The Bluestocking, vol 253

Area Man Complains About Free Lodgings

Happy Friday!

I’m now back from the US, and I spent my plane journey happily reading Spare—my review-essay is below. Give that ghostwriter a medal.

Helen

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DALL-E: “digital art of Prince Harry dressed as a character in a Rembrandt painting holding a spliff”

Prince Harry’s Unwitting Case Against the Monarchy (The Atlantic)

Harry also keenly feels his secondary status as the “spare” to the heir. There’s a mirthless joke about existing only to provide donated organs to William if needed, and he interprets every bit of normal brotherly bickering as a reminder of his lower rank in the hierarchy. Early on, Harry asserts that while he might not be a scholar, he can remember in great detail every place he’s been. And can he! One way to sum up Spare would be “Area Man Complains About Free Lodgings.” His half of a shared childhood bedroom is smaller and “less luxurious” than William’s; his Kensington Palace apartment has no light; the ceilings on his grace-and-favor cottage are too low. Worst of all, at Balmoral, he is given a “mini room in a narrow back corridor, among the offices of Palace staff.” The tiny violin is played heavily in this symphony.

If Harry’s complaints all seem phenomenally petty, we shouldn’t be surprised. Royal courts have always been like this, ensnaring their inhabitants in constant micro-battles for status. Nancy Mitford’s wonderful biography of Madame de Pompadour, mistress of the French King Louis XV, outlines the terrible consequences of the rigid etiquette of Versailles: French nobles let their country estates go to ruin while they bickered over who was allowed a chair instead of a stool in the king’s presence, or at what angle they could have their kneeling cushion in chapel. Even as an adult, Harry is infantilized, dependent on his father for money and on the wider royal network for permission to travel, endorse charitable causes, and propose marriage. “I’d been forced into this surreal state,” he writes, “this unending Truman Show in which I almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered anything online, never received a single box from Amazon, almost never traveled on the Underground.”

I read Spare so you don’t have to, except that you should, because—wow. People go on about Rachel Cusk’s memoirs being brutally honest and fearless, but has she written about hallucinating a talking bin and wetting herself on a yacht? She has not.

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Photo by Sole D'Alessandro G. on Unsplash

Jack Monroe: The acceptable face of poverty (Unherd)

A much-derided blogpost of Monroe’s from last year suggests buying a tin of spaghetti hoops, washing the tomato sauce from the hoops, then grating some cheese on top to produce “Anellini Con Cacio e Pepe”. (Readers are also told that the washed-off tomato sauce can be reduced down “in a vigorous boil to concentrate it” to make something approximating tomato purée.) In the latest book, Monroe waxes lyrical about such culinary temptations as “moonshine mash” (Instant Mash mixed with pureed tinned sweetcorn), chicken cooked in Fanta, and cornflake ice-cream.

Once you have unscrewed your face, consider that the real attraction of Monroe’s writing for readers cannot possibly be that it gives impoverished people genuinely delicious things to eat, still less that it saves them lots of money. After all, no amount of repurposing stale cornflakes or fiddling about with ring pulls is going to make even the smallest dent in household bills these days. Rather, the main appeal of Monroe’s writing is surely that it taps into an old and perennially satisfying literary tradition, which for want of a better term I’ll call Thrift Lit.

Kathleen Stock identifies something which has been bugging me about Jack Monroe: who is the real audience for tips about washing the sauce off spaghetti hoops? Not actually impoverished people, she suggests, but middle-class do-gooders. The ur-text of this is surely Marmee in Little Women making the girls give up their Christmas presents to the starving—but more important, daintily grateful—family down the road. It’s a fantasy of the “deserving poor” which is really just the rightwing “start by selling off your flatscreen TV” gambit in disguise.

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Quick links

1. A chaser to the Jack Monroe piece: Simon Hattenstone’s Guardian profile, which puts some of the allegations about missing money and various dramas directly to Monroe. (Disclosure: the last time I saw Jack was a joint talk at a university, pre-Covid. She arrived halfway through . . .)

2. What Andrew Tate Told the Woman Who Accused Him of Rape (Vice). Feels like something of an indictment of the British police’s inability to prosecute rape cases that Tate texted the complainant saying “I love raping you” and left a voicenote saying “the more you didn’t like it, the more I enjoyed it” and the CPS still didn’t put the case in front of a jury.

3. Great local newspaper intros of our time (Western Telegraph).

4. Podcast recommendations #1: Hadley Freeman talks to Julie Bindel.

5. Podrec #2: Bari Weiss and Nellie Bowles talk to Emily Oster about data-driven parenting, what Covid policies got wrong (and right), and a “pandemic amnesty.” (The Free Press)

6. Eleanor Halls interviews Sam Knight about getting the best job in journalism: being a longform feature writer (Pass the Aux, Substack).

7. “It’s hard to imagine being Ryan Gosling; it’s not that hard to imagine being one of the hosts of Chapo Trap House. And so people who have tasted some success and get to be full-time “creatives” but who lack fame or genuine riches, as opposed to upper-middle-class extravagance, become the most attractive targets.” (Freddie deBoer, Substack)

8. “Slowing rates of disruption may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology.” Interesting new paper just dropped on stalling innovation. Useful background from 2020: slowed canonical progress in large fields of science (open access).

See you next time!