The Bluestocking, vol 65: The height of Hamilton
How do you do, fellow kids?
This week I watched Stephen Bush win an award (well done, Stephen, if you read this). I published an interview with Tony Blair on Brexit and lots of other stuff. And I went to see Hamilton on the first night of previews, but luckily they've been rehearsing for seven weeks so the cast were already good at it.
Having listened to the Broadway cast recording approximately 92,324 times, it was slightly eerie to hear new voices singing these songs I know so well (but using almost exactly the same intonation and rhythm). Jamael Westman, the actor playing Hamilton, is much taller than the other Founding Fathers (except Washington) in this production. Jefferson/LaFayette is particularly pocket-sized, but Burr and Mulligan are also compact.
It was weird to realise how much my concept of Hamilton's personality is shaped by the physicality of Lin-Manuel Miranda, even though I never actually saw him playing the part.
Jamael Westman: not uneasy on the eye
There's an interesting discussion in Gary Younge's book on identity about how much height affects your life chances, yet it's not a characteristic anyone organises a political movement around. This was a good reminder that I (and probably you) make huge assumptions about people based on their height. Harder to be a "cheeky chappy" if you're, like, 6ft 2.
Anyway, please enjoy my Hamilton longread, on how the musical rewrote the founding myth of America:
I love Hamilton – I think the level of my nerdery about it so far has probably made that clear – but I find it fascinating that its overtly political agenda has been so little discussed, beyond noting the radicalism of casting black actors as white founders. Surely this is the “Obama play”, in the way that David Hare’s Stuff Happens became the “Bush play” or The Crucible became the theatre’s response to McCarthyism. It’s just unusual, in that its response to the contemporary mood is a positive one, rather than sceptical or scathing. (And it has an extra resonance now that a white nationalist is in the White House. One of the first acts of dissent against the Trump regime was when his vice-president, Mike Pence, attended the musical in November 2016 and received a polite post-curtain speech from the cast about tolerance. “The cast and producers of Hamilton, which I hear is highly overrated, should immediately apologise to Mike Pence for their terrible behaviour,” tweeted Trump, inevitably.)
Until next time!
Helen
Hillary Clinton talks to Mary Beard
MB When I debated with Boris about Greece versus Rome, it was a fun charity gig, but it revealed precisely that. Boris is very funny. He can work an audience. I admire it. I knew the only way I was going to have a chance of winning was by being fantastically prepared.
HC That sounds very familiar. [Laughter.]
MB I sat and I looked at any video I could find of Boris. I noted the mistakes and I thought, he’s so busy, he’s going to use the same examples – and I know they’re wrong. I must have put about a week of studying Boris videos and reading everything Boris had written wrongly about the ancient world. That is fine for a one-off gig, but you can’t write a long-term debate like that.
HC Or a campaign, in my experience. That’s right. So, I was made fun of for preparing and, at one point in one of the debates, Trump actually said: “Oh, well, she’s prepared.” I said: “Yes, you know what else I prepared for? To be president.” Then he gets elected and he goes: “It’s so much harder than I thought.” ... Mary, what do you think the moment was when you won the debate with Johnson?
MB It was when I said: “Boris has been claiming that Roman literature really wasn’t worth reading. But a leading politician said of Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, on the death of his lover Dido, that it was: ‘The best book of the best poem of the best poet.’ Who do you think that was?” And Boris had to say: “I think that might have been me.”
Several of these Guardian conversations are brilliant (Henry Marsh, as ever, is great) but I particularly loved Clinton and Beard chuckling over pompous men they tried to deflate.
What happened when I asked every TD if they liked Beyonce
On Monday afternoon, I set about contacting all 158 TDs. In my e-mail, I explained that I was getting in touch with every TD to collate their views on Beyoncé. I posed three questions:
Do you like Beyoncé?
If you answered YES, what is your favourite Beyoncé song?
If you answered NO, why don’t you like Beyoncé?
Within an hour or so, I had contacted all members of Dáil Éireann. I didn’t know what to expect or how many, if any, would reply to my query. This was as much an exercise in finding out what they thought of Beyoncé as it was in seeing who would actually take the time to respond.
All in all, 37 TDs replied to my query.
Because it's nearly Christmas, and because this feature reduces me to giggles every time I read it. My favourite answer: "That said, I always felt “Bills, Bills, Bills” from Beyoncé’s days in Destiny’s Child was a good allegory for what has faced the Irish working class. Enda Kenny really is a good for nothin’ type of brother."
52 Things I Learned In 2017
18. The National Health Service in the UK uses more than a tenth of the global stock of pagers.
28. Videogame repair companies in New York report that up to 50% of Sony PS4 consoles they receive for repair are infested with cockroaches. The insects use the wide ventilation ducts on the bottom to move into the warm interior, mate and make a home.
34. An American TV viewer who watches Netflix rather than normal ad-funded television could avoid 160 hours of ads every year. That’s equivalent to a month of eight hour working days.
The trivia motherlode.
Quick links:
"The Aeneid, perhaps the most canonical Latin text, was translated into English by a woman (Ruden) for the first time in 2009." I'm reading Emily Wilson's new translation of the Odyssey for Saturday Review next week, so I enjoyed her piece about the dominance of classics by white men translating dead white men.
Deborah Cameron on The Battle of The Sexes and . . . well, the battle of the sexes as a trope to ridicule feminism.
Is the economy suffering from our lack of attention? The Bank of England's blog wonders if smartphones stopped us from being productive. (Um. Yes.)
Meghan Markle can write! Hurrah! SAVE YOURSELF MEGHAN THERE'S STILL TIME!
Guest gif: a sentiment we can all endorse (sorry, vegetarians)
