The Bluestocking, vol 54: Bats, ballots and Madame de Pompadour
Happy Friday,
This week, I went to the cinema to watch The Ferryman, written by Jez Butterworth and directed by Sam Mendes. I also watched a man chase a bat out of a kitchen. The latter of these was my preferred slice of Irish hokum by far. Did you think The Ferryman deserved all its five-star reviews? Did you also enjoy Birdman? Please reply to this email so I can tell you how you're wrong.
Helen
PS. I also watched quite a bit of the 1997 election. There's a great bit about noon the day after where Jim Callaghan and Neil Kinnock have some great banter. A new dawn has broken, has it not?
Love, Labour and loss
Annesley, Nottinghamshire, 9 April 1992
It’s the day of the general election and there’s only one way this part of Nottinghamshire will go – Labour. But the nine-year-old James Graham is dimly aware that his parents, who separated when he was four but still live on the same street, are voting different ways. This is one of his first political memories – apart from seeing posters during the 1990 Conservative leadership election and deciding that Michael Heseltine was his guy, based solely on his hair. “That mane,” he says now. “It was purely on looks.” (When Heseltine came to see This House, he was reportedly unhappy with the wig used by the actor playing him. “He came about five times so he can’t have been that offended by any of it,” notes Graham drily.)
Oh, how embarrassing, it's me! Yes, my long-threatened profile of James Graham, the author of This House, Ink and Labour of Love is here at last. It's really long, so you know it's either good or, like JK Rowling handing in the one about the Triwizard Cup that was mysteriously twice the length of Prisoner of Azkaban, no one at work dares tell me to cut stuff. Even if you haven't seen any of his work, there is (I hope) some interesting stuff in there about class and politics, and how theatre and other artforms might engage with it.
Riot Girl
Her bosses didn’t really get “Weeds”: Lionsgate came on board to produce the show after Showtime bought the concept, and the executives, especially Bob Greenblatt, were uncomfortable with its twisted morality. Greenblatt sent Kohan endless script notes. “I’d write back, note by note, for pages,” she said. “Finally, he wrote back a short e-mail that just said, ‘Fine, do what you want.’ . . . And I took it as carte blanche.” There was another problem, one she learned to work around, mostly by using a “talent whisperer” who still works for her: for much of the show’s run, she was barely on speaking terms with its star, Mary-Louise Parker. Once, Parker threw a script at Kohan, shouting, “My mother can’t watch this!” Kohan shot back, “I don’t write it for your mother.” (Parker could not be reached for comment.)
I'll read anything by Emily Nussbaum. Here she meets the creator of Weeds and Orange is the New Black.
Donald Trump is the first white president
Packer dismisses the Democratic Party as a coalition of “rising professionals and diversity.” The dismissal is derived from, of all people, Lawrence Summers, the former Harvard president and White House economist, who last year labeled the Democratic Party “a coalition of the cosmopolitan élite and diversity.” The inference is that the party has forgotten how to speak on hard economic issues and prefers discussing presumably softer cultural issues such as “diversity.” It’s worth unpacking what, precisely, falls under this rubric of “diversity”—resistance to the monstrous incarceration of legions of black men, resistance to the destruction of health providers for poor women, resistance to the effort to deport parents, resistance to a policing whose sole legitimacy is rooted in brute force, resistance to a theory of education that preaches “no excuses” to black and brown children, even as excuses are proffered for mendacious corporate executives “too big to jail.” That this suite of concerns, taken together, can be dismissed by both an elite economist like Summers and a brilliant journalist like Packer as “diversity” simply reveals the safe space they enjoy. Because of their identity.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is not here for your dismissal of race from narratives about American "economic anxiety" leading to Trump.
The Conservative Election Post-Mortem
The same centralised approach applied online. “CCHQ took admin rights to our Facebook pages, but everything they posted was “we’re better than Jeremy Corbyn/Jeremy Corbyn will lead to chaos”, as one candidate puts it.
Even if the designs and messages were right nationally, they still might not be well-suited to local circumstances. Activists keen to deliver in Remain-voting constituencies in London feared the Brexit-focused leaflets they were given would do more harm then good, while in Wirral West “…leaflets were delivered with quotes from The Sun prominent. We’re just over the water from Liverpool! Many LFC supporters live on the Wirral. Some of the Hillsborough dead have families here. [They] may as well have sent leaflets round with ‘We couldn’t give a toss about dead Scousers’ on them.”
My former colleague Rafael Behr noted on Twitter this morning that the 2017 defeat for the Tories was their most humiliating in living memory. This is the second of a ConservativeHome investigation into what went wrong in their campaign; the tl;dr is that the snap election caught them offguard, and they decided early on to fight a Brexit election when Labour hadn't done anything to oppose the implementation of Brexit yet, and to put Theresa May front and centre when she hates talking to fellow humans.
Quick Link
- Nancy Mitford's biography of Madame de Pompadour is one of my favourite books. Here's a random New Yorker piece about it.
See you next week! At 6.30pm tonight you can hear try to make jokes about the EU Withdrawal Bill on the News Quiz (Radio 4). I'm also on the Andrew Marr programme on Sunday morning reviewing the papers from 8.30am. Why not send me a tweet about how I need to accept the will of the British people? You'll have plenty of company.