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

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.

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

― Mordy, Tuesday, October 14, 2014 6:53 PM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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

― astuteness isn't everything (wins), Tuesday, October 14, 2014 6:55 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this isn't really about me wanting to focus on white men any more than the thread already is. by all means, tear them all down. i'm throwing an underhand pitch to a lex with a baseball bat, not trying to beam him with it.

idk im missing a lot of contextual references on this thread so im just going to fuck off tho

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.

yeah, i think xxyyzz's critique of the poem was lazy nonsensical weak-sauce wannabe iconoclasm tbh.

I put in lots of things in one (partly bcz we have talked a bit about James in the past). I wasn't criticising the poem for the bridging. That is a quality resrved for much of James' overall work.

So are you going to tell me a 'meditation on death' doesn't sound pretentious already? But those are your terms.

I think it lost me on 'enhanced, in fact' and 'A final flood of colors will live on'. To believe that faculties aren't diminished feels too hopeful and yes, sentimental to me.

I know attacking a dying man's poem isn't a good look but hey art will be a ruthless judge.

I don't think calling it "average" was attacking it really tbh am sure history will forgive u yr withering insight

It won't notice any defenses, averages or attacks. History does not notice posts on message board, although there are footnotes, so some of us might make that.

I'm banking on it tbh

I think so too but I am just channeling a great white male's empty confidence in themselves and their non-ablities.

my major discovery from this thread is that if someone attacks clive james I am inclined to defend him, and if someone defends clive james I'm inclined to attack him.

I don't like that poem though.

haha ilx eh

my major discovery from this thread is that if someone attacks clive james I am inclined to defend him, and if someone defends clive james I'm inclined to attack him.

― woof, Wednesday, 15 October 2014 09:58 (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

I feel eliciting this response is the defining trait of the GWM organism. Unless you're Parsons. Fuck off Parsons. Or de Bottom - he's f'ing irritating in all sorts of ways, but that thing he did at the Rijksmuseum with the fucking post-its has really been gnawing away at me. It perfectly expresses his way of shitting all over things with himself in the name of making things 'accessible' (don't trust people to understand things unless they've got de bottom shit smeared all over them), or relevant (relevant to my banal de bottom shit interpretation of the now). it's so reductive - everything reduced to de importance of de bottom.

I'm totally calling my 2014-15 Fantasy Philosphy Team 'Race to de Botton'.

started from de Botton now we here

started from de Botton now my whole team fucking here

Rijksmuseum with the fucking post-its has really been gnawing away at me.

Sorry you had to see that. I'd love to go to Rijksmuseum someday but they have to take that crap off first.

i only really have attack/defend contrariness with James and maybe Amis… for me it's mostly to do with being an English books person, they've always been there for the 25 years of my proper reading life so the ledger is very very long (but as per upthread, that permapresence is a symptom of GWM culture).

But w/ Amis, I'm way less inclined to try to defend, partly because there's always enough of a crowd sticking up for Money, & partly bcz well take the interview with Perry from the issue:

GP How do you think we can tease out the cultural and political and gender influence of Default Man? Because he is a minority.

MA Well, I don’t think he should be persecuted on that account.

GP He certainly punches well above his weight, demographically, because historically he’s been given all the opportunities.

MA I think he’s heading for a time of comparative wilderness, don’t you? It’s a great disadvantage to be Default Man now.

GP Do you really think it is?

MA It’s getting to be.

GP But he is still Default and, because he is Default, he has power.

MA Christopher Hitchens’s son, Alexander, who’s making a name for himself as a journalist, has as his byline Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens – Meleagrou is his mother’s maiden name. And I thought that was brilliant. “Alexander Hitchens” is defaultish, right? His national identity is a sort of albatross. I always wished I had something exotic about me, because everyone favours that now.

GP It’d be a fun gentleman’s club game to rally round stories of the persecution of Great White Males – but it doesn’t look like that from the outside. It looks like they still have a monopoly on power.

MA On power, yes, but in art, no.

GP Well, within my business, visual art, the intake is 75 per cent female and yet you look at who has showed their work and I think there still is a dominance of males.

etc i mean there's plenty more in there too.

Christ.

there's worse, but when he gets to "that’s Beckett skewered for ever" I just can't

So are you going to tell me a 'meditation on death' doesn't sound pretentious already?

why would that be pretentious? death is something we all have to deal with.

besides mine was better tbh