Tony Sullivan

• I’ve heard the very real tales of what it was like when high heels once dominated society.
• My millennial and Gen X co-workers have attested to wearing heels to grimy college bars and buying their versions of the “Kate Middleton” nude pump for internships in the city. They regaled me with stories of a time when heels appeared to be the only acceptable footwear for women at magazine offices, an era when you’d be awash in a sea of thick platforms at the club.
• Many rejoice at this shift to comfortable, good-for-your-feet shoes. But—and I can already hear the sounds of a million wiser women groaning—I think we’ve made a mistake. We should not have stopped wearing heels.
• the right shoe can make or break the outfit. And sometimes, the rightful pair should be heels.
• I think heels stand undefeated in innovation
• There is nothing utilitarian about a heel. By freeing yourself from considering what’s practical, you can begin to craft alter egos. Who might you be in a strappy black pair that crisscrosses up your ankles? I imagine I’m an off-duty model headed straight to a South Beach dance floor. Heels are all about fantasy. They can help you fake confidence you don’t have. They create the illusion of longer legs. They are a shortcut to sex appeal, which is, of course, rooted in patriarchal beauty standards, and yet I enjoy the fleeting feeling anyway. (Hey, better than doing something permanent to your face.) Here is something I gleaned from the wise Patti Smith in her memoir Just Kids: The practice of dressing and adorning yourself can be just as powerful a form of artistic expression as any other. In that way, playing with your proportions, trying on shoe after shoe, and eventually landing on a short skirt with a tall heel, while not rocket science, can be its own form of art.
• hat I propose is not a return to outdated traditions. I suggest, instead, wearing heels in homage to the people who once loved their pumps and were sad to see them go out of style.
• we are all allowed our vices.
• This summer, after a hiatus from the entire category of shoes, I bought my first-ever pair of kitten heels and wore them out to a club in downtown Miami. I placed preventive Band-Aids in all of the places where the straps would rub against the skin
• They made me feel more like myself, and also nothing like her at all. Now I think I’m ready to graduate to a pair of stilettos.

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• It wasn’t until 2023 that I began naming what many had experienced but couldn’t speak about: female on female bullying. For many of us, it had been hiding in plain sight. We’ve underestimated the damage of unrestrained feminine aggression, especially when it’s disowned, unacknowledged, and driven by soft control tactics. It’s no surprise that so many writers have since taken up the task of exposing toxic feminine traits across individual, maternal, family, group, institutional, and societal domains. This isn’t about hating women.
• Unsurprisingly, this topic gets more support from men than women. Yet speak to any woman one on one, and she’ll likely have at least one story about being mistreated by another woman
• Movements, once institutionalised, stop liberating and start controlling. Eventually, they’re co-opted by the billionaires funding them
• I began my Substack because of my experiences of woman on woman aggression.
• The ones who protest the loudest - those who insist they’ve only had uplifting relationships with women, or who brand themselves as tireless supporters of other women are often the ones working hard to suppress any narrative that challenges them. Some of them are likely the bullies we’re talking about.

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• “feeders” who gorge their partners to the point of extreme discomfort or even physical incapacity and then leave them.

• The main justification for the attacks on the demos is that pro-Palestine protests are making the streets unsafe for Jewish people and in particular effecting Jewish people’s ability to worship. 2fThe government is proposing an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill to further restrict the right to protest to protect places of religious worship. The often-unstated subtext is that the whole movement against genocide is anti-Semitic by nature.
• Managements of companies and institutions across society have reproduced this kind of authoritarianism. Workers in banking have been told not to go on Gaza demonstrations, the Muslim Civil Servants’ Network has been closed down, doctors have been threatened with being struck off by the General Medical Council for posting about Palestine and students and staff have faced disciplinary action over Palestine in 2fat least 28 universities. 
• All this has been met with a chilling silence from most of the so-called liberal commentariat. One of the things 2fthe whole terrible episode has done is exposed the hollowness of a liberalism deeply embedded in the establishment. Many senior journalists are just too close to centres of power to dissent with key British foreign policy priorities. As former journalist Omar El Akkad has pointed out the result has been ‘a fracture, a breaking away of the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all’. 2f 
• journalists’ compliance is being policed by threats to career and reputation. 2f 
• This is not mainly because of the Israel lobby. The British were in at the start of the Zionist project in the Middle East and have been supporters of Israel ever since because Israel is the most loyal defender of western interests in the oil rich middle East. 
• The establishment’s problem is that popular support for the Palestinian cause has been growing in Britain ever since the emergence of mass anti-war sentiment at the start of the century. 2fBy 2019, polls suggested 2fmore than twice as many people sympathised with the Palestinians than with the Israelis. The majority remained neutral or uncertain,
• Israel’s current genocidal assault has widened and deepened popular support for the Palestinians. 2fBy 2024, three fifths of the population 2fthought Israel had gone too far. Even amongst Tory voters, twice as many disapproved as approved of Israel’s actions. 2f 
• the pro-Israeli organisations’ bullying and smearing only has authority because it has the backing of the powers-that-be. 
• The current Labour leadership has form after all. They cut their teeth attacking Corbyn and the left in the Labour party, largely using spurious claims of anti-Semitism. Both those claims of anti-Semitism and the lobbyists that drive them are useful for the British establishment in creating the ideological weather in which their clampdown on dissent can be justified. 
• For all the 2fcampaigning and demonisation by the police and the media, by mid-2024 more Londoners 2fapproved of the demonstrations (46%) than disapproved (36%).
• If increased authoritarianism is partly a response to worries about opinion over Palestine, there is clearly a broader context. Governments in the UK have been strengthening laws against protest since at least the 1986 Public Order act, a trend that has accelerated over the last decade which has seen new laws 2ftoughening police powers almost every year. As well as the Palestine movement, new legislation has enabled vicious attacks on activists from Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and the Republic movement.
• they also calculate that false claims of anti-Semitism provide a useful excuse for a clampdown and that Palestine is an issue on which they can isolate activists and the left in general. 2f 
• US commentator, Ben Ehrenreich, recently argued in the Nation that repression of the Palestine movement was the portal through which Trump, and – in his view – fascism, is being introduced in the US.
• The conclusion must be that there is no way to head off the new authoritarianism without confronting the issues thrown up by the Palestinians’ struggle. 2f
• The wider authoritarian trend is not surprising. The last forty-five years of free market policies have brought falling living standards, spiralling inequality and the sell off or hollowing out of the democratic and welfare institutions that secure some consent in society. This has been accompanied by open collusion between political leaders and the rich. As a 2020 US security report 2fpoints out, the result has been a growing loss of trust in key institutions in society and a level of mass protest around the world that is ‘historically unprecedented in frequency, scope, and size.’

• the police cannot give a single example of any Jewish bystander actually being threatened. 

      

  Instead, they fall back on the argument that feeling threatened is enough to prove intimidation, whether there is any real basis for it or not. In any sensible world there is no way that the law can operate on such a subjective basis.
• this approach is a danger to all protestors. The vague and general notion of ‘threat,’ the creeping criminalisation of ‘more than minor disruption’ can and will be wielded against anyone who wants to take to the streets in anger. 2f
• The article reports that sources close to Sir Mark Rowley agreed that the size of the marches were the main reason they hadn’t been banned up to that point.
• Finally, we need to take advantage of the government’s wider problems. These are serious. Starmer has been tanking in the polls for months. By combining attacks on disabled people with increases in the military budget, he and Rachel Reeves have cemented their unpopularity and popularised the slogan ‘welfare not warfare’ in one stroke. It is hard to see them ever recovering from this spring budget blunder.  If we can build a mass movement against austerity and war in parallel with the Palestine protests, it may well be the government’s ability to govern, not our right to protest, that will be in question

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• f a short novella by Peake called Boy In Darkness 
• First published in 1956 as part of a collection called Sometime Never: Three Tales of the Imagination

• The story tells us of Boy (Titus) and his escape from tedious hours of boredom he spends in the wastes of the castle of his kingdom. Seeking another world he sets out into the featureless lands of dust and pursued by demon-eyed dogs he crosses water into another land of even greater peril. He is taken captive by a mutant creature known only as Goat who is in turn in thrall to the even more terrifying Hyena. Both want to take Boy as a captive offering to their master, the sinister Blind Lamb. Lamb it turns out is the root of all evil – a sort of inverted demon Christ-figure – who, for amusement turns all living things in the kingdom into mutant half-man half-animal creatures. None but Goat and Hyena have ever survived the awesome power of Blind Lamb and are now the only living things in the realm – so the appearance of boy excites Lamb into a frenzy of expectation, planning how he will convert him into a living monstrosity.

    

  I won’t reveal here how it happens but Boy escapes the terrible subterranean halls that Lamb inhabits and is returned to the castle he had originally escaped from.

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• does not make use of the supernatural.
• What makes a piece of fiction fantasy? What makes a piece of fiction “literary”?
• monumental 1946 fantasy classic Titus Groan, first in his Gormenghast trilogy of novels
• bleakly hilarious
• brilliant on the sentence level. When one is in the midst of it, it feels mainly like an exercise in grotesque character work and circuitous, baroque subplots. Insofar as it has an overarching plot, it presents the destructive rise of an amoral social climber during the first 18 months or so of the life of the eponymous character.
• rom the vantage point of the novel’s totality, the themes that emerge are change and continuity. The book’s first two thirds are spent building an intricate picture of the day-to-day life of the noble Groan family who rule Castle Gormenghast—or perhaps are themselves ruled by it and its traditions—and their various servants. The final third tears down the regularity of this life in an ambiguous way that changes some of the personnel but seems to suggest that life in Gormenghast marches on despite these changes
• not an adventure story. It’s more focused on people’s ways and idiosyncrasies than it is on any kind of plot. The main tool of the fantasist it uses is a secondary world.
• character-driven rather than plot-driven, examine the human condition, use language in an experimental or poetic fashion, or are simply considered serious art.
• tartling, funny, dark, and demanding. This is a book I want to advocate for.

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