March Diary
Hello,
Obligatory shilling. This month I wrote on THE ZONE about modern grifting, maturity and care (and looking after plants), real and imagined antisemitism, editing, nü-misogyny, living abroad and divided loyalties, Pierre Ryckmans’ The Halls of Uselessness and Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary.
I wrote for The Critic about Newsnight and the rapist, Michael Gove on extremism and the Princess Catherine story. My podcast review column — which appears monthly in print — covered true crime podcasts.
On being a proud brother. This month I went to England and had the pleasure of attending my sister’s PhD graduation ceremony. Lucy also wrote a beautiful essay this month about Mothering Sunday. My sister was the first of us to really take up writing, and she was the first of us to move abroad (to Russia — a more intimidating prospect than Poland even then). I’m very proud — and very much looking forward to seeing what she accomplishes in the future.
Carrots and whiskers. Suno AI could be the eeriest and most impressive AI generator I’ve seen yet. In a minute, it had generated a fairly convincing musical response to the prompt “a midwest emo song about my guinea pigs, Fajitas and Chimichanga, eating carrot”.
As always, though, the challenge for humans is to be fresher, and more innovative, and more characterful. For now, at least, to the extent that AI seems human it is a reflection on our duller, lamer work.
Hot Cross Buns. I’ve said a lot of bad things about a lot of — in my opinion — bad comedy, so it’s only fair to note that Dave Attell’s new special is the funniest I’ve seen in years. It doesn’t break new ground — but does stand-up have new ground to break? I’m not sure. What it has is a spectacular volume of excellent jokes. “BDSM. You know what I’m talking about? One time a woman wanted to tie me to a mortgage.” “I see there’s one man at the back wearing a mask. Thank you sir. Someone has to live to tell this story.”
Gloriously messy. Jaspreet Singh Boparai reviews Werner Herzog’s memoirs. I can’t wait to read this book:
In some ways, his body of work resembles that of writers like Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, and Victor Hugo—glorious messy and occasionally exhausting talents whose unflagging energy and invention couldn’t always prevent them from writing 60 skippable pages in a row. Yet perseverance is rewarded in the end. There isn’t a film in Herzog’s vast output that isn’t touched somewhere by genuine inspiration.
Living in Wonder. Rod Dreher’s new book is available to pre-order. It looks like a distant right-brained relative of my more left-brained book project:
He shares stories of miracles, rumors of angels, and outbreaks of awe to offer hope, as well as a guide for discerning and defending the truth in a confusing and spiritually dark culture, full of contemporary spiritual deceptions and tempting counterfeit spiritualities.
The conspiracy turn. Fred Skulthorp reviews conspiraphobe Marianna Spring’s Among the Trolls and reflects on disinformation journalism:
There’s an old Chinese proverb that comes to mind: when a wise man points at the moon, an idiot looks at his finger. In the last decade, it increasingly seems that the finger we are staring at as we try to come to terms with the ongoing upheaval across the West is social media.
Rewriting the calendar. Ed West reflects on secular sainthood:
Today is International Women’s Day, perhaps one of the most celebrated feasts in the secular calendar, a calendar that seems very busy this time of year. Last Friday was Zero Discrimination Day, while next Thursday, March 14, is Equal Pay Day, and Friday is the ‘International Day to Combat Islamophobia’; then comes the ‘International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination’ on the 21st, while March 25 is ‘International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade’ and on the 31st there is the International Transgender Day of Visibility.
The social self. Freya India writes on the search for the authentic self:
To be honest I’m not convinced there’s even such thing as a self without other people—let alone an authentic one. There’s a vanity to even thinking there is a self to be found. We are our relationships with others. If you were left alone with all your products and clothes and aesthetic enhancements and never spoke to another person, you would not be your true self. You’d be nothing.
Well, you’d be something. There have been interesting hermits. But for most of us that “something” is an inert property without being activated by others.
Conservatism’s gravediggers. Aris Roussinos laments idiot Tories:
In an attempt to make short-lived political capital at the disquiet over recent pro-Palestine protests, Gove has created a powerful weapon against the Right. Just as Blair’s Human Rights Act enshrined progressivism into the state’s essence, the new definition will shrink conservatism’s space for querying or opposing the most sweeping progressive innovations. It is of a piece with the Online Safety Act, a hurried piece of legislation brought in as a response to a Conservative MP’s murder by a jihadist, which instead functions as a muzzle on “harmful” Right-wing discourse.
The right and modern art. Daniel Evans writes an entertaining counterintuitive essay on the unconventional conservatism of Marcel Duchamp:
Duchamp here is mocking style, taste, and aesthetics, he’s asking questions about reverence, perhaps even worship. But readers, don’t rankle. Duchamp is forcing the protection of what’s valuable, of what’s genuinely accomplished and beautiful. There is something to defend in the rules set around beauty conventions. Just not the progressive ones where the rule is that there are no rules, but there are rules, and they’re the ones who control them. If there’s one thing you should recognise about progressives it’s that they don’t exactly care what they’re telling you to do as much as they care that they are the ones telling you to do it.
I wish all my readers a thoughtful and happy Easter — and have a lovely month,
Ben