John Phipps
@John__Phipps
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Contributing Writer @1843magazine
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This spring, an awful ghost appeared to me by night and told me about a copy of Hamlet that is secretly passed down from one great actor to the next. But before I had time to cry, “thrift, Horatio!”, it had disappeared. By then I was sworn. My piece:
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There’s nothing museums like more than having a BIG entrance that is CLEARLY THE ENTRANCE and which you absolutely cannot use to enter the museum any more
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Interesting: a new and inexplicable folk belief appears to have emerged among Americans that being in Europe makes you somehow dehydrated
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This happened to a friend of mine called Fergus, whose flatmate spent months secretly photographing himself dressed up in Ferg’s clothes, sitting in his favoured positions, reading his favourite books etc. for a massive collage project called "Being Fergus"
I’m glad I didn’t go to art school… I would hate to find out at the end of the year that someone’s thesis project was me
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It Happened To Me: I asked an old man for directions in the Irish countryside and he said 'well, I wouldn't start from here'
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You make the best of life in Britain. You go on a little weekend break, you sightsee in your own city, you even realise that hey, it’s got a lot going for it. And the hot second you get to Europe you realise you hail from a land God has abandoned
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It's genuinely impossible to tell what form of infrastructure or product—belief system perhaps?—is supposedly lacking in ‘Europe’ that means everyone is dehydrated here
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‘How good can his gull impression really be?’ I thought to myself. Then he changed my world entirely
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If someone can patiently explain to me what the complaint is here I promise I will listen politely and won't immediately write back ‘that’s fucking ridiculous’ :)
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The insert photos of his preferred brand of rolling tobacco were a particularly hard own
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My own admittedly biased view is that you should give trusted writers freedom and who cares if the story actually matters. My favourite piece I read this year was an 8,000-word GQ article from the 80s about walking through France to find the world's greatest breakfast wine
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Gonna go stand by the school gates and tearfully shove packs of cigs through like those mums on Jamie's School Dinners
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Imagine going to see Guernica and you hear beside you the tap of a cuban heel, the rustle and click of desiccated fingers, the dry smacking of lips, an all round agitated shuffling, the quiet sound of 'hoo! hoo!'. "surely not", you think to yourself, "there's no way"
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Replies to this is 1500 people saying “Americans can’t walk” and 500 people saying “no water in Europe” and one sole guy punking my ass with stats showing Europeans are way more dehydrated than Americans
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Fred Astaire really nailed it with the location and timing of his birth. ‘Goofy guy who is incredible at tap dancing’ would have been a complete wash at any other point in global human history
Eleanor Powell & Fred Astaire performing the "Jukebox Dance" in BROADWAY MELODY OF 1940 (1940) dir. Norman Taurog
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Last year, uncertain of someone’s religion, I closed an email with a tentative ‘happy holidays.’ The reply was signed ‘With every blessing for the remaining twelve days of Christmas and the remainder of our preparations for His coming.’
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this video of a man making a ham sandwich is the single greatest thing I've ever seen
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beautiful moment in Pretty Woman where Richard Gere's character reads to Julia Roberts from a book called 'Shakespeare Quotations'
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Reading ‘Mating’, by Norman Rush and really wondering why anyone talks about anything else, why everyone isn't always talking about this book, why we have not raised great statues of Rush and/or the unnamed protagonist in our parks and squares etc.
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After I published on le Carré someone sweetly DM’d to ask if I'd read this piece on George Smiley’s marriage. Wrote back saying yes, I know the piece, I think it’s very brilliant, as it happens I'm getting married to its author in about three months time
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some days you wake up slow, anxious, stupid, wretched, weary. but why? for little more than the victimless crime of drinking 100 beers?
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Calling out to the UK’s vibrant early modern community: if you were approached to write Boris Johnson’s book for him last year, or know who was, please DM or email me jp
@the
-fence.com.
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I met Dickie Bird at Scarborough when I was a cricket-mad eleven year old with long ginger curtains. We talked for twenty minutes about the ongoing 05 ashes. Happiest moment of my life. Then he said to my dad, ‘This little girl knows a lot about cricket!’ Wrecked.
“It's been really hard. I'll tell you now mate, it's been really hard.”
Yorkshire icon Dickie Bird has been shielding on his own for the last year.
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@richmondie
I didn’t think - but of course you’re right. I wonder if also they now need more cloakrooms, toilets etc. than those grand entrances can really provide…
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I sometimes think of this as the accessibility trap, whereby professionals with no conception of what makes their subject remote attempt to cosplay as people first encountering it. The near-inevitable result is that the subject becomes more distant and inapproachable than it was.
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This is such an amazing thing for the CEO of a newspaper to say
Journalism is the "secret sauce" at the heart of a successful online business says The Independent's CEO Christian Broughton
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Oh so we’re just uncritically reprinting everything the coronavirus says now are we? Sorry: this isn’t how good journalism works.
Coronavirus: 'People need to pull together in hard times'
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The latest from Italy: the country is now home to a population of 3,300 wolves; picnics are banned in northern Rome due to a wild boar infestation and a man in Florence called the police on a coffee shop after they charged him €2 for an espresso. More as we get it.
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In Xinjiang, a million people have been interned. In London, a tiny community of exiles endures in fear and silence.
My long read on London’s Uyghurs and the long arm of Beijing is out now for
@1843
.
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I wrote about why I love In Our Time
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Definitive, comprehensive and independently verified London vs New York entry in the latest edition of
@The_Fence_Mag
newsletter
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at parties don't forget to tell people that whatever they're talking about is inextricably bound up with power. say 'we shouldn't forget that this is a fundamentally political question'. people love to hear this they think it's incredible
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Watching denialist trolls deliberately target and detail Xinjiang experts, academics and those Uyghurs brave enough to speak out on here is appalling. But my sense remains that the real enemy is public apathy and unconcern
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Thing about the Blair era is men didn’t have beards. Jarvis Cocker didn’t have a beard. Liam/Noel Gallagher didn’t. Tim Henman, canoe man, Charles Ingram, Julian Barratt didn’t. Even Phil Jupitus didn’t have a beard. Abu Hamza yes but Paxman no. Generally speaking: no beards
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[looking at my family’s seven baying Irish wolfhounds as they rampage round the living room]: “Honey, I’ve just had a brilliant idea for something to hang on that bare patch of wall”
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For this week's
@spectator
I wrote about the greatest podcast of them all: Ulysses, by James Joyce
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For decades, the RNLI lifeboat station at Dungeness was a source of local pride in a tiny, conservative fishing village. Today, its unpaid volunteers are on the front line of a global policy crisis and national culture war. My long read for
@1843mag
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the most important skill in criticism is not being able to separate the art from the artist. It's being able to separate your opinion of the art from your opinion of someone annoying who likes the art.
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It seems as good a time as any to say that last week I was made a contributing writer at
@1843mag
.
I couldn’t be more excited about this opportunity. I'll be writing in-depth, reported stories about our extraordinary world. Contact me if you want to tell yours.
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America's cats are killing 365 million birds per year. And no one is talking about it
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In an admittedly massive coup for me last week I married the renowned genius, great beauty and one-woman charm explosion Rosa Lyster
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I take a very strong materialist line on this: the reason British writers are obsessed with the NYer, NYT etc. is because they pay up to 10 times what a good UK newspaper does
If there were not so much else going on to alarm and occupy one there is something long and scientific to be written about the wild British media/pundit obsession with the NYT.
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I don’t envy the wretched Gollum much, but to be able to caper and wriggle in such lithe circles … that I wish
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Some people replying to this saying smoking is neither cool nor fun. Unfortunately, this photo of my granny celebrating the end of rationing by lighting a cigarette with her ration book begs to differ
Articles like this use highly unrealistic images of smoking being uncool, depressing and dirty. In fact, it’s cool and fun.
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Have never been prone to hyperbole so you must believe me when I say watching the new top gun last night at an open air cinema where they let you smoke and drink your own beer was the greatest cultural experience of my life
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The pandemic now well into the stage where most people go about their lives much as they ever did, but a tone-policing minority make it difficult to write about that honestly. In this respect it has come to resemble almost everything else in contemporary culture
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This is a brilliant opening paragraph
In 1632, British mathematician William Oughtred decried the slide rule, saying it required no actual thinking and turned students into mere "doers of tricks [and] jugllers." Surprisingly, he helped invent the thing. Here's me on the history of calculators:
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This 4/10 tweet has been read by more people than anything else I’ve ever written
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The retired man called Laurence Fox who lives in Bermuda and keeps getting @'d in the culture wars: an appreciation thread
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Hello: if you are the person who found a lost wallet earlier, and then went out of your way to hand-deliver it to my parents' address that same day, please get in contact with me as I would like to give you a finder's reward and buy you a fucking massive bunch of flowers
Wallet gone. Press card, debit card, driver’s license. Lifted, dropped, left behind. Don’t know. Vanished into thin air. Walking around Victoria shouting ‘fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’
My wallet! Fuck!
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Creeps are complaining about Rothko again so here's something I wrote about what it's like to stand in front of Rothko's paintings
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Throwing my enormous, black, rakishly worn hat into the ring for the
@FT
to say that Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell’s new book on John Donne, is a total banger
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In 2021, a friend wrote saying he was having a medical catastrophe and didn’t know if he'd make it.
He said he'd been taking finasteride, a baldness drug that thousands of men say has caused them devastating side effects.
This is my friend’s story:
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As a long-time member of the Labour party, I’m deeply and bitterly disappointed that
@HackneyAbbott
, a politician I admire, has chosen to speak with the vile, denialist clique Qiao collective. Below is their summary of the situation in Xinjiang, where 1 in 10 Uyghurs are interned
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26 today, and remembering last year when a friend said 'The problem with being 25 is you can't back out now. You've invested too much. It would just be embarrassing.'
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That bizarre drivel aside, my favourite weird reaction to the Zone of Interest is still this somehow extremely off quote from Steven Spielberg
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I’ve been wanting to say this for a very long time and the time has come: literally all of you care way too much about what actors do in their personal lives
léa seydoux showing a picture of paul mescal and phoebe bridgers on her phone to her godfather christian louboutin and dita von teese will never NOT be funny
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At a dinner party this weekend people were talking about their favourite songs and a friend said "I absolutely love Boko Haram". Situation was finally clarified when he started singing the opening lines of "A Whiter Shade of Pale"
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OK: Who are the Uyghurs and what's happening to them?
I've heard a lot about these people, but I don't know where to begin. What should I read?
Start with
@benmauk
's astonishing oral history of the camps, where about 1 in 10 Uyghurs are interned.
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Thinking today about Hugh Sexey, whose fortune was used to found Sexey’s Hospital, Sexey’s School and Hugh Sexey Middle School
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on Friday a friend of mine said he’d been watching a lot of Chilean cinema and another friend said “I love Chilean cinema, especially that Chilean Murphy they have now”
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I like the way Jane Austen begins all her novels with like, a very clear review of the family’s property portfolio and income
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A year and four days ago I walked into a restaurant in Walthamstow and did my first interview for what i imagined would be a short piece. Fifty interviews, hundreds of hours of work and one viral pandemic later, I can finally say that piece will be published tomorrow.
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Interesting news from the world of bullying: a trend in France of children getting bullied for having been born in the year 2010. Feels like a very avant-garde, conceptually dense direction to have taken – but I'm keen to find out more
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If you liked this tweet about minor cultural differences maybe you will like the article about rare drug side effects that I worked on for almost three years?
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The last cigarette i ever smoked was given to me by a very old french woman. ‘Eet iz poison, pure poison,’ she told me as she handed it over. But she was wrong: it was a delicious treat, and that's just one of the reasons why I'm still smoking today
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Very into this new thing where covid just goes away and no one knows why
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I went to Handforth to find out what the protracted, fiery death of the Handforth Parish Council could tell us about England. Short answer: more than you would hope.
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No more takes, normal opinions only from now on. A really good rom-com is a rare delight. Walking places is a good way to improve your mood. It's lovely to spend time with nature. The music of Mozart is beautiful. That first sip of coffee in the morning? You can't beat it.
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Really really struggling to put into words my surprise and delight and bewilderment here, but I’ve been nominated for an Ellie award in the reporting category, for this piece I did with
@1843mag
on London’s Uyghur community
Ellies 2021:
@1843mag
nominated in Reporting category for “‘If I Speak Out, They Will Torture My Family’: Voices of Uyghurs in Exile,” by
@John__Phipps
#ellies
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If you think you can out-imagine an excited young child looking at a knight, frankly you're insane. Your job is to provide *access* – to help them see what's in the thing. That goes for adults too, in all honesty
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Often find myself remembering the August 2019 Fate-Tempting Special Issue of the LRB
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Absolutely smartest thing you can do with a work of art is relate it to capitalism. Doesn’t matter how. That’s the top smart thing that people do. If you wanna be a writer but can’t do that - forget it baby
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Cool art things I saw in Italy: a thread
1.) At the Brion Tomb, this lavish detail, a strip of concrete gilded with gold
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You can’t smoke in the British library courtyard anymore. Not a problem for those of us who prefer to light up in the rare books room, but sad for people who like a breath of fresh air with their cig
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The Italians’ sense of their own elect capabilities gives them the power to create uniquely terrible food. I have not stopped thinking about this ‘piatto hamburger’ since I ate it this August. An oulipo order, completely detached from external reality, referring only to itself
i thought when we go to another person’s country and laugh at their food it’s called racism. and yet it seems to be ok if that country is italy and the restaurant has a michelin star. let’s just call this what is is: anti-italian discrimination
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@BrandyLJensen
When Charles II came back, parliament's speech to him referred to this – the civil wars and his father's execution – as a time when ‘through mistakes and misunderstandings, many inconveniences were produced, which were not intended’
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What i'm saying is who will publish my 24,000 word follow up, Breakfast Wine boogaloo: the odyssey continues
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Live your life with the reckless optimism and confidence of David Baddiel microwaving his glasses to see if that will fix them
The arm broke off my glasses. I tried supergluing it back on. That made it worse. I put them in the microwave to try and melt the superglue off. They caught fire. Wondering if I need some kind of sponsor I could call before making most of my decisions in life.
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I'm reading Persuasion, by Jane Austen. Wow! What a book. She really knew how to do it, that Jane Austen. Whatever ‘it’ is, she had it in spades and that's my view as a critic and student of English letters and when i tell you that for free you can quote me on it let me tell you
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The age of building is over… the age of digging has come
Pensioner, 71, plunges 130ft to his death down hole he dug under his kitchen floor after dreaming gold was buried beneath his house in Brazil
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Esther McVey is right. To attempt to destroy this beautiful picture of the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst—depicted here as a reclining nude attended by Cupid in her sumptuous boudoir—shows a complete lack of respect for Britain’s heritage. Vandals and hooligans indeed.
Vandalism plain & simple.
How dare these criminals storm our National Gallery & use hammers to smash a painting depicting the Suffragette movement pretending to be raising concerns about the environment - call them out for what they are - vandals & hooligans.
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Have been happily conversing for months with my Italian teacher, a Sicilian woman, asking her how the weather is where she is, commiserating about Sicilian roads, asking how Covid is in Sicily, if she's locked down right now, etc. Today I found out she lives in Manchester.
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can't stop laughing about Knausgaard's dispirited signature in this signed copy of the new novel
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Lunch with granny yesterday. She asked how well I spoke Italian. I said ‘well enough to chat to someone in a bar but not well enough to be funny’. She peered at me curiously and said, after a pause, ‘*are* you funny?'
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Publishers! I'm currently working on a book – part memoir, part self-help – about how cooking for my pet crow while I walked the length of Britain after a bereavement cured me of my mental health issues. Based on a blog, the book includes recipes. Bidding starts at £1 kajillion!
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This bit of Nora Ephron is my favourite anecdote in the genre of ‘a great thing my writing teacher taught me’
My writing teacher at Harvard told me to be less pretentious and stop using semicolons.
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For
@BritishGQ
I profiled how Tarantino writes: how he turns illegible 500 page drafts into screenplays, scrapbooks Pauline Kael, works constantly on unpublished critical essays and about his novel of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. Also the feet thing.
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The literary presses are too cowardly to commission my essay on the state of the novel where I deftly interweave stories from my dating life with lists of novels before zeroing in on the real root problem: late capitalism
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