The Bluestocking, vol 86: Goop, God and Mariachi Q
Happy Friday!
This week? Oh, this week is the week I told Quentin Letts he was talking balls about Brexit. And unless the BBC edit it out, on tomorrow's Week in Westminster I'm going to respond to Peter Oborne calling me a member of the metropolitan liberal elite by asking if he lives in a yurt in a countryside. I blame the heat.
This week's newsletter is heavy on profiles, and as with previous weeks they all seem to keep coming back to the same themes, one of which is the number of fundamentally unhappy, or at least unsatisified, people in the world - and how we've ended up believing that the answer to that is to be consumers of something, whether it's Jordan Peterson's books or Gwyneth Paltrow's branded juice cleanses.
If anyone wants to commission me on why Peterson is the male Gwynnie, my rates are very reasonable and I've already blocked all of his angriest Twitter followers from last time I wrote about him, so it's all win for me.
Helen
PS. Sorry about the Star Trek gifs.
PPS. NOT sorry about the Star Trek gifs.
Jonathan Franzen is Fine With All Of It
Franzen thinks that there's no way for a writer to do good work without putting a fence around yourself so that you can control the input you encounter. So that you can have a thought that isn't subject to pushback all the time from anyone who has ever met you or heard of you or expressed interest in hearing from you.
Without allowing yourself to think for a minute.
It's not just writers. It's everyone. The writer is just an extreme case of something everyone struggles with. "On the one hand, to function well, you have to believe in yourself.
On the other hand, to write well, you need to be able to doubt yourself - to entertain the possibility that you're wrong about everything, and to have sympathy with people whose lives and beliefs are very different from yours." The internet is supposed to do this, but it doesn't.
Sure. OK. But to avoid digital interaction these days is to not participate in life. If you are going to write novels about our modern condition, don't you have to participate in it? But his answer is no. No. No, you absolutely don't. You can miss a meme and nothing really changes. You can be called fragile and you will live. "I'm pretty much the opposite of fragile. I don't need internet engagement to make me vulnerable. Real writing makes me - makes anyone doing it - vulnerable."
Part 94 in an ongoing series: how can you be a full human person in a relentlessly demanding digital world? This profile attempts to rehabilitate Franzen, who has become an internet punchline, a symbol of Jurassic white male obliviousness. As often happens, it turns out he's been dragooned into being the villain that people need to make their own politics work.
Theresa May's Impossible Choice
During her short campaign, May had coined the phrase “Brexit means Brexit,” to indicate that she would honor the result of the referendum. But she said little more. Soon after May appointed her first Cabinet, in which she named Johnson Foreign Secretary, M.P.s and senior officials began to leave for their summer vacations. “I thought, This is very odd,” the former minister told me. “Why are we all going away, when there is a sort of national crisis going on? You know, where are the meetings?” Aides in Downing Street noticed a similar absence of activity. “I expected to find the government completely obsessed with dealing with Brexit. Actually, that wasn’t what was happening at any level,” one of them said.
I always enjoy reading about British politics when the piece is written for a foreign audience, because there's a process of alienation - it reminds you of what absolutely nutty stuff you've come to take for granted. This New Yorker long read on Brexit makes a very good case that Britain has truly stuffed up the process through lack of preparation.
(Me at a Jordan Peterson gig)
Philip Collins on Jeremy Corbyn's un-radical economic policies
Where, in the Corbyn economic programme, was the intention to shift the tax burden away from income and towards wealth? The leader of the Labour Party sounds less radical than the governor of the Bank of England. Mark Carney has pointed out that five British families own more than the poorest 12 million citizens and that inequality on this scale erodes the social bonds that hold capitalism together.
The answer should be taxation on wealth and property. Domestic residences attract no capital gains, so property becomes an investment as much as a home. Council tax is still based on 1991 house prices and every house valued at more than £320,000 pays the same amount. It is no wonder we have a housing crisis. This is an economic problem of the first order and Mr Corbyn could do something about it if only he were radical enough.
I want to read more of this sort of piece, which just soberly assesses the substance of what Corbyn is proposing, rather than getting mired in a culture war around him. If a no deal Brexit leads to anything like the economic shock that we'd expect, then Labour would have to do something fairly spectacular not to win the next election from its current position.
So what would it do with power? Collins argues that Corbyn's Labour has little to say on two of the biggest challenges of today - the anti-competitive nature of the huge tech companies, and the fact that capital is taxed in a far less aggressive way than income. The New Statesman has been banging on about the latter for years now; Britain has an incredible concentration of land ownership in the hands of just a few people, such as the Duke of Westminster, who is 8 years younger than me and owns a quarter of London or something silly like that. (Call me, Duke of Westminster.)
My worry is that the Labour high command will continue to run against the "centrists" and the "MSM", gaining a patina of faux-radicalism from that; meanwhile, it will ignore the kind of truly radical and necessary policies that it could enact which would make Britain much fairer and more equal. I currently have about as much appetite to write about Labour as I do to stick my hand into a blender, but that's what I'm going to make an effort to focus on next parliamentary year.
(spaceship acting)
Quick links:
A fascinating thought about meme culture which will only make sense if you know a LOT about Star Trek: The Next Generation. Sorry, 99 per cent of people.
"As I listen to Williams, I am struck by the thought that in our bare-all era, “private” is often conflated with “sensitive” or “fragile,” when in fact a fierce demand for privacy might mean a person is uncompromising and tough." Good for Michelle Williams, who got paid $80 a day for one set of reshoots, when her co-star Mark Wahlberg got $1.5m, and is now speaking about it publicly.
"Tech has a fractal irresponsibility problem: Each small worry reflects in miniature the shape of the industry’s big problems. The scale changes, but the substance doesn’t." Alexis Madrigal on why Facebook etc keep going, "whoops" then hoping we'll all leave them alone.
"Reflecting on the god-shaped hole in secular culture, he turned to the audience: ‘I suspect that many of you are here because you’d like to have the void addressed.’ To me this was a revelation. I thought we were here to watch a brain grenade being hurled at snowflakes and postmodernists. But I’m sure he was right." My regular check-in, courtesy of the LRB this time, of what Jordan Peterson is selling this week.
"It’s never clickbait, she told the class. “It’s a cultural firestorm when it’s about a woman’s vagina.” The room was silent. She then cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, “VAGINA! VAGINA! VAGINA!” as if she were yodeling." As a strange companion piece - here it's women being sold happiness and fulfilment rather than men - here's what Gwyneth Paltrow is selling. (Also: Taffy Akner is one of those writers you read and think: whyyyy can I not write like this)
Guest gif: No, YOU hang up, Data.
See you next time!