The Bluestocking, vol 46: Blame Canada
Hello,
No newsletter last week because I was in the Rocky Mountains of Canada, and spent the day driving from beautiful Banff to equally beautiful Jasper. We landed in Vancouver and spent a couple of days there before flying out into the wild, and I cannot get over how polite, clean and just damn orderly this country is. There are so many road signs telling you to do, or not to do, stuff. (Sample on the road to Jasper: don't feed wildlife, clean your boat before winter, don't bring weapons into the park, don't bring timber into the park, speed fines DOUBLE if there are construction workers about.) The roads are also really well maintained, in sharp contrast to somewhere like Missouri which seemed to have bits of busted tyre and wing mirror every few dozen miles.
I hope you also had a good hard LOL at the Guardian's best summer reads, which was full of people saying "darling, the BEST thing to read on holiday is poetry", plus one person who claimed they were going to tackle all three 1,000 page volumes of the Arabian Nights. Instead, I've re-read Jean Plaidy's novelisation of the early life of Catherine de Medici and read Oliver Sacks's memoir On The Road and Margaret The First by Danielle Dutton, and I'm now embarking on The Lola Quartet by Emily St John Mandel, who also wrote the best novel I read last year, Station Eleven.
After my last newsletter, someone asked for podcast recommendations, and I have plenty of those too (we've been on some loooong drives). I won't put links in, because unless you're some kind of freak I'm assuming you'll search for these in Overcast, or your other podcast app of choice, instead of listening to them in a browser.
Best technology podcast: Note To Self, which covers topics like identity, moderation, fitness tracking, Facebook ads.
Best world affairs: Jeremy Bowen's Our Man in The Middle East, which starts 25 years ago with the first Gulf war. Bowen is a brilliant storyteller, and I really like that these are only 15 minutes long. That's very much Not The Done Thing with podcasts, but the BBC can get away with it, and it really works here.
Best true crime: I enjoyed Serial but bailed before the end, and I only made it through two episodes of S-Town. So the award goes to Criminal, particularly the first episode on owl strikes, and the one about faking your own death.
Best politics (except the NS obv): Talking Politics, from Cambridge University. They do a good job of tackling big thematic subjects, like the rise and fall of Ukip.
Best science: BBC Inside Science, which Adam Rutherford hosts, is a breezy magazine style show.
I'm also really enjoying Hilary Mantel's Reith Lectures, and Adam Buxton's interview with Edgar Wright was very funny and insightful. I always listen to Infinite Monkey cage when there's a series on, and Page 94 from Private Eye. In the car today we listened to Julie Burchill's Desert Island Discs, which was hilarious, mostly intentionally. I've got a lot of Longform podcasts queued up too on the strength of their subjects (Ariel Levy, David Grann, Nick Bilton) but I accept that not everyone might be as interested as I am in writers wanging on about writing.
Talking of which, I've got an extremely long piece in this week's magazine - a profile of Almeida theatre director Robert Icke. His production of Hamlet is currently in the West End, and it's probably the best version I've ever seen (I loved David Tennant's acting, but I wasn't that keen on the rest of the RSC production, and I was pretty lukewarm about the Barbican's Cumberhamlet.) If you're a journalism junkie, then the current Almeida production - James Graham's Ink - is a really great rollicking couple of hours about the early days of the Sun newspaper. Do have a read of the profile, it's one of my favourite bits of writing for a while and it's always a bit dispiriting how much easier it is to get people to read the angry rant you bashed out in 30 minutes than the longread you lovingly crafted over several weeks.
Right, you probably wanted some links, didn't you, if you've made it this far.
The woman who choreographs rape scenes
It's already dark outside when Deven MacNair laces up her shoes for work. Like anyone's job, MacNair's occupation can fall into routine. For her, it's a lot of direction: "Right arm on left shoulder." "Left elbow on right hand." "Right knee on left thigh."
That's not a game of Twister — it's a choreographed rape.
This is a phenomenal piece, looking at TV/movie rape scenes from the point of view of those who have to make them - not least, the actors who have to play rapists and then deal with people staring at them with intense dislike they can't put a finger on. It also lays bare just how over-used a trope the gratuitous rape scene has become, which I've heard script readers talk about before. Some writers see it as "sex, but edgier".
In the secrecy of the newsletter, I think I can say that we are very bad at looking at the working conditions of those involved in anything to do with sex - selling it or performing it - and I have a teeny tiny hunch about why. It's a boner-killer.
Why are we so unwilling to take Sylvia Plath at her word?
This past November, I was nursing my wounds over the election by spending a weekend at Smith College, researching a book on Plath. At dinner one night, when the woman next to me at the bar asked why I was visiting, she shuddered, then smiled sadly, at the mention of Plath’s name. I used to love her work so much, she said, shrugging. But I outgrew it.
In this way, Plath is both deified and dismissed. We are talked out of her.
How Ted Hughes turned Sylvia Plath into the poster child for female instability, not least to excuse his own physical and emotional abuse of her.
The woman who popularised Ms
During these years, Ms. Michaels was seeking, as she told The Guardian, the British newspaper, in 2007, “a title for a woman who did not ‘belong’ to a man.”
“There was no place for me,” she continued. “No one wanted to claim me, and I didn’t want to be owned. I didn’t belong to my father, and I didn’t want to belong to a husband — someone who could tell me what to do. I had not seen very many marriages I’d want to emulate.”
Let flowers fall upon the grave of Sheila Michaels, because it's objectively weird in 2017 that forms still suggest you might want to indicate your marital status within your name itself.
Shakespeare's Cure for Xenophobia
There is something very strange about experiencing “The Merchant of Venice” when you are somehow imaginatively implicated in the character and actions of its villain. You laugh when Shylock’s servant, the clown Gobbo, contemplates running away from his penny-pinching master. You smile when Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, having escaped from her father’s dark house into the arms of her beloved, declares, “I shall be saved by my husband. He hath made me a Christian.” You shudder when the implacable Shylock sharpens his knife on the sole of his boot. You applaud the resolution of the dilemma, when clever Portia comes up with the legal technicality that confounds Shylock’s murderous plan. The Jew who had insisted upon the letter of the law is undone by the letter of the law; it is what is called poetic justice. But, all the same, you feel uneasy.
A nice companion piece to the one above. Around the time Sheila Michaels was wrestling with Ms, Stephen Greenblatt was being told he couldn't apply for a side-job at university because his name sounded Jewish.
Guest picture of Oscar Isaac playing Hamlet for reasons of srs theatre criticism:
See you next week!