The good thing about not writing a weeknote for a week is you have plenty of things to write about. The bad thing is that you have plenty of things to write about.
We’ve managed to fit in two movies in the past fortnight: All of us strangers, and The zone of interest. What a pair of absolute crackers. Go and see them in the cinema, don’t wait till you can stream them or whatever. But then I would say that because I love the cinema, something I have only recently rediscovered.
On a trip to that there London, we managed to squeeze in both exhibitions on at the Courtauld – Cute, and Frank Auerbach – as well as a wander around the newly renovated National Portrait Gallery. Cute was a little disappointing: lots of great objects, but the curation didn’t really tell a story that had any narrative to it. It was more “here’s a thing, here’s a thing, oh and another set of things”. Auerbach is a brilliant artists, but not totally my cup of tea – but he is Kim’s, so that’s fine.
The NPG was a place that I was very familiar with. When I worked at Redwood, we were just across the road in a building which is now a hotel, so I often dropped into the NPG at lunch time for a sit and think. The renovation is a huge improvement, not simply for the fabric of the building but also for the way it’s curated. The Victorians, which used to be a gallery of Dead White Men(TM) now actually tells a story of colonialism and empire through almost exactly the same pictures. Also: whoever decided to put Radclyffe Hall in between Churchill and George VI is a genius.
We also headed over to Oxford for an overnight trip, seeing our lovely friends and their lovely children and also William Kentridge doing the fifth of the Slade Lectures Hilary 2024. I wish we had been able to go to the whole series – Kentridge is a brilliant lecturer as well as an artist I greatly admire. Seeing things like that makes me wish I lived in an academic city, instead of in a city which just happens to have two universities bolted on to it. There is a profound difference, and it’s one of the things that I most dislike about Canterbury.
At the Ashmolean, we saw Colour Revolution, which will have closed when you read this. I liked it: in particular I liked the bust of Maharajah Duleep Singh, heir to the Punjab who was forced into exile in England when we stole his land. The bust on display has his actual skin tone. Queen Victoria insisted on a classic, plain white version for herself. If that isn’t a nod to how Indians – even noble ones – were seen by the Victorians, I don’t know what is.
While there, we also caught Monica Sjöö’s The Great Cosmic Mother at Modern Art Oxford. I was not impressed. There is something about the retreat into mysticism which radical politics of the 60s and 70s succumbed to which irritates the heck out of me. It’s particularly true for second-wave feminism: as Michael Moorcock said in The Retreat from Liberty, “being Mother of the Universe cannot offer much consolation while Father is always in evidence somewhere, even if he spends most evenings at the pub.”
Coincidentally, Moorcock was also critical of the Greenham protests, which he saw as faux radical with zero chance of actually changing anything, and with little/no consequences if you got arrested. It’s not popular to say so now, but he was right – Greenham changed nothing, and the energy which went into it would have been far better spent campaigning, say, for the police to take rape seriously (which they very much didn’t at the time).
This week I have been reading…
Having finished the 500+ page Babel I dived into the 500+ page The Whispering Swarm by Michael Moorcock, and finished it. It's the closest thing Moorcock is likely to write to an autobiography, but of course includes huge strands of fiction in it. Weirdly, he includes many real names of people, but disguises others -- perhaps to make it clear that this is a fictional "real" Moorcock too (it's not down to actually needing the disguise people for legal or other reasons -- changing Ballard to Allard isn't going to fool anyone, and with JGB dead there's no issue of libel anyway).
I also finished Zoe Schiffer’s Extremely Hardcore, which is the story of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. If you haven't been obsessively following it this book is an excellent romp through all that's happened. But if you have, there's probably not a lot in here which will either surprise you or that you won't be aware of.
Musk is, of course, the main character. But until the day when he tells his own story, he's a main character that is almost entirely absent. That allows the reader to paint in whatever their own feelings are about him, but it doesn't really answer the question of why he is like this, why he takes these dreadful decisions. Nor does it really tell us mush about how he manages to get away with it, although having more money than is right for any human being is probably part of the answer.
The Emperor’s New Clothes definitely applies to those around him, and one of the more interesting parts is the accounts of those who attempted to play along with the Musk regime at Twitter, mollifying him and trying to find ways to do what he wanted without destroying their own values in the process. There will no doubt be a few more of those stories come out over the next few years, and I hope there is ultimately a revised version which tells those too.
This week I have been writing…
Last week’s Ten Blue Links was really a collection of bad things that are happening in tech at the moment. It really is quite grim: between Apple deciding it’s more likely to achieve growth through rentier capitalism than making high-quality products that ordinary people can afford, VCs turning out to be utter morons, and Sam Altman being, well, what we all know he is (but aren’t really saying) I don’t think there has been a more depressing landscape in the tech industry.
As I said at the end of that piece, it’s best to sup with a long spoon.
Meanwhile I made some progress on Orford. Not as much as I would have liked, but I solved a knotty problem in the plot by bringing the introduction of a character to much earlier in the work.
