The Bluestocking, vol 252
There are no bad elephants
Happy Friday!
There was no newsletter last week for two reasons: 1) I wrote about 5,000 words on feminist schisms but it needs more time to brew; 2) I was on holiday, swimming with dolphins.
I know what you’re thinking: isn’t that wildly over-rated? And I say: NO. It is exactly as awesome as I thought it would be—watching them slip through the water like bullets while I floundered around on the surface. (I am consoling myself that overall, in a triathlon, I would win.)
Anyway, then I returned, and British politics . . . did what British politics does. I dream of the day when I will be able to renege on commitments without using the phrase “don’t blame me, blame the Conservative party.”
On Monday, I wrote that what Liz Truss got wrong was everything. Yesterday, I noted that Liz Truss fought the lettuce, and the lettuce won.
Helen
The Original Tiger Kings (Atlantic)
There are no bad elephants, but some elephants are easier to handle than others. When Siegfried & Roy moved to the Frontier, they acquired Gildah, an excellent elephant. She was the heart of what was then a new old trick: making an elephant disappear. Houdini did that in 1918. No magician had attempted it since, mostly because no magician happened to have an elephant handy, or a performance space big enough to vanish one. Teller, of Penn & Teller—two more magicians who call Las Vegas home—is the Siegfried of his particular duo: the logician, the focus, the sober second thought.
Making an elephant disappear, Teller says, “is the kind of thing that you read in a magic book and you say, ‘Well, that’s a clever idea, but no one could actually do that.’ And they did, which is perfectly consistent with everything about their thinking: Take whatever it is, and do it over the top.” Siegfried was a devoted student of magic, but he was never much of an inventor. Siegfried & Roy knew that they would be forgiven for their unoriginal illusions so long as they elevated them, and giant animals have a way of elevating everything. The devil’s half of the bargain was that Siegfried & Roy could become the grandest version of themselves only by surrounding themselves with the instruments of their potential destruction.
Chris Jones is the author of one of my favourite-ever features, Teller’s Rose, so I was delighted to see him return to the subject of magic with this longread about Siegfried & Roy, which features an unexpected but welcome cameo by Arnold Schwarzenegger and his mum.
Mike Connor v. The Pain (Esquire)
He could hear others scream and then the sound of heels—clomp clomp clomp clomp—and a woman’s voice—“Call 9-1-1!”—and then, as the clomp clomp clomp came nearer and the voice got louder, he heard a gasp: “Oh my . . .” Then creation went black.
And then, suddenly, Mike Conner found himself standing before a large wooden door, like in a castle. Tall, dark, beautiful old wood. He could feel a protective arm move across him, opening the door with a creak, and inside there was blackness. Then Mike heard a voice, epicene, monotone, beside him in the dark. The voice asked, “Do you want to live?”
Mike had a question, too. “Does my penis work?”
And then he awoke.
What it is really like on the inside of one of those inspirational stories of someone who is “lucky to be alive.” Also credit to Mike for focusing on the practical questions during his near-death experience.
Quick Links
This story of a prolific online stalker is so horrible. What can you do with someone like this? (Guardian)
Stuart Ritchie on how the claims made for “growth mindset” shrank (Substack).
“Mr. Musk had a difficult childhood, in which he was bullied and attacked (to the point of hospitalization) by classmates. Now, at 51, he seems to be living the teenage years he never had — parties, drugs, popular friends, beautiful girlfriends, jokes cracked to an adoring audience — without quite escaping his own innate insecurity.” (New York Times)
Winston Churchill going down a water slide (Twitter).
“Whatever Happened to Brendan Fraser?” The answer to this sweet 2018 GQ profile is “starred in the new Darren Aronofsky movie that everyone loves”.
William Shatner had his own Pale Blue Dot moment in space (twitter).
“Humour is at least somewhat subjective, I know, but I think one use of the word ‘pee-pee hole’ would have been more than enough.” Some people might say: Helen, why do you pursue your energising but ultimately pointless vendetta against James Felton? And to those people I say: this asshole has apparently sold 100,000 books. (The Critic)
After a year on Substack, Max Read has 13,000 subscribers, of whom just under 1,000 pay him, netting him $50,000 a year. (Substack)
Related to that, Hamish—one of Substack’s founders—has written a post getting salty about the company being referred to as part of the “newsletter economy.” While also boasting about how its newsletter offering has made all the legacy outlets up their game. I feel like he could have written this post without the anti-MSM topspin, but I guess when you gaze into the heterodox abyss, the heterodox abyss also gazes into you (Substack).
“A combination town crier and volcano god, [Nikki] Finke evokes in her readers both anxiety and respect.” Thanks to Eleanor Halls for this New Yorker piece on Deadline’s Nikki Finke, who died recently, and the Hollywood power players she terrified and seduced. Apparently Finke made the NYer factchecker’s life hell.
Pretty thorough fisking of John Oliver’s very sloppy, clap-line-driven show on youth transition (City Journal).
The Indian remake of Thriller (Twitter).
“I made particular friends with a doctor—we’ll call him Dr Ray. He was a genial Nigerian man who possessed the sense of abandon that could only arise from being a married religious professional who has seen more vaginas than Charlemagne.” The headline here is great and the piece just gets better and better (Guardian).
It’s not on for much longer, but I loved EUREKA DAY at the Old Vic last night. You know my obsession with representing the internet on stage/screen—this play had the perfect representation of a Zoom chat going off the rails, complete with someone writing “ducking”. There’s a beautiful comic rhythm to messenger chat speech—almost like lines of poetry—which as someone who spends 5 hours a day on WhatsApp, I have come to appreciate. Plus Helen Hunt, who really could be Laura McInerney’s real mum.
See you next time!
“Humour is at least somewhat subjective, I know, but I think one use of the word ‘pee-pee hole’ would have been more than enough.”
Having read the piece, I actually disagree with this - to the extent that the joke works at all (which is to say, barely), it works by repetition of the silly phrase "pee-pee hole". Once is merely silly, four times in a paragraph is giggle-inducing. Or at least it presumably is for Felton's audience.
Incidentally, the linguistic term for compound swearwords like "cockwomble" is "shitgibbon" (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shitgibbon), because linguists apparently have the sense of humour of a five-year-old too.
As soon as I read Ben’s excoriating piece, I wondered whether you’d link to it - and I’m delighted to see you have. Please, do continue your „pointless vendetta”, thank you.