[The Weeping Angel]

Nick Cohen

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -with-fact

The Sydney Morning Herald, whose code of ethics boasts that it has “no wish to mislead” and “no interest to gratify by unsparing abuse”, ran a long attack on Rooney. Its commentator, Jessie Tu, spends an age bragging about how brave she is for defying the consensus that Rooney is an interesting writer and then announces, “Normal People should be called White People because, in Rooney’s world, people like me don’t exist. In the book, Asians are mentioned only as tourists who choke the pathways of museums in Italy. ‘I don’t know why we’re bothering with Venice – it’s just full of Asians taking pictures of everything’, one of the male characters whines.”

I was reading the novel when the piece appeared, and found the anti-Asian sentiments. They come from an odious man, Jamie. Rooney portrays him as a spoilt, sadistic rich kid. His casual racism is wholly in character. The plainest of plain stupid errors a critic can make is confusing an author with her characters. The Herald’s critic does precisely that. I read on and wondered if something more than ordinary stupidity was on display. In the book, Jamie is instantly upbraided. A man lunching with him says: “God forbid you might have to encounter an Asian person … it’s kind of racist, what you just said about Asian people.”

[Malcolm Armsteen]

What's your point?

[Cyclist]

Marina Hyde is on fire again. I don't think Jeff Bezos will be amused.

Jeff Bezos is on a quest for eternal life – back on Earth, we’re searching for Amazon’s taxes


...Further developments in fauxlanthropy for the Amazon overlord, then, who has decided that death is as inevitable as taxes. Which is to say: not at all inevitable for the likes of him. Bezos was this month reported to be a significant investor in Altos Labs, an age-reversal firm which is on the scientific quest for immortality. Among other expansions, it is thought the firm will now open a lab within the UK, which I think you’ll agree means so much more to our nation than a fair tax contribution from Amazon. You know we’d only spend that shit on social care or the NHS or something, when Jeff can see it’s far better for us to get people on ordinary incomes to pay extra for all that, so that guys like him are freed up to spaff their money on Earth’s most preposterous midlife crises. ..


...Then again, he has long tended toward what Charles Dickens called telescopic philanthropy – a convenient focus on faraway “good causes” as opposed to the ones on his own doorstep he could fix pretty much immediately. Incredible, really, that a man who steadfastly refused to pay so many of his workers a living wage could ever publicly utter the words: “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel.” Yet here we are.

It’s best to think of Bezos as Phony Stark, the kind of off-brand superhero who could only be thrown up by a planet seemingly incapable of rising to the challenge of itself. We must hope the boffins do manage to grant him eternal life. At his current rate of personal growth, it feels like it will take Jeff that long to work out that charity begins on his home planet – and that philanthropy starts with paying tax.


https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... azon-taxes

[The Weeping Angel]

What's your point?

My point Malcolm is that Nick Cohen has written an informative article that explores the issue of false and malicious allegations within the world of litreture and how damaging those allegations are.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

So what's your point? We can all read newspaper articles.

Do you have anything interesting to say about it?

[Tubby Isaacs]

I think it sounds like a crap book review, possibly maliciously so.

But that's somebody taking a silly pop v an Australian author who hasn't been cancelled, anything like. So I'm not sure what Cohen is getting at really.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ew-neil-tv

Hard to pick out a single bit, just a joy from start to finish. Although I did like:

Neil was very insistent on rubbishing comparisons with GB News: “That is an easy, inaccurate shorthand for what we are trying to do”. Or as a GB News source told the Times yesterday: “The idea that we aren’t Fox News is increasingly laughable”. You say that, but people watch Fox News.

[RedSparrows]

I think it sounds like a crap book review, possibly maliciously so.

But that's somebody taking a silly pop v an Australian author who hasn't been cancelled, anything like. So I'm not sure what Cohen is getting at really.

Irish author?

[Andy McDandy]

John Crace (who has been unwell for a while but is now back to work) on the reshuffle:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... 3uo6bzapNo

“The thing is,” said Carrie over a takeaway pizza in the No 10 flat later that evening, “you seem to have achieved the impossible. You’ve found people who are more spectacularly shit than Williamson and Raab and given them a job. Imagine a world where there is no one better to be transport secretary than Grant Shapps. The cabinet is in even worse shape now than it was this morning.”

Boris shrugged. He could only play the cards he had been dealt. The gene pool of talent in the Tory party was at an all-time low. After all, how else could someone like him become its leader? Still, there was one upside. Everyone was so focused on the reshuffle that they appeared to have forgotten that he had just had his arse handed to him on a plate by Keir Starmer at PMQs over universal credit. You win some, you lose some.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -reshuffle

Knocking it out of the park for the second time this week.

I had to balk at the Spectator’s suggestion that Nadine “will oversee a more punchy attitude to the culture war aspect of her brief”. Sorry, but what culture war aspect of her brief?! Psychologists say that if you give a child a present and they end up playing with the box, then the toy you gave them was too complicated for them. If you give a minister a brief that encompasses the entire media, the UK’s data strategy, regulating big tech, 5G rollout, cyber-security, the charity sector, the whole of sport and the £100bn-plus creative industries, and they spend so much as ONE NANOSECOND fanning up some culture war nonsense about panto, that isn’t so much playing with the box as taking a shit in it. And nobody, other than fellow infants, wants to see that.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

10/10

[Cyclist]

Alison Flood reading dross so we don't have to.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Why are Nadine Dorries’ novels so full of Irish cliches?
Good women are beautiful. Bad women aren’t. And men will do anything for a Guinness and a potato. Our writer loses herself in the blarney-filled world of the new culture secretary’s oeuvre

Alison Flood

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2021/ ... ss-blarney

It’s hard not to wonder, when reading Nadine Dorries’ novels, whether the newly anointed culture secretary keeps a checklist of cliches about the Irish beside her as she writes. One character even says: “No one in their right mind ever had a bad word to say about a potato.” Jesus, Mary and Joseph, as a Dorries protagonist would say. And in fact does.

Another has “vivid, twinkling blue eyes, the kind that can only come from Irish roots”. A third “embodied everything everyone knows to be true of an Irishman. He was as bold as brass, full of the blarney and didn’t know the meaning of the word shy.” Men knock back the Guinness (28 mentions in The Four Streets, Dorries’ first book), while they dream of “green fields the colour of emeralds, or a raven-haired girl, with eyes that shone like diamonds”, and kick each other’s heads in. “It was the Irish way. Fists and boots first, words later.”

Jerry, the true Irishman mentioned in the previous paragraph, loses the plot when he sees beautiful Bernadette, she of the “long untameable red hair”. Dorries writes: “Holy Mary, he thought to himself, where the feck has me sensibility gone and why is me hand shaking like a virgin on her wedding night, spillin’ the bleedin’ tea everywhere?” ...

...According to defence secretary Ben Wallace, speaking on Sky News, Dorries is qualified to be culture secretary because she is a bestselling author. “What’s great about Nadine Dorries is she produces culture that people buy and actually want to see, rather than some of the more crackpot schemes we’ve seen being funded in the past by taxpayers’ money.”

The books Dorries is writing – which Wallace didn’t go so far as to claim he’d read – fall squarely into the saga market, which is known, rather dismissively, as the “clogs and shawls” genre, and which feature misery, poverty and abuse followed by a happy ending, set at some point in the past. Her novels neither transcend nor are notably worse than others in this booming area....

...The award-winning crime novelist Abir Mukherjee, wielding his words with a skill far removed from Dorries’ vapid prose, tweeted: “Calling Nadine Dorries an author is like saying cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer was a chef.”...

[RedSparrows]

Culture being garbage wot the plebs like, and anything else is modern art nonsense.

Brilliantly nuanced take by Wallace there.

[Abernathy]

What does the term "best-selling" actually mean ?

Writing a book that sells more than any other book ? Surely not, Nadders.

Writing a book that sells moderately well because its author has quite a prominent media profile? Getting closer.

Just writing a book that sells more than 200 copies? More like Mad Nad's territory.

The reality is that "best-selling" like so many other terms so freely bandied about, means fuck all. But sounds vaguely impressive. QED.

[Andy McDandy]

There are many bestseller lists, and they all take their info from different sources. So if you want to top the, say, Sunday Times, make sure it's selling in these particular shops. Or arrange for some selective buying.

If you want a definitive bestseller list, Amazon would probably be your best bet. But it doesn't have the cachet of the Times or Guardian and so on.

Ultimately, I think Terry Pratchett put it best - you're a bestselling author when you can afford to do it full time.

[Cyclist]

Her first bucket of ordure went to to the top of the ebook list with 100,000 sales. Add to that the 637 hardbacks sold, and the 300-odd paperbacks, 103,000 doesn't come anywhere near bestseller status. And her first book was the one which sold the most.*


*I'm going on old data here - the interweb seems strangely reluctant to discuss the specifics of Nad's book sales.

[Andy McDandy]

That smells strongly of "bundled in with a new Kindle" to me.

[Bones McCoy]

Or "bought and pulped by a donor".

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ate-crisis

Marina Hyde tackles the energy crisis.

“There will be no rewards for failure or mismanagement” for the energy companies, intoned Kwarteng – perhaps not the consequence-based space this government wants to get into, after its various triumphs over the past 18 months.

Nothing could be more convenient for those countries resisting net-zero goals – whose current plan for the poorer nations seems to be to sink them, and who would somehow find excuses for waiting-and-seeing even if the conference were being held on a collapsing ice shelf or in the middle of a forest fire.

They are, of course, vocally supported by that rather-too-large section of society that will believe the climate science is “settled” only when they’re beating back children to catch the last lifeboat off Ben Nevis. Even now, total inaction is being pushed by people who expect a limitless supply of items manufactured in China, while smugly pointing out that China pollutes more than us.

And ain't that the truth?

[Andy McDandy]

John Crace on Johnson and Arcuri being - on different side of the pond - in the spotlight:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... -in-london

Boris had wanted to focus on climate change – apparently Joe Biden was so onboard with cutting carbon dioxide emissions that UK meat production was now under threat – but Guthrie mainly wanted to talk about Afghanistan.

How had the prime minister felt about the chaotic scenes in Kabul during and after the withdrawal of US troops? Johnson’s attempts at diplomacy just made him look out of the loop as he tried to maintain the evacuation of Afghanistan had been a logistical success. Guthrie looked amazed. No one had told her she was dealing with a halfwit. God knows what a failure would have looked like.

The interview ended with Boris fessing up for the first time that he had six children. Or, to be strictly accurate, six children he was prepared to acknowledge – with another on the way. He didn’t say whether there might be more he had forgotten about. Or if he could remember all their names.

Meanwhile in London:

She had been doing an MBA in 2012 and in the space of a couple of years had become the centre of London’s tech industry. She was the Bill Gates of Shoreditch who didn’t take no for an answer and would demand that people find another way to say yes to her. Without her, Bloomberg would never have moved to London. Even though the company had done so years before she came on the scene.

And as for the trade trips she may or may not have been on – Arcuri made it sound like nothing more than a coincidence that she would happen to turn up in the same cities at the same time as Boris and his delegations – there was no conflict of interest.