The Bluestocking, vol 299: Stipe and Slow Horses
sometimes he thought he was made of glass
Happy Friday!
Last weekend I was in Ghent, in the Flemish part of Belgium, for work. Let me tell you something—go to Ghent! It’s a very charming, walkable city and you can get there from London via Eurostar to Brussels and then a 30-minute double-decker train.
The Ghent altarpiece—nearly destroyed by angry Protestants in something called the “Iconoclastic Fury,” seized by Napoleon, repatriated in the Treaty of Versailles, stolen by a rando, seized by Hitler and hidden in a mine, and then finally returned—is worth the visit alone.
Ghent is also the subject of a fairly dire poem by Robert Browning:
And all I remember is, friends flocking round
As I sat with his head ’twixt my knees on the ground;
And no voice but was praising this Roland of mine,
As I poured down his throat our last measure of wine,
Which (the burgesses voted by common consent)
Was no more than his due who brought good news from Ghent.
That “twixt” is simply unforgivable, isn’t it? FIND A WORD WITH THE RIGHT NUMBER OF SYLLABLES.
Helen
Michael Stipe Is Writing His Next Act. Slowly (New York Times, £)
Stipe is not a big reader, but several times I heard him bring up a particular book to people he encountered. The book is called “Pretentiousness: Why It Matters.”
Its author, Dan Fox, works to separate pretentiousness from the many turnoffs the word conjures, like arrogance, self-absorption and snobbery. Pretentiousness itself is innocent, Fox argues; it shares a root with “pretending.” To be pretentious is to pretend to be larger or more sophisticated than you are, “overreaching what you’re capable of” until your capabilities catch up. In this sense, David Bowie was pretentious. John Lennon was pretentious. Fox asks us to imagine how impoverished the world would be if every young creative person were told that “it was pretentious for them to take an interest in literature, music, theater, gardening or cooking — that they could only be true to the circumstances into which they’d been born.”
After hearing Stipe mention the book so many times, I read it and was excited, when we reconnected last fall, to discuss it with him. But right away, Stipe told me, “I never finished the book, to be completely honest with you.” Talking up a book on pretentiousness you never finished feels extremely pretentious, yet he volunteered this information without embarrassment — which might be the least pretentious thing I’d ever heard.”
I basically read this profile of REM’s Michael Stipe through a vale of tears. Journalists so rarely get this level of access to a celebrity, and can therefore not deliver this level of insight. There’s so much texture in this profile about what the grind of life as a professional music superstar involves, but also so much about creativity and collaboration. You need heroes in the generation above (to emulate) and admirers in the generation below (to keep you fresh). Also, you cannot be cynical: Stipe’s total unselfconsciousness about the possibility of being pretentious is inspiring.
I also appreciated how slyly the writer of this article made Tony Gilroy sound like an absolute plank here.
I asked Gilroy what the song was about. He said, “It’s about a kid who’s discovering that they’re not cis.” But then he started elaborating, eventually offering a close-textual analysis of a line that seemed to catch Stipe by surprise and provoke an uncomfortable laugh.
I asked Stipe what the song was about. But Gilroy interrupted, scoffing at the futility of my question. “He’s going to say it’s about, like, a label manufacturer in Milwaukee,” Gilroy riffed. “‘It’s about a hardware store in Zimbabwe!”’
Stipe grinned and did not answer.
Son, did you write Losing My Religion? No? Then wind your neck in.
There’s a lesson in here for anyone who has a creative person in their life. I give notes for a couple of trusted friends, and I’ve learned that the worst thing you can do is impose yourself onto the work.
When giving notes, people tend to offer solutions: cut down the final act, set it on a submarine, blah blah blah.
No. Your job is to tell the artist or writer your personal, human reaction: I got bored two hours in, this character’s actions didn’t make sense to me. Then they can find their own solution. For instance, earlier this year I told a friend that I didn’t “get” the final act of a film and he sadly quoted back William Goldman’s rule to me: if you have an Act 3 problem, it’s really an Act 1 problem.
This also applies to editing journalism or books: saying “I don’t understand this” or “I think these sections are in the wrong order” and letting the author figure out their own solution is more useful than simply rewriting it to how you would have written it.
Britain is a Nation of Slow Horses (The Atlantic)
In recent films, even James Bond has swapped glamour for grit, but Apple’s Slow Horses goes far beyond that. The humor is pitch-black, and the overriding tone is one of cynicism—the perfect match for post-austerity, post-Brexit, post–Boris Johnson Britain. In the foreground is a succession of double crosses, mole hunts, car chases, and assassinations. The background is a quiet hum of institutional failure, political corruption, and hopelessness. National assets are sold off, extremists are indulged, and no one is trustworthy. The failures of recent Tory rule seem all the more squalid when viewed through the conventions of genre fiction. Forget the Cold War; Britain’s contemporary problems feel less like grand ideological struggles and more like persistent clerical errors. We are a nation of slow horses.
I’ve been enjoying Apple’s adaptation of Mick Herron’s Slough House series of novels about spies kicked out of MI5 headquarters to an “administrative oubliette.” So I wrote about the series for the Atlantic.
A couple of people have asked if it’s worth reading the books if you’ve already seen the television series, and the answer is yes. Even the best telly (and this is very good) can’t capture the same level of detail as a book.
2023 In Me
Highlights of my year included tracking down Florida Man for the Atlantic; trying out Brazilian jiu jitsu for a bonus episode of The New Gurus on the manosphere; reading Prince Harry’s Spare; recording a second series of Great Wives on Radio 4, covering Wu Zetian and the McDonalds widow; and asking Satanists about their schism.
Quick Links
“Without her independence, with her eyesight bad enough that she could no longer read, no acting work in the post (due to Covid, not to any lack of offers I might add), her dignity daily diminishing, she simply did not want to be here.” Diana Rigg’s daughter writes about the horrible process of dying from cancer, and her mother’s call for assisted dying (Guardian).
“His malady grew worse every day until his mind was completely gone. Sometimes he thought he was made of glass and would not let himself be touched. He had iron rods put into his clothing and protected himself in all sorts of ways so that he might not fall and break.” I’ve always been fascinated by the French medieval king who thought he was made of glass—something which I now know is a “culture bound syndrome,” a form of mental illness influenced by the surrounding society, in this case the technological innovation of panes of glass. Here’s Brian Klaas on what the Glass King can tell us about QAnon (Substack).
By chance, A Body Made of Glass is the title of my former colleague Caroline Crampton’s memoir/investigation into hypochondria, out next year.
Paul Bloom passes on some excellent gift advice: buy a special version of an everyday thing.
See you in 2024!
The other reason to read the Slow Horses book is Jackson Lamb. The TV version can only give a flavour of the sheer brilliant horror of the insults that come out of his mouth in the book. He is the very definition of politically incorrect, and the scriptwriting has to compromise with fart jokes. But the books are gaspingly funny
I stopped watching slow horses because the baddies were evil right wingers who were going to behead a random Muslim. You could have had so much more subtlety and complexity if you’d had kept antagonists as motivated by hatred of Muslims but maybe have an underlying cause like having a sister or daughter that was abused in Rotherham style scenario.....