in theory, everything is settled
the unspeakable inevitable, and other food for thought...
In my last post I made mention of the Unspeakable Inevitable (also known as the Queen’s death), a rather indecorous subject to bring up on the occasion of her Platinum Jubilee — but hey, I’ve got time on my hands (a four day weekend here in the UK!) and decorum has never been my strong suit.
The Queen’s death has become something of a morbid obsession for me ever since 2017, when I happened upon Sam Knight’s absolutely staggering Guardian long read on the subject. It is absolutely bananas! A sober-minded litany of madness — one of those pieces of journalism that lingers on in the imagination for years. Better yet, it’s the kind of story that makes you suspect that maybe, just maybe, the internet exists for something other than porn and the slow dismantling of democracy (like re-reading a Sam Knight piece whenever we bloody well fancy). So if you haven’t read it, enjoy. And if you have, your welcome for the reminder.
I was recently reminded of Knight (now the London-based staff writer for the The New Yorker) when listening to his recent interview on The Longform, one of my favourite podcasts — a kind of audio answer to The Paris Review, for writers and readers of creative non-fiction and ambitious, in-depth journalism. Knight is one of those rare writers who’s voice IRL is very much akin to his authorial “voice” (like Jerry Seinfeld — he only plays himself) — he’s intelligent and irreverent, somehow simultaneously earnest and witty, with nary a whiff of glib. His peculiar genius as a writer is in choosing arcane-yet-universally-fascinating subjects and unpacking them in a very straight-forward and exhaustive way, which manages to never to be anything less than riveting. It’s a subtle superpower, but one I deeply respect. I still can’t figure out how he does it. Just research, I imagine he’d shrug (he seems very humble). But there’s more to it than that, there must be. It takes literary witchcraft to seduce countless readers into settling in for several thousand words on the history of the British sandwich . And yet, he does.
On the podcast he discusses his work as journalist, including his obsession with the reading rooms at the British Library, why he’s always on time, and how he sought to write the Queen’s death story in the voice of one of those Jubilee parade commentators on public television who describes, in painstaking detail, the meaning and import of royal pomp and circumstance as it unfolds.
I got a kick of this, because Robert Hardman, whom I interviewed in my last post, actually is that guy — if you happened to watch the CBC’s Jubilee parade coverage, you will have heard his marvellous cut-class accent murmuring reverently about the significance of the cavalry and carriages.
If you’re looking for other stuff to read this weekend, may I recommend Jen Gerson’s fabulous rant on Bill C-18 — a piece of Canadian legislation aimed at effectively subsidising the country’s legacy media by forcing big tech companies to compensate them for linking to their content. She calls the bill “panda trash fodder” and “a hot mess created by a clearly well-intentioned government that appears to have been bamboozled by a group of media industry lobbyists.” Legislation born of a process that, in her view, is hypocritical and corrupt at every level and perhaps most importantly, terrible for journalism and democracy itself. In addition to being a brilliantly articulate piece of literary fulmination, it sheds light on what has become a matter of growing global debate, given that similar laws are afoot in Europe and here in the UK . While I’m broadly in favour of increased data regulation and the protection of a fact-based free press (what sane person isn’t?) Gerson’s piece made me think twice about many of my own knee-jerk progressive assumptions about the value of such legislation — especially in light of Canada, a wealthy G7 nation who’s hobbled legacy media has, over that past decade or so, played a significant and worrying part in managing to render itself all-but irrelevant through sheer complacency.
Finally, this piece in the most recent New Yorker about the English novelist Barbara Pym is a balm for the soul — and not just for middle aged, mid-career, mid-list women writers (who secretly suspect we might be coming into our prime!). I recommend reading it then preparing yourself a nice French omelette paired with a glass of Sancerre and settling down in front of the first season of Julia on HBO Max. It’s created and written by an old theatre school classmate of mine, the spectacularly talented Daniel Goldfarb. In addition to being his first series, a critical and commercial smash hit, Julia stands as a testimony to the fact that a middle-aged Canadian Jewish man is more than fully capable of pitch-perfectly capturing the life and soul of a middle-aged menopausal American WASP female just coming into her prime.
Bon appétit!