Cuttings: June 2017

Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins: ‘People really thought that only men loved action movies’ -
interview by Hermione Hoby in The Guardian. "In one scene, Diana annihilates an enemy sniper, and takes out the better part of an ancient church. After a suitably suspenseful pause, our heroine emerges, straddles the wreckage, and patiently grants the camera some adoring seconds on her immaculate face. Watching this, I was overcome with the perfection of her liquid eyeliner. I tell Jenkins as much and she laughs uproariously. Was it important to her that Diana look gorgeous at all times? 'Absolutely. As I always say, it would be more practical if Batman were built like a very small rock climber, it would be much easier to get into spaces, to do all kinds of things. Well, that’s not your fantasy. Your fantasy is he’s unreasonably big and built. Good. My fantasy is that I could wake up looking amazing, that I could be strong and stop the bully but that everybody would love me too. I think that’s intrinsic to fantasy – fantasy is fantasy.'"

Jeremy Corbyn​ has won the first battle in a long ​war​ against the ruling elite - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "The British ruling elite and the business class are not the same entity. They have different interests. The British elite are in fact quite detached from the interests of people who do business here. They have become middle men for a global elite of hedge fund managers, property speculators, kleptocrats, oil sheikhs and crooks. It was in the interests of the latter that Theresa May turned the Conservatives from liberal globalists to die-hard Brexiteers.... When most socialists treated the working class as a kind of bee colony – pre-programmed to perform its historical role – Gramsci said: everyone is an intellectual. Even if a man is treated as 'trained gorilla' at work, outside work 'he is a philosopher, an artist, a man of taste ... has a conscious line of moral conduct'. [Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks] On this premise, Gramsci told the socialists of the 1930s to stop obsessing about the state – and to conduct a long, patient trench warfare against the ideology of the ruling elite."

Baileys prize winner Naomi Alderman on fame, Trump and Wonder Woman - interview by Alex Clark in The Guardian. "Naomi Alderman writes novels and video games, teaches, makes radio programmes about science, art, fantasy and culture for the BBC.... The Power is 42-year-old Alderman’s fourth novel... A work of science fiction featuring four protagonists, it imagines a world in which women have physical dominance over men via their ability to electrocute them at will, and where institutional, social, political and personal power reverses. ... In her Baileys acceptance speech, Alderman declared that 'my life would be more possible with the women’s movement existing and no running water than the other way around … And I suppose one of the things the book is about is that the support and the power of other women has been more vital to me than electricity.' She also implored the audience to go and see Wonder Woman, throughout which, she says, she wept."

Being Wagner by Simon Callow: what makes Wagner so controversial? - review by Thomas Laqueur in The Guardian. "This book grew out of the research Simon Callow did for a play, Inside Wagner’s Head, which he wrote for the composer’s bicentenary in 2012. What was it about this man, he asked himself, that made him so controversial – in his day and since? It is an actor’s book and he came up with an actor’s answer: his subject’s 'demiurgic personality'.... In this book, as in the 2012 play, Callow is still engaged with what was going on inside Wagner’s head – 'What was it like to be Richard Wagner?' But he expands on that question here: 'What was it like to be with Richard Wagner?' And, more revealing, 'What was it like to become Richard Wagner?' It is a book about the production of a man for whom 'self-dramatisation was his essential mode' and who, in his autobiography My Life, set the standard."

Tiananmen Square: the silences left by the massacre - article by Madeleine Thien in The Guardian. "Each year around the anniversary of 4 June 1989, the Beijing massacre, words vanish from the Chinese internet. A comprehensive list of blocked words is published by China Digital Times, which keeps an extensive database. Digital censorship has pushed Chinese citizens to create an irreverent, ingenious and hilarious counter-language of puns, gifs, memes, nicknames and more, to fill in the spaces otherwise left blank. I turned to those missing words to record the events of 1989 and the aftermath.... The poet Bei Dao wrote: 'Life’s only a promise / Don’t grieve for it / We knocked down midnight’s door / alone like a match polished into light.' Today, 27 years later, even the words yesterday and tomorrow are so politically charged, they disappear." (Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien was shortlisted for the Baileys prize.)

Blooming marvellous: the world's first female photographer and her botanical beauties - "Anna Atkins is considered to have been the first female photographer. She was born in Kent in 1799, and she made her most significant contribution across 10 years in the mid-19th century in which she created at least 10,000 images by hand. But it was what she did with those pictures that gave her a place in art history. Atkins realised what millions of social media users know today: that images are for sharing. She created the first book to contain photographs, and she paved the way for photography’s power to connect people.... It was Atkins’s interest in the study of algae that prompted her book. She was so disappointed by the lack of illustrations in a guide to British algae published in 1841 that she decided to do something about it. In the autumn of 1843 she began work on creating images of hundreds of different types, using Herschel’s cyanotype method. It was a meticulous task whose skill rested in working quickly to assemble the dried algae arrangement, before leaving the paper exposed to sunlight for precisely the right amount of time."

Essayism by Brian Dillon: pure creativity on the page - "Dillon himself is a superbly varied essayist; the author of a range of books about photography, hypochondriacs, the great explosion at a munitions factory in Faversham, Kent, in 1916, and another written in 24 hours called I Am Sitting in a Room, his lines of inquiry are the body and its afflictions, contemporary art and literature, the history of place and ruins. He has a natural affinity for the essay 'as a kind of conglomerate: an aggregate either of diverse materials or disparate ways of saying the same or similar things'. Lists are a wonderful tactic of essayism – consider Georges Perec’s astonishing lists in Species of Spaces, from the food and drink he consumed in 1974 to the objects on his desk. Dillon helps us see, via Joan Didion in The White Album, the list as incomplete, the very act of making a list a gesture at what cannot be listed or will always be left out: 'the list, if it’s doing its job, always leaves something to be invented or recalled, something forgotten in the moment of its making'."