The Bluestocking, vol XXXII: French tongue, Mailer balls and 9/11 Seinfeld

Evening,

There was no magazine this week, so it was time to take my spade and dig myself out of my own personal Admin Avalanche.

I also wrote 4,500 words about why people love Jeremy Corbyn. The responses were really interesting; almost universally positive, from both Corbynsceptics and fans. The only group that really took the hump were the anarcho left, who said I was petty bourgeois etc etc.

My sense is that more and more of the mainstream left will peel away from Corbyn as his leadership goes on, while this fringe - who are supremely grump in victory - will become unbearable in defeat. At the moment, Corbyn is holding together his own personal coalition with a common enemy to defeat. . . but after he wins again, his support might fragment as those who simply wanted an anti-austerity leader realise that they are on the same "team" as ex-SWPs, Communists etc, who want to pull the party in a different direction.

Until next time - H


Learning to Love in French

I need French like a bike messenger needs a bicycle. I consider myself a fish. One day, I see a woman named Alessandra Sublet on television and pronounce her name “sublet,” as in what you do to an apartment, achieving a sort of reverse Tar-zhay effect.

But there’s Bradley Cooper, nailing his uvular fricatives on the evening news. I tell myself the same thing I do when faced with such challenges as doing my taxes: if that guy can hack it, I can, too. Maybe you speak French not because you’re privileged; you’re privileged because you speak French. The language suddenly seems mine for the taking, a practical skill. Herbert Hoover was fluent in Mandarin.

Lauren Collins is one of my favourite writers, and her memoir about learning French - her husband's first language - is predictably light and deep.

Jihad vs McWorld

Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures—both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe—a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. The second is being borne in on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food—with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald's, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous global network: one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology, communications, and commerce. The planet is falling precipitantly apart AND coming reluctantly together at the very same moment.

From the Atlantic's archive, this 1992 piece on globalisation and tribalism is an eerie thing to read.

Quick links: Patton Oswalt on losing his wife will leave you with something in your eye. My lord, Hillary Clinton has put up with decades of bullshit questions. Someone wrote a spec script for a post-9/11 Seinfeld episode and it's amazing. A NYer longread on Savile Row, and why you can't copy a really good suit. David Frum on why people support Trump.

Quote of the week: "A good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls". (Norman Mailer explaining why he doesn't read female writers, quoted in a 1990 Francine Prose essay.)

As a chaser, have Vivien Gornick's response to that Mailer/Roth/Bellow generation, in a Paris Review profile: "They wanted to put down on the page the taste of their own lives, and that taste was saturated in grievance—the grievance of their own previous social marginality. "

Podcast recommendation: Slate's Trumpcast attempts to understand the most baffling political career since Lembit Opik's. The episode with a "Bernie or Bust" supporter will have you WTFing - apparently Hillary Clinton caused Brexit. (When we all know it was the latent desire for big blue passports.)

Hate-read recommendation: It was tough to beat The Canary's satire vertical, Off The Perch, but I think Everyday Feminism just outclasses all the competition. Enjoy "These 3 Powerful Stories Show Why Wearing Camo Can Be Anti-Feminist", then dig into the archive. You're welcome. (I highly recommend the "privilege" tab.)

Guest gif: Me to internet commenters:

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