The Bluestocking, vol 98: Farewell
Hello Friday . . .
Yes, the first draft of my book is filed, and I celebrated, much as Ernest Hemingway did in such situations, by going to the corner shop for some Maltesers. I'm in the weird state now where I have no idea if it's any good or not; I'm just too close to it.
In other news, are you tired all the time? Consider taking a vitamin D supplement. After some light bullying from my other half, I reluctantly went to the GP to have blood tests to see whether there was anything physically wrong with me. (Me to doctor: I'm aware it might be psychosomatic, but also I don't want to be one of those Daily Mail stories. Doctor to me: I don't want that either.)
Anyway, it turns out that while a person's vitamin D level is supposed to be between 50 and 120 [units], mine was 29. Total rickets territory. AND: here's the crucial bit: winter vitamin D deficiencies are *incredibly* common in northern Europe, particularly people who, say, sit inside all day writing a book. So treat yourself to a multivitamin today.
Helen
PS. I got back from my run this morning to the news that Jeremy Hardy had died, of brain cancer, at the age of 57. When he emailed a group of friends, colleagues and acquaintances before Christmas and said that he was dying, it felt unreal. I'd seen him only a couple of weeks before at a News Quiz recording.
It's no exaggeration to say that over the last few years, whenever I've felt angry at some bits of "the left", I've thought about Jeremy: solidly to the left of me, but always curious, open-minded, generous, kind. We had long email discussions about gender and Israel and Corbyn and anti-semitism, in which he always tried to understand why I thought what I did, even when he strongly disagreed. It was a way of being that I will always try to emulate.
Plus, you know, he was bloody funny. Before recording started, or if there was a technical glitch, he would tell a joke that was so unbroadcastably rude you wouldn't believe it, and this Radio 4 audience - who looked like they had been BORN in a garden centre - would be roaring away. Thank you, Jeremy. I'll miss you.
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."
One Art
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
***
Writers Must Be Moral
This past year, regular contributors to Condé Nast magazines started spotting a new paragraph in their yearly contracts. It’s a doozy. If, in the company’s “sole judgment,” the clause states, the writer “becomes the subject of public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals,” Condé Nast can terminate the agreement. In other words, a writer need not have done anything wrong; she need only become scandalous. In the age of the Twitter mob, that could mean simply writing or saying something that offends some group of strident tweeters.
This will have a chilling effect. There's no way to write about some of the subjects I do, for example, without offending one side or the other (sometimes both). How could I possibly guarantee I won't be the subject of complaints? Notice this wording doesn't limit the clause to *justified* or even *true* complaints.
For the past two years, I’ve refused cautions — from editors, from family, from peers — that I might be edging into burnout. To my mind, burnout was something aid workers, or high-powered lawyers, or investigative journalists dealt with. It was something that could be treated with a week on the beach. I was still working, still getting other stuff done — of course I wasn’t burned out.
But the more I tried to figure out my errand paralysis, the more the actual parameters of burnout began to reveal themselves. Burnout and the behaviors and weight that accompany it aren’t, in fact, something we can cure by going on vacation. It’s not limited to workers in acutely high-stress environments. And it’s not a temporary affliction: It’s the millennial condition. It’s our base temperature. It’s our background music. It’s the way things are. It’s our lives.
That realization recast my recent struggles: Why can’t I get this mundane stuff done? Because I’m burned out. Why am I burned out? Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it — explicitly and implicitly — since I was young. Life has always been hard, but many millennials are unequipped to deal with the particular ways in which it’s become hard for us.
OK, I hear you, but also: have you tried taking a multivitamin?
(Seriously, I think this piece is good about the debilitating effect of insecure work and an ultra-metrics-driven environment. That's something which applies even more at the bottom end of the labour market, but it's no fun in journalism or academia either.)
The real reason Trump lies
Outrage at Trump’s duplicitousness is a dangerous pleasure, in a Trump-like way, self-satisfying — what Philip Roth called “the ecstasy of sanctimony”. While it is comforting that journalists are fact-checking Trump, this exercise too may be worse than pointless. If my analysis is correct, outrage and fact-checking will certainly not stop his dishonesty. These acts may even help Trump to have what he wants — forever, to be in our minds.
A psychologist's view on the Orangina Mussolini.
We now go live to Buzzfeed's Ask Jonah Anything Slack Channel
I know a lot of great journalists who worked (and have worked) at BuzzFeed. They've done some incredible work: big investigations, strong news, fun stuff. Working in a shrinking industry can be grim, and it's particularly hard for American staff, given that US employment law sucks. Solidarity to the journalists seeking compensation for the time off they forfeited to feed the BuzzFeed news and buzz mill.
But I can't help saying that this piece is very illuminating, and not in a good way, about some of the "social justice" trends that BuzzFeed has encouraged and monetised (and which some of its staff have clearly internalised). The piece chronicles how some people on the "ask the founder anything" slack channel talked about their feelings about being laid off, how to assuage their feelings, whether bringing dogs into the office could help their feelings, etc. And the other half were like: hey, could we have the time off in lieu money that the company owes us?
I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea of monetising social justice, anyway. But also this sense that discrimination and injustice is a matter of feelings, putting the emphasis on individuals and their emotional states. It feels very (don't hurt me) neoliberal, and ultimately not very radical or conducive to organising against oppression.
Screw the dogs, pay the money! Discrimination is structural, everyone participates in it to some extent, and the answer is to demolish those structures and build new ones. Don't demand therapy dogs. Demand proper employment practices. You can't eat therapy dogs. (Well, not more than once.)
Chaser: in 2018, Buzzfeed scored 130 million hits thanks to a 19-year-old who made quizzes for the site, for free, in her spare time. More than one a day! "Why didn't they offer her a job," you might think. The obvious, if cynical, answer is that people doing stuff like this burn through their ideas/enthusiasm/willingness to grind out work in a couple of years, so it's not a long term "investment".
The Daily Mail's web training scheme, as an another example, had such a high drop-out rate that there was talk of penalty clauses to discourage employees from bailing out. As someone who trained at the Mail an aeon ago, that was particularly sad to read. Yes, I only earned £15,000 in my first year there, but they paid for me to be trained first at the PA centre in Howden, and then on the job with talented people in the newsroom. It was an exchange: low wages now, but you'll acquire skills that will allow you to earn more later. I think that contract is under strain, or broken, in some places now. The deskilling of journalism - to produce high volumes of low-quality SEO and social traffic - has made life very tough.
Quick links:
NSFW, but I absolutely lost it when I got to the tortilla. One woman buys and tries on a very, very small and high-waisted pair of bikini bottoms.
I've never wanted to be in a band until I watched this. Just heartwarming.
Hard to disagree with this analysis of Twitter as "the crystal meth" of newsrooms, or its jarring note that people really thought that they could find the truth about the Native American/MAGA boys confrontation simply by looking at more videos online. "No reporter can go to the scene of a dozen events per day, observe what happens, interview those affected, sort the meaning from the dross and file a story. But Twitter offers an endless stream of faux events: fleeting sensations, momentary outrages, ersatz insights and provocative distortions."
This is a great reason to have a baby.
Bless Die Zeit's journalists for trying to get Angela Merkel to say she's a feminist and failing repeatedly. Theresa May, bow before the master of the interview stonewall.
See you next week . . .