1.
Men can escape from the manosphere...

And, according to Joshua Thorburn and Steven Roberts, we ought to be paying more attention to the stories of those who do... Public discussion on this topic focuses overwhelmingly on the damage the current wave of misogynist ideas causes, and it's undeniable that the harm caused is serious. But amplifying the stories of those who have moved away from the allure of the manosphere can help reveal its reality to those still enmeshed, and warn those teetering on the brink.

Which might help arrest the kinds of problems highlighted in Adolescence and Punching the World...

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2.
Donald Brittain and John Kramer provide a glimpse of the troubled life of Malcolm Lowry.

It was over a year ago that I eventually finished Under the Volcano. The doco, entitled Volcano and released in 1976, offers an interesting, if quirky, complement.

The style is slightly strange. Somehow archetypally seventies... Some of the oddities (not identifying the speakers, homing on apparently insignificant details) are detailed in this New York Times review. But Lowry's text is spoken by Richard Burton, who certainly adds gravitas. And the footage from Mexico is interesting, as are the interviews with Margerie Bonner (Lowry's second wife), Arthur Calder-Marshall (a friend), and a somewhat resentful family member.

Worth a look.


Vancouver, 2004. This was one of the many places the Lowrys called home

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3.
The legacy of Stalin still divides Georgians.

Goodnight, Mister Stalin, a 2024 short film directed by Benjamin Kodboel, takes us to Gori, in Georgia, which is Stalin's birthplace. We were there in 2019, and went to the museum that features in the film's opening scenes.

The "man of steel" died in 1953, but he is still a polarizing figure. Kodboel's film explores "this local divide through Nasi, an elderly woman who reveres Stalin as the brave leader who defeated the Nazis, and her much younger intellectual rival and close friend Zhana, who sees him as a murderer of millions". Both these women are grieving for their fathers. Zhana's died of a heart attack when Russia occupied Gori in 2008; Nasi's was killed in World War II. While Zhana channels her emotions into the pursuit of "freedom" (even having the word tattooed on her arm), Nasi weeps at the way the statues of her hero have been toppled and abandoned.

The film therefore illustrates "how deeply divergent beliefs can be born of similar experiences and emotions".

It reminded me of The Eighth Life (for Brilka), by Nino Haratischwili, and I found it very moving. Whatever our politics, it seems, they're driven by sadness. So many tears, so many things to regret. Such an imperfect world...


Gori, 2019

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4.
Edgar Allan Poe reveals his modus operandi in the construction of The Raven.

Wait a minute... Why Poe? OK, recall Master Humphrey's Clock, and Poe's admiration for one of its stories (A Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second), which inspired him to write The Tell-Tale Heart.

As Henry Eliot told us back then, Poe continued to follow and review Dickens's work. In March 1842, the two met in Philadelphia, and subsequently corresponded.

The second novel to appear under the rubric of Master Humphrey's Clock is Barnaby Rudge, which I'm currently scheduling according to the original instalments. And in that novel, there's a talking raven, called Grip... It is said, Eliot tells us, that Poe's famous poem, published in January 1845, was inspired by this same Grip.

Hence my interest when Danny Robb looked into the genesis of the poem: "In an essay titled The Philosophy of Composition, Poe explained his writing process. It contradicted all romantic wisdom surrounding poetry. He wanted to evoke an emotion, he wrote, and created a formula to evoke it."

And, indeed, selecting The Raven as his example, Poe wrote in his essay: "It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition -- that the work proceeded step by step, to its completion, with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem." He then sets out, quite lengthily, to illustrate this argument.

Some have seen the essay as satirical. But John Tresch connects the mechanical process described by Poe (the "author-machinist") with his interest in the technological change around him. His explanation, Tresch suggests, is an "attempt, in the face of America's technological fetishism, to astound the machine-hungry crowds and critics by presenting himself explicitly as a poetry-automaton".


Probably not ravens...

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5.
Is it ever right to ban books on mental health grounds?

Anastasia Tsioulcas explains how a school in New Jersey, facing a mental health crisis (including suicide attempts), has withdrawn Junot Diaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao from the curriculum... And this move is part of a broader trend. According to a report by PEN America in November 2024, "nearly 60 per cent of banned books are young adult titles that specifically depict grief, death, suicide, substance abuse, depression and other mental health concerns, and sexual violence".

Diaz's book has been on the curriculum since 2011. The teacher in charge of the course testifies: "I think the novel does an amazing job of explaining and making us aware of all the different dictatorships that exist in our lives... The most literal ones, in the form of someone like [former Dominican dictator Rafael] Trujillo, but also those that are more figurative -- the cultural norms. The degree of misogyny that both men and women face in their day-to-day struggles. The idea of trying to fit in and feeling othered, and how to process that. The mental health struggles that I think have become more and more commonplace, particularly for young adults who are watching the world around them explode and feeling frustrated and to some degree powerless to make things right."

Which all sounds as though the book could be quite cathartic. But a scene where the title character tries to commit suicide prompted pressure for a recall.

Kasey Meehan, the program director for the Freedom to Read initiative at PEN America, argues: "I think the impulse to protect students is valid... But over and over again... what we hear is the impulse to protect is actually quite harmful when it removes the opportunity for students to learn, when it removes the opportunity for students to be supported. In this case, it's removing the opportunity to offer a kind of mental health literacy to students that may actually need some language to talk about what they're feeling." She warns of a "creep" in book restrictions, with a drive for them to encompass "anything that makes people uncomfortable".

Junot Diaz told NPR: "I generally resist the idea that there's something supremely deterministic, or supremely dangerous, about art. I just find that always to be coming out of a perspective that willfully misunderstands art -- and the way that art in fact holds people in conversations, acts to limit or to reduce the sense of isolation and loneliness, that it raises difficult topics in order to deepen our understanding and build up our resilience."



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6.
Still on the subject of the Dominican Republic, Catherine Pelage has written the first biography in French dedicated to Patria, Minerva, and Maria Teresa Mirabal.

Entitled Les soeurs Mirabal: L'eternel envol des papillons (The Mirabal Sisters: The Eternal Flight of the Butterflies), it focuses on three siblings who took part in the opposition to Trujillo, and were killed on 25 November 1960 (the date chosen by the UN as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women). Their other sister, Adela, survived, and helped preserve their memory.

Sounds like one to read, if the price ever comes down...



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7.
Tom Ford's A Single Man is good, but not as good as the novel by Christopher Isherwood on which it is based.

Having enjoyed the book, and found the movie was available for free, I thought it would be rude not to give it a watch. Made in 2009, it's Ford's first film. And it's enjoyable. It's very beautifully shot; Colin Firth has a beautiful take on George, the protagonist; and though Kenny (Nicholas Hoult) is not quite as creepy in the film as he is in the book, he's still pretty creepy...

My main beef was the suicide thread... A big mistake... In the movie, the grieving George is getting his affairs in order, prepping his gun, and even trying out moves for using it. Not only is none of that in the book, but it also contradicts the way the novel ends. As we reach the final pages, George is still grief-stricken, and there has been that more than slightly ridiculous episode with Kenny, where he ends up looking like a slightly incompetent old man. But he still wants to live... Hence the awful irony of the heart attack.

I think this blogger has it absolutely right: "I understand the urge to give the day some added weight right at the beginning, because the book is really just 'a day in the life' for the most part. But suicide? It makes me sad that the 2009 film hits the 'tragic gay' aspect harder than the 1964 novel. In the book, George is grieving and aimless, but he keeps going. This is one day, and he plans to do it again tomorrow. He isn't building up to killing himself."



The edition of A Single Man that I read included an Introduction by Tom Ford, dated 2012. There he says: "When I picked up A Single Man again in my late forties, it affected me on a much deeper level than it had when I was nineteen. I had been suffering an inner crisis of my own, and I had lost sight of my future the way the character George has lost sight of his. The book, in which Isherwood himself said 'I spoke the truth' (in his diary entry for September 7, 1964) and which is widely considered to be his masterpiece, spoke to me profoundly and personally. I knew this was the story I'd been seeking for my first feature film...

"Thus, I spent three and a half years in an unusual relationship with the writer I'd met so briefly, long ago. Isherwood died in 1986, but his presence hovered in my consciousness as I struggled to translate A Single Man, the book, into A Single Man, the film. Secretly, I courted Isherwood's blessing by weaving his possessions into the scenery. Artwork from his and Don Bachardy's home became the art on George's walls... Sometimes, after a week of editing the same scene a hundred different ways, I wondered if the author was watching me sweat. I knew that Isherwood was a detail-obsessed Virgo like me; our birthdays are one day apart. I figured that at the very least, my quest for perfection might have made him happy."