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Spectator
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Let straight white men write novels!
About 15 years ago, I tried to interest my literary agent in a state-of-the-nation novel set in 21st-century London. My model was Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe's masterpiece about New York in the 1980s. I'd read Wolfe's essay in Harper's magazine called 'Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast' in which he urges ambitious young authors to dispense with namby-pamby, post-modernist experimental nonsense and follow in the footsteps of Balzac, Zola and Dickens – write realistic novels documenting every aspect of contemporary society in granular detail. I wrote a 10,000-word proposal summarising the story, which began with a black teenage drug dealer coming to the rescue of a posh teenage girl in Shepherd's Bush by fighting off a group of roadmen trying to steal her puppy. They gradually get enmeshed in each other's lives, with predictable tragi-comic results. It was basically Romeo and Juliet but with race and class dividing the lovers. I was quite pleased with it and so was my agent. That is, until she ran it past a recent Cambridge graduate she'd just hired as an in-house sensitivity reader, who declared it an absolute 'no-no'. How dare I, as a straight white man, presume to create a young female character and – worse – a young black man? Talk about cultural appropriation! If the agency sent this proposal out to publishers and they commissioned it, it would be denying a voice to the very people I was proposing to speak on behalf of. Didn't I realise the literary phallocracy was in its death throes? The 'litbros' must make way for girlboss authors such as Zadie Smith and Rachel Cusk. I talked it over with my agent and she said this probably reflected the prevailing attitude in the publishing trade, which is largely made up of young female graduates. And so it proved to be. These days, novels written by straight white men – particularly young men – are as rare as hen's teeth. No white British man under 40 has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize since 2011. The closest is Douglas Stuart, a 49-year-old Scot, who won it in 2020. This isn't just true of the UK obviously. A recent article in Compact revealed that not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in the New Yorker. The dearth of young male novelists has reached such a pass that various literary lions are taking steps to address the problem. Unfortunately, their pleas for young men to submit manuscripts are nearly always prefaced by the usual throat-clearing about the insufferable privilege enjoyed by straight white males. For instance, a novelist and critic called Jude Cook announced in April that he was launching an independent literary press called Conduit Books that would focus on overlooked male writers. 'We believe there is ambitious, funny, political and cerebral fiction by men that is being passed by,' he said. He then spoilt it by denouncing the male-dominated literary scene of the 1980s and 1990s as 'toxic' and described the 'excitement and energy around new and adventurous fiction' by female authors like Sally Rooney as a 'timely corrective'. Not sure I'll be sending my proposal to him. Another bat signal appeared in the New York Times at the end of last year, entitled 'The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone'. The author, who teaches creative writing at the University of Nevada, urged men to start writing novels again, not because he thought they might have something to say but because it might get other men reading again and that would be therapeutic. 'Reading fiction is an excellent way to improve one's emotional IQ,' he said. That, in turn, would be good for women. Literature helped men 'transgress patriarchal boundaries', he added, and that meant the lives of women 'fundamentally changed for the better'. When will these self-appointed champions of male novelists stop apologising for being men? The literary agent Matthew Hamilton told me an anecdote that illustrated the point: 'Last week I heard a story of a prominent agent submitting a novel by a straight white male and apologising it was by a straight white male in the accompanying letter. Needless to say, he's a straight white male.' Happily, there's light at the end of the tunnel. Hachette has folded its Dialogue division, which was set up to publish more 'diverse' authors, into another subsidiary, and a literary agency set up to find 'new voices' (i.e. anyone apart from straight white men) has just closed its doors. Perhaps I should set up an imprint myself: Toxic Books. It would just publish novels by people like me for people like me. I might make a mint.
The Guardian
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Those Passions by TJ Clark review – a timely study of the connection between art and politics
Politics runs through the history of art like a protester in a museum with a tin of soup. From emperors' heads on coins to Picasso's anti-war masterpiece, Guernica, and Banksy's street art, power and visual culture have been closely and sometimes combustibly associated. This relationship is explored in essays by the distinguished art historian TJ Clark, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Many of them first appeared in the London Review of Books, where the academic is given room to dilate in its rather airless pages. He brings a wide scholarship and unflagging scrutiny to his task. That said, his introduction includes the discouraging spoiler: 'art-and-politics [is] hell to do'. From time to time, the reader finds themselves recalling this damning admission. Clark writes from a 'political position on the left'. He reflects on epoch-making events such as the Russian revolution, which spawned socialist realist art. He says the Dresden-born artist Gerhard Richter, 93, maker of abstract and photorealist works, is 'haunted by his past' in the former East Germany. But there are also dustier subjects, including the Situationist International, a group of avant-garde artists and theorists who were active from the 1950s to the 1970s. Clark's take on art and power is timely, though. Donald Trump's friends the tech bros are a new class of fabulously rich patrons with political clout to match. They are sponsoring a revolution in image-making through AI and social media. Clark writes about widely shared and often manipulated photographs of rioting in England in 2011 (and calls the typical subject of these visuals 'the un-elated looter'). But his pieces, the oldest of which dates back 25 years, have been overtaken by leapfrogging developments in the digital sphere. His definition of what constitutes political art is broad; or better, say, elastic. One chapter examines a crucifixion done in grisaille, or shades of grey, by a northern Renaissance master. Is this political art? According to Clark, the painting expresses 'a Christian nihilism… lacking the consoling vehemence of the isms to come'. In fact, the picture was made in the immediate aftermath of a pretty vehement ism: a monk called Savonarola was responsible for the fanaticism of tossing books and paintings on to the Bonfire of the Vanities in Florence. Clark examines faces painted by Rembrandt. These are 'political' in the sense that the artist became the society portraitist of a new class in Dutch society, the bourgeoisie; but then the entire golden age of art in the Netherlands was paid for by their wealth. Confronted in a gallery by the alchemy that transforms pigment, canvas and mark-making into a canonical work, some of us are content to attribute this to genius or serendipity. We imagine a silken thread connecting the artist's eye, hand and the picture. But to an art historian such as Clark, it's more of a Gordian tangle, and untying it is correspondingly knotty. He worries away at the inscrutable expression on the face of Mars by Diego Velázquez, with the god of war seen in what looks like a French firefighter's helmet and very little else, like an exhausted strippergram. Clark finds a similar look on a rifleman in The Surrender of Breda, also by Velázquez, who was painter to Philip IV of Spain. 'Mars's expression still eludes us,' Clark concedes, though one reading he offers of this poker face is that it was the default look at Philip's court, and that went for his tame artist and his portraits, too: 'Keeping things superficial, and therefore not subject to malicious misinterpretation, may be a virtue, not to say a survival skill.' Clark doesn't indulge himself or the reader with the felicities of a stylist such as the critic Robert Hughes (who beautifully draws our attention in The Surrender of Breda to Velázquez's 'palisade of lances' and makes Clark's point about the artist with effortless succinctness, calling him 'the greatest impersonal painter who ever lived'). There are moments when Clark's inquiries are beneath his considerable dignity. Art historians have something in common with mediums and spiritualists: they attempt to get in touch with the other side. While there's a certain amount of empirical data about an artwork – its age, the materials it was made from, its provenance and so on – some commentators like to round out their appreciation with a kind of seance involving the artist. What was he thinking as he made his masterpiece? (See the art historians pitch up at the National Gallery in their gaudy headscarves and Romany caravans!) Clark divines the intentions of Hieronymus Bosch (who died in 1516) from the tiniest lick of paint on the face of a small figure on one of four panels now in Venice: 'I'm very sure that Bosch had an idea from the start how the man's mouth might serve his purposes.' This communing with long-dead artists to channel what was going through their heads made me think of a British film star who once played a badly wounded war hero. He nailed a heartbreaking scene in which he woke up in hospital to find his leg had been amputated, and his co-stars begged him to reveal how he did it. He said: 'I just thought: 'I hope they've still got some beef sandwiches in the trailer.'' Is it bathetic, or simply an acknowledgment of human nature, to imagine that Velázquez, Bosch and the rest sometimes thought of beef sandwiches, so to speak? After all, the old masters were hired hands, working to commission. They were fulfilling the wishes of a client – often a demanding one – rather than expressing themselves or chasing a muse. The sign of a good painting, it used to be said, was that the eyes follow you around the room. For Clark, indefatigable scrutiniser of facial features, the hallmark is that he follows the eyes around the room instead. Those Passions: On Art and Politics by TJ Clark is published by Thames & Hudson (£40). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
On This Day, Feb. 7: Communists give up monopoly of Soviet politics
Feb. 7 (UPI) -- On this date in history: In 1497, the Bonfire of the Vanities in Florence, Italy, took place when followers of Girolamo Savonarola burned thousands of books, art and cosmetics. In 1940, British railroads were nationalized. In 1964, the Beatles arrived in the United States for the first time and immediately set off a frantic wave of "Beatlemania." In 1973, the U.S. Senate voted to set up a committee to investigate a break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters in Washington's Watergate complex. In 1979, Josef Mengele, the so-called Nazi "Angel of Death" who conducted medical experiments on victims of the Holocaust, died. His death -- caused by a stroke while swimming in Brazil -- wasn't revealed until 1985. In 1984, U.S. astronauts Bruce McCandless and Robert Stewart made the first untethered spacewalks. McCandless was the first to float freely in space, propelled by a nitrogen-powered "jetpack" after leaving the shuttle Challenger. In 1990, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev issued a series of reforms and the Communist Party gave up its 70-year monopoly of political power in the Soviet Union. In 1991, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was inaugurated as Haiti's first democratically elected president in 186 years. In 1992, the European Union was created when the Maastricht Treaty was signed. The treaty officially went into force Nov. 1, 1993. In 1995, the mastermind in the 1993 bombing of New York's World Trade Center, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, was arrested in Pakistan. He was sentenced to life in prison in 1998. In 1999, King Hussein of Jordan died of cancer at age 63. Hussein ruled Jordan for 46 years. Crown Prince Abdullah succeeded his father as king. In 2009, the most deadly series of brushfires in Australian history claimed more than 200 lives, destroyed almost 2,000 homes and burned at least 1.1 million acres in Victoria state. In 2021, Rep. Ron Wright of Texas died of COVID-19, becoming the first member of Congress to succumb to the disease. In 2023, LeBron James surpassed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to become the NBA's all-time leading scorer. He had a game-high 38 points in the Los Angeles Lakers' loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder to reach a total 38,389 points. As of Feb. 6, 2025, he maintained the record at 41,557.
