The Bluestocking, vol 55: Sitting cats, screaming artists and the 2017 election

Happy Friday!

This week, I wrote a column about not hating Tony Blair, and I'm reading Hillary Clinton's memoir and finding I don't hate her, either. Think this might be the centrism I've heard so much about on the internet. Or, alternatively, being a grown-up who can process the idea that people might be a mixture of good and bad. Hard to call.

I also wrote for UnHerd on how the left conquered social media, if you're of a nerdy persuasion.

See you next week!

Helen

PS. Only one person would admit to liking Birdman. Rest assured, everyone else, we are the silent majority. That endless bloody percussion was annoying.


The Cat Sat on the Mat

If a man writes ‘The cat sat on the mat’ we admire the economy of his prose; if a woman does we find it banal. If a man writes ‘The cat sat on the mat’ we are taken by the simplicity of his sentence structure, its toughness and precision. We understand the connection between ‘cat’ and ‘mat’, sense the grace of the animal, admire the way the percussive monosyllables sharpen the geometrics of the mat beneath. If the man is an Irish writer we ask if the cat is Pangúr Ban, the monk’s cat from the ninth-century poem of that name – the use of assonance surely points to the Gaelic tradition – in which case the mat is his monk’s cell, a representation of the life of the mind, its comforts and delineations. The cat, female and probably white, is the secret sensuality of the ascetic life; not in the monastery garden, or out in the bog, but sitting in its proper, bounded place. Or the mat is Ireland itself, if this is not too much of a stretch, in the age of saints and scholars, that golden, undivided time before the Norman invasion, in which case the cat could be anything at all: the playful cipher, sitting on a very inert, territorial mat. No – scratch all that – this is just a very truthful, very real sentence (look at those nouns!) containing both masculine ‘mat’ and feminine ‘cat’. It somehow Says It All.

If, on the other hand, a woman writes ‘The cat sat on the mat,’ her concerns are clearly domestic, and sort of limiting.

Anne Enright's LRB diary is a) very funny; b) very interesting on the male dominance of the Irish canon, and c) addresses one of the most interesting questions for any literary editor. Why don't men review - and champion - books by women?

Whenever we do a round-robin invitation to nominate your book of the year/favourite political book etc, we always try to get good female representation in terms of respondents. The really stark disparity is that while women have no problem nominating male writers, it's much rarer for men to pick female writers.

Requiem For A Scream

This means the process of making intense, focused creative work can look a lot like insanity, even if you’re perfectly well. You have to be at least a little odd to truly believe that you’ve a chance at making a living from your frescoes or freestyle dance routines. You have to believe in some extremely fanciful things, like financial solvency after five years of experimental playwriting. You have to balance enormous bursts of irrational self-belief with the drive to work obsessively, relentlessly, and with no guarantee of reward. You might not be mad, but you’re going to have to act like it.

Laurie Penny points out that You Don't Have to Be Mad to Write Here, But It Helps.

(I feel like this is a pretty good metaphor for British politics)

Bridget Phillipson: This wasn't a good result for Labour

This was all topped off with a marked reluctance to countenance any change to the amount of money we transfer as a society from working people to pensioners. To put it bluntly, our manifesto was a nod to every stakeholder and lobbyist, as if the Clause V meeting was like the caucus-race in Alice in Wonderland where all must have prizes.

Bridget Phillipson, a backbench Labour MP, reflects on Labour's election result - and why she doesn't think it was the triumph it is being presented as. She makes the under-noticed point that NHS funding is useless if costs are rising because migrant workers are leaving Britain. This can't be said often enough: Jeremy Corbyn's anti-austerity programme is really, really difficult to reconcile with a hard Brexit.

It's a sad fact of modern politics that you could make an absolutely cracking Labour frontbench purely out of women, and yet most of them are not well-known names. Imagine a cabinet of Bridget Phillipson, Jess Phillips, Gloria de Piero, Angela Eagle, Emma Reynolds, Holly Lynch, Angela Rayner, Thangam Debbonaire, Chi Onwurah, Liz Kendall, Lilian Greenwood, Meg Hillier, Emily Thornberry, Laura Pidcock, Stella Creasy, Ali McGovern and Rachel Reeves. All killer, no filler.

Quick Links:
- A piece about brain haemorrhages, or rather, about how a medical breakthrough has made them survivable by deskilling the operation required to staunch them.
- Came across this retrospective of playwright Caryl Churchill, which I enjoyed.
- Hadley Freeman interviews Dov Charney, and he doesn't masturbate in front of her, so I guess that counts as a win.
- Which Way Did He Run? From 2002, a David Grann piece about a firefighter who survived 9/11 when the rest of his crew didn't, and how his lost memories haunted him.
- The Lossy Jpeg compression of Afghan War Rugs. I can't explain this Twitter thread, just enjoy it.
- You'll never be famous, and that's OK. (NYT)
- Ed Caesar's profile of George Osborne was the talk of Westminster this week.

Guest gif: I just started watching The Sopranos

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