Unpublishing continues apace

Plus, Kate Winslet in lesbian sex scenes

Just a round of quick links for this Monday:

A hilariously Canada-less The Rest is History episode on the Wild West. “It’s just too boring to pay attention to,” is how Tom Holland almost puts it. Somebody on Twitter asked for recommendations of history of Canada books: what would you have recommended? I have a lot of favourites but they are about segments; I can’t think of anything that looks at the whole thing that would be a stellar read. Somebody suggested Pierre Berton to the original tweeter. Any other ideas?

Heather Mason is an advocate for women in prisons, and a former inmate herself. She has been speaking out about the transfer of male convicts who declare themselves trans women to women’s prisons. A paper called Kitchener Today covered her advocacy, then buckled under massive social media pressure and accusations of ‘transphobia’ and unpublished its own piece. The normalization of unpublishing and memory-holing is proceeding apace. I’ll write about this more, but I can already spot at least two positions which until a minute ago were part of the national conversation but will now get you the mother of all pile-ons and if your editors don’t have your back unpublished within 24 hours.

I was prepared to dislike Ammonite, a fictionalized bio pic of the pioneer paleontologist Mary Anning which turns her into a very lesbian lesbian. It received a bunch of huffy reviews (“cold as the Lyme Regis coast it was filmed on! cold as a fossil!” etc etc) but having seen it I’m now ready to fight for it. The unfortunate thing about it is that it’ll remind everyone of Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. But here is my theory: the critics are now nasty about this film as a way of belatedly being critical about Portrait. Every-freaking-body with a publishing platform adored Portrait, and I’m realizing now this was because it allowed us to practice our education. Oohh, ‘male gaze in cinema’! The myth of Orpheus! The neglected women painters! The music of the ottocento! But good lord, that was a heck of a cold cold film, and we didn’t want to admit it. It even chickened out of sex scenes; the two women in this innovatively told love story just kind of talk a lot, look at each other a lot, analyze what they see, reminisce, and erm… hang out in bed? These days, I’d rather take the grit of Ammonite over the leisurely aristocratic lady and her lady painter. It could be that what irritates me is that Portrait is excessively rosy about the class differences between the principals, whereas Ammonite is more realistic? Maybe it’s that Winslet’s age is practically mine and I like seeing the freely aging Gen-X actresses in excellent roles? (The two actresses of the Portrait are Millennial sex kittens.) Ammonite even has Fiona Shaw as Mary’s older ex, and the script does not conveniently remove the mother from the story, as Portrait does. Then there are the sex scenes. In this Samira Ahmed interview Winslet says that since it was a low budget indie, there was no intimacy coach on staff in Ammonite, so “the two of us figured it out among ourselves”.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk on the superiority of Ammonite vs Portrait. Till next one -

LP