Cuttings: October

How to tell if your cat is interested in your novel – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian.  “Cat meows constantly at the study door: the cat is not interested in your novel. Cat watches you intently as you write: the cat is not interested in your novel. Cat goes to sleep on your manuscript: the cat is not interested in your novel. Cat repeatedly walks across your keyboard: the cat is not interested in your novel. Cat nests in your box of author copies: the cat is not interested in your novel.”

The wellness realm has fallen into conspiritualism; I have a sense why – article by Sarah Wilson in The Guardian. “People I loosely know have flooded my social feeds with impassioned pleas for me to ‘wake up’ and fight #msm (mainstream media), quoting what we now know to be QAnon conspiracy jargon, hashtagged and often in screaming caps. When I ask to see their research (I’m genuinely curious and the sheer onslaught has made me question my adherence to the scientific method) that coronavirus is a hoax dreamed up by a satanic cell of elites, I am directed to alt-right YouTube links and the viral documentary Plandemic. When I flag (in what I hope is a calm digital tone) the film has been removed from most digital platforms and Science magazine has systematically disproved most of its claims, I’m told it’s me who’s been sucked into the (#msm) conspiracy. #DOYOUROWNRESEARCH, they scream-text at me.... little prepared me for this most recent pop-political mash-up, coined conspiritualism. It’s certainly a Venn overlap that is hard to fathom. How did wellness warriors come to unite with the alt-right QAnon community? How did the ‘love and light’ go so dark?”

Pandora's Jar by Natalie Haynes: ancient misogyny – review by Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian. "All the usual suspects are here, including Helen, Medusa, Jocasta, Penelope and Medea, and it’s striking, considering their stories en masse, how often they have been passed down the literary and artistic canon as scapegoats for the mistakes of men, or else muted altogether. Take the title character, who never had a box in the original version (the confusion is likely the fault of Erasmus in the 16th century, mistranslating the word for a large jar), and whose name means simply 'all-giving'.... As Haynes points out: 'Every telling of a myth is as valid as any other, of course, but women are lifted out of the equation with a monotonous frequency.' Except when they are vilified; she points to famous images of the Medusa myth as an example of the way the male viewpoint is privileged and we hardly think to question it: 'it’s just a hero and his trophy'. But Medusa was not always a monster; in some versions 'she’s a woman who was raped and then punished for it with snakish hair'."

Thirty books to help us understand the world in 2020 – chosen by Michael E. Mann, Anne Applebaum, Jeffrey Boakye, Helen Lewis, John Naughton, in The Guardian. For Small Creatures Such as We, by Sasha Sagan. "Carl Sagan was arguably the greatest science communicator of our time. He inspired many – including me – to enter the world of science. He is sadly no longer with us. But his daughter, Sasha Sagan, honours his legacy in her wonderful new book." The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson. "A refreshing counterbalance to the glut of apocalyptic visions of climate catastrophe.... Stan uses the accounts of fictional future eyewitnesses to convey the stark threat of climate change. But that future, by some measure, is already here. Rather than suggesting our doom is destined, he shows how we can rise to this extraordinary challenge." What Is Populism?, by Jan-Werner Müller. "The movements that we have come to call 'populist' are defined by one central idea: they reject pluralism....Populists, Müller explains, claim that they alone represent the people, or the nation; that their opponents are traitors, foreigners or unpatriotic elites; that there can be no neutral political institutions and symbols." Think Like a White Man, by Dr Boulé Whytelaw III. "Powerful exploration of race politics is one thing, searing social commentary is another, and razor-sharp satire is a third entirely. But put them all together? This is a book like no other, taking you on a thrill ride/thrill guide through the world of default white dominance.... Wicked in every sense of the word." Men Who Hate Women, by Laura Bates. “'Women have very little idea of how much men hate them,' wrote Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch. Well, the internet certainly fixed that.... Bates has spent eight years giving talks to schools, and in that time she has watched boys become 'angry, resistant to the very idea of a conversation about sexism'." Re-engineering Humanity, by Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger. "This sobering book by a legal scholar (Frischmann) and a philosopher (Selinger) suggests ... that we have been building a world in which humans are being subtly re-engineered to make them more receptive to machine-driven logics. ... Implausible? Maybe. And then you remember that the only response option offered to its users by Facebook is to 'Like' something: the entire spectrum of possible human responses is forced through a single, narrow aperture. If that isn’t dumbing down, I don’t know what is."

The real black history? The government wants to ban it – article by Priyamvada Gopal in The Guardian. "One familiar defensive response to discussions of racism today is to insist that Britain is one of the most tolerant countries in the world. Missing from that grand claim is the story of how all progress on race has been won through persistent protest and campaigning, by ethnic minorities and their allies. Black people, both in Britain and in the colonial world, have not waited meekly for changes to take place.... Black people in Britain have defended their communities, mobilised and contributed to vital social and institutional change. ...Across Britain and the British Empire black people were never just passive victims but active resisters.... Minority ethnic communities, including those of African and Caribbean heritage, have long helped shape Britain for the better, insisting on taking their place and staking their claims. They were, of course, demonised as extremists for doing so, just as Black Lives Matter is being vilified by politicians today."

Boris Johnson,The Gambler: no blame, no shame – review by Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian. "Think of the many character flaws that we associate with the prime minister: serial infidelities, narcissistic ambition, a desperation for adulation, reckless gambles, broken promises and betrayed colleagues. The essential source of it all, contends Tom Bower, is a traumatised childhood.... Stanley Johnson was a feckless and self-obsessed dad and an unfaithful and violent husband, according to this book. ... The advantage of this as a biographical framing device is that it offers an apparently logical explanation for his subject’s frequently appalling behaviour as an adult. The flaw in assigning all the culpability to Stanley is that it gifts Boris a gold-plated alibi. We should not, it suggests, think too badly of him when he betrays a wife, concocts fabrications or stumbles from debacle to disaster through a public health crisis. We should think of him as the victim of that troubled childhood.... The apologias continue once he becomes prime minister. When his attempt to shut down parliament in 2019 is ruled unlawful by the supreme court, the villain of Bowers’s account is the court’s president, Brenda Hale, 'who had rarely concealed her contempt for Boris' and was animated by 'her determination to slap down the government'. This suggests that the Tory leader had been confounded by one outrageously biased woman, rather than condemned by the unanimous verdict of all 11 of the country’s most senior judges."

Pale Rider: painful lessons of the flu pandemic – review by Miranda Seymour in The Guardian, published June 2017. “In the spring of 1918, confusion was caused by the fact that the as-yet unidentified virus was not inevitably deadly. It struck first in Haskell County, Kansas, where a young army mess cook fell sick one morning in early March. By lunchtime, a hundred similar cases were reported at the base. By the end of that week, a makeshift hospital for victims had filled an aircraft hangar. Among the young soldiers who survived, some may have carried their infection to the front, where both sides became badly stricken by the virus. ... Late in the summer of 1918, a far deadlier form of Spanish flu appeared. It struck at three points around the Atlantic: Freetown in Sierra Leone, Brest in France and Boston in the US. ... Spinney’s important book does not attempt to offer light reading. No less than four pandemics are predicted in the 21st century. At least one will take the form of flu. Vaccination is not cheap, because the flu virus is constantly mutating. Annual vaccines currently offer the best protection. Britain does still possess a National Health Service. The enduring message of Spinney’s magisterial work is to underline just how crucial that remarkable service is to the future security of an unusually privileged nation.”

Are we nearly there yet? How Margaret Calvert steered Britain into the fast lane – article by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. “It is almost impossible to escape Margaret Calvert. She’s standing at every motorway junction, beaming out in bold, bright letters, and at the corner of every street, warning of potential hazards ahead. Now aged 84, and still busy in her studio, the designer jointly responsible for giving British roads their visual identity is the subject of a retrospective at the Design Museum. ‘I’m not quite as slim as I was back then,’ says the South African-born designer, standing in front of one of her famous school crossing signs on show in the exhibition. ‘But the hairstyle has remained the same.’ Tasked with updating the previous sign, which had depicted a grammar-school boy in a cap leading a younger girl with a satchel across the road, she decided to flip it around and put the girl in charge. She modelled the silhouette on a photo of herself as a child. Her neat bob hasn’t changed much since – nor has her ability to lead the way.”

What now for the BBC? – article by Peter York in The Guardian, based on his book with Patrick Barwise The War Against the BBC. “The newly intensified attacks against the BBC are real, and the attacker is the government. This PM seems to be the most hostile towards the BBC of any in living memory – including Margaret Thatcher..... The world’s most admired and successful public service broadcaster now faces hits to its income of anywhere between £500m and £1bn. (A billion would be around a third of its current public funding.) And the recent attacks come on top of far deeper cuts than people have realised. In March 2020, consumer group Voice of the Listener & Viewer(VLV) analysed the BBC’s finances. The results are astonishing: since 2010, Osborne’s funding cuts have reduced the net public funding of the BBC’s UK services by 30% in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. It’s remarkable that the BBC’s services have held up so well in the circumstances.... The positive case for the BBC is familiar: it creates social cohesion within the country – ‘One Nation’ – and develops the UK’s ‘soft power’ externally – ‘Global Britain’. Both things are, we are told, important to this prime minister. Without the BBC we would be more fragmented, we wouldn’t share the same realities, we would be more vulnerable to disinformation and polarisation. Recent research from the University of Zurich examined the factors that make nations more or less ‘resilient’ to sweeping disinformation, such as conspiracy theories. One key resilience factor is the existence of an independent public service national broadcaster at scale, such as the BBC. The US – nearly off the researchers’ scale in its vulnerability to such conspiracy theories as QAnon – has never had an equivalent-sized public service broadcaster.”

Time's Monster by Priya Satia: living in the past – review by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. “Time’s Monster is a book about history and empire. Not a straightforward history, but an account of how the discipline of history has itself enabled the process of colonisation, ‘making it ethically thinkable’. Satia’s story begins with the Enlightenment, when the traditional idea of time as cyclical unwound into a linear vision of history, which came to be seen as ‘something that moves irresistibly forward’. ... The Enlightenment’s obsession with progress, combined with an unshakable attachment to moral universalism, Satia suggests, helped ‘normalise the violence of imperial conquest’. Colonialism came to be seen as morally just, a means of bringing progress to non-European peoples, freeing them from their own barbarism.... Time’s Monster is a coruscating and important reworking of the relationship between history, historians and empire. It is also a frustrating account. ... In the final chapter, ... she worries that historians have in recent decades become sidelined by political leaders and that new kinds of experts – economists and political scientists – have taken their place, experts who seem even more willing to be bag carriers for the powerful. .... Today’s historians, in other words, should continue the practice of using history as a means of deriving moral norms, but with different norms, a morality that supports the powerless rather than the powerful. It’s a demand that might seem obvious, but it’s also one that cuts against the grain of much of the argument in previous chapters which has condemned the very act of using the lessons of history to craft moral norms.”

The Interest by Michael Taylor: busting the British slavery myth – review by Fara Dabhoiwala in The Guardian. “Britain’s national myth about slavery goes something like this: for most of history, slavery was a normal state of affairs; but in the later 18th century, enlightened Britons such as William Wilberforce led the way in fighting against it. Britain ended the slave trade in 1807, before any other nation, and thereafter campaigned zealously to eradicate it everywhere else. As Michael Taylor points out in his scintillating new book, this is a farrago of nonsense. Slavery was certainly an ancient practice, but for 200 years the British developed it on an unprecedented scale. Throughout the 18th century, they were the world’s foremost slavers, and the plantation system they helped create devoured the lives of millions of African men, women and children. ... The cessation of the transatlantic trade in 1807 didn’t end this. It changed nothing for the 700,000 enslaved people already held captive in Britain’s West Indian colonies; soon afterwards, the British government acquired additional slave territories in South America. Slavery remained central to Britain’s economic and strategic interests, and for more than a decade and a half after 1807 almost no one campaigned to end it.... The Interest is the story of how widespread and deeply rooted such attitudes were, how powerfully calls for abolition were resisted and why the British parliament nonetheless voted at last in 1833 to end slavery in its West Indian and African territories.”

What the flip! The chance discovery that's uncovered treasures of the very earliest cinema – article by Pamela Hutchinson in The Guardian. “While later silent feature films were duplicated and distributed widely, there are hundreds of short experiments by the first film-makers, movies no more than a few seconds long, that no longer exist even as a memory. ... Yet a dogged research project by an independent scholar from France, Thierry Lecointe, has helped uncover miraculous images from lost films, not just by Méliès, but also by Alice Guy-Blaché. The frames were preserved as images printed on to the card pages of tiny flipbooks. With digital technology, the flipbooks, known as folioscopes, have now become something like film fragments again. The photographer Onno Petersen shot each page in high-resolution and the motion-picture restoration expert Robert Byrne, from the San Francisco Silent Film festival, produced animations revealing such treats as a long-lost magic trick, dance, comic sketch or a train caught on camera more than a century ago.”