New podcast with just Dixon this week.

I discuss Piddington voting to leave the UK, and whether the people there ‘deserve’ to have a huge number of migrants dumped in their village because the wider area is majority Lib Dem.

I also look at the bizarre attacks on Sydney Sweeney, and why women are now praising a child murderer, whilst attacking a woman for doing a fairly standard risqué advert.

Sign up now to watch the full episode, exclusively on nickdixon.net

By becoming a paid subscriber, you get full versions of all Dixon Cox episodes, my entire archive of guest interviews (never released in full anywhere else), and all my articles. Plus you can comment on all posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. As ever, I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Many thanks,
Nick

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As someone who has claimed The Shards is Bret Easton Ellis’s masterpiece, I was anxious, in both senses, to watch the TV adaptation.

Hence after waiting for all the episodes to ‘drop’, I subscribed to Disney Plus just so I could ‘binge’ the whole thing.

And, like almost everything now, it was a tremendous disappointment. Of course, I didn’t expect it to be exactly like the novel, but to me it captured nothing of the book’s essence. Less than zero, one might even say.

It didn’t have to be this way. Cool pop songs and seductive images imbue Ellis’s novel, which should give TV a head start. And indeed there are plenty of songs and some decent visuals in the show. But the creators seem to be going for an ice-cold 80s pastiche, rather than the warm, hazy nostalgia Ellis captures in the book.

Because despite the gory murders and unnecessary amounts of gay sex (admittedly I speak as an extremely alpha heterosexual male) the book makes you want to be there at the Buckley School with Bret and all his rich-kid friends. Not for the Quaaludes, cocaine, and sex (even the straight stuff), believe it or not, but for that strange mixture of coolness, strong emotions, hope, and possibility that is youth.

Somehow the show misses this in a series of disconnected scenes with underdeveloped characters and miscast actors. True, the Bret actor is good, looking and sounding uncannily like a young Ellis. Susan is at least beautiful, albeit in a slightly conventional, my-mom-is-literally-Cindy-Crawford kind of way. But Robert and Thom are completely wrong, and others forgettable, with the notable exception of Wes Bentley’s portrayal of the sleazy Terry.

Still, no cast is ever going to match a reader’s vague mental projections, and this alone wouldn’t have been a deal-breaker. But everything else is also wrong.

Ironically they try to cram in too much of the book in pure content terms, via a voiceover of almost Scorsese-esque loquacity, but in doing so they miss the vibe. And vibe, with Ellis, is everything. Indeed he described his debut, Less Than Zero, as a ‘vibe novel’.

I’m not saying this is a thing easily captured or even described. It’s something to do with detached irony mixed with aching sincerity, lots of ambiguity, often nostalgia, and simply beautiful writing. Perhaps it can’t even be named in English. One turns, improbably, to the Germans and their ‘Sehnsucht’.

The roots of this word are in yearning combined with sickness or addiction. I have seen it described as an ‘addiction to longing itself’, and that is a pretty good description of the magic of The Shards. The novel, but sadly not the show.

These failings are quite surprising when one considers that Ellis himself is the executive producer. However, it seems after giving his approval based on the first two episodes, he had little more to do with the show. This might explain the failures in tone, which apparently I’m not the only one to notice. A quick AI search tells me:

While the book is heavy with mature regret, shame, and memory, Ellis acknowledged on his podcast that the show naturally over-indexed on the campy, sexy, and hyper-stylised elements of the 1980s—something he anticipated when handing the keys over to the executive producers

I suspect Ellis could have done a better job with closer involvement. But really the show is a great advert for reading. In books like The Shards and Lunar Park, and to a slightly lesser extent American Psycho, Ellis relies on the kind of ambiguity that lends itself to prose fiction, but is near-impossible on film, for the simple reason that the latter medium demands that everything be concrete and real.

This element will always be absent from any adaption, as will the humour of the prose itself, and the neurotic internal monologue, to which no voiceover can really do justice. The more VO they use, the more you think ‘I could just read the book.’ Which is, of course, exactly what you should do.

Episode four begins with a clear parody of American Psycho. The movie of American Psycho, that is. Which itself, while appealing in some ways, didn’t come very close to the genius of the book. The film then led to a meme, and one suspects in the Shards TV show we are getting a parody of a meme, taken from a film, based on a book. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that the whole thing feels hollow.

You can’t force people to read, and the decline of the publishing industry doesn’t help, but it is frustrating knowing there is a world of riches that awaits anyone who makes the slight effort to turn off this kitsch, flat, borderline slop, and pick up the book.

Unlike the tragic yearning of our German friends for the ineffable, books are still here, and—like a Bret Easton Ellis protagonist describing his teenage crush—they are totally effable.

Read my original review of the The Shards book here.

The last time I felt happy was 9/11. If I had to go back even further, I’d say it was swimming with my mother in the outdoor pool in Lanzarote as a child, with her holding me afloat, guiding me along. I will never get back to that feeling of peace, security, and joy. But the closest I came was September 11th, 2001. It was the summer break from university, and I was on a cheap resort holiday in Almería with my girlfriend Lizzy, our friend Ruth, and Ruth’s friend James, who was only there because Ruth’s boyfriend couldn’t come. I had never met James before and neither had Lizzy. Inviting him was a bad idea from the start.

The other bad idea was Ruth saying we should go for two weeks. One week seemed more reasonable to me, but Ruth won and we settled on two. I don’t remember the name of the resort where we stayed, or much about the flight. I do remember the coach ride from the airport to the resort, but only because as we pulled in I was listening to Tom Petty on my walkman. Lizzy said ‘Look’, and tried to nudge me to look out of the window, but ‘Even the Losers’ was playing and I wanted to get to the end of the song. I really related to the lyric ‘Even the losers get lucky sometimes’. That was kind of how I felt about having a sweet and pretty girlfriend like Lizzy, and now we were going on our first holiday together, and she was ruining my enjoyment of the scene by talking. The song is about recalling the thrill of a love affair, and I was making the mistake I’ve often made of attempting to feel nostalgia for the present.

The next day we all went to the beach, except it turned out there was no beach. Or there was, but it was covered in rocks, and the sand was black and felt like gravel. The rooftop pool at the resort was slightly better. It wasn’t very big, but there weren’t many other people around. They were probably too smart to pick this resort. I would sit by the pool reading my book about the assassination of JFK. It was only much later that I saw the irony of reading this book as another violent American tragedy was about to unfold.

The rest of the time we sat on the balcony playing music, mainly my Beach Boys CDs. Or we walked around fairly aimlessly. At one point we travelled to the Alhambra palace in Granada, which I’m afraid was totally wasted on me. I’ve always hated sightseeing of any kind. I guess I’ve always preferred to live in my own head.

At night we sat outside the resort where an old geezer murdered various classics on the piano. We ate pizzas and drank beer. Some nights we went out to a nearby bar and played pool. At one point England beat Germany 5-1. The game was showing on a small TV high up in the corner, and I was annoyed not to be watching it properly. One night playing pool I somehow got into an argument with James, who had been weird and moody the entire trip. I don’t remember what it was about, but when I got back to the little self-catering apartment I was so wound up I threw a glass at the oven. Instead of the glass smashing, it went right through the oven glass instead. That worried me, as it seemed potentially a lot more expensive. But when I reported it the staff didn’t seem too concerned.

The next day Ruth came and told us something had happened in America. Something bad. We turned on the small television in her apartment, and in stunned silence watched the planes flying into the buildings. I don’t think I even knew what the World Trade Center was until then. I doubt I had ever formed those three words in that order in my head or on my tongue.

To make things even stranger, it turned out all this had happened the day before, and was only just reaching us now. The simple resort was a little behind the times. There was no Internet, and this was long before smart phones. We just had Nokia bricks that could call, send a text, or play Snake. That was all we needed back then. I suddenly realised the day I threw the glass through the oven had been 9/11 without us knowing it. We knew the date, I suppose, but not the significance. I couldn’t help but think my glass was a little like the planes, and the oven was the World Trade Center.

That night the barman at the resort spoke to us about it in his broken English. After a brief conversation he said ‘Not good’, then walked away shaking his head sadly. That was our last night.

Once I got home to England, I would lie awake at night worrying about World War III. When I heard an aeroplane overhead, I would think it had finally started. It sounds silly now—the low-resolution thinking of a young man with no idea about the world. And it was. But 9/11 did something to us all. I was only 19 and staying in an attic room in a shared flat in Newcastle. Seven boys living there, in absolute chaos. There was no heating in the room, but it did have a skylight window where I could watch the planes flying by, perhaps leaving or returning to the local airport.

Planes had always meant holidays, excitement, and mystery. Now they were terrorist death machines hurtling into iconic buildings we had never even heard of before. America no longer represented an exotic new world of possibility, but a dangerous place that could reach into your life and take away all your safety.

That’s why I say 9/11 was the last time I was happy. There was a moment that day at the swimming pool, before we knew about the planes, before the argument that night and the glass thrown through the oven. Ruth and James had gone back inside. I put my JFK book down and got into the pool with Lizzy. I lifted her up under her arms and swung her around the pool. Her smiles and laughter emanated pure joy, like the barely-contained frolicking energy of a young animal. I only realise now the odd connection between my mum lifting me up in the pool as a child, and me lifting Lizzy up in the pool on our holiday. Maybe that’s strange, because Lizzy would be my child in the analogy. But I don’t feel like it’s strange. It’s just two different versions of love, at two different but somehow related times.

When I think about that day, I wonder if I could have been normal. If I could have stayed with Lizzy and had a normal life. But that turned out to be my last taste of innocence, before the planes hit the towers and everything became clouded by confusion and fear. The world got darker after that. I broke up with Lizzy and became increasingly lost. I went out with other girls, of course, but I never experienced quite that same love again. Maybe it was all destined, just as the planes had already hit the towers that day without us knowing it. But I’d choose that joyful ignorance over reality any day. Give me our 9/11, splashing in the pool, hidden from the world—from ageing, loneliness, death and chaos. For me, the problems all started on 9/12.

No podcast today as I’m locked out of Twitter and Paul had a power cut. Hopefully tomorrow.

In the meantime, have you watched my video on the Dover and Portsmouth protests? Many people are saying it is a good one, and very balanced.

I talk about the issue of wearing masks at protests, the morality of attempting to stop migrant coaches, the response from Reform UK and Restore Britain, and much more.

Click below to watch.

Cheers,
Nick

Dixon Cox is back!

This week:
-Restore Britain’s civil war
-Kemi’s reshuffle
-Starmer resigns as MP
-Burnham’s first PMQs
-James Cleverly puts himself forward for London mayor

Sign up now to watch the full episode, exclusively on nickdixon.net

By becoming a paid subscriber, you get full versions of all Dixon Cox episodes, my entire archive of guest interviews (never released in full anywhere else), and all my articles. Plus you can comment on all posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. As ever, I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Many thanks,
Nick

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Dixon Cox is back yet again.

This week we look at the disturbing case of Lindsay Clancy, and question why hundreds of women are saying they ‘stand with’ a child killer.

We also discuss William Clouston standing down from the SDP, and, following the sad death of Dolly Parton, we ask if she was the last celebrity to be loved on both sides of the political divide.

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By becoming a paid subscriber, you also gain access to my archive of guest interviews, as well as all my articles. Plus you can comment on all posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. As ever, I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Many thanks,
Nick

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Hello, I hope you won’t mind a quick bit of cross-promotion as my books channel is still very young and needs help to fly.

If you think that sentence sounds like I’ve been reading too much Japanese fiction, you are right.

Hence I have just released a new video on Haruki Murakami, particularly his extraordinarily successful novel, Norwegian Wood.

I try to work out why this strange, rather dark book resonated with so many people, compare it to his magic realist novels, and consider some of the odder aspects of Murakami’s writing life.

I also discuss whether the novel’s moral ambiguity would be permitted in our ideological age.

Hopefully this will be worth watching whether you have read the book or not, so check it out below.

Many thanks,
Nick

Dixon Cox is back, with more Cox than last time.

This week:
-The sad death of Jason Arday
-Some call Arday’s death a ‘lynching’
-Leftists attack journalists and call to censor the press over the Arday story
-Arday’s Trafalgar Square vigil becomes a post-truth cult of rage and identity
-J.K. Rowling and others brand Nathan Cofnas ‘racist’
-Tim Montgomerie is suspended from Reform UK

Sign up now to watch the full episode, exclusively on nickdixon.net.

By becoming a paid subscriber, you also gain access to the full versions of my many guest interviews, all my articles, my Q & As, and my exclusive regular podcast with Jamie Franklin on the big questions. Plus you can comment on all posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. As ever, I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Many thanks,
Nick

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All suicides are tragic. My own family has not been spared this particular misery, and it is absolutely devastating. When I heard Jason Arday had killed himself, I felt sick, and you will not see me making light of it on social media.

However, we already appear to have moved into a new phase where the real Arday fades away, and an idealised, saintlike figure emerges.

At the vigil for Arday in Trafalgar Square, the prevailing mood was incoherent anger combined with wild revisionism.

The term ‘lynching’ has already been used to describe what happened to Arday, and one speaker, grasping for an even more hyperbolic term, claimed this was a ‘public assassination’.

At one point the crowd chanted Arday’s name over and over, like a scene from Fight Club, or a cult about to indulge in a ritual sacrifice or act of mass violence.

If the term ‘post-truth’ ever applied, it is here. Reason, facts, and logic have been entirely swept away in a torrent of rage, the targets of which are highly selective.

It doesn’t matter that Cambridge University is more responsible for Arday’s fate than the media, or that the left-wing Guardian eventually exposed Arday as robustly as any other outlet. Nor do Arday’s own choices, from the lies he told to his final tragic decision, seem to play a part.

Instead, we get a very simple narrative: the right-wing (white) media killed (lynched) a black man.

It is one part woke textbook, one part American history, and one part George Floyd. It has nothing to do with truth, and everything to do with identity.

Like all simplistic narratives, it has an arch-villain. In this case it is Nathan Cofnas, a Jewish scholar who has become the unlikely face of white supremacy.

Everyone from Dan Neidle to J.K. Rowling has called him racist, while Diane Abbott and others scream about him from a makeshift stage in Trafalgar Square.

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Dixon Cox is back, except this week it’s Dixon Kearse.

This week:
-The Telegraph goes to war against Restore Britain
-Charlie Downes gets attacked for his Twitter posts
-Alex Phillips gets into some nasty exchanges with Restore supporters
-Kemi Badenoch stands up for convicted former extremist Joshua Bonehill-Paine

Sign up now to watch the full episode, exclusively on nickdixon.net.

By becoming a paid subscriber, you also gain access to the full versions of my many guest interviews, all my articles, my Q & As, and my exclusive regular podcast with Jamie Franklin on the big questions. Plus you can comment on all posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. As ever, I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Thanks!
Nick

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Hello,

I have just posted a new video on the Nick Reads YouTube channel, discussing Don DeLillo’s White Noise with comedian and reader of great literature, .

I normally don’t cross-promote from here to Nick Reads, but as it’s Simon I thought some of you might like to watch.

We discuss the postmodern themes explored by DeLillo (especially the work of Jean Baudrillard), the prophetic aspects of the novel, its underrated humour, and much more.

Click below to watch the video.

Cheers,
Nick

Dixon Cox is back.

This week:
-Rod Liddle sadly dies, and the usual people are as vicious as ever
-Rupert Lowe offers Farage a deal
-The five points Restore insist on to work with Reform
-Will Reform’s small boats plan work?
-The chaos in Ceuta

Sign up now to watch the full episode, exclusively on nickdixon.net.

By becoming a paid subscriber, you also gain access to the full versions of my many guest interviews, all my articles, my Q & As, and my exclusive regular podcast with Jamie Franklin on the big questions. Plus you can comment on all posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. As ever, I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Cheers,
Nick

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By now we are all painfully aware of the demonic glee with which a disturbingly large segment of the population greets any new death of a person they don’t like.

But the very sad news about Rod Liddle seems to have brought out another variation on this theme, or perhaps a change in emphasis, along with some signs that an increasing number of people are sick of this morbid trend.

There is a fundamental divide here between what I will call ‘normal people’—i.e. those who see death as the moment to emphasise a person’s good qualities and leave out their inevitable flaws—and those horrible bot-like beings for whom someone’s death is the ideal opportunity to demonstrate conformity to the prevailing ideology, strangely by indulging in an orgy of hatred that they have convinced themselves is somehow appropriate and merited.

What became clear following the death of Rod Liddle—and this is what I mean by a change in emphasis—was the mindless degree to which people appeared to be arbitrarily looking for the handful of items they could use to justify their feral outbursts of rage.

It’s as if, upon hearing of this latest death, they leapt up to access some file of alleged transgressions that they could tick off in order to avoid the complex demands of being human.

In Liddle’s case, this meant the headlines of a few articles they almost certainly hadn’t read or understood. These were enough to call him every word under the sun, and repeatedly state how glad they were that he had died. One account replied to absolutely every post about Liddle with these sentiments, to the point where I had to stop scrolling—there was simply too much. Naturally, it was a Scouser.

I include that last line as the exact kind of thing these humourless cretins would use as proof that a person should be entirely banished from society.

As I say, the key difference between our traditional approach and this new breed of hysterical death detectives is that while we look for the good at this moment of sorrow and mourning, they immediately seek out the bad. From a standpoint of traditional morality, it’s hard to see what they’re doing as anything other than evil, and that indeed is my position.

If I had to try to steel man the Devil, I suppose I’d say that to their hivemind, anyone setting back ‘progress’ towards their utopia is inherently doing something bad, so any attack on them becomes a kind of good.

That’s my best attempt, though I admit it’s hard to fairly represent such a vaccuous worldview. Utopianism is always stupid, and this lot don’t even have cool uniforms.

Some attacks even came from those broadly on ‘our side’, such as Bev Turner, who, linking to an article where Liddle comments on so-called anti-vaxxers, said ‘I used to love Rod Liddle. He was always in on the joke. Then he said this about people who had done their own research and I realised he wasn't what I had thought.’

It should be obvious that this kind of thing is not appropriate upon someone’s death. I personally despised Bev’s ill-informed and extremely radical pro-abortion rant on GB News, but if anything happened to her there would be zero chance of me tweeting about it. In fact I’ve never mentioned it before, and only bring it up now to make my point.

The standard ‘I didn’t agree with everything X said BUT’ is comically redundant in the case of Liddle. I doubt there is a soul on earth who agreed with everything he said. The free-thinking nature this implies is one of the things Liddle has been most praised for, along with his personal kindness and integrity.

This is how it should be. Seeking the good sometimes means praising one side of the same coin. In this case, it’s clear that free-thinking will almost certainly entail occasional or even frequent disagreement. Thus it is not necessary to bring up the latter at the moment of someone’s passing, and in doing so you creep into territory occupied by the ideologues whose primary value, if we can even call it that, is adherence to doctrine.

To be generous, there has been immense pressure on people in recent years to behave like ideological robots. This has somehow become the high status position, to the point that traducing someone upon their death is seen by many as not just ‘a bit off’, but actually the morally superior path. Hence the wild, unencumbered alacrity to do just this that we see from so many NPCs of the current cult.

But, as I hinted at the beginning, there are mildly encouraging signs that many are getting tired of pretending humans can be expected to meet some protean and frequently absurd ideological standard, and that they should be forever judged according to these grim criteria.

See, for instance, Jeremy Vine’s excellent tribute to Liddle. Though a reply stating ‘I'm surprised at you for posting this Jeremy. What was your view on the article he wrote saying he wanted to string piano wire across roads to decapitate cyclists?’ is a perfect example of the humourless puritanism of the new Bots.

Vine’s reply to this is a succinct expression of the old morality some of us still uphold: ‘He overstated everything for effect. I'm really sad he's left us. He was so talented and funny. Like many people he also made mistakes. I don't want to focus on them today.’

I don’t want to focus on them today. This used to be the standard view, but now needs to be spelled out for the apparently endless stream of nasty morons on social media.

Rosie Duffield, Kathleen Stock, and Julie Bindel also paid tribute. Duffield then met with the inevitable tide of idiocy, to the point where she added a second post stating: ‘It is not my job to like the same people as you, or come to the exact same conclusions about people simply because of the threat of potentially offending you by liking someone you've decided is a *bad person*.’

Perhaps all these staunch defences are just a result of the number of friends Liddle had in politics and media. But it does appear to me that more and more people are growing weary of being constantly berated by the Borg-like proponents of political correctness.

Although some in the Terfosphere(?) may have their limits on who they would defend, it might be that here we see the real divide in the culture war. On one side are those who retain a traditional and very British conception of decency, flexibility, humour, and an empathetic acknowledgement of what it is to be human.

On the other are the puritans who pretend to be perfect robots, and strangely express this, for reasons discussed, through the medium of being as overtly vile as possible, at the least appropriate possible moment.

Naturally the motto of these people is ‘be kind’. Yet if we do the exact opposite to them in every single instance, we will be much closer to that difficult yet noble aspiration.

Last night I finally got around to watching the Bruce Springsteen biopic, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. It wasn’t quite as pretentious as I expected, nor did it rise above the level of a three-star movie, but it did speak to a theme I’ve discussed on here before, namely the death of the monoculture.

The film starts out well enough, with an artistic crisis and meeting a girl, then gradually falls apart later on. We are expected to care about a rockstar going to therapy, which is a tough sell at the best of times, and we’re not really given a reason why poor old Bruce is depressed about his massive success. It seems to be related to his relationship with his father, which is also underdeveloped.

It’s as if they’re expecting us to have read Springsteen’s autobiography, and come in already caring about these things. Well, I have read most of the autobiography and love his music, and I still didn’t care.

The relationship angle is slightly more interesting, though ends up very much like the recent Bob Dylan movie A Complete Unknown, i.e. with Bruce binning off the girl because he’s too dedicated to his art and his own self-mythologising.

Thankfully the film doesn’t go into Springsteen’s political views, which are those of any rich Democrat NPC.

What is most interesting to me about the movie is the extreme reverence for the artist displayed by those around Springsteen. Obviously this is largely due to their own commercial interests, but even that is telling, as an artist as serious as Springsteen also being a giant cash cow is something that belongs to a particular era of the ‘monoculture’.

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Hello,

I don’t normally link to Nick Reads from this page anymore, but my new video is quite political in theme, so I hope you don’t mind.

It is a piece on J.M. Coetzee’s masterpiece, Disgrace, which, as well as dealing with violence and tension in South Africa, also arguably predicted the MeToo movement.

It concerns a professor who has an affair with a student, but refuses to abase himself at an academic struggle session, instead claiming ‘I became a servant of Eros.’

When he leaves the university and heads to the Eastern Cape to live with his daughter, violence and violation soon ensue.

The novel raises uncomfortable questions of race and power, and though those might sound like leftist talking points these days, Coetzee takes no clear side and offers no easy answers. This is no doubt why the book was condemned by the ANC, and Coetzee left South Africa for Australia not long after.

Here I delve into the complex ambiguities of this extraordinary novel. Please give it a watch below.

Thanks,
Nick

Dixon Cox is back.

This week:
-Shocking new details in the Ann Widdecombe case
-Shabana Mahmood and Wes Streeting caught joking about early release of prisoners
-Andy Burnham selects his new cabinet
-Natalie Fleet steps down as safeguarding minister
-Stella Creasy has a massive birdwatching fail

Sign up now to watch the full episode, exclusively on nickdixon.net.

By becoming a paid subscriber, you also gain access to the full versions of my many guest interviews, all my articles, my Q & As, and my exclusive regular podcast with Jamie Franklin on the big questions. Plus you can comment on all posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. As ever, I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Cheers,
Nick

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Hello, we are back with another episode of God Knows, with the Rev Dr Jamie Franklin.

This time we discuss:

-The World Cup (skip to 27:40 if you don’t like football)
-The terrible murder of Ann Widdecombe
-The bizarre state of Woke publishing
-Writing practices and the nature of creativity
-Steven Pressfield and the War of Art
-The difference between obligation and discipline
-Outsider fiction
-Lewis vs Tolkien
-Jamie’s novel
And loads more

Sign up now to watch this episode, which is over two hours and only available for paid subscribers of either me or Jamie.

By becoming a paid subscriber, you also gain access to the full versions of my many guest interviews, my topical podcasts with Paul Cox, all my articles, and you can comment on posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Many thanks,
Nick

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Dixon Cox is back.

This week:
-The shocking murder of Ann Widdecombe
-The left’s sickening response to this tragic event
-Zia Yusuf demands proper security for all politicians
-Keir Starmer’s last PMQs
-Kemi’s approval rating goes positive

Sign up now to watch the full episode, exclusively on nickdixon.net.

By becoming a paid subscriber, you also gain access to the full versions of my many guest interviews, all my articles, my Q & As, and my exclusive regular podcast with Jamie Franklin on the big questions. Plus you can comment on all posts and join my private chat group.

Sign up for £5 a month, or just over £4 with the yearly option. As ever, I can only keep doing this with your help, so please consider subscribing today.

Many thanks,
Nick

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The moment I heard Dua Lipa was curating a list of ‘banned’ books, the first thing I knew for certain was that these books would definitely not be, in fact, banned.

For a start it’s a tautology to point out that if they were banned she couldn’t easily get hold of them and display them in a famous bookshop (Livraria Lello in Porto).

Secondly, there’s zero chance a famous mainstream pop star would decide to obliterate her career with anything genuinely controversial. ‘The Dua Lipa David Irving Collection’ would make a funny meme—as when dense and edgy political viewpoints are jokingly attributed online to Sydney Sweeney or Lana Del Rey—but it would likely not be much of a career boost.

And thirdly, I am dimly aware of similarly-named sections in high street bookshops, which invariably contain the least banned books on the planet.

Hence I was able to guess much of Lipa’s list without even seeing it (A Clockwork Orange, 1984 etc), yet it turned out to be even more mainstream than I imagined. These are books I studied at school (The Handmaid’s Tale) and university (Invisible Man, Things Fall Apart).

Which doesn’t mean they’re all bad, nor do I really mind that they weren’t all literally banned. As Vogue Adria explains: ‘The collection also includes books that may never have been formally banned but have nevertheless questioned existing structures of power or the suppression of individual and collective voices’.

What I do mind is that the list borrows the cachet of works that are bold artistic achievements, some published in genuinely hostile circumstances, and segues into books that uphold the current ideological orthodoxy.

This is most notable in the ‘Voice’ section, which, we’re told, ‘amplifies voices that have historically or systematically been marginalised, excluded or underrepresented’.

Here we have Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but also works like Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. Thus Lipa, or whoever has helped her come up with this list, attempts a sleight of hand. The implication is that the liberal era of individual genius and freedom of expression leads naturally to the Woke era of radical leftism, aggressive conformity, and cancel culture.

Of course there are postliberal thinkers who would agree with this, but they would mean it in the negative sense that liberalism’s inherent logic guaranteed its own demise in the form of Woke. Others, like Andrew Doyle, believe Woke is a hard break with liberalism—a hostile force attacking it from the outside.

Lipa’s list falls within the first camp, with the key distinction that she is implicitly claiming this progression into Woke is a good thing. Just as few Woke ideologues even now will admit to being against free speech, Lipa knows that there is something good and important about the literary achievements of the past, and tries to harness that energy to bolster the oppressive contemporary ideology her list ultimately advocates.

We can see this hypocrisy in, for example, the fact that publishers have relentlessly weeded out the Salingers of today. Catcher would be instantly dismissed as the narcissistic ramblings of a privileged white male, and would not have a hope of being published. In that sense it really is ‘banned’ in spirit, but that is certainly not what Lipa means by the term.

William Burroughs also features, yet he would definitely be cancelled today, and probably in jail (the latter perhaps a reasonable outcome from shooting your wife in the head). Burroughs’s Naked Lunch is in the ‘Control’ section, along with Kafka’s The Trial. These are apparently works that ‘explore the mechanisms of control, both visible and invisible, including surveillance, propaganda, technological influence and ideological conditioning.’

It’s hard not to laugh at the last part, in a list stuffed with works on decolonisation, ‘antiracism’, and gender ideology. But there is also little evidence the Woke authors on this list offer a real critique of bureaucracy or technocracy, and typically the Woke were the most fierce enforcers of state tyranny during the Covid era (along with Piers Morgan).

The Handmaid’s Tale also appears in this section, and is the perfect representative of the whole list. It imagines an oppressive Christian patriarchy which in many ways resembles the real Islamic patriarchies that are in operation in parts of the world right now. As with Lipa’s list, it is far safer to create a straw man opponent and pretend you’re ‘banned’.

This is why the one genuinely brave choice on the list is Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. One key distinction between the liberal and Woke eras has been the latter’s tendency to ignore Islamic oppression in favour of viewing all Muslims as victims of the West. Rushdie exists on the faultline between these two worldviews, and it would have been typical for a list like this to duck controversy by not including him. This almost makes me think he is there by mistake, or perhaps it’s because Lipa’s library is in Portugal, where they may not have got the latest Woke memo, much in the way that Michel Houellebecq is still allowed to be a literary star in France.

Rushdie’s horrific stabbing in 2022 proves that this book is still highly dangerous. The rest are largely classics that are no longer considered controversial, or, to the extent that they are, it is at the hands of the kinds of people behind the more recent works on the list. It is they who love to tear apart the canon and let loose ‘sensitivity readers’ upon the very giants on display here.

Lipa doesn’t look like she eats a great deal of cake, and that is to her credit, but here she is trying to have her cake and eat it. You either celebrate beauty, individual expression, and artistic risk, or ‘identity’, ideological conformity, and activism posing as art. You can’t have both.

Dear Legends,

This is just to let you know I have now launched Nick Reads as a separate Substack page, which you can find here.

It has a cool logo and everything.

I have added all my literary videos there as an archive, and from now on I will put all the book stuff on there and the politics on here.

The Nick Reads YouTube channel is doing very well, and already has 100k views, despite some topics that I assumed were fairly obscure. So the channel has potential.

But I didn’t feel I could send these book fans over to a Substack about British politics. It just wouldn’t make sense.

Thus I have started this new Substack page, and I hope some of you will follow me on both. As long as you understand that Nick Reads is apolitical!

In future I hope to get a book club going on there where we can read great books together. For now, I will have solo videos, articles, personal essays, interviews on literature, and notes and observations on what I’m currently reading.

Founding members of my current site will get a comp if they want it (feel free to message me), though I will make most posts free initially. For paid subscribers, I know it’s not ideal to pay twice, but hopefully there will be enough value over time for some to consider it.

But for now please subscribe for free here.

Best,
Nick