The Bluestocking, vol 71: Strong women, fabulous men and a living goddess
Hello from Kathmandu!
I've spent the week in Nepal with Room to Read, a charity which runs literacy and girls' education programmes across the world. After flying into Kathmandu on Monday, I flew on to Nepalgunj (crazy name, crazy driving) and have spent the week here visiting rural schools. Some of the challenges that young people have overcome here to get an education are incredible; I'll be writing about it soon.
On Monday I got a chance to look at Durbar Square, home of the historic palaces. It's a spectacular, but sad, place - devastated by the 2015 earthquake and only partially rebuilt. I saw the Kumari - living goddess - a grumpy looking toddler who is regarded as the embodiment of devi, the divine feminine, but only until puberty, when she gets kicked out of her palace - where she has been waited on by priests and only allowed outside on festival days - and sent back to her family. The last former living goddess was sacked last year, hence the very young age of the new one.
Talking of children, here I am making new friends:
Another highlight of the trip: seeing a peacock in the wild (I certainly felt emotionally supported). But perhaps the standout was a visit to Pashupatinath temple, about ten minutes’ drive from the airport, which is itself incredibly close to the city centre. At Pashupatinath, bodies are bathed in the river before being set alight on pyres, wrapped in white sheets and orange garlands. It’s an extraordinary experience to be so close to the dead in a city which is otherwise so teeming with life.
Until next week,
Helen
Why comedy double acts fall apart
When Dawn French, who worked with Jennifer Saunders in a double act for two decades, appeared on Herring’s podcast last year, the conversation inevitably turned to the subject of broken creative partnerships.
“Isn’t it just the men that fall out?” asked French.
“But aren’t you competitive?” says Herring, gently pressing.
“I suppose I was a bit surprised at how much success she had on her own – that was a cocktail of strange emotions,” she said, before admitting that, after Saunders won an award for her sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, French sent her friend a bouquet of flowers with a card that read: “Congratulations, you c***.”
Just a total joy, as you would expect from Simon Parkin. I find it interesting that he seems to have spoken to the (self-identified) "losing" halves of the partnerships.
David Hare: 'I am sick to death of hearing about the need for strong women"
Hare has written plenty of films, including Damage, The Hours and The Reader. For Collateral, though, he had to learn some of the rules of episodic television, even if only to know which of them he could break. He feels he understands why television drama can take us by surprise in a way that is harder to pull off in film. “Audiences are very sophisticated. They can foresee that, in the tenth reel, the hero will meet an insuperable problem and in the eleventh reel the hero will overcome an insuperable problem. And that is a real problem with feature films now. The audience knows what the formula is.
“Whereas the huge popularity of episodic television is its shapelessness. So to take Breaking Bad, an obvious example, you may have one episode that has only two or three people in it. And entirely concentrates on the psychological relationship between those people. And in the next one you have suddenly got car crashes and people being shot, huge numbers of people. You don’t know which way it is going. That’s what people love.”
There is much righteousness in this interview from David Hare about what duty writers do and don't owe to feminism. For me, it starts and ends with this: write women. Write lots of women. Write them with inner lives and stupid opinions and fatal flaws and terrible mistakes and powerful obsessions and hidden fears. And write their relationships with other, equally interesting, women. The end.
However, the interview also makes the very good point outlined above. The 90-120 minute film is such a rigid formula, and all the takeovers and buyouts and production company collapses (hello, Harvey Weinstein) increase the temptation towards caution. I've seen far more formally experimental TV and theatre in the last year than I have seen innovation in film.
Is RuPaul's Drag Race the most radical show on TV?
The controversy speaks to how quickly the culture has changed over the past 10 years. When I was on the phone with Lady Bunny, I used the word “queer.” Bunny let out an exasperated sigh. “Oh, God, do I have to say it, too, now?” During her youth, which is still recent history, “queer” was a slur — what “they’d say right before they bashed you in the head,” she reminded me. The boundary-pushers of Charles and Bunny’s time reveled in making a mockery of identity politics and political correctness; ours is defined by sharpening categories as a means to demand inclusion and recognition. (Facebook now has more than 50 options for listing gender identity, including pangender and agender.)
The answer is yes. Hopefully the Militant Literalists of the internet won't suck all the joy out of a show which celebrates playfulness among marginalised men.
Why the Alt-Right are Lifehackers
When a senior engineer at Google describes the actions of white supremacist employees as “a denial-of-service attack on human resources,” that is not a mistake and hardly a metaphor. The alt-right’s guerrilla tactics are a specific carry-over from its members’ approach to programming and video games: Learn the rules, and you learn how to hack them.
This is a useful frame for thinking about the strange intersection of male self-help and internet racism and sexism. It shouldn't be a surprise that Jordan Peterson has become an internet celebrity by selling basic life advice to men who feel the world is a confusing place, and are angered by that.
Quick links:
- Really concerning interview with Claire Kober, former head of Haringey council, about what she sees as the sexism and anti-semitism in the Labour party.
- Stark piece about the (mis)use of "forensic science" (actually hoodoo) in the US courts system, which has undoubtedly caused miscarriages of justice. It reminded me of talking to Sue Black - a forensic anatomist - who told me that huge swathes of the discipline needed to be revisited."Other staples of forensic science, such as gait analysis, now face similar questions. 'In America at the moment, they’re having horrendous problems – and we’re not surprised – with bite marks'.”
- From the Archive: Martin Amis interviews Roman Polanski.
- "He'll refer to the time Nelson Mandela tried to get him to touch a cheetah—"I couldn't do it"—and then he'll mention that Colin Powell called a couple of days ago because Powell was annoyed at how Tyler Perry appeared to be portraying him in a forthcoming movie." Boy, Quincy Jones has lived a life. Another sample quote: "I mean, the other guys were dead. His head fell off. I mean, I almost had a heart attack. See your friend with his head off?"
Guest gif: shout out to Room to Read staffer Rishi, who asked if I knew much about Nepal, and when I said, "There's this video game..." went, "FAR CRY FOUR! I LOVE IT!" Proving that once again, the universal language of how awesome it is to watch rhinos attacking tigers can bring the world together.
See you next time!