January 8, 2012
When Rooney Mara, star of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, suggested that Lisbeth Salander was not a feminist, Stieg Larsson’s partner knew how to put her down. “Does she know what film she has been in?” asked Eva Gabrielsson, who shared much of Larsson’s life until his death in 2004. “Has she read the books? Has she not had any coaching?”
In case you were in any doubt, the questions were rhetorical. To Gabrielsson, Mara was another ignorant Hollywood star. If she had taken the trouble to understand The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo before playing its goth heroine, she would have realised that Salander’s “entire being represents a resistance, an active resistance to the mechanisms that mean women don’t advance in this world and in worst-case scenarios are abused like she was”.
Her repetition of “resistance” flagged that Gabrielsson, like Larsson, had done time on the European far left. Their backgrounds only emphasised the extraordinary and apparently admirable success of the Millennium trilogy.
Carry on reading
Posted in Observer |
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January 8, 2012
In October 2010, American liberals held their largest demonstration in Washington DC since the great crash of 2008. They did not raise their angry voices to denounce fantastic corporate greed and fraud. They were not furious that speculators had destroyed the hopes of millions of Americans. Instead, they staged the world’s first protest against anger – a rage against rage.
Its organisers, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, exhorted their followers at the “Rally to Restore Sanity” to wear “I’m With Reasonable” T-shirts – ironically, of course – and set aside political differences in the interests of getting on with their neighbours. Despite the subsequent Occupy Wall Street movement, the pattern Stewart and Colbert set has held. Genteel liberals have allowed American conservatives to all but monopolise political fury since the banks went down. Considering what conservatives allowed financial markets to do, the fact that the right could be furious with anyone but itself is an astonishing story and one that Thomas Frank was born to cover.
Read the whole thing
Posted in Observer |
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January 2, 2012
“How unlike our own dear Tories the tea partiers are, the Economist implies. While the Yanks are demented, the Brits are sensible, practical men and women of moderate temperament who abhor extremism and have no time for wishful thinking. No member of the coalition cabinet or editor on the Economist would sign up for any let alone all of the above.
Yet British conservatives hold extremist views on economics that are as wild as anything you can find on the American right.”
Carry on reading
Posted in Spectator |
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January 1, 2012
The Syrian revolution is a motherless child. The “international community”, so vigorous in its declarations of support for human rights, does nothing to protect it. Assad’s state terrorists have unrestrained freedom to murder, rape and nail-bomb protesters and abuse and castrate children.
To grasp the scale of the barbarism, listen to Hamza Fakher, a pro-democracy activist, who is one of the most reliable sources on the crimes the regime’s news blackout hides. “The repression is so severe that detainees are stacked alive and kicking in shipping containers and disposed off in the middle of the sea,” he told me. “It is so bad that they’ve invented a new way of torture in Aleppo where they heat a metal plate and force a detainee to stand on it until he confesses; imagine all the melting flesh reaching the bone before the detainee falls on the plate. It is so bad that all demonstrators have opted for armed resistance. They know it is about survival now, not about freedom any more. This needs to be highlighted: Syrians are fighting for their lives now, not for freedom.”
Carry on reading here
Posted in Observer |
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December 30, 2011
In which I talk about my You Can’t Read This Book which should be out in a fortnight. (You can preorder on Amazon here.) And also Thomas Frank’s marvellous demolition of the Tea Party – Pity the Billionaire.
Click this link for the podcast
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December 28, 2011
In normal circumstances, the lower you sink in the media the higher you rise. The failure of Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley to make a success of Daybreak, a witless breakfast show that was fluffier than a cheerleader’s pompom, has therefore caused something close to consternation in the television industry.
Carry on reading
Posted in Standpoint |
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December 23, 2011
From Standpoint on my forthcoming You Can’t Read This Book which is available for preorder at Amazon here
Why write a defence of freedom of speech? The postmodern Left regards the idea as pernicious and contemptible. Few go as far as the American literary theorist Stanley Fish, author of There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing, Too, who announced, “The only way to fight hate speech or racist speech is to recognise it as the speech of your enemy. What you do in response to the speech of your enemy is not prescribe a medication for it but attempt to stamp it out.” But the professor is hardly the only “liberal” to believe that the state has the right to suppress offensive speech as if it were crushing an insurrection.
Read the Whole Thing
Posted in Standpoint |
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December 18, 2011
Nick Cohen pays tribute to the most ‘intellectually generous’ man he ever met
Why are so many who love the English language and human freedom in mourning for Christopher Hitchens? His full-length books never showed his talents to the full – not even God is not Great, his atheist bestseller. With typical modesty – and he was always self-critical, despite appearances to the contrary – he thought that only his literary essays would be read after his death. The dominance of theory-spouting obscurantists in university English departments meant he had that field pretty much to himself, and his writing on Larkin, Powell, Rushdie, Bellow and, above all, Orwell is indeed “imperishable,” to use his favourite word.
Carry on reading
Posted in Observer |
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December 11, 2011
In “Musée des Beaux Arts”, WH Auden crafted a description readers never forget of Brueghel’s painting of the fall of Icarus. All Brueghel shows of Icarus is a small pair of thrashing legs disappearing into a vast sea. Farmers on a clifftop carry on ploughing the fields and watching their sheep as if nothing has happened. A ship sails by the drowning hero, its crew unaware of Icarus’s suffering. In Brueghel’s vision of tragedy, says Auden:
Everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure.
Nearly everyone who is not directly suffering from the crisis is a ploughman today. We keep our eyes down. We concentrate on our work. We behave as if times were normal or, if we cannot manage that pretence, we behave as if times will soon return to normal. In the still rich regions of Britain, the pubs and bars are full of Christmas drinkers…
Carry on reading
Posted in Observer |
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December 7, 2011
Another day at the Telegraph and another attack on Laurie Penny, this time for writing a short piece describing how she had received excellent treatment at a New York hospital. While she was on her sickbed, she reflected that in the States, ‘Those who are wealthy enough to afford decent healthcare have their needs met in relative luxury, while those who are poor live in fear of getting ill, worrying that one misadventure might leave you with yet more debts to pay off.’
This humane thought inspired one Daniel Knowles of the Telegraph to pen a whole column condemning Penny.
Carry on reading
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Nick Cohen
