Isolated and shot down

We (as in 'vee Chermans') have had better days, or so the current main page at the Guardian would suggest.

A message, as it were, from the belly of the beast.

Otherwise known as London.

Unnecessarily charming

Something I ran across in the British Library:

Crime and War

Gangster films get more like war films every day. Scarface (at the Empire) certainly is more like All Quiet on the Western Front than any other film I have seen. The moment the “South Side” introduced machine guns there was nothing for the police to do but to introduce gas-bombs. For the moment Scarface was caught napping and came to a truly terrible end. His successor by now is doubtless provided with heavy air bombers, and it will be interesting to see whether the police will be able to ripost [sic] successfully with supertanks. In fact every American town seems to be conducting, in little, a fine European armaments race. Scarface is certainly one of the most disgusting, and hence one of the most effective, gangsters I have seen. It was, however, criminally immoral to make Scarface himself so unnecessarily charming. I found the guns rather agitating, particularly perhaps as the afternoon was so hot. Scarface is emphatically evening entertainment, and very good entertainment too.

The New Statesman and Nation, 2 July 1932, p. 13

As Rick says to Heinrich: "Well, there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade."

On 'La Dietrich', 'unreal abnegation' and 'too much talky talk'

A film review found while trawling through The New Statesman and Nation:

Shanghai Express, with La Dietrich and Clive Brook, is the last word in Paramount commercial competence. The pure camera work is as slap-up as anything possibly could be. True, the story is foolish; the psychology grotesque; and there is too much talky-talk, and that talk is singularly inept, though uttered in a uniform tone of pregnant emotion.

The Blue Express was far from a first-class picture but succeeded in two minutes in suggesting the reality of a Chinese train, an achievement which eludes Paramount through a good hour of apoplectic effort. You could see nothing for the local colour, as in a bad story by Théophile Gauthier [sic].

But it is merely priggish to take seriously a film that has no purpose save to put La Dietrich through her paces. And you will admire Shanghai Express according to how much you admire Dietrich. "Did you ever see such close-ups?" a couple of sentimental adolescents next to me kept whispering in notes of subdued rapture. And they were quite right. The close-ups were marvellous. Her astonishing bony face was photographed in every conceivable chiaroscuro, registering every variety of complicated pain, and surrendering to every unreal abnegation.

Dietrich is a physical genius, who does well to spend her time on an international train. She has the sleek and sensual efficiency of a really expensive new leather dressing case.

 The New Statesman and Nation, 26 March 1932, p. 393

I have to admit that that comparison in the last line caught me a bit by surprise.

It's not what I was expecting. 

Julia, She-Wolf of the Anti-Sex League

While browsing through Boing Boing I was struck by this image, a cover from some Signet edition of 1984, which makes Orwell's classic novel of political totalitarianism look more like a 1970s sexploitation film...

Double-plus extraordinary.

Notes from a fairy tale of commerce

One of the things I'm reading at the moment is J. B. Priestley's English Journey. It's curiously out of print (curious, as it's quite a well-known book) but I managed to find a cheap used copy from 1937 which has held up remarkably well.

In any case, I wish I had read this one earlier, as the book is full of excellent writing and quite amusing anecdotes.

I liked, for instance, this, during the opening excursion to Southampton:

The town was making money. At first I felt like a man who had walked into a fairy tale of commerce. The people who jostled me did not looked as if they had just stepped out of an earthly paradise; there was no Utopian bloom upon them; but nevertheless they all seemed well-fed, decently clothed, cheerful, almost gay. The sun beamed upon them, and so did I. Their long street was very pleasant. I noticed that it shared the taste of Fleet Street and the Strand for wine bars. I went into one of these; and it had a surprising succession of Ye Olde panelled rooms, in one of which I drank a shilling glass of moderate sherry and listening  to four citizens talking earnestly about German nudist papers, their supply having recently been cut off by Hitler. Their interest in these papers was genuine but not of a kind to commend itself to the leaders of the nudist movement. (English Journey, London, 1937, p. 13)

One of the other things I'm reading is Norman Collins's London Belongs to Me, excerpts from which will also, I believe, be featuring here in the near future.

Reality beats epistemology

In trying to hone my academic cross-disciplinary smack-down powers, I think I might learn a lot from Jerry Coyne:

When Lynch asserts that “debates over epistemic principles sound abstract, but they have enormous practical repercussions,” he’s simply wrong, and merely defending his turf. These debates have no practical repercussions, because a) scientists ignore them, and rightly so, and b) the public won’t pay attention to them, either. They’re important only to philosophers.

One bite-sized chunk of a long but worthwhile post at Coyne's blog.

For women's rights and good design

It's International Women's Day.

So here's to women, internationally!

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Fighting them on the (cultural) beachheads

This is a very nice article about how cool German culture has become (even being 'embraced' in the UK...who'd have guessed?); however, did they really need to use the word 'invasion'?

And, to me, the combination of text and image suggests that Germany's 'big shift' has involved making half-naked people stand in very, very uncomfortable positions.

I'm struggling to find this complimentary.

The British Bob Dylan and the Fountainhead of Genius

There's a lot of nice Robyn Hitchcock available online. Though Robyn Hitchcock playing Syd Barrett is something special.

Well, at least it feels like a brush with fame

It's nice when my Facebook feed brings together things I love (for those not in the know, the voice of Anglophone Cultures Uni Mainz has a special relationship to yours truly):

We've now found the one context in which neither of us minds saying: 'I'm a believer.'

Glad to know that Billy is with us on this.

The decline of the western hemline

Here's something I just unexpectedly ran across while looking through inter-war newspaper articles for references to Oswald Spengler: a recounting of a lecture at the Edinburgh City Business Club by Mr. R. H. Munro on the topic of fashion.

Mr Munro was dealing principally with the ever-changing fashions in women's wear. Married men profess to deplore these changes, but no man likes to see his wife fall behind in the parade. It is true that a woman who remains old-fashioned long enough may find herself again in the fashion, for as Beaumont and Fletcher observed in the Elizabethan age, "We know that what was worn some twenty years ago comes into grace again." In somewhat less that twenty years we have witnessed our womenfolk abandoning their crowning glory only to grow it again, and shortening their skirts only to lengthen them again. Yet history never repeats itself in exact detail. Women's infinite variety is never staled by custom, for custom never gets a chance.
"The Dictates of Fashion," The Scotsman, 8 May 1935, p. 12.

The Spengler reference (in case you're interested in these kinds of things) derives from his concept of "Dionysian Man", which Mr Munro uses as a description of a feature particular -- in his view -- to Western civilisation: the type of person "in a state of continual movement from one idea to another", who is "constantly on the quest for visions to guide him along untravelled roads".

"The dark, howling apex of infinity"

Not least for the H. P. Lovecraft reference, I pretty much adore this passage from Charlie Brooker's latest column (which is actually about the Sun):

It's hard to cheer when a newspaper closes. Even one you're slightly scared of, like the Daily Mail. Even though the Mail isn't technically a newspaper, more a serialised Necronomicon. In fact it's not even printed, but scorched on to parchment by a whispering cacodemon. The Mail can never close. It can only choose to vacate our realm and return to the dominion in which it was forged; a place somewhere between shadow and dusk, beyond time and space, at the dark, howling apex of infinity.

It's just a newspaper. It's just a newspaper. (Repeat 100 times a day.)

See no evil?

The German President, Christian Wulff announced today that he would resign, in the wake of accusations that he has, over the years, gotten just a little bit too much help from his friends.

This is not a surprise.

I'm wondering, though, whether this was really the best picture the Guardian could find to accompany its story:

Perhaps it was a wry commentary on the blindness of the powerful?

Nah.

Anyway, it would all be very exciting...if the scandal itself were not so boring: even the name for the alleged wrong, 'Vorteilsannahme im Amt' sort of puts you to sleep.

I bet Silvio Berlusconi is laughing his ass off...

Toys are not citizens. I hope that's clear now.

This is...surreal:

There hadn't been many – indeed any – rallies like it before in Russia. Last month saw dozens of toys, from teddy bears to Lego figurines, standing out in the snow of a Siberian city with banners complaining about corruption and electoral malpractice.

At the time, Russian authorities in Barnaul declared the protest "an unsanctioned public event".
Now a petition to hold another protest featuring 100 Kinder Surprise toys, 100 Lego people, 20 model soldiers, 15 soft toys and 10 toy cars has been rejected because the toys have been deemed not to be "citizens of Russia".

Well, it's hard to disagree with that logic.

I guess.

I sure am glad that a significant portion of our energy supplies come from this country....

Hey, stop being so mean!

Just another example of that horrible, nasty, 'militant' secularism at work: the discussion of a poll commissioned by Richard Dawkins's Foundation to explore the social attitudes of British Christians.

Example:

[O]ur findings show that the majority of UK Christians share the secular, liberal, humane values that are the hallmark of a modern, decent society.

This won't come as a surprise to most Christians reading these results, I suspect, nor to those of us who count liberal Christians among our friends, families and colleagues.

Now, that is really over the line.

I mean, how divisive and insulting. 

Damned militant atheists. 

I didn't expect the secular inquisition!

Baroness Warsi, government minister and co-chair of the UK's Conservative Party, is concerned about freedom.

My fear today is that a militant secularisation is taking hold of our societies. We see it in any number of things: when signs of religion cannot be displayed or worn in government buildings; when states won’t fund faith schools; and where religion is sidelined, marginalised and downgraded in the public sphere. 

 Not only is this secularisation 'militant' it is even reminiscent of 'totalitarian regimes':

For me, one of the most worrying aspects about this militant secularisation is that at its core and in its instincts it is deeply intolerant. It demonstrates similar traits to totalitarian regimes – denying people the right to a religious identity because they were frightened of the concept of multiple identities. That’s why in the 20th century, one of the first acts of totalitarian regimes was the targeting of organised religion. 

So worried is our Baroness, in fact, that she will be conveying this message to the Pope today via the ministerial delegation she is leading to the Vatican, a place famous for centuries a bastion of reason, tolerance and the acceptance of 'multiple identities'. (Cough, cough...)

As Ophelia says elsewhere, 'oh vomit', and there is much purgative pleasure to be found in the Baroness's missive (if you're into that sort of thing), which is eagerly echoed by the usual suspects at the Telegraph and the Daily Mail.

(And probably elsewhere. You know, for such a sadly marginalised social group, religious people seem to have no shortage of large-circulation platforms from which to bewail their marginality.)

I'm too weary of these kinds of comments to go through it line by line (say with regard to the typical canards that 'signs of religion cannot be displayed or worn in government buildings', or that totalitarianism and 'religious identities' have somehow been mutually incompatible), though no doubt others will do me the favour.

However, a couple of things immediately jumped out.

Like this:

I will be arguing that to create a more just society, people need to feel stronger in their religious identities and more confident in their creeds. In practice this means individuals not diluting their faiths and nations not denying their religious heritages. 

At a time when (just to pick a few examples) a good third or more of young British Muslims believe apostates from their faith should be punished by death, when leading American presidential candidates have no problem placing the authority of the Bible over that of the constitution and when ultra-orthodox Jewish religious fanatics can use terror and violence to enforce a radical form of patriarchy, it would seem that there is no great shortage of people who feel pretty 'confident in their creeds'.

Methinks the Baroness might be missing something here.

(And is it just me or is there something a bit sinister about the good Baroness's reference to people 'not diluting their faiths', especially given some of her co-religionists' touchiness on precisely this issue.)

But, for me anyway, an immediate, sure-fire dead give-away of the problem popped up with the phrase 'militant secularism'.

Militant secularism.

I pointed this out before (five years ago! I've been at this too long), in a response to a complaint about 'militant atheism', one directed at authors such as Richard Dawkins.

I concluded:

Until the day that Richard Dawkins appears on television standing in front of a poster of Darwin while holding an AK-47 and screaming for the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, can we find a different, perhaps more appropriate adjective to describe his approach?

It would seem to me that this still stands.

Our weapon is reason, reason and sarcasm. Our two weapons...

[UPDATE] The juxtaposition on the front page of the Telegraph is classic (and useful in case you need to identify one of those 'militant secularists'. No, wait...).  (Informed via Chris B, image via here)