Patrick Kurp follows his own advice with a consideration of Donald Justice:
Don’t confuse essays with bloat. Some of the best I know – by La Rochefoucauld, Lichtenberg, Karl Kraus – are one sentence in length. Disguised beneath the modesty of Justice’s apologia for excerpting his notebooks (a typical Justice assertion: “Already I have made too much of this”) is an ironclad confidence in their worth. That mingling of humility and confidence is what distinguishes the best bloggers — and writers of any sort.
Nabakov said that what was required to write a novel was the ability to hold two incompatible ideas in your head at the same time. I wonder if he meant humility and confidence.
In nine steps, with the New Yorker’s Amy Ozols:
Step 9: Self-confidence is the most attractive trait a person can have. For this reason, strive to love yourself and accept yourself exactly as you are. This will be difficult if you are overweight, on account of your loathsome physical appearance and compromised value system, but do your best. And, if the going gets tough, remind yourself: every person is beautiful on the inside, provided that they are also extremely attractive on the outside.
Went to see the new production of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens over the weekend: a pretty uninspired production that relied far too heavily on setting and a single (albeit excellent) special effect.
When I got home I got the book out, and saw this. Peter calls Hook a codfish in front of his men, who draw back from the pirate:
They were his dogs snapping at him, but, tragic figure though he had become, he scarcely heeded them. Against such fearful evidence it was not their belief in him that he needed, it was his own. He felt his ego slipping from him. ‘Don’t desert me bully’, he whispered hoarsely to it.
But Hook recovers:
In his dark nature there was a touch of the feminine, as in all the great pirates, and it sometimes gave him intuitions … In a moment Hook was himself again, and Smee and Starkey were his favourite henchmen.
They don’t make em like that any more.
ps. Ever wonder what Ru-fi-ooooh has been up to since Hook? Find out here.
Speaking of arrogance, I received this from Spiked on Monday (disclaimer: I did a short work experience stint there. Awful).
Aaah – the classic Spiked combination of chippiness, conceit and self-importance, marked as always by the complete absence of anything approaching humour. We’ll miss it so much.
UPDATE: The Spiked team are obviously sanguine about their fate, if Deputy Editor Rob Lyons’s latest article is anything to judge by:
… the political parties we have today have no divine right to exist. If they cannot persuade enough of us to support them, not just with cash but also by actually arguing for them, then they deserve to die. The march to a new kind of politics can only begin by trampling on their rotting corpses.
Quaintly, Lyons’s article has footnotes instead of direct links. And you can’t leave comments. Spiked “online”: is that the smell of putrefaction?
As the expenses crisis claims its latest victims, Harriet Harman’s performance on the World at One today shows exactly why people are (still) so angry about this issue.
On the ropes against Martha Kearney, Harman tried every trick on the book: context of economic crisis; we are dealing with this firmly; female solidarity (odd repeated and emphasis of “women”). Then, running out of excuses, she reverted to type, mounting that favourite old soapbox: the moral high ground.
You’ll have to listen to the clip (at 17.50) to get the exact tone of righteous indignation. But here are the words:
Just for a second – if I could just cut in here and say: we’ve got important elections on Thursday, we’ve got a global economic crisis, we’ve got councillors, Labour councillors, defending childrens’ centres and good public services … but this is all political gossip … the overwhelming majority of MPs go into the House of Commons to do public service.
The importance of moral entitlement, rather than simple financial entitlement, has been overlooked during this whole affair. It’s a small step from seeing yourself as uniquely worthwhile to deciding that you deserve special privileges.
And, more simply, it’s this kind of attitude which explains why people just won’t let this go. MP’s make this sort of argument all the time. They’re always telling us how hard they work and how vital they are. Most of the time they do so in the passive voice, or the third person: “the political system is in crisis / needs public involvement / is the most important thing out there, bar none” (Harman, of course, is guilty of this grammatical back-slapping). Then they are so surprised how overjoyed people are to see them fall flat on their faces.
It’s not the deeds themselves that make this expenses issue so infuriating. It’s the arrogance and the hypocrisy that went before.
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