The Bluestocking, vol 68: Steve Bannon and the juicy dolphin
Happy Friday!
A quiet return to work this week, punctuated by recording the News Quiz (Radio 4 tonight) and snacking back excerpts of Michael Wolff's Trump book while also worrying that it might not be as copper-bottomed in its sourcing as you'd hope. Then I remembered that Donald Trump doesn't believe in the idea of truth anyway, so if it's wildly unfair, sod him.
Hello to anyone who is a new reader, brought over by Julian Simpson's recommendation. I'm loving "newsletter culture", which reminds me of the heady days of early 2000s blogging. (Remember having a "blogroll"?) It felt positively utopian - anyone could join in, you could be anonymous, the quality of your writing spoke for itself, no Nazis, and so on. In return, I would like to recommend Julian's irregular INFODUMP, particularly if you're a writer (as he is).
Helen
PS. Here's a list of the best British longreads of 2017, which I'm not just promoting because they put me on there (OK, a bit) but also because every single other piece is suuuuperb. Go on, try Kate Mossman hanging out with KISS in Moscow. Treat yourself.
Jordan Peele's X Ray Vision
America loves a loud, crazy, funny black person as much as it needs to see him passed over for work, harshly sentenced and shot to death. “Key & Peele” was unusually creative in the way it satirized that duality, until the gravity of what we were being asked to laugh at began to darken the lunacy of the show.
Lovely profile of Jordan Peele, writer/director of Get Out.
Bannon for President
Since Charlottesville, Trump has governed almost exclusively for Bannon’s base. For all the tsuris Bannon causes the president, the two need each other. “He momentarily has lapses when he’s convinced by people around him in the White House to do ridiculous things like support Big Luther Strange, another genius move by Jared,” Bannon said. “But look at how many things he approved right after Alabama to get us back on board. I think the establishment has to understand something. Their day of running the Republican Party is over.”
Moore’s defeat could well be the Waterloo of Bannon’s movement, though it’s far too soon to tell. In his view of history, it’s always 1933, but he projects an unrelenting optimism about his own future and those of his projects. It’s a salesman’s gift, one he shares with Trump. Create enough chaos, and the world will re-align. Or it won’t.
Perhaps this Bannon interview has been superceded by the huge dump he's taken all over the Trump administration in Michael Wolff's book, but nonetheless it offers insight into the game he thinks he's playing.
The Nothing, reviewed
This burst of work felt so important, so needed, that it engendered a stubborn loyalty. With the same stew of hope, despair, shame and perverse pride endured by the long-suffering fans of a long-losing team, Kureishi’s readers have stuck by him even as he churns out, with dismaying industry, a series of leaden farces and desultory intrigues. They — we — have squirmed through his enthusiasm for (and rudimentary grasp of) psychoanalysis and unpardonable sex writing. From “The Last Word”: “You are a succulent woman, juicy as a dolphin and at your sexual peak too.”
I hope one day to write a sentence as transcendentally bad as that one about the juicy dolphin. It makes all my merely poor sentences look hopelessly amateur.
Quick links:
- This interview with the new scion of the NYT is interesting on the future of the media. It also contains the best description of why I love journalism: "it was just that beautiful combination of spending half your day learning and half your day teaching".
- What comes after the Bechdel test? Some of these are terrible suggestions, some of these are great.
- Patricia Lockwood on Joan Didion. Heaven be praised to live in a time where women write about women with sharpness like this.
- Two dying memoirists wrote about how they would like their partners to find love again. They did - with each other.
- A compelling case that there's a good Yuval Hariri (the historian) and a bad Yuval Hariri (the futurologist)
- If you run a service just for men, no one asks "what are you doing for women"? Great story of the whataboutery faced by anyone trying to do feminism.
- The photographer Nan Goldin was an Oxycontin addict. Now, she's taking on the company making billions from America's opioid addiction.
Guest gifs: that's how you get suffrage, baby
See you next time!