aaron ~

@owenbroadcast aujourd’hui, maman est mogged.

@funkentechno a lot of early OPN albums take this label as a touchstone. the album artwork for ‘drawn and quartered’, for e.g. youtu.be/unayAY4xaOg?si…

ok this is ~incredible~ feels like the soundtrack to a heady scifi movie I grew up watching.. that, y'know, doesn't exist. gonna have to hear everything I can from this label.

@_TheLondoner @moorehn @DanNeidle “hoover scion” is such a funny consecution of words. like something out of chris morris. did ‘cyclonic knight’ not scan well enough?

Thanks to data unearthed by @DanNeidle at Tax Policy Associates, we can reveal that London's biggest overseas property owners include hoover scion James Dyson, Israeli billionaire Teddy Sagi and Mohammed bin Salman's brother.

@OliDugmore please tell me you screenshotted the evil line because rory is the exact likeness of the puppet from the interpol music video for … ‘evil’.

“Rory Stewart is the best prime minister we never had.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read that sentence, in my texts, in comments sections, after our interviews. Over the last 10 years he’s spoken to me as a Tory leadership contender, Covid canary in the coal mine, independent London mayoral candidate, or, as in this instance, a podcaster and author. His brand of conscientious conservatism beguiles the significant part of our country that is relatively normal and looked on in horror/confusion as the right wing actively attacked Britain and/or descended into explicit bigotry, parochialism, and conspiracy. We spoke about political evil and how it’s often fun to be so, boarding schools, and whether or not we should rewild wolves in Britain. Eclectic and thoughtful. Performative and precise. I think it’s the best episode of The Exchange so far, but it’s Yanis Varoufakis next week and that was pretty good too. Subscribe, listen in bio, text me about alternate realities. xx @RoryStewartUK @NewStatesman

@roryisconfused receding bohemia. good meades documentary made on this in the 1990s. still to be found in verdant ruritanian enclaves like stroud.

Feel like “posh hippies”, of the sort that populate Tessa Hadley novels, are radically on the decline…young guy with long hair and tweed blazers who went to Oxford but who’s usually stoned and thinks it’s very important that he’s into Pink Floyd…a dying breed…

@Michaeljhandy @arisroussinos + what woolf disdained really was the erudition, not lack of; the “undergraduate scratching his pimples” remarks. the upper-classes have always affected a sort of jolly philistinism; it is vulgar and graceless to be too ostentatious with one’s learning. hence her antipathy to UL.

@aaroninky @arisroussinos I adore Woolf as a writer but she's being a massive snob here with no justification.

The strange thing in this is that, apart from being the better writer, Joyce was also objectively better educated than Woolf

@cosmorxn @Michaeljhandy @arisroussinos i didn’t have enough characters to include mention of schools like clongowes or portora - more sensible choices for an irish son than eton. but yes, his education reflects his social background. comparison to woolf needs this context.

@aaroninky @Michaeljhandy @arisroussinos For what it’s worth, he went to Clongowes, which is maybe the most prestigious school in the country.

@Michaeljhandy @arisroussinos again: illiterate. woolf’s aristocratic lover, vita sackville-west, from one of the richest families of the time, was educated by governesses, debuted as a deb, and never formally educated. this was a social signal for the upper crust. education was aspirational.

@aaroninky @arisroussinos It's not 1750, by Edwardian times aristocratic women with academic leanings were absolutely sent to Somerville or St Anne's.

@Michaeljhandy @arisroussinos joyce was an irish catholic. it would seem pretty churlish to judge him for not being sent to eton in 1890. catholics tended to have their own elite boarding schools and jesuit colleges. again: basic context here.

@aaroninky @arisroussinos Sorry, but no. Woolf is dunking on Joyce for not studying at Eton and Oxbridge when she herself never studied there and studied at a university of similar prestige to Joyce. And there were plenty of Oxbridge Women's Colleges in her time.

@Michaeljhandy @arisroussinos woolf was certainly being a snob and women’s higher education did exist then, but there’s plenty of sociological reasons for why she herself didn’t go to university. most aristocratic women did not.

@Michaeljhandy @arisroussinos “joyce was objectively better educated”. he was the son of irish petit-bourgeoisie, where being sent to somewhere like belvedere was aspirational. haute-bourgeoisie or aristocratic families didn’t formally educate their daughters almost out of principle. this is basic context.

@Michaeljhandy @arisroussinos this is so stupidly historically illiterate. woolf was raised in the late victorian era. women did not have equal access to education (she worked lots with groups to broaden access, particularly w/c women). people didn’t have uni rankings brain in 1913. ‘early red brick’ lmao.

@danyay @lacherbauer if i had to (inevitably) generalise, i wld say JP represents a past vision of the future: it’s cute and somewhat neutered as a result. korea is the actual, as opposed to imagined, cutting-edge of capitalism. the dystopic tropes - suicide, overwork, fertility - apply more there.

@aaroninky @lacherbauer Why SK? In some ways it feels dated much like JP does. In others it feels advanced, but not really dystopian?

Very accurate. Even the trains which are advanced feel dated, as does most of the public infrastructure and even a lot of the architecture.

@tonytost ironically, given the language you use to describe hierophantic new critics, i feel like the hermeneutic tradition is very good for the sort of criticism to which you refer, and which possibly sidesteps the ego-centering, therapeutic stuff and its tendency to nombrilisme.

There's a type of art critic I rarely ever dig. They discuss works of art as if they themselves have no pressing emotional, psychological, physical, or spiritual wounds the work might balm. They're some kind of high priest, examining at a safe remove. A disembodied intellect.

@SurtseyAna @Thought_Critica @kasukalan the discussion wasn’t about rates of fiction reading relative to overall literacy, though. it was about whether one should read fiction if trying to become a fiction writer. your lack of humility and basic incuriosity on this front preclude you from ever becoming a good writer.

@aaroninky @Thought_Critica @kasukalan Facts: the majority of people who can read - don't read fiction. Rather than admit the current model is flawed. Readers gaslight themselves by maintaining non-readers are less intelligent. Yup, Rowling & James are terrible. You people are right.

'must u read novels to write them' is such a ridiculous question but maybe also reveals the difference between seeing a novel as a v specific (aesthetic) mode of human expression vs seeing the novel (and novelist) as solely a product / commodity that one can cosplay as or perform

@Vince_Zurich @cinecitta2030 a lot of the satire has also aged poorly though (as indeed it often does). he’s funny, wry, and amusing - but a giant of literature? eeh. france is good at putting figures like this on a pedestal, especially if they do the usual ‘épater la bourgeoisie’ act. topical, not immortal.

@cinecitta2030 He is well ahead of his time…25 yrs ago he wrote a brilliant book (‘Platform’) about the ‘clash between Western hedonism & radical ideologies, transforming an apparent paradise into a literal and metaphorical hell’ … 🤔

Nobody has more aura than a hideous little goblin who is a towering man of literature

@BovrilG @tfromthemeadow his new statesman column was very funny for a while. he has however been announcing the death of the novel as well as literacy itself for about 20 years now.

@tfromthemeadow He wrote a hilarious article in about 2010 about hiking with his son and a security guard trying to detain him under the assumption that he was a nonce trying to abduct the boy

Can never bring myself to dislike him tbh, this is magnificent