Donald's Blog

  This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there.

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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever, and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc. to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.

 

May 29, 2018

The Times Literary Supplement

I've been reading the weekly Times Literary Supplement, founded in 1902, for nearly 50 years, turned onto it by my then father-in-law in Washington DC. I still remember the first issue that didn't have the table of contents on the cover, in 1974: instead it was an exploded drawing of a motorcycle, noting the publication of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance. The weekly has been changing more lately, and now I see why.

The new editor for a couple of years has been Stig Abell, who has just been profiled in the New York Times. He was recruited from The Sun, the rather nasty tabloid that used to be famous for photos of big boobs on page 3. He was nominated for the new job by Rebekah Brooks, who had been the editor of the gossip tabloid News Of The World when it had to be closed after it had hacked the cellphone of a missing teenager who turned out to have been murdered. Brooks escaped going to jail when a jury believed her protestation of ignorance, and is now CEO of Rupert Murdoch's News UK. (Yes, Murdoch owns the TLS, but has pretty much left it alone, so far.)

Stig is a nickname from a children's novel. As the profile in the NYT pointed out, it would be difficult to imagine our Stig in tweeds. He is one of those youngish men who appears fashionable by pretending that he can't afford to buy a razor. I do not know whether he is covered with tattoos or wears a baseball cap backwards, but he has a double first in English from Oxford University. I suppose he can be best understood as a symbol of how everything is changing around us.

I used to read almost everything in the TLS; I often drew the line at philosophy, which can make my eyes glaze over. Nowadays I notice more reviews of books about pop music, er, I mean rock. In a recent issue the lead review covered three books about mothers and motherhood, right around the time of Mother's Day ("Mothering Sunday" in Britain). I confess that I only skimmed it. But I still find a lot to read in the paper, and, well, let's face it, of my favorites, Eric Korn is long gone, and Hugo Williams is almost as old as I am. (NB or J.C. on the back cover, whoever he is, is still as feisty as ever.) And Stig must be doing something right: it is still high-class as literary papers go, and to my surprise it is said to be the fastest-growing weekly in Britain. I guess I'll stick with it for now.