Digital Weekly Digest #5
Caught on the Net 27.xi.23 - 01.xii.23
Mythical: Shane MacGowan
Shane MacGowan: the poet-musician of dereliction who became a mythical figure (Guardian)
He never set himself up as a poet of the working class: what he wrote about, again and again, was a kind of underclass of outcasts (“the junkies, the drunks, the pimps, the whores”, as The Boys from the County Hell put it), a subsection of society in which people from all walks of life can end up.
I am old enough to remember Shane MacGowan’s fist appearance in the inky columns of the New Musical Express. It was a review of a Clash gig and Shane was pictured in the audience, literally getting his ear chewed off by an over enthusiastic friend.
It was the kind of incident we came to expect from him - funny, daft, and chaotic all at once. But the songs he wrote were of a different order. As the linked piece from Alex Petridis points out, MacGowan’s songs for The Pogues were about not Ireland but London - dismal backstreets, dirty pubs, unforgiving mornings.
MacGowan died on the same day as Henry Kissinger (and Alistair Darling, former chancellor of he exchequer) which reminded me that Aldous Huxley checked out on the same day as JFK was assassinated. Few noticed. It’s all about the timing.
A friend sent me a text: “I shall remember Shane fondly. Kissinger not so much.”
The End of Histor (Substack)
In short: either there was some utterly wild disparity in the way different races were hit by the bubonic plague in London - or maybe the researchers aren’t identifying what they think they’re identifying. I rather suspect the latter.
Ian Leslie unearths some smelly practices around the medieval plague and its purported toll on black women living in London. Bad history is a sign of shoddy thinking. It does no-one any good.
Christmas tree “abomination” (Daily Mirror)
One person said: “Brighton doesn’t seem to know how to celebrate Christmas, or it doesn’t care, almost avoiding the occasion. It chose not to have a Christmas market this year. Missed a trick there financially and getting into the mood, and its decorations are the same recycled vacant slogans they use each year.
There’s always a row over the Christmas tree. Authentic needles all over the floor? No! Fake glittery apology stuck on the bookcase? Again, no!
My home town has got into the festive mood early with a decision that will please no-one. Top marks.
The 25 most influential women of 2023 (Financial Times)
This special project was assembled, over several months, in consultation with hundreds of FT journalists across dozens of bureaux, our readers and industry leaders. The end result is a list filled with women who have received prestigious accolades, but even Nobel Prizes, Pulitzers, Grammys and World Cups fail to fully capture the multi-faceted nature of their work.
What do you mean you’ve never heard of half of ‘em? Shame on you. Now you have.