Why I hate the Daily Mail, as distilled into one edition

oops xposts

Mantel is talking about, and levelling her "personal" comments at, the Kate-persona as manufactured by the media.

Shouldn't she be dismantling this if it's a bad thing, rather than fuelling it with more presumption of her own?

right, it's about the Kate-persona - and she's also pretty carefully structured the material - so we get the superficial/appearances stuff early on, and the comparison to Marie Antoinette. All that is slightly acid and gets the attention (& has worked too effectively), but then she starts bringing in the Diana references, which open up the unreason and strangeness of the monarchy - "In looking at royalty we are always looking at what is archaic, what is mysterious by its nature, and my feeling is that it will only ever half-reveal itself. "

how that plays itself out in relation to royal women is her topic & I don't think there's any hypocrisy in wanting or needing to talk about that, when it's obviously coming from a position of sympathy:

We don’t cut off the heads of royal ladies these days, but we do sacrifice them, and we did memorably drive one to destruction a scant generation ago. History makes fools of us, makes puppets of us, often enough. But it doesn’t have to repeat itself. In the current case, much lies within our control. I’m not asking for censorship. I’m not asking for pious humbug and smarmy reverence. I’m asking us to back off and not be brutes.

I don't think it's that she sees Kate as not-an-agent, more that monarchy is this massive superhuman psyche-warping machine that britain's lumbered with & that she doesn't want it/us to destroy another young woman.

a position of pity maybe, i wouldn't say sympathy.

xp Don't fully agree, Woof. For the reason of this para again:

Kate seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character. She appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana...

The Kate-appearance only comes in halfway through before that, we have what Kate is. As you say, this is carefully-done...

Ugh I wish I could proofread what I write here, it's a disgrace.

That last linee should have read "The Kate-appearance only comes in halfway through. Before that, we have what Kate *is*. As you say, this is carefully-done..."

if were parsing on that level, the first sentence opens with 'seems'

The question LG raises about what real-Kate would think about the article if she read it is an interesting one, and not one to which there's necessarily a simple answer. It's not impossible to imagine her being quite pleased that she and her team have managed to control her image to the point that she seems irreproachable; presumably Kate herself believes she has a personality distinct from her public persona, and she might be rather invested in the two remaining separate?

And I have known plenty of people who have taken "painfully thin" as a direct compliment!

but it's "seems to have been selected" not "seems painfully thin".

xpost to max

yeah but i think it arguably brackets the whole sentence

the diana comparisons are a whole other can of worms, that is her deceased mother in law, afterall.

xpost, maybe, though clumsy was one of the earlier criticisms.

I actually think "creepy" was a good criticism of the piece, at least the Kate bits.

i read "painfully thin" as appropriating the daily mail's own language - note that it's followed by "as anyone could wish" (but who could possibly wish to be "painfully" thin? is it even a phrase you hear outside of the tabloids much? is it not - along with phrases like "flaunts her curves" - the very essence of tabloid scrutiny of celebrity bodies as if they're public property?)

I agree that it is, but I don't give her the benefit of the doubt there, I think the piece at worst comes off like part of a problem, rather than a remedy.

One of the interesting things in the article (to me) was that it took the (sound) feminist line that we objectify and alienate women by locating our sense of them their bodies rather than their minds*, and extended it to the whole of royalty.

Charles becomes a nicely-tailored suit; Henry 8 becomes a succession of medicalised physique-speculations; the whole lot of them become pandas in a zoo.

Apols for the clumsy expression, doing this in snatched moments at work.

NB haven't thought this through very well but I suppose I think there's a bunch of interesting stuff in here which is not helped by the somewhat creepy stuff about Kate. Makes it topical though, eh?

i don't think it's meant as a remedy - the "now back off!" concluding paragraph is the weakest section, because it seems way too pat and comes out of nowhere, it doesn't fit what the piece had hitherto been about - drawing parallels between how contemporary and historical royal/celebrity bodies are pored over, by the media/the public/historians.

I tweeted, out of frustration at the way the Mail uses this stuff with such aplomb, "Please RT if you prefer Wolf Hall to the Daily Mail" - it's fast becoming my most RTed tweet ever.

#fail

yeah, the 'back off' is a little weak - imo it's because there's a kind of fatalistic unreason at the back of the lecture, which is both its strength & a limit - I think she thinks this kind of story plays out as it must.

Why's it taken two weeks for this to come into contention, I wonder?

LRB article was published in hard copy end of last week, giving time for Mail hacks to do hatchet job early this week.

Aha.

ajhsdljdluegfliedfl ed miliband has weighed in

our entire political establishment is stupid and illiterate

The best either Cameron or Miliband could have done was to say nothing about it at all, and concentrate on actual issues affecting the UK. But politicians today don't know how, or when, to shut up.

yeah, I got a little wrapped up in defending the lecture there, but just so much ridiculous about this whole affair, especially now the really pointless noise-making from politicians.

Good for the LRB though, that's something.

Page hits bruv

Ed says her comments were offensive. I can sort-of see him being politically offended even by a correct reading of it. How dare she say that our establishment objectifies royalty and reduces it to meaningless ciphers etc etc. Bet he doesn't mean that, though.

LRB article was published in hard copy end of last week, giving time for Mail hacks to do hatchet job early this week.

think there was a specific lrb speech/lecture in the last couple of days this was linked to. article was ok I thought, nothing special but a bit of a coup for the lrb and clearly coming from the angle of how to interpret the metamorphosing of a concept rather than a personal attack. language sailed close to personal attack in tone, I thought as much as anything out of a desire to get a bit of argument/angle to the piece, but on the whole I subscribe to lex's illiteracy/mail anger manufacture. there's a question I guess of how much mantel or agent, say, could have foreseen this, courted it even. I suspect not much. "Author writes article in lrb" not much of a story in book world after all.

the article is her lecture from 2 weeks ago - I think that might explain some of its phrasing and structure - I'm sure she wrote it carefully and planned to publish, but it was for delivery to a room of LRBish people.

On the foreseeing… yeah, I strongly suspect that, despite the recent cheques, trophies, etc, she still thinks of herself as the sort of literary author no-one outside the books pages pays much attention to (because that's she was for twenty years) & that the LRB is a quiet enough little space to follow through a thought.

and I mean she's basically right, this feels like a freak incident based on a Dacre-whim or something.

from the bbc article

David Sillito Arts Correspondent

Hilary Mantel has been accused of describing the Duchess of Cambridge as "a shop window mannequin with no personality of her own". However, read the speech and it's clear she is in reality defending the duchess.

The list of accusations is actually a list of the "threadbare attributions" she says were presented in the press about Kate Middleton.

It is a long speech and its subject is the way royal women have been portrayed and maligned over the centuries. Hilary Mantel says we treat the Royal Family like pandas, staring at them as if they are in a cage.

Her fear is that we become like "spectators at Bedlam. Cheerful curiosity can easily become cruelty. It can easily become fatal".

That word "fatal" is a reference to Princess Diana who, she says, "we" drove to destruction. Her conclusion is that we have now a chance to be different.

She concludes: "I'm not asking for censorship. I'm not asking for pious humbug and smarmy reverence. I'm asking us to back off and not be brutes."

If this is an attack on anyone it is the press not the Duchess of Cambridge.

she's right, we should let them go into the wild and take their gilded cages and enormous personal fortunes off them, for their own good

Her angle on diana taken by itself is rubbish for a start

idk i liked it. but i kind of didn't believe she was that taken in by the national grieving over diana, and was using "we" very metaphorically.

hope i'm not blowing up his spot by posting this:

http://tomewing.tumblr.com/post/43494992485/diana-was-spared-at-least-the-prospect-of

which i also thought was pretty good

Cant find a why i hate the bbc thread but i feel this somehow belongs in here anyway
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21511904

Why have the white British left London?

And?

thats the headline

I assume the answer is to get away from the rest of the white british in london.

you're one of those nasty scots taking jobs away from patriotic white englishmen, tom ;)

Finally a detailed statisical analysis of the aspirations and lifestyle changes of *my* demographic. oh no wait i'm not working class, can we get one for white british middle class single straight cis males plz?

Scottish is not British?

That article is a perfectly reasonable look at census data and shifts in British working class patterns of residency, a legitimate topic IMO.

should have said "white British" above, obv.

though I did laugh at this picture apparently denoting some white people, yesterday

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/65966000/jpg/_65966407_149794837.jpg

Couple of Rangers fans no doubt

... no, hold on, they're smiling

maybe Orangemen with bowler hats just oiut of shot

but again the smiling would indicate not

The white British article is pretty reasonable, but by posing it as a question in that maddening way that News Online does with everything now, they sort of stoke unpleasantness.

That piece wouldn't make it into a newspaper imo. Not in its colloquial, here's some shit I just found, way. I think if the top line of a feature is a question it's likely to be shit, nine times out of 10, and you just wouldn't get away with it in a proper paper. Beeb's feature writing is fucked tho, they don't know what they're at with no background as a paper.