The Sunday dozen
John Wyver writes: welcome to the end of an extraordinary week, which is reflected somewhat in today’s selection of stuff that has engaged me in the past seven days; but there are also recommendations about television, film, literature and history that might perhaps help you forget what a grim world this too often seems to be.
One ‘housekeeping’ note: we migrated our server this past week, which is why the blog posts have been infrequent. But all seems to have gone well with the process, so we should be back to a regular schedule from now on.
• Inside the BBC’s Gaza fiasco: absolutely exceptional reporting and analysis by Daniel Trilling for the new online venture Equator; essential background to the week’s turmoil at the corporation; also very well worth reading are Crisis at the BBC – the long view by David Hendy, and Alan Rusbridger’s The real threat to the BBC’s impartiality for Prospect.
• Exploring The Wednesday Play’s legacy At 60 – 03:05: The Trial and Torture of Sir John Rampayne (BBC1, 10 November 1965): scholar Tom May is writing an excellent blog about each of the plays of the BBC’s The Wednesday Play strand, and this is a very fine edition about a largely forgotten studio drama with Jack Hawkins and a 26-year-old Ian McKellen.
• All’s Fair and the new television of nothingness: a brutal takedown by Steven Zeitchik for The Hollywood Reporter – one of many – of the Kim Kardashian series that has just landed on Disney+, but also a really interesting argument about contemporary television.
• Art and life in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague: the person whose response I most wanted to read after loving Linklater’s account in Nouvelle Vague, above, of the making of Godard’s A bout de souffle was the older filmmaker’s biographer Richard Brody, and this New Yorker column [£, but limited free access], and another this week, The joyful mythology of Nouvelle Vague, do not disappoint:
The movie both shows the fashioning of the New Wave as a modern myth and confirms the enduring power of that myth. Linklater’s essential subject is the undiminished centrality of the New Wave—the idea of it maybe even more than the movies themselves—to current filmmaking.
The film is out this week in the UK, and here’s the delightful trailer:
• Impassable borders: for The Nation, Becca Rothfeld is so good on the Austrian novelist and poet Ingeborg Bachmann.
• Thanking librarians: a timely reminder from Luke McKernan’s essential blog.
• Young but daily growing: personal reflections from Richard Williams at the blue moment about the latest multi-CD release in Bob Dylan’s Bootleg series, Through the Open Window, and about
how lucky I’[ve] been to live my life alongside his. I’m six years younger than Dylan, so I was 16 when I first heard Freewheelin’ in 1963; for members of my generation who discovered him early, he’s been a unique kind of companion, and still is. Through the Open Window does a good job of showing how that came about.
• England’s mysterious sunken roads: a rich story of the nation’s landscape by Daniel Stables for BBC Online.
• The 100 greatest men’s Ashes cricketers of all time: nothing has given me more pleasure this week than the Guardian‘s totally engrossing interactive; do also read Barney Ronay, It had to be Shane Warne: the Ashes Elvis had an aura that eclipsed all others, which is yet further evidence of his exceptional talents.
• Imagining what’s in Trump’s brain: for The New York Times [£, but limited free access], David Brooks draws on Swiss author Giuliano da Empoli and his books The Wizard of the Kremlin and The Hour of the Predator to reflect on how authoritarians exercise power; fascinating, and perhaps especially the point about ‘vertical power’.
• The lingering delusion: for The New York Review [£, but limited free access], the brilliant Fintan O’Toole on Kamala Harris’s memoir 107 Days.
• Are we doomed?: David Runciman for the LRB [£, but limited free access]:
Are we doomed to die out? We find ourselves at the only point in the history of the species when the rate of population growth has dramatically slowed and is about to go into reverse. So maybe there is a good reason to think this is an important – and ominous – moment.
… and finally, there has also been lots of good writing this week about Keir Starmer and the Labour government, but to be honest I found it so depressing that I could not bring myself to highlight anything, so instead here is Nina Simone performing ‘To love somebody’ in Antibes in 1969:
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