PL39 - Bashed up!
Yow!
“That’s pretty sombre for the hombre.”
I got pretty well bashed up on the internet this week team after seeing fit to stage a major intervention on the state of contemporary masculinity. Everyone was talking about troubled young men after seeing Adolescence and hearing Gareth Southgate’s lecture so I thought I’d have a go at some ideas. But I had blundered into some pretty spicy stuff. Someone called me “bog roll”.
The post went up on Thursday morning. It was quite exciting to get three Reddit comments and I texted my friends. But then there were twenty, and then they were coming faster than I could read them. I spent the day gawping at the numbers. By its end there were over four hundred comments and one hundred and fifty thousand views, and my status as a “pointless” “pseudointellectual” “thesaurus” was concrete.
Nothing like that has happened to me before. It was very kind of some of you to message saying you hoped I was okay, and thank you very much for that. But actually I loved the attention! I had been very nervous before the piece went live. But it turns out that people disagreeing with you actually doesn’t hurt. I think what would is personal stuff, like someone calling you ugly, but all I got along those lines was someone saying women should stop commenting on male issues. I can’t claim that wasn’t something of a stinger, but it did seem to be a genuine mistake!
There were also some thoughtful, personal comments, like one from a mum about raising her sons. I know we are all meant to be turning on democracy but I’m still quite sentimental about it, and did feel pretty moved that people were having such discussions under something I’d written. And things got even better when the article was put right at the top of RealClearBooks!
What I would like to know, if any of you have ideas, is how you exploit a success like that and parlay the attention into discussing the piece on radio and tv and podcasts and so on? How do you do that?
An out-of-work football manager has dropped a fresh batch of stone tablets and the House of Commons has found a workaround for Netflix’s password-sharing restrictions, so, under the twin waves of Adolescence and Sir Gareth Southgate, we have enthusiastically recommenced our national hunt for that promising superman: “the positive male role model”. How long have we been chasing that hopeful silhouette now? Long enough by now to realise, I think, that he’s not just elusive – he’s a chimera.
He is also, really, a squeamish innuendo. Southgate has no balm for the boiling shame of your porn consumption. When a large man forcing you off the pavement leaves you livid with impotent rage for hours, visualising that you were actually Marcus Rashford vaulting a slide tackle is no good. Sam Fender’s new album, Idris Elba’s new documentary and Stormzy’s new McDonald’s meal might constitute a delightful night in, but they are no salve for rage of male youth.
“Our demons – metaphorical and literal.”
The next day I had out a review of a debut novel called I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There by a young journalist called Róisín Lanigan. Debut novels are such an exciting thing. I love reading and discussing them. You always wonder: Is this it? Is it about to happen? The great novel?!
“That is my life,” Áine thinks, looking at her packed boxes. She is a graduate in 2010s London. Friends like “barbecues, fantasy football, macramé, Facebook, the crying laughing emoji, burrata, heterosexuality, Lewis Capaldi, the help-to-buy scheme”. A house 8-feet wide sells for £1.3m. Anyone without “money, smiling mothers, fathers in suits” is left “treading water alone”. Full-time work from home means no more “paying for public transport or buying overpriced stale supermarket sandwiches”. WhatsApp conversations measure a relationship and pleasure is found in “being unseen and unperceived”. Inserting the coil is shockingly painful, and pretending to like choking during sex an obligatory performance. Lanigan has her characters and their point in time nailed: New Labour dead, Elizabeth Windsor alive, smartphones total, Covid unforeseen. It is exciting to see this period, only recently defined, already recorded so attentively.
But if an overthinking anhedonic young female protagonist who spends all day online, neglects her health, and worry-clenches her fist to the point of drawing blood sounds a bit more like the incumbent great Irish writer than the next, this book also has banshees and demons and zombies and vampires and ghosts. Lanigan’s ambition here seems to be to test the limits of the millennial novel. Her caustic social commentary is undercut by a supernatural mystery horror. Strange apparitions and paranormal intrusions lift the novel into a atypically fantastical realm, and its highest pleasures come when Lanigan leaves behind familiar clipped prose and plunges headlong into gothic deliria.
Thanks for all the kind encouragement on the three big commissions I had going on. Two are filed and all looks good. With any luck I can show you those soon.
Welcome to all new followers, thanks as ever to all old ones, and hope of all of you have fun weekends.
GM
my positive male role models — keith floyd—kenneth griffith—emerson, melville, whitman, thoreau—henry james—mozart—mitt romney—slavoj zizek
George! Love your writing. Would love to do something similar myself. What's it like working at the NS? If I can buy you a coffee let some time then let me know know, I'd be grateful for any tips on getting started. Cheers, Felix