The Bluestocking, vol 74: Annihilation, late bloomers and pearls on dogs
Happy Friday!
Never write a book.
Helen
PS. If you're in London on Monday night, I'm chairing an event on political speeches (are they dead?) with some great panellists. Only a fiver.
PPS. Productivity King Julian Simpson - whose "Morning Pages" thing has dramatically improved my life - also recommended this: "interstitial journaling". Essentially you write a note every time you change tasks. Sounds like a grotesque amount of work, but I'm intrigued.
Fun fact: this scene was inspired by the way everyone reacts when a busker gets on the Tube*
How Annihilation broke the rules
These images are beautiful and discomforting at the same time, a fitting backdrop for a quest by five women who all turn out to be self-destructive. “One of the reasons the film works so well is that the story’s outward signs are linked to the psychology of the characters,” says the writer Andrew O’Hagan, who has known Garland for several years. “Nature is subverted in the scenes – those twin fawns, the trees that take the shape of people, the menacing flora – in a way that makes you dwell on what is ethically askew in the lives of the characters . . it’s pure cinema.”
Shameless self-plug, but what of it? This was a hard piece to write because I saw both rushes and an early cut of the film before the final VFX and so nearly slipped up a couple of times by writing about memories of the wrong version. It was a good insight into how hard it is to keep a whole project like this in your mind, and not lose track of the iterations involved in working on something with so many contributors and moving parts. *not actually true
The Late Bloomer
If you go to the Cézanne room at the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris—the finest collection of Cézannes in the world—the array of masterpieces you’ll find along the back wall were all painted at the end of his career. Galenson did a simple economic analysis, tabulating the prices paid at auction for paintings by Picasso and Cézanne with the ages at which they created those works. A painting done by Picasso in his mid-twenties was worth, he found, an average of four times as much as a painting done in his sixties. For Cézanne, the opposite was true. The paintings he created in his mid-sixties were valued fifteen times as highly as the paintings he created as a young man. The freshness, exuberance, and energy of youth did little for Cézanne. He was a late bloomer—and for some reason in our accounting of genius and creativity we have forgotten to make sense of the Cézannes of the world.
Inspiration for anyone over 25 and therefore feeling over the hill, from Malcolm Gladwell's archive.
If you have a dog, I hope it's this well-dressed. . .
The Male Glance
A famous Susan Sontag meditation on this aesthetic paradigm bears repeating: “The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man. The beauty of a boy resembles the beauty of a girl. In both sexes, it is a fragile kind of beauty and flourishes naturally only in the early part of the life cycle. Happily, men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks – heavier, rougher, more thickly built … There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every grey hair, is a defeat.”
If our ability to see detail in a woman’s face is magnified by our visual habits, our ability to see complexity in a woman’s story is diminished by our reading habits.
Found this a little chewy, but it's worth reading for Mark Twain's snooty dismissal of Jane Austen (fight me, corpse of Mark Twain); and the dramatic shift in the career of Elizabeth Gilbert once she started writing about women. (Talking of chewy, this LRB essay on desire and whether it has to be politically correct outlined some interesting case studies, but I felt a little short-changed in terms of analysis. Am I missing something? If you read it and find it more enlightening, hit "reply". The author clearly had done the reading so I was surprised not to enjoy it more.)
Quick links.
1. A thought-provoking post-script on Jim Bowen's Bullseye.
2. Someone pulled together all those movie posters which show men with headless women.
3. Department of Makes You Proud to Be British.
4. Savage burn of all the people who wanted to believe in Team Sky's "incremental gains" doctrine while overlooking the possibility their cyclists might also be bending the rules.
5. Apart from the incorrectly high placing of Carpe Jugulum and the incorrectly low placing of the Tiffany Aching series, I broadly agreed with this ranking of Discworld novels. I wonder if everyone puts Small Gods first because it's a standalone, or because they think it's the most Ishoos.
6. "Something of the psychology of Weimar, the desire to touch the electric fence just to see what happens, lives on in modern societies and makes them, in their own ways, vulnerable to extremism and demagoguery." The Economist reviews a new translation of a book from Weimar Germany.
7. Nice piece on the phenomenon of "but we already have one thing by a woman" in comedy.
Guest gif.
Found this on Tumblr with the caption: "Annihilation, 2018, dir. Alex Garland"