Sunday links
John Wyver writes: back now in the groove, here’s a new collection of articles and a video or two that have engaged me over the past week. As ever, I am most grateful to those in my Twitter feed who pointed me in the direction of many of them.
• Volume control – how creating my library brought order in a world of chaos: given what a sh*t-sh*w the past week has been, I needed something lovely to start with – and this totally delightful piece is just the thing; Lucy Mangan for the Guardian on creating a personal library. Needless to say, I am deeply envious.
• Boris Johnson’s claim that the Roman empire fell due to “uncontrolled immigration” is wrong – and dangerous: I know we’ve had several news cycles since this, but it’s important; our shambles of a Prime Minister made me angry at pretty much every moment of the past week, first in Rome and then in Glasgow, and then once again in Westminster. Here, Rachel Cunliffe for New Statesman rips apart his sub-Ladybird history guff from the Coliseum…
• Fascism and analogies — British and American, past and present: … and for broader background, see this essential Priya Satia essay from LA Review of Books in March this year.
• Owen Paterson was just the fall guy. This week was all about Boris Johson: of course I could, and probably should, feature Marina Hyde’s columns every week. Twice. This one has a magisterial first paragrph.
• … and for one more essential contribution on the Paterson scandal, here’s the peerless broadcaster James O’Brien on LBC:
• Kane and Kong: Luke McKernan has a lot of fun reflecting on the connections between two Hollywood classics.
• The Shakespearean legend at the heart of Joel Coen’s Tragedy of Macbeth: a very fine profile by David Canfield for Vanity Fair of the great Kathryn Hunter, who it was wonderful to watch at work when we recorded the RSC’s Timon of Athens.
• Christelle Lheureux introduces her film 80,000 Years Old: one of my obsessions over the past months has been the screen language of split-screens, and here’s the French filmmaker introducing here 28-minute drama that uses the technique throughout, and is currently available on Mubi.com.
• The TV hit that wasn’t: such an interesting New York Times piece by John Koblin about the rights and distribution travails in the USA of Impeachment: American Crime Story.
• Top 10 postmodern books: hours, weeks, nay months, of fun and laughter here, as recommended by Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian – in fact, of course, pretty much every one of the suggested volumes is essential reading.
• How David Foster Wallace anticipated Netflix’s digital gatekeeping: … and here’s an extract from Stuart Jeffries’ new book about postmodernism from Verso, Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern.
• Dylan 1980-85: Richard Williams at his blog The Blue Moment on Springtime in New York: The Bootleg Series 1980-85, and
• Angelina (Shot of Love Outtake) – no pictures, but 6 minutes of gloriousness.
• Red Flags / Bloodshed / Contagion: dazzling journalism and display about 6 January, the before and the after, from The Washington Post.
• Madrid, 2031: a story from Storythings for COP26 by María Bonete Escoto:
It’s 3pm and it’s March and you’re tired. The metro was full and you ended up in a corner. You still feel sticky, and when you step outside on the street and take off your mask, you blink under the glare of the sun. It shines white and high up in the sky, and you still remember when spring felt like spring, when summer was just another season and not the only one.
• Future Madrid: a response to Madrid, 2031: … and thoughts in reply from climate expert Alice Bell:
Madrid is not on fire in this story. But that doesn’t mean everything will be ok. The weather is not what it used to be or, as the narrator puts it: ‘you still remember when spring felt like spring, when summer was just another season and not the only one.’ There’s a sense of hopelessness and things closing in; that the craving for ice cream isn’t just the memory of a delightful creamy, sweet and cool treat, but a memory of hope.
• Stop telling kids they’ll die from climate change: Hannah Ritchie’s column for Wired is another COP26-linked piece that is well worth your time.
• Thirty films that expand the art of the movie musical: … and we need something positive to end on as well, and Richard Brody for the The New Yorker supplies it in the shape of this wonderful list of familiar and very much not-so titles, including Youssef Chahine’s Alexandria: Now and Forever, 1989 (header image), currently, and remarkably, available in the UK on Netflix, and this:
• The Pajama Game, 1957; ‘Steam Heat’, with choreography by – of course – Bob Fosse.
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