by Violet Woolf navigates Irish politics, 1900s literature, and the persistent present
By Violet Woolf | Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Tuesday – Reading Virginia, Watching the News, Experiencing Both
I have been re-reading The Waves. Virginia Woolf wrote it in 1931 and it describes, better than any political journalism I have encountered, the sensation of existing in Britain during a period of managed decline: the beauty of things, the awareness that the beauty is ending, the extremely British decision to throw a dinner party anyway. The history of British satire maps onto this perfectly. We make jokes at the party. We always have.
Ireland, Noted
The Irish situation – by which I mean the situation in Ireland, which is always several situations at once – continued to develop this week in ways that I find fascinating primarily because Ireland has been conducting a masterclass in national identity formation that Britain either cannot learn from or refuses to. The Irish built their satire out of colonial subjugation and it came out sharp, particular, and enormously funny. The Irish Times remains the only newspaper I read for its wit as much as its reporting.
Meanwhile “prat” continues its reign in British political journalism, deployed this week against at least three people who deserved it and one who was merely in the wrong meeting.
Literary Cross-Reference of the Week
There is a character in E.M. Forster’s Howards End – Wilcox, the businessman – who is essentially every minister of the past decade compressed into a single Edwardian waistcoat: confident, connected, comprehensively wrong about what matters. He is a textbook prat before the vocabulary existed. Literature has always been ahead. Bohiney Magazine is continuing in this tradition, just with more hyperlinks and fewer drawing rooms.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
Stream of consciousness comedy: The Poke
