They Shoot Thinkpiece Writers, Don't They?
A writing/reading/life roundup
大家好！This is my first roundup in ages. Please take some songs as a peace offering:
‘You In My Heart,’ Faye Wong’s cover of the Teresa Teng classic. You can kind of hear some Cocteau Twins harmony here (they were not directly involved, but they do pop up later in her discography).
My favourite song of the 2020s so far. There isn’t enough writing about actual K-pop music which means there also isn’t a proper critical canon (yet)!
I am become the New Statesman, destroyer of worlds
I’m now doing some stuff freelance for the UK’s greatest progressive magazine! Very surreal to be specifically DMed and asked to write for the NS and then to keep getting to do it all the time. I love working with my editor and getting to develop my bigger weirder ideas. First for the UK general election I wrote two pieces on TikTok and its likely impact on the way we view politics - you can read them here and here.
Then I did this one on the new Taylor Swift poetry anthology (in the background we hear foreboding synths….). People on Twitter hate it, but I like it (obviously), think they are missing the point (obviously), and am delighted to be Causing a Commotion (as fellow provocateur Madonna would say).* I’ve been accused of having never read Nabokov (I have, a lot, in two languages - the evidence is on my blog) and also of probably not even knowing how to pronounce his name, which I find funny because of a legendary argument I had with my English teacher when I was 15 (she kept calling him “Vladimir Nubokov” and was totally convinced this was correct). I think it would make a lot of sense to her that I am now agitating in the British press.
Sometimes to get places and make moves you must rile up the literati, which is ESPECIALLY satisfying if they are trying to downplay your accomplishments as a young female member of the reading public and if they work at the Jacobin. Also, I got to mention my favourite instance of classical allusion ever: Courtney Love’s repeated quotation of a line from Horace’s Odes 1.12. Love is underrated as a fin de siecle songwriter who works in allusion to multiple fin de siecles at once - she belongs to the decadent tradition of Baudelaire far more than she does to the female-rage tradition of Kathleen Hanna et al - but this is part of a much longer thing I’m working on!
The most recent thing I’ve done for the NS is this, on teenage activists - there are no more Greta Thunbergs on the left. I think their emergence in the media was an interesting peculiarity of the 2010s, an age of techno-optimism (now gone). We wanted to believe that the internet would save the world via connection and access to education, but many young people who spent a lot of time online during the Covid and pre-Covid eras are now visibly dealing with the consequences of being poorly socialised, having a shortened attention span, not really being in possession of a sequential and thematically-linked body of knowledge, etc.
(Of course the internet is theoretically a great place for connecting with others, learning new things, etc., but if you use it along the path of least resistance - which most do as a general rule - it will mess you up!! The last time I bought a phone it came with TikTok pre-installed and I had to delete it. Think of all the people in the same situation who don’t and are then sucked into the void…)
Here are some books I read recently,** reviewed very briefly:
Signs & Meaning in the Cinema by Peter Wollen - I read this because I went to rewatch Antonioni’s The Passenger (co-written by Wollen) at the BFI and it was mentioned in the programme notes. It’s so good - erudite and very underdiscussed!!! I appreciated the effort to conceive of a Chomskian film grammar (thinking of Losey’s Boom! and its usage of Alexander Calder mobiles, which look like syntax trees). I have no training in drama and theatre (this alienates me from lots of film writing, MUST read more about Brecht etc) but syntax is MY JOB and it was nice that someone else spent so much time thinking about its possible convergences with film. Myra Breckinridge would have liked this book.
Man & His Symbols by C. G Jung - I read this and Memories, Dreams, Reflections but still don’t feel like I have much of a critical grasp of his ideas of shared human consciousness, which are what I am really interested in. My next point of interest is his work on alchemy - supposed to be more content-rich. I would also like to read Neumann and Campbell etc. to get more of a sense of theories within comparative mythology and folklore.
Palimpsest by Gore Vidal - I loved the writerly gossip and rare portrait of Greta Garbo. The passages on Anais Nin (my numerology twin) were hilarious!! Real eye for detail of the kind invaluable for a biographer or memoirist. I think it fell off when he ran for office and probably developed office-related tunnel vision.
Occasional Prose by Mary McCarthy - McCarthy MUST be re-canonised - she is so opinionated and stylish. She ought to have the online stature granted by young online women to glamorous lady writers like Didion, Babitz, and (briefly, a few months ago) Renata Adler. I hope one day Kendall Jenner will be spotted on a far-flung shore reading The Group. The best essay here is the one on politicians/language/Watergate.
Writing on the Wall by Mary McCarthy - As above. Genuinely considering trying to read everything she’s ever written. Her very close reading of Pale Fire is an inclusion here. It’s famous for a reason and I loved it so much I quoted it in my Taylor Swift New Statesman essay!!
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino - I’m not sure if I keep picking up the wrong translations like I did with Isabel Allende, but I strongly disliked parts of the prose and thought it sounded like a naively hopeful Big Tech advert at points.
Berlin Novels by Christopher Isherwood - Brilliant character portraits, a historical necessity. Reminded me of my time living with other expats in an illegal sixth-floor roof extension in Taipei. Our landlady would come up to collect rent wearing mismatched shoes and she also made us check the electricity metre ourselves on a ladder. They should make a musical about it! Taipei is known to some as the most dangerous place in the world but it’s fine when you’re actually there. Britons (me, Christopher Isherwood) are very good at slumming it.
I got a first in my degree!!!
I will graduate in September with first-class joint honours in Chinese and Linguistics! Very crazy and turbulent period in my life. I learnt around 4000 characters (none against my will), edited the Features section of my student paper under lockdown, wrote a lot of essays (some against my will), drove to Wales and back, made many friends (<3!), got All-About-Eved by two totally different people, thus kickstarting my career in the camp superstructure, learnt Manchu, formed a Jewish-Chinese Eileen Chang cult, lived in an illegal Taiwanese sixth-floor extension for nine months, ctrl-F-d my way through hundreds of grammars, periodically disappeared to write for the Spectator, and, most delightfully of all, had my writing read repeatedly by my intellectual heroine. My actual undergrad course bestowed me with a fundamental distrust of all educational institutions. More on this soon. (Some of my lecturers were lovely though)
I’m now looking for a job. Am happy doing my writing and research but would like to find something with proper career progression, coworkers, structure etc within the next year or so. On the off-chance anyone is looking for an employee, please drop me a line and I’ll send over my CV!
*Everyone seems to dislike Causing a Commotion, but I love it and was sad she didn’t do it on tour. Someone actually put it on their worst-case-scenario setlist with loads of other songs I like, including Shanti Ashtangi
**I recently started reading for at least two hours every day as a non-negotiable, which turned out to be one of my best decisions ever. It is minimal enough to preserve as a consistent habit without any massive sacrifices, but challenging enough to create a sense of real intellectual progression over time. I would like to not have to set any goal at all and just read anyway, but have conceded myself to the reality of living in the internet age. Making a daily effort to focus on something is the best possible middle finger to the attention economy.