The Bluestocking, vol 73: Brendan, Brownmiller, Bannon & Black Panther
Happy Friday!
I'm a month into my research leave, and wow, it's going fast. Not least because my library trip this week was cancelled due to the end of civilisation as we know it. I like how the weather appears to be in competition with itself to find the nastiest possible conditions: freezing rain is a new one on me, but it does appear to be distinct from snow or hail. Meanwhile, it's a balmy six degrees at the North Pole. Everything is fiiiine, I'm definitely not going to spend the last ten years of my life - my fifties - foraging for mushrooms in the ruins of what used to be London.
Anyway, here's something I wrote for GQ on the "bullshit tax" women have to pay just to navigate society.
Helen
Has anyone seen the president?
He watches for a bit, until a reporter asks if it is true that Trump asked McCabe whom he voted for and Sanders replies that she has no way of knowing, as she wasn’t in the room. “I know he didn’t ask me!” she says, brightly.
He stops the tape. In this moment he sees something much bigger -- a subplot in the Trump presidency. The people meant to speak for Trump either do not have, or do not want, real access to him. The McCabe story is on the front page of major newspapers. There is no chance that someone isn’t going to ask a question about it. “The press secretary is supposed to go to the president and say ‘What did you say to Andrew McCabe?’” he says. “It definitely erodes her credibility with the press when she says, ‘I dunno, I wasn’t in the room.’ And the fact that she is willing to prepare makes you wonder why she hasn’t.”
More to the point, he thinks, there is every chance that Sanders will be swept up in the Russia probe. “And in that case there’s benefit to her saying, ‘I haven’t talked to the president.’” Expect a lot more of her not talking to the president, he thinks.
Michael Lewis visits Trump's Washington, and it is good. Stay around for this priceless Steve Bannon quote, on seeing coverage of sexual harassment: “I think it’s going to unfold like the Tea Party, only bigger,” he says. “It’s not Me Too. It’s not just sexual harassment. It’s an anti-patriarchy movement. Time’s up on 10,000 years of recorded history. This is coming. This is real.” Bloody hell, Steve Bannon, you really are a political sage. Well done for finally noticing the ENORMOUS, SWEEPING LEGAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE BROUGHT ABOUT BY A CENTURY OF THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT.
The author of Against Our Will
Was it easy to get work afterwards? “I was the rape person for a while. But yes, in the end, I wrote other books [her latest, published last year, is about the high-rise garden she keeps on her balconies]. I have thought about men who have made a huge contribution to something with a book, and it seems that the world lets them do other things. But when I do, people aren’t so happy about it.”
Down the years, she lived with three different men, but she never married and she never wanted to have children. “It was easier in my day not to have children,” she says. “In the counterculture anything went. There’s so much mom-ism out there now. It’s one of men’s most powerful weapons against women.”
Putting this in because a) I'm shamefully ignorant of Brownmiller's work and don't think I've read any of her stuff directly; b) as I feel increasingly decrepit I'm happy to know that she was 40 before she wrote her first book; c) I love the phrase 'mom-ism".
Black Panther and the invention of Africa
At the same time, it is all but impossible not to notice that Coogler has cast a black American, a Zimbabwean-American, and a Kenyan as a commando team in a film about African redemption. The cast also includes Winston Duke, who is West Indian, Daniel Kaluuya, a black Brit, and Florence Kasumba, a black woman from Germany. The implicit statement in both the film’s themes and its casting is that there is a connection, however vexed, tenuous, and complicated, among the continent’s scattered descendants.
Short but interesting piece by Jelani Cobb on Black Panther, which I loved. (My bit here.) And here are three writers from African countries discussing it. Also the guy who plays the Gorilla King got into acting because of Derek Jacobi's hammy Hamlet (Hammylet?) in Frasier.
Whatever happened to Brendan Fraser? A lot
When his episodes of The Affair began airing, in late 2016, Fraser was asked to give his first interview in years, for AOL's YouTube channel. It is an uncomfortable watch. Fraser seems morose and sad; for much of it, he speaks in a near whisper. The video went viral. In the months that followed, theories sprang up about what ailed him, focusing on his 2009 divorce and the fact that two franchises he'd once starred in, The Mummy and Journey to the Center of the Earth, had been rebooted and recast without him.
As it turns out, what was behind the sad Brendan Fraser meme was…sadness. His mother had died of cancer just days before the interview. “I buried my mom,” Fraser says. “I think I was in mourning, and I didn't know what that meant.”
I love a celebrity profile done right. This one is gorgeous. Don't bother with the Vanity Fair one of my chilly-nipped nemesis Jennifer Lawrence, it's awful.
Quick links:
1. Why the 30-hour work week is almost here: god, I hope so.
2. What should you think when your mother tells you that you're moving again because you're on the run from the mafia? Particularly when her lover says that you'll only be safe in the "weird world"? This story is crazy.
3. James Graham makes the case for civility in public discourse. BURN HIM.
4. "She quickly learned how best to disarm people. “Women learn it early on: the placating-predator-smile. The ‘I think you’re a good man, aren’t you a good man who would never hurt me?’ smile,” she says." Oh god, I know that smile. I've done that smile.
5. Anna Leszkiewicz on Lady Bird, a film I loved, and which is notable for its woozy colour palette and incredibly short scenes.
6. A profile of the "Marie Antoinette of Trumpworld", aka Mrs Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.
7. "The fear is part of the attraction because, if I am honest, the “opinion” part of opinion-journalism is no longer as scary it once was. Reporting—another word for discovery—will always be scary. Opining, less so. And nothing should really scare a writer more than the moment when they are no longer scared." Ta-Nehisi Coates on writing Captain America - but also just a good manifesto for a writer's life.
Guest gif: I saw a production of Macbeth this week. Sadly it did not feature Michael Fassbender in eyeliner.
See you next time!