In One Ep She Talks About Emailing Philip Norman For Info And He Refused, So Now We Have The Amazing

Do you have any big opinions about rpf?

Not sure what we're counting as "big" here.

Aside from the standard "don't harrass the people it's about" take, I guess my opinion on rpf is that it does say something about its authors, readers and the broader fandom. Not in a moralistic "writing about bad things means you endorse them" sense, or even in the sense that you can conclude an author's historical takes from their writing. (I know a fair amount of people who will read or write McLennon without really buying into the theory of it being true)

But I think there's enough parallels between the trends in fic and the trends in analysis to see that these two things aren't neatly separable. As a fellow author, I can understand Cynthia being frequently brushed aside in fic, even if I don't love it – when it comes to analysing the real history though, I am less forgiving. However, because of the seeming link between the decentring of Cynthia in fic and her frequent exclusion from meaningful analysis, I find myself being (perhaps disproportionately) frustrated with her treatment in fic as a result.

Cynthia here is just an example among several, but I think the fact that she's not treated meaningfully better by the wider (generally more heteronormative) Beatles fandom speaks to the fact that what I'm describing isn't just attributable to the largely queer space of Beatles RPF fandom decentring straight relationships. (also any other lesbians fucking tired of people decrying any consideration to women as homophobia??)

I have also noticed that some people's takes on the history have a very literary bent – I'm thinking about times I have seen people call for symmetry between John and Paul, as though their relationship needs to be made up of perfectly mirroring feelings to be beautiful. There's an important distinction to be drawn here between descriptivism and prescriptivism – like, to be clear, there is something inherently literary in observing parallels between their lives, like say losing their mothers young, but I am specifically referring to people saying John and Paul should be analysed with the assumption of this symmetry existing, which feels like a limiting way of looking at real people.

That being said, I'm not sure how much engaging with RPF as such affects this sort of attitude. To some extent, we are all always trying to make sense of reality through narrative, but I'm not sure how aware of it people are.

With all that in mind,

I think RPF is a very cool way to express and explore thoughts related to the history (and, at least in my case, engage in discourse about the history as well as the fandom itself) that don't need to be fact-checked whilst being contained in an explicitly fictional realm. I also think that a lot of speculation people engage in about celebrities is actually kind of akin to fanfic and I sort of prefer the fact that RPF is upfront about its fictionality.

I like thinking about what RPF has in common with things like biopics and how it diverges from them, its strange but existing relationship with the concept of "truth" (which I think is somewhat distinct from the concept of "factualness"). I'm fascinated by adaption in general; I find the process of systematically pruning, supplementing and molding historical reality until it takes the shape of a narrative deeply interesting, and even when I don't love the product, I think there's meaning to be derived in understanding how we got from point A to B.

Living for the city

By a stroke of luck I caught the second episode of BBC2’s ‘Welcome to Lagos’ last night, and it was just as fascinating as the first. Last week the focus was on born-and-bred city people, but this time the thousands who migrate from Nigeria’s countryside to live in the city’s slums were in the spotlight. In the same way that the first episode looked at life on the rubbish dump, the lives of various people living in the slum of Makoko, built on stilts over the massive Lagos Lagoon, were examined. Chief among the many characters was Chubey – fisherman, entrepeneur, father of 18 children and master of the weekly Lotto, who served a linchpin for the other stories to revolve around. Highly intelligent, with plenty of what we Irish call ‘cop-on’, Chubey nevertheless was a firm believer in traditional sorcery and remedies, wearing what appeared to be a bird’s head around his neck and arranging for his son to receive an elaborate cleansing ceremony when he started running with a bad crowd. It’s not just rural ignorance that causes people to cling to such remedies – as Chubey revealed when he stated ‘We don’t have gates and guards like the rich men in the city, so we use our own protection’ – it’s also about asserting identity in a city where the haves and have-nots look at each other across such a vast chasm. Racial identity is also maintained through these practices – many people spoke of how traditional medicine was a uniquely black way of doing things, distinct and separate from the ways of white people. Makoko is like a slum Venice, made up out of thousands of small wooden huts supported on stilts sunk into the thick black sand of the lagoon bed. Inhabitants get around on small rowboats, often perilously overloaded with people, logs, sand, bricks and other bits and pieces. The presenter (refreshingly always behind the camera) astutely noted how ancient and modern coexist almost seamlessly in this place – the few medical centres provide antibiotics and tree-bark potion, everybody has a mobile phone but the primary method of disseminating information is still word-of-mouth. The patchy-to-nonexistent levels of service provided to the inhabitants was revealed by two deaths by electrocution of saw operators in the slum’s largest business, the Ebute Metta timber yard. Worn cables and a lack of protective gloves meant that even touching the wrong part of the wire connecting the huge electric saws to the power source led to instant death for two unlucky employees. The workers formed a makeshift union and demanded rubber shoes and gloves for safety, which appear to have eventually been provided. Also working at the mill were two boys of about eleven, who had left their rural villages behind and were saving to return home and build a house. How realistic their ambitions were remains to be seen. But as Chubey pointed out ‘If you come to Lagos and don’t have sense, you will get sense very quickly. You will never leave Lagos without getting sense.’ One person who seemed to be lacking in sense was Chubey’s teenage son Payo, who, as Chubey put it ‘is only good at going out’. Despite the traditional ceremony, he continued on his no-good-nik ways until eventually he was thrown out of the family home, along with his mattress and few belongings. Teenagers everywhere fall out with their parents and run away from home, but I don’t envy Payo trying to negotiate a life alone in Lagos’ slums. He maintained ‘I refuse to beg him [Chubey]’ but a few weeks out in the world might make him rethink his stubbornness. Female voices have been fairly absent from the series so far, probably due to to the fact that the central characters tend to be family patriarchs who would be unlikely to allow their wives (seemingly plural in Chubey’s case at least) and daughters to speak alone to the camera team. However the women of the slum were noisily present in most scenes last night, even if we didn’t get to find out much about their thoughts on life. One charged into the sawmill when she heard of the second electrocution, clutching an empty bottle of schnapps and roaring about how God had forsaken them. Meanwhile a couple of concerned sisterly types tried to persuade Payo to apologise to his father, but to no avail. Chubey – who despite his rather aggressively irascible manner, seemd fundamentally decent – eventually won the equivalent of £54 on the state Lotto, and the programme ended with his entire (and extensive) family celebrating. Another man, Paul, saved up enough money from his work at the timber yard to buy his own tiny home. Their ebullience and repeated assertions that money was making them extremely happy shows yet again that the bizarre mental trickery involved in separating money from a certain level of contentment is an invention of the affluent West. Again this super series provides a humanist, unpatronising view into the lives of people inhabiting a confusing, dreadful, fascinating and thoroughly modern city. I look forward to the next episode!

"He looks around, around

He sees angels in the architecture

Spinning in infinity"

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John Lennon & Paul McCartney on the set of television special The Music of Lennon & McCartney at Granada Studios in Manchester, England | 1 November 1965

I need you all to stop what you’re doing and look at these pictures of George and Ringo

The city of memories: Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria

If one of the novels in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet were submitted to a publisher today, it probably wouldn’t make it past the receptionist. A great, sprawling meditation on the tangled loves and confusing lives of a group of wealthy, privileged eccentrics living in 1930s Alexandria, the two I’ve read (Balthazar and Justine) break just about every rule in the creative writing book. The plot, as much as there is one, meanders aimlessly, all the characters speak in an identical voice that exactly mirrors that of the narrator, the prose is laden with archaic terms and classical allusions, and the mood of relentless intensity never lets up. Yet the novels are captivating in a way other, better-written books are not, because even though they present us with one writer’s idiosyncratic version of reality, that reality is presented with utter conviction and sincerity. Durrell himself was fully aware of what he was doing, as the note at the beginning of Balthazar reveals. In it, he explains that ‘modern literature offers no Unities, so I have turned to science and am trying to complete a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition. Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix recipe of a continuum. These four novels follow this pattern.’ In the postmodern age, such grandiose ambition might seem incredible, but Durrell was not being an egomaniac – he was simply following the themes of early 20th century modernism, in all its forms, when many still believed that art and literature could change the world. He acknowledges himself the outdatedness of his ambition, even as early as the 1950s (Balthazar was published in 1957): ‘These considerations sound perhaps somewhat immodest or even pompous. But it would be worth trying an experiment’ I have always found that the greatest artists are the ones who succeed in drawing you absolutely into their world, who weave such a compelling spell with words or music or images that even the flaws in the work become an essential part of it. Other great artists can present you with a perfectly achieved idea or object, to be consumed in the exact moment it is seen in and executed with the flawless precision that comes from years of work. Paul Klee, Philip Larkin and Stevie Wonder are examples of this kind of artist, and they and their kind are essential and great. But there is an especial wonder in being drawn into a fully realised artistic world, and it take a very different kind of artist to do that – the kind that writes a four-volume novel about one city and a few of its inhabitants. Evoking place is a key obsession for many novelists, and Durrell succeeds magnificently. Alexandria – a long-disappeared Alexandria – seems to breath from the page as he lovingly describes the moods of its harbour waters, the smell of the streets, the faces of diplomats, policemen, Bedouin and barbers, the wind swelling the curtains of the narrator’s tiny room, the sweep of coast and silent deserts outside the city walls. The characters live vividly, even though they all speak in the narrator’s voice – in fact that is part of the spell, as the quartet is telling the story of one man’s experience of a place and time. Wordy, humourless and intense, the characters should be insufferable, but Durrell’s longing eye lights on a hundred and one idiosyncracies and tiny mysteries that makes them all live and makes you care what will become of them. I say ‘longing’ because though the central theme of the quartet may seem to be the course of a love affair, in fact it is about memory and the almost painful longing that writers have to preserve long-distant times and feelings in prose that will bring it all back to life, rather than condemning it to a dry death on the page. Many times throughout the books the narrator makes reference to the continual struggle of the artist to catch a place and a time, and the act of love required to hold that form permanently. It’s love that inspires this kind of writing, not just romantic love, but love of existence. The unequal city with its countless tales of poverty, misfortune and unhappiness is presented with a loving eye that doesn’t want any part of it to be forgotten. It’s this loving capture of a personal version of reality which brings the work of Henry Miller to mind. Durrell greatly admired Miller, but though they shared the same all-encompassing eye Miller’s approach was much more rough-and-ready, not just in his sexual explicitness, but in his harsher assessments of the people around him. However, in Tropic of Capricorn, he evokes New York in the early 1920s with the same vividness that Durrell does Alexandria, taking the same joy in every beautiful and hideous aspect of the city. This is the great value of fiction – when written by a person consumed with longing for a place and time, it gives us a kind of completeness of vision that could never be provided by a straight-up factual account. We read non-fiction to find ways to change the wrongness of the world, we read fiction to balance that quest and find a fully realised version of reality. Much of this is a matter of taste – plenty would find Durrell’s intensity impossible to read, and there’s no denying that the novels have pretentious passages. The focus on the lives of the rich and idle, and their various hangers-on, is not exactly all-encompassing, even though just about every part of Alexandrian society features in some way. But if Durrell had ever adapted any of his content to suit a greater number of readers, or provide a more fully-rounded version of the story, the spell would immediately have been broken, because the sincerity would be gone. For any who do start the novels and find the first few pages heavy going, my advice would be to give it time to work its magic. As a postscript, I generally am not very interested in books about fading aristocracy – ‘Big House’ novels leave me cold – but between this quartet and the wonderful, little-known novel Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali I have developed a compulsive fascination with the former aristocracy of Egypt: the French-speaking Coptic community. Perhaps the heterogenuity of the world they lived in, as opposed to that of the aristocracy of England and Ireland, has something to do with it.

Too good to be true?

The Riace Bronzes

A recent episode of the Bettany Hughes series, The Ancient World, entitled ‘Athens: The Truth About Democracy’, covered the history and development of that unprecedented experiment in direct, representational democracy in 5th-century Athens. As expected, the show covered the astonishing achievements the Greeks made in art, drama and philosophy. Interestingly, Hughes pointed out that these achievements actually coincided with the period in which pure democracy was beginning to decline, eroded by the dominance of Pericles and the dragged-out nightmare of the Peloponnesian War.

Among the most notable achievements was the abrupt evolution of Greek sculpture from the stiff, Egyptian-like figures of the kouroi to the astonishing dynamism and realism of the Discobolus and the Riace Bronzes. The suddenness of this evolution and the perfection of the resulting art seems to be in keeping with the rest of the ‘Greek Achievement’, but an English sculptor has a different theory. Nigel Konstam, interviewed by Hughes in the programme, thinks that the lifelikeness of these sculptures is just that – namely that they were made using plaster casts of live models. He demonstrated how this could be done in his workshop, where a number of sculptors smeared plaster over a carefully positioned, suitably muscled male model.

Konstam didn’t stop there, though. His ultimate piece of evidence was the soles of some of the Riace sculpture’s feet. The underside of the sculpted toes and soles are flattened at exactly the same point a live standing model’s would be – a detail unnecessary for verisimilitude, since the soles are invisible. It’s a persuasive argument, though it could just as easily be argued that Greek sculptors paid the same attention to detail on the invisible as the visible in their work. A more convincing proof for the argument came to me as I looked at the images of various statues, something that has often occurred to me while looking at Greek sculpture – namely, that the heads and bodies often seem notably different to each other., Even when the proportions are perfect, as they usually are, the bodies are so life-like as to seem to be breathing, while the faces are oddly generic – both male and female faces have the same long noses, pursed lips and round cheeks (incidentally the young Elvis had a perfectly ‘Greek’ face). It’s less conclusive than the soles-of-the-feet evidence, but this disparity strongly indicates, from an aesthetic point of view at least, that models with perfect bodies were used as moulds for both male and female Greek sculptures, while the faces were created from imagination. It’s not implausible that such ripped torsos would be plentiful among Athenian citizens – soldiers in the triremes spent up to 8 hours a day solidly rowing.

If true, this theory rather takes away from the idea that the Greeks were innovators in sculpture, but the thought doesn’t bother me. Their myriad achievements in just about every other field more than make up for it.

hi pope leo can u drop the skincare routine pls

Half Agony, Half Hope

A canon-divergent AU, inspired by Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

In the summer of 1959, Paul’s life is perfect. He has his music, his new band, and his first true love; his song-writing partner, his best friend. John. But then autumn comes, and Paul’s dad convinces him that his dreams are nothing but a foolish fantasy, and that he needs to grow up, get a real job, a real life. Five years later, John is an international music sensation, his band taking the world by storm. And Paul? Paul is exactly where John left him, working a dead-end job, no family, no prospects, no life. And then one day, John comes back to town…

The playlist (further suggestions welcome)…

And the theme song for chapter 1...