Worst white man on the cover of the New Statesman's 'Great White Male' issue

heh

you refer to the brit posters ITT of course

this was clive james' column on global warming, and it's all basically a really long-winded exercise in reiterating the two fundamental claims of climate skepticism: (1) there is no scientific consensus, and (2) the world is not actually getting hotter anyway so what's all the fuss about. how much importance you place on where someone stands on climate change is going to vary, but for me at the time it seemed to be a pretty good indicator of that person's general stance on issues of social justice on a global level, bearing in my mind that it's likely to be the poorest people that suffer the worst consequences. maybe that's an immature or superficial reason for writing someone off - i'd probably take that criticism on the chin. that aside, as a piece of writing it's not especially entertaining or enlightening, and does that whole smugly dismissive thing to demonstrate his vast erudition on a subject that frankly he doesn't actually seem to grasp the basics of.

bearing in my mind

so that was my gripe with him, but there are far worse men on this horrible list

Can forgive overseas posters for not fully comprehending quite how awful most members of this rogues gallery are.

― Wristy Hurlington (ShariVari), Tuesday, October 14, 2014 4:58 AM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm willing to concede it. my post was overlabored and concern-trolling and motivated mostly by reading a beautiful poem written by dying writer clive james last week. it seemed dehumanizing to put him, and possibly the other writers here whom i haven't read, among the likes of right wing tabloid journalists as instances of the "great white male." i realize it is no more dehumanizing than myriad other things that lump women or minorities together in a way that irons out the differences among them, and i said that this poll might be good if the goal of it was just to make that very point.

Ugh, that's pretty ick and disappointing.

xp

That poem Treeship mentions is remarkable.

James has written, presented etc. scores of amazing things and is allowed a crank moment or several

1.Parsons
2.Amis
3.de Botton
4.Jones,D
5.Gill
6.Baddiel
7.Bragg
8.James
9.Parris
10.Marr
11.Fry
12.Webb
13.Parr
14.Williams
15.Perry
16.Self
17.Snow
18.Jones,O

dunno who Shone and Barr are, a scan of their wikipedia entries indicates they wouldn't trouble the top ten here, they'd likely slot in somewhere between Parr and Self.

That poem Treeship mentions is remarkable.

yeah, i will try and read that

it is short!

feel like most days we're all somewhere between par and self nest pas

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain. Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable.
You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there, Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new. Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame. What I must do Is live to see that.
That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colors will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

thanks, rm/rm

clive james rap sheet = mocking foreign tv

With no little irony, British TV (best in the world, like the Premiership) ended up copying many of the programmes Clive used to snigger at weekly and, tbh, I sniggered along with him. Seem to remember some Islamophobic harrumphing from him too, to sit alongside the climate change denial, but I would dismiss that as old geezer talk.

I think James' defining political characteristic is a complete distrust of ideology which, effectively, reverts back to conservatism but he's outside of the Europa League placings in this company.

His book-length ode to Prince Charles, and his subsequent 'friendship' with Diana, was pretty cringey

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Charles-Charmings-Challenges-Pathway-Throne/dp/0224019546

I might quibble about individual placements in BB's list but the top two are right and everyone is broadly in the right part of the list. Matthew Parris is too low though.

i've always just found clive james pompous, boring, fake-erudite...very fitting that even in this list he's bang in the middle of the road. obv far from the least defensible, but tbh if you're looking at this list in this context and your reaction is to find the "least defensible" you're doing it wrong. (if i wanted to defend anyone: owen jones (albeit probably only cuz i know him & the first chapter of chavs (is it worth reading his new one??)), will self, jon snow.) i think what gets me about this list isn't so much the outright objectionable cunts like gill and parsons but the relentless AVERAGENESS of the bulk of these dudes: they're masters of the Great White Male tone of voice/writing/expression and of using it to disguise innately mediocre levels of talent and insight.

(i mean, in terms of writing style, aa gill is probably one of the most gifted people here. he's a terrible person but i can see why he's been successful. alain de botton? david baddiel? dylan jones? robert webb? AVERAGE)

(would also be interesting to chart the careers of all of these people and see how much they owe to the usual Great White Male connections but i guess that would've been too radical for the staggers)

Has the New Statesman ever been any good (in say the last fifty years?)

Are any political publications "good"? I expect GWM syndrome thwarts that to a large extent.

are these guys all public schooled?

Obviously The Spectator is full of the most odious writers in the world, but as a product it is in many ways very accomplished, much moreso than the New Statesman, imho.

In my lifetime, I would say that the Class War newspaper and Marxism Today under Martin Jacques were also 'good' political magazines.

Clive James certainly wasn't, emac

there's a barnes/amis/hitchens/fenton arts & books period in the 70s that I imagine was pretty good if you like that sort of thing. But, no, it's never been good in my memory.

are these guys all public schooled?

No, but I bet their kids are.

thinking more, fenton & hitchens would have been politics/foreign correspondents

NS is usually excellent imo. Strong stable of critics, interesting essays and reportage, diverse columnists (especially online - proven by the fact that they keep heckling and blocking each other on Twitter). Most of the people in this issue aren't regular contributors, thankfully.

I agree with Lex re: reprehensible arse with real prose skills (AA Gill) vs mediocrity but James is a serious intellect imo, albeit one prone to horrible lapses like his Diana infatuation. Glibness overtook him on TV and his politics aren't mine but he's a strong essayist. Perhaps the fact he's dying makes me more inclined to fight his corner.

cheers Stevie

gonna start using e-mac as my new online presence obv

I think I read James' autobiography during a night shift abt ten years ago but have zero recollection

haha sorry dmac, am using a computer that autocorrects my posts for me!

James' memoirs, as I mentioned before, are excellent. Lex, have you read them, or his early TV criticism?

Unreliable Memoirs, the first volume, must've sold a lot of copies, it's a very common secondhand book

I thought we'd try and look for some reasons to dispatch any of the positives off.

- Clive's poem is average. A bit like Stephen Fry. Says a lot in a style but its content-free guff that is apologised by 'bridging the gap between high and low culture'.
- Will Self's 'provocations' are incredibly average. Was never inclined to read his fiction (his article on the decline of serious reading comes from someone who seemed to me to be apologising for the average London lit scene that has failed to produce anything of note in the last 20 years)
- Parr is a very average photographer (compared his stuff with Tony Ray-Jones and its lacking), clearly patronizes the working class.
- Williams did not stick out as Archbishop of Canterbury and make the thing self-destruct. Hugely disappointing.
- Tom Shone: seems like he wrote about the history of Hollywood blockbusters. Doesn't seem useful.
- Grayson Perry: Edited this thing? So if his article was so right on (sure enough but there were some dubious assumptions that a gender equal parliament and banking industry would not have bought the world to its knees, when the need to modify the structures of these places in particular ways were not acknowledged as a thing), and of course why did he invite this lot to contribute?
- Jon Snow: C4 news is so meh, self-satisfied. Doesn't have as good a reporter as Sue-Lloyd Roberts in the international desk.
Owen Jones: I think if his phones and movements are tapped or he serves a term in jail I might notice. ";-)"

If only they'd asked:

Liz Jones
Suzanne Moore
Allison Pearson
Barbara Ellen
Yasmin Alibai Brown
Julie Burchill
Janet Street Porter

we'd be ushering in a new post GWM era

...

Suzanne Moore's great. I've an abiding affection for JSP too.

i haven't read james's memoirs as i haven't been the tiniest bit interested by anything he's ever said on anything. hundreds of writers i've yet to explore thoroughly that i'd choose above him. agree w/xyzzz that his middlebrow respectability is tremendously offputting too.

suzanne moore has done some excellent things but also some appallingly offensive shite.

wrt James he had a stint at the LRB. Does the trick to 'dazzle' but sometimes you want him to stop and really talk about what he loves about Pushkin and Montale's poetry, or starts doing some work full stop. I've read a lot more of the latter and there is a rich mine to unpick, as a modernist and a cultural conservative that he was. iirc (no subscription these days) James doesn't even begin to unpick. Guess his next lunch with Diana was more on his mind - and who can blame him!

Gill is another one - often there comes a point in his TV columns where he'll defend Jeremy Clarkson. Write great prose if you like, just leave your brain out of it.

Saw an interview with Owen Jones on C4 news - the hack who came in to debate said he had "2nd album syndrome" and instead of being dismissive it got all v cosy. At the moment he just makes the elite he criticizes shift comfortably in their seats. I wouldn't put it past him to spend six months wokring in an amazon warehouse and writing a book about work next.

Bob Six- Suzanne Moore is in this issue.

Really good writeup of James' career here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n05/christopher-tayler/roth-pinter-berlin-and-me

I don't want to belabor this because obviously I recognize the irony of a thread like this evolving into a discussion of the qualities of the white males under the microscope but "cultural amnesia" by James opened my eyes in an accessible way to a lot of subjects w which I had only cursory knowledge and did so w v good prose. Admittedly I disagreed with him about plenty-his hot takes on Benjamin and 20th cen philosophy in general strike me as borderline slate pitches as ideas. But even the subjects on which I feel pretty knowledgeable already (miles davis or ellington or fitzgerald) I came away thinking about interesting questions--in the case of fitzgerald, a really exciting enthusiasm. I can definitely read a pompousness in it, it's an attitude that reminds me very singularly of ilx. Lol but serious? I mean one of the things I like about lex's writing is that it can be plate-clearingly pompous. This isn't a backhanded thing.

At any rate I feel faintly ridiculous defending a white man against climate change in a thread understandably rolling its eyes at a great white men magazine issue but i guess I'm in part hoping to provoke a little more specifics if we're gonna tear him down lol

Nb I haven't read that link yet.

trying to parse if this issue was actually about the great white male by the great white male for the great white male.

if accepted as so then the entire thread and complaint is obv totally wrongheaded id say. the rest of ye have twitter and ilx to deign to tell that gender and racial category how you'd like it to behave so what harm a publication focusing on the subject introspectively. in fact why the fuck ask mary beard anything.

nb if this wasn't the premise I been drinking

don't great white males already have a forum to focus on themselves aka the entire planet and everything in it

the entire planet and everything in it and most of twitter and ilx

my opposition to this thread is more disciplined - it challenges the great white male hegemony (even in the most inconsequential + worthless way) and must be suppressed.

the entire planet (no) and ilx (no lol) and twitter (no wtf lol) and one dedicated new states (which let's be honest wasn't exactly dragged out the fuckin hands of sjcru circulation for the purpose now was it)

Clive James

Might want to use this thread if we want to discuss his merits.

i think this is the right thread for it. i agree with others who say that his distrust of ideology causes him to misinterpret things but i don't think this long anti-ideological tradition in (especially) british letters -- stretching back at least to orwell, or at least he is the paradigm of it -- is something we should write off entirely. atwood is a thinker in this camp imo, it's not just a male thing. anyway, this:

- Clive's poem is average. A bit like Stephen Fry. Says a lot in a style but its content-free guff that is apologised by 'bridging the gap between high and low culture'.

i really don't think that poem is a bridging between high and low culture. i think it's an unpretentious meditation on impending death that avoids both sentimentality and self-pity. this is way harder to do than it seems. the fact that the poem seems so natural, i mean, this is its accomplishment.