and in Silicon Valley more broadly. In 2009, Hastings and chief talent officer Patty McCord had published a 128-page PowerPoint presentation laying out their management philosophy: lead with context, not control; don’t hire brilliant jerks; and, most crucially, always be honest. . . Over the past 10 years, as Netflix has gone from Hollywood outsider to one of the most powerful forces in entertainment, the company’s relationship to its workforce has changed. Previously, streaming video was a massive problem that could only be solved by investing in engineering talent. (Recall that the popularity of shows like Game of Thrones could overload HBO servers, making it difficult for viewers to watch live.) Now, the most competitive part of Netflix’s business isn’t what its coders produce — it’s what content shows up on the platform.” The end of Netflix’s culture of feedback (The Verge).

2. I only understand about a third of most Matt Levine newsletters, but I always enjoy them. Here is he is on Elon Musk deciding he doesn’t want to buy Twitter, after all (Bloomberg).

3. The Atlantic has put its full archive online, and commissioned 25 Atlantic writers of today to write about the Atlantic writers of the past: Henry David Thoreau, Jack London, Sylvia Plath, WEB Du Bois. I wrote about Eleanor Roosevelt.

4. Talking of which, my editor Jeff recommended this piece from January 1939, entitled “I Married A Jew.” It’s sweet in its own way—about a German woman who marries a Jewish American, but it also makes some, er, bad calls: “It is hard for Ben to take the long view. He looks upon Hitler as something malignantly unique, and it is no use trying to tell him that a hundred years hence the world will no more call Hitler a swine for expelling the Jews than it does Edward I of England, who did the same thing in the thirteenth century.”

5. “Time was, if you were a television personality who had written a book, you’d do one of these events and hope that a decent percentage of the audience would hang around afterwards to buy the book and get it signed. […] Now, it’s standard practice for many of these events to include a copy of the book in the ticket price and here’s the beauty of it: all those book sales count towards the chart position.” Stephanie Merritt in the Guardian.

6. “The CCP doesn’t just use intelligence officers posing as diplomats in the classic fashion. Privileged information is gathered on multiple channels, in what is sometimes referred to as the ‘thousand grains of sand’ strategy.” The joint address by the heads of MI5 and the FBI about China’s industrial espionage is a weirdly great read.

7. This clip of a young Rishi Sunak is hilarious. Narrator: he did not, in fact, shock them when he revealed he went to a posh school.

8. It was easier to be skinny in the 1980s (video).

9. Nothing has made me laugh this week like this person who asked her family to send her voice notes of them trying the Queen of the Night Solo from the Magic Flute. At university, I trolled future famous food writer Felicity Cloake by telling the music student living opposite her in halls how much I loved this solo, ensuring that student spent the next 24 hours trying to hit the high F.

10. Relatedly, I then fell down a hole of various performances of the solo. Maria Callas is incredible—her voice on the F6 sounds like an instrument, or a bird—but there is a special place in my heart for notoriously bad singer Florence Foster Jenkins, who isn’t tone-deaf and murders it.

11. Maybe if I ever do a paid version of the Bluestocking the premium subscriber benefit will be that I will send you a voice note of me doing this.

12. This BBC interview with the person who proposed having a Non Binary Day (it was yesterday, you missed it) was more nuanced than I expected.

13. “One Week was a plague on humanity in 1998, and it’s still a plague on humanity today.” Terrible opinion. From Stereogum’s feature reviewing of every single number one.

14. Michael Flatley is the lead in a spy thriller called Blackbird, which is apparently a real film (Twitter). Update: he is also the director.

15. “. . . with the Tesla CEO furious that his father had impregnated his stepsister.” I understand Elon Musk a lot more now.

See you next time!