Category: Old Dish

Two new pieces on the growing phenomenon – from Fortune and PCMag. Both are on the right track, but neither quite gets it. As with most truly revolutionary technologies, it’ll take time for people to absorb what’s really happened to publishing and journalism.

BOOK CLUB UPDATE: Getting ready for next week. We’re coming close to a thousand active reading members of the club. But if you’re interested in the war on terrorism, classical military theory, insights from Churchill, Machiavelli, Sun Tzu and others, feel free to eavesdrop.

I had steamed haddock and treacle pudding last night. Up to a 34 waist again. Meanwhile, a reader sends in a literary reminiscence of British food. It’s from – who else? – Kingsley Amis, from his book, “The Folks That Live on the Hill”:

[A waiter] came and laid in front of him a considerable plateful of fried slices of white bread and thick salty bacon with all the rind left on and ancillary tomatoes, as specified. Fats swam and bubbled there.
‘My God,’ said Harry with remote envy. ‘Butter too.’
Freddie shook his head as he picked up two of the three varicoloured plastic dispensers before him. ‘Butter, who said anything about butter? This is marge. Very hard to get these days I can assure you. . .’

“Marge,” by the way, is British for margarine. At the end of the meal, Amis continues:

‘Do you know what I enjoyed most about that snack?’
‘The marge?’
‘The fact that it wasn’t beef Stroganoff or sole bonne femme or steak en croute or tripe a la mode de Caen.’
‘I see. Aren’t you going to have some afters?’
They looked over at a blackboard advertising spotted dick – roly poly – syrup pudding – plum duff. . .

Now, that’s patriotism.

CIVILIAN DEATHS: Here’s the first solid piece I’ve read about them in the Afghanistan war. Noam Chomsky probably shouldn’t read this story. The truth is always a problem for him.

LADS IN TROUBLE: Here’s an interesting cultural indicator. In Britain a few years ago, the “hottest” magazines were testosterone-laden, chauvinistic men’s magazines – the kind that soon came over to the States and made Maxim a huge success story. According to this piece in the Guardian, they’re now in trouble. Big declines in circulation and advertizing. But my favorite detail, noticed by a reader, is the fact that the editor of the leading “lad” magazine, “FHM,” was unavailable for comment because he is on “paternity leave.” As my reader points out, “It’s like finding out that the editor of Cigar Aficionado is on the nicotine patch.”

This time, it’s a cartoon.

Guess who I ran right into in the lobby of the St Martin’s Lane hotel last night?

DASCHLE’S BALLOON: Word travels fast. Last night, I was having dinner with two English journalist friends. Of course, the war came up. I hadn’t been following the wires all day so I was surprised to hear one of them ask me for an explanation of Senator Tom Daschle’s criticism of the “axis of evil” phrase in the State of the Union. If Americans are so united about the war, I was asked, why is the Senate majority leader taking on the president? I had three off-the-cuff explanations: a) just to get himself in the paper; b) a simple gaffe – it’s what he believes, but he knows it’s politically dumb to say it; c) he wants to get a premature end to the war so he can use domestic politics to tackle the president’s popularity. Of course, it could also be a combination of the three. And the ruse works better if you subsequently disown it. This was a trial balloon. And at small intervals in the future, the Democrats will do it again. After all, it’s their only hope. Meanwhile, the president should ignore the politics and get on with the deadly serious task of protecting the West from another September 11 – or worse.

Sodomy and unequal protection in Kansas; the few alternatives to Supermax prisons, etc.

James Taranto emails to inform me of a threat to my beloved pudding. Apparently, there’s a move afoot to rename it as Spotted Richard. What an assault on British national sovereignty. We should fight this on the beaches, we should fight it in the skies, we should never surrender – in the defense of spotted dick.

Another one came up last night when we were discussing an art film made by one of our contemporaries. When it was shown on television, it was given a three-word listing that seemed to us one of the most damning ever printed: “Tedious erotic thriller.”

The art hasn’t been lost over here. Here’s a passage, again from this week’s Private Eye, on the novels of Iris Murdoch:

Murdoch’s fictional project was essentially to borrow plots from Shakespeare and ideas from Plato and meld them together as novels. Characters with names like Lysander Prosper chat and shag on islands or at large country houses, arguing over whether perfect love or essential goodness is achievable until, after a few hints of the supernatural, the plot is resolved in an exaggerated flurry of deaths or marriages. It’s like A.S. Byatt without the jokes.

One of the joys of British journalism is the work of Craig Brown. He’s Tina’s brother, I think, and he’s got her talent – but in a different form. He writes a lot for Private Eye, the satirical bi-weekly which has so influenced British journalism (and was one of the inspirations for the Dish). It’s like the Onion, only makes fun of elites more than ordinary people. Here’s Brown’s spoof of a diary written by Her Majesty the Queen. (Now that would be a great blog, wouldn’t it? E2R.com.) I guess some of you might not get it (it helps having been subjected to endless prose about the monarchy over the years), but I thought it was a hilarious and brilliant insight into the sheer middle-class tedium that is the essence of the modern monarchy. Anyway, here’s an extract fom the Queen’s Diary:

Monday.
In the evening, Edward and his wife arrive. We all shake hands.
She has fair hair.
“Hello, mummy,” he says, “We were just passing so we thought we’d just drop by to say hello.”
I say hello.
“Hello,” says his wife.
“You remember Sophie, of course,” says Edward.
“Of course,” I say, making her feel at home. “Have you come far?”…
Tuesday.
I receive my Prime Minister, a Mr. Blair. He informs me of his plans for revitalizing the National Health and modernising the railway system.
“This is all very interesting indeed,” I say.
“Thank you,” he says.
“You’ve obviously put a tremendous amount of thought into it,” I say.
“Yes,” he says.
“Railways are still very popular,” I tell him. “They are particularly useful if people want to get from A to B and for one reason or another they don’t have a driver. “
“You’ve hit the nail on the head,” he says.
After fifty years as their monarch, I have a wealth of knowledge and experience to offer my prime ministers… I have had quite a number of prime ministers during the course of my reign. One of them was a woman. The others were men…
Wednesday.
This evening, my son Andrew turns up. He is divorced. “I was just passing by so I thought I’d just pop in to say hello,” he says.
“Have you been waiting long?” I say, setting him at his ease. “Have you done this sort of thing before? Keep you busy, do they?”

No wonder Margaret drank a couple of bottles of vodka a day.

It’s been a long time since I had a brutal hangover, but I’ve been nursing one all day. Hence the late start. Drinking is, of course, another integral feature of British life. It was in a good cause, I hasten to add. Last night, a whole bevy of my old college friends were kind enough to throw a dinner party for me. It was a blast. Funny how some people seem not to physically change at all, while others (like yours truly) look physically unrecognizable from eighteen years ago. It was an eclectic cast of characters – journalists, economists, writers, academics, civil servants, bankers, etc. We realized that, in ancient British tradition, almost all of us had spent many years abroad. Between us, there were years spent in Rome, Moscow, Tokyo, New York, Paris. And, in some weird echo of our debates in college twenty years ago, we got embroiled in the debate of the day. Back then, it was the Cold War. At the height of my college experience there was the arrival of cruise missiles in England and the final stand-off with the Soviet Union. I was the most strident anti-peacenik even back then. When the missiles arrived on English soil, I held a champagne party in my dorm room in celebration. In the English student culture of the time, I might as well have put a Pinochet poster on my wall. Day after day, we’d have near shouting matches about the whole matter (these were also the days in which Margaret Thatcher was regarded by almost every student as a combination of Tina Brown and Muammar Ghaddaffi.)