Dominic Green

It was that philosopher of modern life Iggy Pop who first noticed that the screens were watching us. ‘See that cat, down on her back?’ Mr Pop reflected thoughtfully on the Stooges’ Funhouse album of 1970. ‘She got a TV Eye on me.’ These days the ‘TV Eye’ is on all of us. Black Mirror, back on Netflix for its fifth series, is what Stooges guitarist Ron Ashton would have recognized as an extended riff on the same theme. Except that while Mr Pop found the experience quite pleasant— ‘Yeah I love her so’ — it’s hard to enjoy Black Mirror. To be fair, that might not be the point of it. We aren’t here to enjoy ourselves. Iggy Pop’s signature move is to drop his pants at the end of the show.

Tolstoy tried to write a history of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, but found that his story required the broader canvas of fiction. We like to think that fiction emerges from reality, and that a novel, which is as much as species of hallucination as it is a social document, might retain enough of its physicality to be, as we say of War and Peace,’realist’. But the traffic between fiction and reality goes in both directions. ‘What force moves the nations?’ Tolstoy asked in the philosophical coda that, returning fiction to history, he added to the end of War and Peace. The discipline of history, its reliance on facts, was at the heart of the Enlightenment.

If they asked me, I could write a book about Dr John, who died on Thursday aged 77. He was a sideman, a showman, a kind of performance artist with his Dr John Creaux the Night-Tripper alter ego and the music-hall voodoo of songs like ‘Walk on Gilded Splinters’, a songwriter but, above all, a piano player whose every phrase could only have come from his native New Orleans. In 1956, when he was 14 and still Malcolm John Rebennack, Jr. the son of an appliance vendor who fixed record players and sold records, Dr John met Professor Longhair, who was no longer Henry Royland Byrd and who had developed a piano style which combined a rolling, rhumba-influenced left hand with a flamboyant, bluesy right hand.

If Oscar Wilde were on Twitter, he might note that the only fate worse than being talked about is being canceled. Readers fortunate enough to still be dwelling on shrinking islands of civility amid the rising tide of contemporary barbarism may be forgiven for not knowing what ‘cancel culture’ is. To be canceled is to undergo the digital equivalent of people pretending that you no longer exist. Ostracism was the worst of ancient punishments, solitary confinement is the cruelest of legal modern punishments, and cancelation is the next worst thing in the lands of digitalia. Laura Loomer has been canceled. At this juncture, it may be necessary to explain who Laura Loomer is too.

About halfway through the Swedish space saga Aniara, I realized that there is no future. Or at least no alternative future for us in space. For a genre set in a distant future, space movies haven’t changed in decades. The limits of the form, and the techno-dystopian implications of the flight from reality, were mapped out in the Fifties and Sixties. The peak space movies were all made a long time ago: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (1983), and Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 (1995).

To understand the differing status of the arts in Britain and France, compare the publishers in Bridget Jones’s Diary and Olivier Assayas’s new film, Non-Fiction. In Bridget Jones’s Diary, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) is an underwear-obsessed cad who gets his comeuppance when he is beaten up by Colin Firth. In Non-Fiction, Alain Danielson ruminates philosophically about what the ‘digital transition’ means for civilization, and indulges in plenty of Cleaver-style trifling with the staff, but gets away with both. We are reminded that ‘intellectual’ is a compliment in France but a dirty word in Britain, and that sex is dirty in Britain but intellectual in France.

‘Was Shakespeare a Woman?’ Elizabeth Winkler asks in the new issue of The Atlantic. Of course he was. If you believe that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, but Francis Bacon, or Walter Raleigh, or the Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, or even Emilia Bassano Lanier, then you have succumbed to a conspiracy theory. A pity that, given the public’s increasing willingness to believe anything, and some people’s increasing willingness to publish anything, that this conspiracy theory should be promulgated in The Atlantic, a magazine with a long, albeit lately abandoned, tradition of intelligent writing on literature.

Remember hygge, the Danish art of warding off existential horror by suffocating your fear and trembling beneath a soft blanket? The cult of coziness is a Scandinavian speciality. You too would insist on marshmallows in your hot chocolate if there was a howling blizzard outside your window — in May. You too would feel like making the best of living alone with a cat and a set of matching sofa pillows if you had no choice but to live alone like Agnetha from ABBA in ‘The Winner Takes It All’. It was a Dane, Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote Fear and Trembling. This is not a novel set in a Danish dinner party, but a reflection on patriarchal authority and the uses of religious despair.