Who is George the Poet? A few years ago, the answer to that question would have been straightforward – he’s a beloved Cambridge-educated Ugandan-British spoken word artist, whose lyrical social commentary about British life had reached such a wide audience that he was invited to read a love poem at the 2018 royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. He’s a writer and musician, born George Mpanga in 1991, whose poetry has been commissioned by the likes of Sky Sports F1, and who was offered an MBE. Today, defining Mpanga by those achievements feels problematic, largely because of how critical the 33-year-old poet is of his own rise to fame. “I got all sorts of privileges, awards, little nods, passes and pats on the back from the establishment,” he says now. “Going to Cambridge – these things are signifiers. The more I learned, the more I realised that none of it was a coincidence. Yes, I took myself to university. I made myself become a poet. But you can’t separate [my success] from its political utility to conservative interests.”
In the process of writing this profoundly life-affirming memoir, it is clear that Salman Rushdie has found his own peace. No one deserves it more. For the rest of us, though, his book should have the opposite effect. It should shake us from our complacencies. It should renew our resolve to confront and defeat the forces that led a young man to plunge a knife into an artist. Rushdie has done us a great service in writing this book. It is up to us now to heed its message.
At the start of 1900, 10 days into the new century, a 17-year-old James Joyce delivered a lecture to the Literary and Historical Society at University College Dublin. His topic: “Drama and Life.” His conclusion: that ordinary experience is sufficient to yield up the stuff of literature: “I think out of the dreary sameness of existence, a measure of dramatic life may be drawn. Even the most commonplace, the deadest among the living, may play a part in a great drama.” It’s a striking phrase, “the deadest among the living.” We know, I think, instinctively what it means, though Joyce provides a gloss, too — “the most commonplace” — and we’ll come back to that. But it asks us to think of aliveness as something more than a biological state.
Adam Phillips’s new essay collection, “On Giving Up,” presses at this same theme. What, other than the obvious, is aliveness? Phillips’s background is in psychoanalysis, both as a practitioner and an explicator. He is a prolific essayist whose other collections include “On Balance” (2010) and “On Wanting to Change” (2021), and since 2003, he has served as the general editor for Penguin’s retranslations of Freud. Naturally then, it is through the lens of psychoanalysis that Phillips views the question of aliveness.
As we slapheads know, bare bonces become inescapable identifiers and gag magnets. In Bald: How I Slowly Learned to Not Hate Having No Hair, Heritage reclaims the wisecracks. I snorted throughout what amounts to the funniest imaginable version of a grief memoir.
Take that, men. Graham’s dances were the manifestation of the female gaze in its purest form. The strength required to be a woman artist, the banishment of doubt needed to keep going in the face of incomprehension, the place of desire in the creative act, the need, too, for love—all this is the material of her dances. In Errand into the Maze Jowitt explains them to us with the clarity of a critic experienced in looking intently at dance. But if you want to get a sense of what it was like to be around Graham, to sit at her feet and learn her movement language even as she tore it out of her gut, to suffer her rages, and to see the tumultuous effect of her passions, you might want to look at de Mille’s Martha as well.