Sunday Night/Monday Warning S2E17: The medium-sized breakfast
Another instalment of weekly recommendations and miscellaneous items.
This is the weekly round-up of things I liked in the past seven days + extra content for paid subscribers.
4 Things I Actually Enjoyed This Week
1. ARTICLE
Where be your jibes now?
by Patricia Lockwood for LRB
A certain sort of man treats David Foster Wallace like a secular saint; Patricia Lockwood doesn’t and that’s what makes this essay so excellent:
I can list a hundred things David Foster Wallace should have written before he wrote a book about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers. His backstory – but surely you can picture it. One dancer is addicted to weed, another feels like he doesn’t belong, and eventually Michael Flatley’s head, which has been seeming to grow on a parallel track with his sinister influence, gets microwaved successfully against all known laws of physics, and we have a moment where we hear all his thoughts as Death clogs his failing body through space and time. There. Done. The Pale King never needed to happen, nor all the rest of it.
Though there is one thing we wouldn’t want to lose: a character named Mr Bussy.
That’s how I felt before I read it, anyway. Criticism of the book at the time, less uneasy in its knowledge of Wallace (in fact performed at the peak of his sainthood), mostly centred on one question: Why did he choose to do it? As in, why would you choose to swim the Channel? Why would you lie on a bed of narrative nails? Why would you slip into the bodies of the men in grey flannel, the opaque fathers, the personified footnotes, the data mystics, the codes and by-laws among men? (We’ll get to the women later. If the male IRS worker’s backstory is that he carried a briefcase as an eight-year-old and had hyperhidrosis, the female IRS worker’s backstory is that she was diddled.)
2. ALBUM
Rat Saw God by Wednesday
Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
Noisy, angry, and excellent, this record came out in April but there’s still time to pick it up and pretend you were on it from the start.
3. ARTICLE
Read the first reviews of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
by Dan Sheehan for LitHub
“For Mr. Orwell, the most honest writer alive, hypocrisy is too dreadful for laughter: it feeds his despair. Though the indignation of Nineteen Eighty-Four is singeing, the book does suffer from a division of purpose. Is it an account of present hysteria, is it a satire on propaganda, or a world that sees itself entirely in inhuman terms? Is Mr Orwell saying, not that there is no hope, but that there is no hope for man in the political conception of man?”
–V.S. Pritchett, The New Statesman, June 18, 1949
4. ARTICLE
Something Is Rotten on the Street of Denmark
Jimmy McIntosh for The Fence
The Fence is one of maybe two handfuls of magazines in the UK that publish work that wouldn’t or couldn’t appear anywhere else. I particularly enjoyed this:
Come out of Tottenham Court Road station today and you’ll find a very different vista to the strange mix of knock-off luggage shops, internet cafés and bureaux de change that lined Charing Cross Road 15 years ago. The area immediately to the east of the station, St. Giles, was until relatively recently one of the centres of London’s murky, creative underworld.
By the time the Second World War ended, the area had cleaned up its act (sort of), becoming the centre of England’s music industry. You couldn’t move on Denmark Street in the 1960s without bumping into a wide-eyed songwriter with a propensity for underage girls, and as such the area became very, very hip...
Updates, Corrections & Clarifications
None this week.
From here, it’s usually bonus material for paid subscribers. I’ve taken down the wall this week but if you’ve not yet become a paid subscriber, why not do it now…
THE MICRO ESSAY
Names unnamed
UK libel law is a nest of vipers inside a maze of vipers guarded by even larger vipers that shoot vipers out of their mouths… or something. The key thing is that the legal penalties for wrongly naming someone are so onerous and the chances of being tied up in legal action for years even if you have the resources to fight are so high that it’s not worth the risk. I know the name of the BBC star taken off air after extremely serious accusations published by The Sun but if I published it here, I’d face a legal risk that I can’t shoulder.
THIS WEEK’S STATS
There are currently 9,867 subscribers to this newsletter in total (up 98 in the last 30 days). There are 748 paid subscribers (down 5, numbers always dip in the summer).
Newsletters from this publication were read 107,000 times in the past month.
This week’s most-read edition was…
.. which was read 11,400 times with an open rate among subscribers of 49%.
THE NEWSLETTERS I NEARLY WROTE THIS WEEK
A Shadow Civil War
This will get written; I have a broader theory about media and politics that I just need to work on a bit harder.
PLAYLIST
YOUTUBE FIND OF THE WEEK
The original Superman movie trailer from 1978 is highly motivating:
Thanks for reading, and for sharing.
Previously:
Orwell: VS Pritchett probably unequalled, but a good discussion about 1984 in Melvyn Bragg’s heroic In Our Time series, 15 September 2022 on Radio 4. Picked up nicely on Eton-educated Orwell’s class blinkers when it came to depiction of the Proles (only 85% of the population).
On dystopia and hypocrisy, anyone else weirded by the spectacle of the BBC celeb story being aired by The Sun, which routinely paid 15-16 year old schoolgirls for its Page 3 click-bait?