Biology of the Worst Kind

Down Among the Handbags

There's a new review by me in the LRB.

• Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Lustre by Dana Thomas

There’s a science-fiction short story, I can’t remember by whom, which has a New York journalist on a hiking tour, lost in the Appalachians. He comes across a ramshackle house lived in by a family of hillbillies and they give him a bed for the night. In the morning at breakfast he notices that one of the girls has her headscarf tied in a manner he’s never seen before – it’s strange but very elegant. One by one he discovers that all the other members of the family are wearing an article of clothing in an unknown way, or have run up a frock or made a sweater or decorated their dungarees to look startlingly different. When he asks about it, they each tell him they just sort of thought they would, no big deal, gotta milk the cow, chop some wood, see ya. He stays a while and it emerges that he has discovered in this one family the actual source of fashion, the single place from which all new trends spring and stream out to couturiers, glossy magazines and eventually the city streets. No one, not even the family themselves, had any idea that was how it worked....

The rest is here if you are a subscriber.

 

A Busy Month for Princesses

Mrs Margaret Townsend as wasn't: my royal contribution to this week's LRB...

Princess Margaret: A Life Unravelled  by Tim Heald · Weidenfeld, 346 pp, £20.00

And now for the other princess: the one who failed to stop all the clocks in Kensington Palace and Mustique, and grew old. In doing so she became sick, fat, grumpy, drunk and unloved. This, you might think, is the fate of many people who leave dying to their later years. But in a princess these flaws, if not the necessary concomitants of age then surely an entitlement of age, are particularly disappointing. We like our princesses young and adorable, and if possible witty and talented, though we’ve had to settle for the former. While she was young, Margaret Rose was the apple of her father’s eye, enchanting to all who met her, talented, witty, artistic, they said – and then one day she was middle-aged, frumpy, snobbish, self-centred, a raddled old gin tippler and a bore. So much apparent promise, so little follow through.

The rest of it at the LRB Online.  Subscribers only again, but you know you should...

Princess Diana - Again

Tunnel Vision

Jenny Diski   

The Diana Chronicles  by Tina Brown · Century, 481 pp, £18.99

Diana  by Sarah Bradford · Penguin, 443 pp, £7.99

I had supper with a friend on 31 August 1997. He arrived looking wonderstruck. ‘Are we just going to have dinner?’ he said.

‘Why, you think we should sit shiva?’

‘But if she can die then anyone can.’

I don’t think anyone else ever got around to articulating that quite so precisely.

One friend spent the day of the funeral in his study, locked away from the world, reading Civilisation and Its Discontents. Others I knew wandered around the flower carpet outside Kensington Palace, spying and sniffing the air to gauge whether sentimentality and hysteria actually might achieve what neo-Marxian analysis had failed to do in the 1960s and 1970s. Not being a great one for crowds, I stayed at home with the TV on, just watching and wondering at the events of that week, which really were strange on a scale beyond anything I’d encountered. Some months later, I saw a documentary made on the day of the funeral, in which a bag lady was asked for her opinion on the death of the Princess of Wales: ‘Oh, she’s died has she? I wondered why there were so many people about.’...

The rest of this article on the latest Princess Diana books is available online at the LRB site.  Subscribers only, I'm afraid.

Seriously Uncool

                        

At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches  by Susan Sontag ed. Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump · Hamish Hamilton, 235 pp, £18.99

A Photographer’s Life 1990-2005  by Annie Leibovitz · Cape, 480 pp, £60.00

Susan Sontag intended something like the book which is now published as At the Same Time to be her final collection of essays. After that, says her son, David Rieff, in his foreword, she intended to get on with what she most valued, writing fiction. Edited by her, somewhat differently no doubt, this would, then, have been her next book. As it is, published two years after her death, and put together by Rieff and her assistants with an eye on her preliminary sketch of its contents, it is her last book. Or rather, it is her first posthumous book, since Rieff plans to bring out further collections of her letters, diaries and unpublished writings.

A next book and a last book must be read in different ways, even if they are identical in content and in either case written in the shadow of a cancer that she surely knew was going to kill her sooner rather than later. None of these introductions to other people’s books, contingent newspaper articles and speeches written between 2001 and 2004 was intended as last words. Rieff is adamant about that. And to underline it he speaks of her ‘unalloyed fear of extinction – in no part of her, not even in the last agonised days of her ending, was there the slightest ambivalence, the slightest acceptance’. But it is very hard for the reader, knowing it to be her last, rather than her next book (and coming to it via Rieff’s elegiac foreword) not to see these writings as valedictory – a round-up of Sontag’s thought and work. We may know that death is always an arbitrary interruption of a life, but with us here and her not, and our narrative-hungry brains being what they are, we bind death to life by assuming a summation rather than allowing life to spill pointlessly over the edge into oblivion...

This is a new review in the latest London Review of Books of Susan Sontag essays and an Annie Leibovitz photo book, the rest you can read here.

(...Just seen that you can't read the rest at the LRB site. Sorry.  The piece is restricted to subscribers - which of course it's worth doing if you can afford it.  On the other hand there are some excellent articles in this issue available to read for free.)

Jowls Are Available

This is a new article of mine in the new issue of The London Review of Books.  The whole thing can be found here.

Most religions suggest that we get at least one other go at being. Christianity offers an afterlife, Judaism suggests an altogether better existence once the Messiah arrives, while Hinduism and other Eastern religions try to deal with samsara, the terrible burden of having to do life over and over again until you get it right. But I don’t think any of them offer much help with the alarming notion of multiple worlds, which quantum theorists have arithmeticked to prove entirely possible. As far as I can understand it, Many Worlds Theory proposes that there are n zillion worlds like this one but marginally different, operating in parallel to the only world in which we think we exist. There you’re wearing pink kitten heels not Hush Puppies, there you had sausage for breakfast not muesli, there it so happened that you took a left turn not a right one and became a fashionistic, carnivoracious arch-criminal instead of the peace-negotiating, vegan, style wasteland you are in this world. We might each be living out all our possible lives, through all the variations of what we could possibly say or do, in an infinite number of worlds where everyone else is living out their variations, each at some weird angle to this one that my sorry, innumerate and spatially challenged brain is unable to comprehend. If this sounds like hell on earths to you then you probably haven’t signed up for Second Life....

Confessions of a Spiderphobe

This is a Diary piece in the latest LRB, the rest of it is at www.lrb.co.uk:

Autumn looms darkly and terrible in my life. From midsummer I start to worry, and by late August I am filled with dread. My arachnophobia has ensured that the autumnal mating urge which causes spiders to wander into our houses – confused by some sudden indefinable but compelling ache in the forefront of their small minds – in search of a nice warm dark corner to nest (don’t think about it), ushers in my personal annual festival of anxiety and horror. Not that I felt secure during the other ten months of the year. My ex, having been my ex for some years and grown tired of being called out in the middle of the night to deal with a spider, gave me a blowtorch, which I used with desperate abandon. It’s a professional version of the hairspray and lighter technique, more or less likely to have resulted in my charred remains (oh God, and the daughter, the cats, the occasional lover . . .) being found in the smoking ruins. But death was never a worse alternative to being in the same room as a spider....