Muskism: A Guide for the Desperate
by Quinn Slobodian & Ben Tarnoff (Allen Lane £25)
Shortly after Elon Musk paid $44bn for Twitter in November 2022, he found #StayWoke T-shirts in the San Francisco headquarters that remained from the time of the founder Jack Dorsey, and sent a video to confirm the company’s infection by the woke mind virus. The next morning, he wrote that reports of the murder of Michael Brown, an African-American who was shot and killed by Missouri police, were false. “‘Hands, don’t shoot’,” he wrote. “The whole thing was a myth.” Later that day, he posted images of a new commercial on Twitter, a T-shirt emblazoned with the new slogan, “#Stay@Work”.
The story of two T-shirts is a symbol for the authors of this pacy, instructive analysis of the richest man in the world and his anti-revolutionary views. Musk was turned into a Covid-era Gradgrind and Twitter became X, the world’s clearing house for racial hokum, including the “Great Replacement” theory that says liberals plan to accelerate immigration to replace white people.
What is muskism? For this reason, it integrates lean Fordism (his businesses are integrated directly, keeping supply lines short and dependence on bad actors from other countries less); cybernetic futurism (combining Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide on Ray Kurzweil’s transhumanism); and eugenicist thought.
When he left the Trump administration last year as the head of the cost-cutting Doge, Musk said:[P]it leads to trust in humanoid robots and digital intelligence. ” Pedal to the metal, really. How sad that the Memphis data center for his AI communication business Grok is located in a historically black community that was a freed slave community; their descendants now face increased rates of cancer, asthma and respiratory diseases due to methane gas. One protester said: “We are not a place of sacrifice for the profit of a billion with technological dreams. But, in a way, we all are.
Stuart Jeffries
Fairies: A History
by Francis Young (Polity, £25)
In the modern world, fairies come to us mainly through Disney, safely rendered in bright pink. But fairies, or fairies, have a very dark origin in the history of supernatural belief. Traditionally, they are often useless, untrustworthy, morally ambiguous—and, in their diversity, a challenge to any notion of neat tax analysis.
Undeterred, historian Francis Young pursued his analysis of pre-Christian British beliefs. Evening of the Gods, by expanding his study of fairies into the European continent. You find a riot of trolls, leprechauns, elves, gnomes, goblins and bogeys, who bring chaos, bad luck, bad luck or sour milk. Fairyland is seen as a parallel world, a distant context perhaps of the pagan or animist beliefs that have accompanied Christian cosmology for thousands of years.
Young looks at the idea that fairies began in literature and then passed into traditional belief, embodiments of magical intervention without the theological problem of angels or demons. He draws vividly—sometimes tiresomely—on three centuries of scholarship, antiquarianism, and ethnography. The result has a lucky-dip kind of appeal, but, as he admits, any kind of explanation is not as simple as a fairy tale view. And that is certainly as it should be.
That said, there are similarities in mythological beliefs across European cultures: they are almost always in decline; they are thought to live in high places, ruled by kings or queens; they are often closely related to the landscape; Pointed ears are a persistent trait and indeed an eternal legacy from the Greek god Pan.
Belief in fairies survived the Revolution, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution to reappear, apparently, in environmental protest movements (fairies are generally opposed to technology and new ways). The online Fairy Census in 2018 alone has logged over 500 events – including a mysterious report of a hedge elf. The Fairies’ steadfast refusal to disappear is living history in action.
Lucy Lethbridge
Love the Dangerous Joy of Magical Power: Yoko Ono and the Avant-Garde Diaspora
by Paul Morley (Faber, £25)
David Sheff’s classic biography of Yoko Ono, Yokopublished last year, had a mixed reception. Paul Morley’s new book instead focuses on Ono’s life after she left Japan but before she met John Lennon in a London gallery in 1966. His title, “Yoko Ono and the Avant-Garde Diaspora”, says it well; this is Ono mixing with Fluxus artists, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and low-level designers, among whom he found the meaning of his work. Morley’s hard-hitting analysis and important historical facts are the antidote to Sheff’s tone.
However, in some places he is given a hard time writing Ono’s book that slips over Lennon. I feel I have read about the Beatles many times, while Morley’s story sends us somewhere very unusual: Ono, as an unknown person, is moving in the New York avant-garde scene in the early 1960s, where he not only succeeds but becomes an important power player.
Ono’s famous loft that opened at 112 Chambers Street was a research center where, every night, the audience can be expected to sit inside the electronic drones that move through the ice, or to see the musicians burn their music. It is easy, from this historical distance, to look at such antics with disdain, but Morley will not hear of it. Passionate about making a new, better world—in fact, he saw the horrors of Japan during the Second World War—Ono was determined and determined, and inquisitive by nature.
In response to his first election victory, he tweeted @realDonaldTrump in a record-breaking outcry—his stance has long been a disdain for authoritarian behavior, and Morley does a masterful job of exploring why.
Philip Clark
Holy Boy
by Lee Heejoo, tr Joheun Lee (Picador, £14.99)
They say that all human parents are sometimes tempted to want to eat their children. This “good desire” is the natural desire to bite and squeeze something you love to the point where it can produce feelings similar to anger—but, most importantly, you don’t want to cause harm.
Holy Boy is the first of Lee Heejoo’s novels to be translated from Korean and takes this concept to heart. What would happen if that desire didn’t subside and the urge to part with something you loved overwhelmed you?
Lee is known for the way he writes about K-pop – that is, the popular Korean music of groups such as BTS – its fans and “their fierce and innocent love for their male idols”. He Holy Boy is set in the 1990s, when K-pop exploded into what it is today – a global cultural icon – and explores that love from all possible angles: maternal, idolatrous, existential, religious, forbidden and even illegal.
To say that none of the four women at the center of this story are the same is an understatement. Their plan to kidnap their beloved Joseph, whom they loved, is bad to begin with—and only gets worse. But Lee’s deft writing and careful descriptions of his protagonists’ desires and jealousies mean you can’t help but understand where they’re coming from.
The scares in this “horror-thriller” are, when they do happen, almost random—but they’re so thrillingly rendered that they’re physically repulsive. Here are eyes as soft as the whites of eggs waiting to be spooned into; drops of blood pouring from the head hit by the handle of the gun.
Is everything real? Who knows? Holy Boy slipping so smoothly between dreams and waking life that the reader will begin to question their own strength. But this is not from Lee’s side; it is a feature of the wonderful world, which he creates. I’m a fan.
Ellie Jay
Palm House
by Gwendoline Riley (Picador, £16.99)
Gwendoline Riley is respected by critics and writers for her short, caustic stories that are light on plot and emotional and psychological dramas, often featuring a strong mother-daughter relationship with an estranged father. However, despite many awards at the beginning of his career, he is not read as widely as he should be.
Palm Househis seventh book, is typical of family matters, but here the main emphasis is on friendship and loss. Laura Miller, the first-person narrator, met Edmund Putnam at a UCL careers fair 20 years ago. He was the assistant editor of a literary magazine called Sequence. Laura, now 40, followed him into journalism, with its financial difficulties, and the pair became friends.
The story, such as it is, begins with Putnam, at the age of 49, leaving Sequence because he can’t stand the new editor. Simon “Shove” Halfpenny is in for a turn Sequence to get into The New Yorker. “As long as it’s not boring. That’s our motto now,” Shove tells the staff at his first editorial meeting, without hesitation. Putnam is also dealing with the recent death of his father.
Riley weaves his story-in-five-acts together with a series of vignettes that jump between the present and the past. A picture of an atomized society emerges. As always, Riley’s ear for conversation and eye for insight are unmatched. In one of Laura’s flat episodes, “the three of us wandered around the place in towels, and often with headphones on.” All of this helps explain his loyalty to today’s waning Putnam.
Ultimately, a balance between nostalgia (A-Zs! Blockbusters!) and second chances will do Palm House catnip for anyone who has worked in the media, or suffered through the arrival of a new boss, who doesn’t know what they think.
Susie measured
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