Angry (but creative) old men

Realising I hadn't visited it for some time, due to travel and needing to get some other work done, I took a look at Ballardian yesterday and discovered that there are a lot of new and interesting things up over there.

The most recent is Mike Holliday's 'Angry Old Men', an interview with author Michael Moorcock mainly about his work and that of his friend J.G. Ballard. I don't know most of his writing, but I have very much enjoyed his Elric series since I discovered it at about age 15.

After reading the interview, though, I'm hoping to read more.

There are few points at which the interview meanders rather further into the minutiae of science fiction publishing in the 1960s than your average reader would maybe prefer (though this is great for those who love that stuff), but if you persevere there is not only a cool photo of Moorcock on stage with the Blue Öyster Cult (?!) but also some interesting discussion:

Jimmy had been through that Japanese prison camp. I had been through the Blitz. These were, if you like, extreme experiences, yet seemed to us to have a lot to do with how it was in the world we lived in. Neither of us were bothered by the H-Bomb, for instance, as such. Jimmy felt it had saved his life, probably. I saw it as keeping the peace; Brian Aldiss, too, saw the Bomb as having saved him being involved in the invasion of Japan. We were both impatient with the themes of the chattering classes of our day.

An impatience, I think that any sane person (in any day) should share.

Thanks to Mike Holliday, whom I had the great pleasure of meeting at the recent Ballard conference in Norwich. He's not only a great guy, he runs his own J. G. Ballard site, available here.

Speaking of impatience with the 'themes of the chattering classes', I was led via the comments at the end of Mike's interview to a posting by Alex at The Yorkshire Ranter justifiably taking Terry Eagleton to task for chattering the following:

'For almost the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life.'

Now, I think Eagleton, when he's good (or perhaps, when he was good...I begin to fear that that time may be passing), is very good. His eviscerations, for example, of the wackier excesses of literary theory (most anything with a 'post-' attached to its name) make for inspiring reading.

But when he's bad, he can be...quite dreadful indeed, and there are signs that something has gone rather badly off the rails in Eagleton country.

There was, for instance, that astonishingly bizarre review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. (Something to which, in these pages, The Wife responded.) And now, his curious despair that all has gone quiet on the questioning the 'western way of life' front.

I'm not even sure what to make of that.

As Alex suggests, it may be that Eagleton is simply overlooking a lot of literature that in fact does what he's suggesting it doesn't.

On the other hand...even if he were more awake to forms of literature which don't generally reach the rarefied air of Serious Literature, I'm not really sure to be honest what Eagleton means by 'questioning the western way of life' (or at least being 'prepared to' do that).

And even if I did know that, I'm also not sure that I'd be all that enthusiastic about seeing it. In some ways it seems that for Eagleton 'questioning the western way of life' merely means sharing his political views, and I'm not all that certain that what the world needs now is more explicitly 'engaged' political literature. I mean, any literature that is too clearly driven by ideology ends up being pretty dreadful tripe.

Isn't the point of literature to question more thoroughly the enduring complexities of 'life' and not simply obsess about its more curious (and perhaps more transient) 'western' way of living it?

I, for one, find that the more interesting books do just that...

(Moreover, since some of the ideological foundations in parts of the West have become rather too infected by cultural relativism, a blinkered version of multiculturalism and just a bit too much fucking 'tolerance' for nonsensical ideas, I humbly offer that some of the authors he so scornfully mentions are doing just the sort of questioning he suggests is necessary.)

Finally, I'm not at all opposed to the idea that life in the west is up for some questioning (pretty much like life everywhere else). I'm just a bit sceptical about the notion that, assuming some Politically Right-On Important Fiction gets written, some new novels are going to have much affect on said way of life.

Literature is interesting and important. But--outside of a few exceptions (none of which occur to me right now, but I'm just covering myself here by raising the possibility they might)--its political effects always seem to have been pretty negligible.

To borrow and bend one of his own lines: Serious literature, Terry, never stormed the Winter Palace.

I know, the dream of utopian transcendence dies hard.

But, like us all, it dies nonetheless.

I'm not sorry there's nothing to say

The Wife and I settled down to watch Wong Kar-wai's film 2046 just the other night, which she gave me as a very welcome birthday gift not all that long ago.

We had both enjoyed his earlier film In the Mood For Love, and 2046--which is, in a sense, its sequel--certainly lived up to its predecessor, mixing wistful and romantic with cruel and sexy (and combining dreaminess with hard-edged realism) in a way that few films manage (and which even fewer attempt).

Stories of love lost or chances not taken, even when they're beautiful, are brutal, and of all the terrifying forces in the world, maybe one of the most frightening is simple contingency.

Which, somehow, maybe not quite by chance, leads me to this song, which I've liked since I first heard it and which the film made me think of:



('Your Ex-Lover is Dead' by Stars)

Let's Talk About Sex (-ratios)

Speaking of sex videos, I can think of few better ways to spend a spare half-hour on the Sabbath than watching Richard Dawkins give a 'brisk run-through' on sex-ratio theory and sexual selection.

Not only do you get a rare opportunity to see Dawkins lecture in casual beachwear, there is something special about hearing the Oxford professor utter words like 'copulation' and 'Bull sea lion' in the same sentence. (Dawkins, for instance, seems genuinely moved by the unjust plight of the 90% of 'bachelor sea lions' who 'never get a look in'. His pronunciation of harem as 'har-eem', though, is a bit mysterious. Perhaps things are done differently in Oxford...)

(While we're on the topic of sexy animals, it has recently been suggested that even sparrows have some kind of notion of what it means to be cutting edge, musically speaking. Thanks to Anja for the tip.)

Also this Sunday, I'm concluding my reading of Christopher Hitchens's book, God Is Not Great. I've enjoyed it very much, although much as in the case of my reading of Sam Harris's The End of Faith, or Dawkins's own The God Delusion, there is an odd feeling--almost a kind of exhaustion--that comes with reading so much intense argument with which one agrees.

I am struck, though, by what I see as an unexpected mildness of tone in Hitchens's critique of religion. Not that he doesn't have his (enjoyably) splenetic moments, but I found the book to be surprisingly balanced.

(A General Theory of Rubbish has posted just today some quite good video of Hitchens in fine, though restrained, form. Hitchens's mildness is all the more remarkable given the sunny, superficial inanities uttered by John Meacham, the other guest. I mean, please: 'I believe in God for the same reason I believe in love'? This is what Meacham builds his life around?)

Of the three, it strikes me that it is Harris who comes across as the most angry, whereas Dawkins is the most relentlessly rational. He (Dawkins) is also the most optimistic. There is a weariness in Hitchens's book, I think (for all its energy and venom), which perhaps derives from a pessimism about how likely it is that the fanatical madness he chronicles can be subdued. If so, this is a doubt I share.

Not, of course, that he (or I) would for a moment suggest that we should stop trying.

As it was pithily put recently, in a message directed toward the most recent attempted outrage by religious fanatics: 'We'll just set about ye'.

And I, for one, can't top that.

Getting back on track

I've been away for a while and will slowly be getting back into the swing of things blog-wise.

While away--in London--I was gearing up to write a long screed about the increasing unreadability of British newspapers, as it struck me again (as it has more and more over the recent decade) that even the serious ones have been taken over by a combination of tabloid sensibility and nouveaux-riches solipsism. Why, for example, Glastonbury was front-page news for about 4 days remains a mystery to me...

(For those of you who read German, the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa wrote a nice commentary about the more general problem of the sinking standards in the press for the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Thanks to Anja for the tip.)

Then, of course, there were the failed attacks on London and Glasgow, which, were the murderous intent and potential not so horrendous, would be almost laughable.

I mean...is it just me or is there not something darkly comical about a man--enraged by the failure of his ineptly built bomb to explode--dousing himself in gasoline and screaming 'God is great!' while trying to punch at a police officer who was trying to put out the fire?

This brings to mind the sad New Jersey wannabes who hoped to attack Fort Dix and were ultimately discovered because they wanted to transfer their nifty self-made jihadist training video to DVD...and did so at the local electronics store. Well done, lads. (Strangely enough, the prevalence of images of thugs-with-guns is one of those areas where jihadism and gangsta-rap seem to come together...)

A reminder, if needed, that along with whatever other sensible attitudes one adopts toward terrorists, a healthy dose of contempt might also be appropriate.

Losers. Dangerous losers. But losers all the same.

Anyway, the other thing that seems to have received an astonishing amount of commentary over the last couple of weeks is the EU-produced video clip labelled 'Film Lovers Will Love This', a montage of sex-scenes from award-winning films aimed at advertising a new EU fund to promote European film.

It's safe to say in this case that it was not only my generally federalist political leanings in all things European that made me like it....

I think reactions to the film have in some way been instructive, as it raised almost enragingly predictable negative responses from euroskeptic Britons (Are there any other kinds? No, really, I don't think they exist...) and also from the--increasingly annoying--world of Polish politics.

"They do have an image problem," Conservative MEP Chris Heaton-Harris told the BBC in reference to the EU, "but I think cobbling together 44 seconds of soft porn on the Internet is not a brilliant way of solving it."

Thanks Chris, but labelling films like 'Amelie' and 'Breaking the Waves' as 'soft porn' only tells us more about you than it does about either European cinema or the EU.

And this is even better:

Euro-skeptic MEP Godfrey Bloom told the tabloid Sun that it was "cheap, tawdry and tacky."

Godfrey was speaking of the video montage, of course...but the 'it' in that sentence is delightfully, and appropriately, ambiguous, don't you think?

It is unfortunate, in some ways, that the video in question has so overshadowed the others in the series, which highlight the same message (the EU helps distribute European films) by striking different tones.

The method--themed montage with matching mood-oriented music--is terribly simple, but I think the results are quite effective. (All the EU-themed videos are available at the 'EU-Tube' site. Information on them is available from a European Union media page here.)

Here are, for example, themed clips on joy and sadness.

One, to which I am for some reason particularly partial, strikes a romantic note:



Of course, if I wanted to promote the romanticism of European cinema, I might have included something like this...



(From Un homme et une femme.)

Academia: the larval stage

Yes, this sounds familiar:

Graduate school is not about learning. If you learn things, it’s only because you’ve already internalized the habit of learning, only because you make the effort on your own and in concert with fellow graduate students. You learn because that’s what you do now, that’s your life. ... Graduate school is not education. It is socialization. It is about learning to behave, about mastering a rhetorical and discursive etiquette as mind-blowingly arcane as table manners at a state dinner in 19th Century Western Europe.

Graduate school is cotillion for eggheads.

Ahh. The good old days.

More wisdom available on the question "Should I go to graduate school" available here from Easily Distracted. Something to hand out to those eager young things who enquire about having an 'academic career'.

Matters of Honour(s)

Having never actually read any of his novels (a fact I normally hold in reserve in case I find myself roped into a hard-fought game of 'Humiliation'), I am relatively ill-equipped to judge the merits of the British government's decision to grant Salman Rushdie a knighthood.

I do know, however, that Sir Salman has said a fair number of very sensible things about the world recently. And I recall well the issuing of the fatwa calling for his death, not least since I worked in a bookshop at the time, and the management apparently took seriously the possibility that violence might be visited upon those who sold it. Although the chain that owned the store did continue to sell the book, it was not displayed. We had to keep them behind the counter to be sold only on request. Rather like the porno-mags. In retrospect, I can see this as a small defeat for values I hold dear.

Furthermore, many of the reactions to this announcement (commented upon by Ophelia and Shuggy) are, all by themselves, reason enough to applaud the government's decision, revealing, as they do, the infantile worldview of those would justify murder for fictional 'blasphemy'.

Consider the comments of the Pakistani religious affairs minister, Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, who reportedly said:

"The west is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the 'sir' title."

The thought that statements like those in his second sentence might be one of the causes of the accusations referred to in his first sentence does not appear to have crossed his mind.

Nonetheless, without wanting to diminish Rushdie's claim on recognition as an artist--and despite my own conviction that 'blasphemy' is among the most pernicious and idiotic concepts ever developed--I couldn't help but think of J. G. Ballard's reaction when, just a few years ago, he was offered a CBE.

He turned it down.

Why? Well, I'll let him explain.

"I might have been tempted had I been entitled to call myself Commander Ballard - it has a certain ring. I could see a yachting cap and a rum ration as perks of the job. If I was French and was awarded the legion of honour, I might well accept. But as a republican, I can't accept an honour awarded by the monarch. There's all that bowing and scraping and mummery at the palace. It's the whole climate of deference to the monarch and everything else it represents. They just seem to perpetuate the image of Britain as too much pomp and not enough circumstance. It's a huge pantomime where tinsel takes the place of substance.

"A lot of these medals are orders of the British Empire, which is a bit ludicrous. The dreams of empire were only swept away relatively recently, in the 60s. Suddenly, we seem to have a prime minister who has delusions of a similar kind.

"It goes with the whole system of hereditary privilege and rank, which should be swept away. It uses snobbery and social self-consciousness to guarantee the loyalty of large numbers of citizens who should feel their loyalty is to fellow citizens and the nation as a whole. We are a deeply class-divided society.

"I think it's deplorable when leftwing playwrights like David Hare, who have worn their socialist colours on both sleeves for so many years, should accept a knighthood. God almighty, this man actually knelt down in front of the Queen.

"I'm in impressive company [in refusing]. Most of them are thoughtful people and people of spirit and independence. It's good to see quite a few showbusiness people, like Albert Finney, a great actor. There were Aldous Huxley, Robert Graves - it suggests there's quite a large number of people who reject the whole notion of honours in their present form. And it might do something towards bringing the whole system down."

(Source: The Guardian)

'Impressive company' indeed: the same year, the excellent playwright and author Michael Frayn not only turned down a knighthood but had also previously refused as CBE; however, he claimed it was out of relatively prosaic motivations:

"I haven't done this for reasons of modesty," he claimed yesterday. "I like the name 'Michael Frayn'; it's a nice little name to run around with. I've spent 70 years getting used to it and I don't want to change it now."

Despite such caveats, however, I do of course wish Sir Salman a long number of years to get used to his new name.

Be careful, sir.

Cultures of Violence

I am pleased to announce (a bit belatedly, but no matter...clocks move more slowly in the academic world) the publication of Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective, edited by Stuart Carroll, now available from Palgrave Macmillan.

Along with some other very fine contributions from internationally renowned scholars, it also includes a chapter from yours truly, entitled 'Conceptualizing Cultures of Violence and Cultural Change', which concludes with the words:

In a seeming paradox, cultures of violence are both robust and fragile. On the one hand, they influence some of the most fundamental beliefs of large numbers of people, thereby playing a role in shaping countless individual conflicts and, alternatively, enabling and repressing many kinds of serious and petty cruelties. However, on an almost daily basis, the contemporary world confronts us with evidence of how rapidly the intricate rules and prohibitions imposed by such cultures can break down. Cultural historians of violence would do well to keep such lessons in mind.

Yes indeed.

From the book's blurb:

Thinkers and historians have long perceived violence and its control as integral to the very idea of 'Western Civilization'. Focusing on interpersonal violence and the huge role it played in human affairs in the post-medieval West, this timely collection brings together the latest interdisciplinary and historical research in the field.

A sample chapter (the introduction, as a .pdf ) is also available.

(And amongst other good stuff, it contains two articles in which decapitation plays a prominent role.)

51st State?

I'm not sure which of the following is more discomforting, this:

So eager is the country to accommodate Mr. Bush that Parliament unanimously approved a bill last month allowing “American forces to engage in any kind of operation, including the use of force, in order to provide security for the president.” One newspaper, reporting on the effusive mood, published a headline that read, “Please Occupy Us!”

Or this:

After the visit on Sunday, some people expect to see a rash of babies named George.

And this, I don't understand at all...

“Nowhere else can you find such respect and hospitality for the president of the United States. Even in Michigan, he wouldn’t be as welcome.”

Even in Michigan, huh. Wow, that's saying something.

I think there's going to be some time that needs to pass before Albania joins the EU.

Under a leader, undoubtedly, named either Bill or George.

(From the New York Times, via Atlantic Review.)

The Crimes of Paris

Yep, that just about nails it:

(From A General Theory of Rubbish, via Shuggy.)

Just thinking....

As anyone who stops in here semi-regularly might have noted, things have gotten a bit slow of late.

This has partly had to do with my need to spend a greater percentage of my limited attention span and my sitting-at-the-computer time (there is only so long I can manage to do that these days...the fucking ageing process, as my mother used to call it, I suppose) on work-related projects and writing.

Which have been going well, so there's one gamble that's paid off.

I've also been travelling a bit, including to London last week. It was a very fine trip, not least since a good friend of mine (with excellent taste in such things) had arranged tickets for a comedy show by Daniel Kitson.

I'd never heard of him, but it was a great evening. But it was also an odd one.

Kitson is very funny, but his humour seems to contain more than a slight undercurrent of feelings that range somewhere between melancholy and outright existential despair. It's an unusual mix, but a very effective one.

At the show I saw, this combination of emotions was amplified by the opening set consisting partly of some excellent songs by a friend of his (whose name I've forgotten but whose music I haven't) which had the kind of effortless heartbreaking quality that many songwriters would kill for. (I can speak from experience...and I was myself quite close to homicidal thoughts on the evening in question.) [UPDATE: Ah, it was Gavin Osborn, whose Myspace...um...space...is here. Great stuff.]

In any case, the cycle of songs about a youthful love that was quietly longed for, forgotten, re-found, carefully tended and, ultimately, cruelly obliterated, was a strange (but lovely, really) appetizer for the comedy that followed.

It's also rare to find comedy that makes you think while still making you laugh at a word like 'cock'.

Kitson's website contains some very worthwhile audio and video files.

Speaking of thinking, though...

Some time ago You Are Here very kindly granted me a 'Thinking Blogger Award', an internet meme that started, appropriately enough, at The Thinking Blog and was aimed at recognising those bloggers that...well, that make you think.

The rules are 1) If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think and 2) Link to the original post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme. Winners get to display the nifty award logo.

I like the thought behind this award and I've been terribly remiss in living up to my part of the deal. So, I thought I'd do my duty and pass along the love...

It's a difficult choice, since I find things that make me think at many blogs, but if I really had to name those that I consistently find worthwhile to visit they would be (in no particular order):

1. Click opera: Momus's blog was actually one of the first ones I read and the one that suggested to me that there was something worthwhile in the whole phenomenon. A very fine mix of keen observation, art, music, philosophy, politics and appropriate solipsism.

2. 'Notes and Comment' (at Butterflies and Wheels): Butterflies and Wheels is one of the few sites that is literally worth looking at every single day to keep up on how things are going in the battle for reason and sanity. (Usually, they're not going all that well...) At the blog, Ophelia Benson comments on the fray. I don't always agree. But I do mostly. And in either case, I find it to be time well spent.

3. Geoff Coupe's Blog: Next to Ophelia's blog, I think I have found more interesting things to read on a regular basis via Geoff than through any other source. And I think in the ability to surprise me with a truly unexpected gem, Geoff takes second place to no one. (And, unlike your humble narrator, he has learned a useful thing or two about brevity.)

4. Fisking Central: Search as you might, it is rare indeed to find a place where the fine arts of argument and sarcasm are more fully developed. Mainly devoted to taking things apart rather than putting them together again...but as Franz Ferdinand has so succinctly put it, 'What's wrong with a little destruction'?

5. Pharyngula: Hardly an obscure link, I know. But really...this is about as good as it gets, thinking-wise. And I can't put it any better than that.

Thanks, all, for the thoughtful times.

And here's looking forward to many more.

Arguing against the gods

For a quite intelligent journal, this is quite a singularly stupid opening sentence:

SINCE arguments about God have run for thousands of years, it is a little peculiar to ascribe overwhelming importance to the publication of Darwin's “On the Origin of Species” in 1859.

No, no, and no.

'Arguments about God' may have been going on for 'thousands of years', but it's only comparatively recently that the arguments against have gained real evidential force.

(Just as was the case with the 'arguments'--including many fairly stupid ones--which raged about things such as the causes of disease until the mid nineteenth century.)

Before there was evidence of a round Earth, arguments about a flat one were on an equal footing.

Before evidence emerged of a heliocentric solar system, the geocentric vision was a somewhat reasonable one.

Before there was a convincing naturalistic argument to explain the development of life on this planet, there was a good reason to believe in fairy tales.

But no more.

And Darwin was a significant part of that shift.

So what's so 'peculiar' about recognising that?

Besides which, Mr. Collins seems like a deeply confused man:

Mr Collins has no time for intelligent design but conceives God to be of the non-interfering sort, a kind of divine CCTV camera. Yet he believes that Jesus was His son and he prays regularly.

Oh yes, sounds like a man to give serious attention to....

Welcome back Jack

Welcome back to freedom.

And here's wishing you a life, and death (not too soon, I hope), with dignity.

Appalling

Well, among the many offensive things in today's Russia, this still somehow manages to stand out:

"We believe these perverts should not be allowed to march on the streets of Moscow, the third Rome, a holy city for all Russians," said Igor Miroshnichenko, who said he was an Orthodox believer who had come to support the riot police.

"It (homosexuality) is satanic," he told Reuters. One man holding a crucifix threatened to beat up any gay person he saw. [NOTE: a fine lesson in Christian virtue, no?]

Richard Fairbrass, a gay singer with the British pop group Right Said Fred, was punched in the face and kicked by anti-gay activists while speaking to Reuters in an interview.

"We understand this is a gay event and so we came down here today," Fairbrass told Reuters before being hit. Blood dripped from his face after the attack.

Volker Beck, a German Green Party politician and gay rights campaigner, was hit in the face with eggs before being detained by riot police. "We didn't do anything," he told Reuters as he was led away.

The rest is here.

Close your minds

Shuggy identifies a peculiar 'concept inflation' afflicting the notion of 'open-mindedness', and he puts in a few, rather convincing words for something we might call 'appropriate intolerance':

Any sort of context seems to have been lost. Looking for a partner? Then you better discriminate against the under-16s. Is the earth flat? We really aren't obliged to be 'open-minded' towards people who think this. Apart from anything else, open-mindedness like this must surely be rather inefficient.

Appropriate closed-mindedness allows doctors not to waste time on the possibilities that the patient before them is ill because they were abducted by aliens the previous evening, or they're possessed by a demon, or have been disabled by a witch-doctor or something. And mechanics can fix cars more quickly if they dismiss the suggestion that engine failure is down to fact that the driver's ying was out of sync with his yang.

The topic was homeopathy; the truth is universal.

Be good now...

There are very good, non-theistic reasons for being 'good'. In fact, more than necessary.

As Matt M. explains:

I to – being human – have a number of “immoral” urges. So why don’t I act on them? Hmmm… perhaps because doing so would more than likely leave me friendless, jobless, hunted by the police and wracked by guilt at the misery I’d caused.

At what point does that become attractive?

Immoral acts – i.e. acts which cause pain and/or suffering to others – are attractive only to psychopaths. The rest of us, regardless of our metaphysical beliefs, have plenty of good reasons – internal and external – for avoiding them.

As Stan Lee used to say: nuff said?

Size matters

Rats. Had I been born in one of those many countries with more sensible health-care systems than the US of A, not only would I probably be healthier, but I would also be taller:

Prior to World War II, US citizens were some of the tallest people on the planet, but since then their heights have stagnated; Europeans are now on average between 2 and 6 mm taller, despite the US position as the most affluent nation on earth. Like the previous study, this data reflects the growing disparity in prosperity in the United States, where income inequality is higher now than at any time since the Gilded Age.

The rest, by Jonathan M. Gitlin is worth reading, as are the two studies he mentions.

(The report from The Commonwealth Fund, also suggests to me that Germans should stop griping so much about their health care system: yes, it's getting less generous, but the results remain impressive. Speaking from personal experience, I've found health care in Germany to be fabulous. And all the doctors are so tall...)

(Via Lawyers, Guns & Money)

The play's the thing...

Filled with husbandly pride (and, knowing how much work went into it, no small amount of awe and respect), I am very pleased to announce that The Theatre of Civilized Excess: New Perspectives on Jacobean Tragedy is now available to order.

From the summary:

Jacobean tragedy is typically seen as translating a general dissatisfaction with the first Stuart monarch and his court into acts of calculated recklessness and cynical brutality. Drawing on theoretical influences from social history, psychoanalysis and the study of discourses, this innovative book proposes an alternative perspective: Jacobean tragedy should be seen in the light of the institutional and social concerns of the early modern stage and the ambiguities which they engendered. Although the stage’s professionalization opened up hitherto unknown possibilities of economic success and social advancement for its middle-class practitioners, the imaginative, linguistic and material conditions of their work undermined the very ambitions they generated and furthered. The close reading of play texts and other, non-dramatic sources suggests that playwrights knew that they were dealing with hazardous materials prone to turn against them: whether the language they used or the audiences for whom they wrote and upon whose money and benevolence their success depended. The notorious features of the tragedies under discussion – their bloody murders, intricately planned revenges and psychologically refined terror – testify not only to the anxiety resulting from this multifaceted professional uncertainty but also to theatre practitioners’ attempts to civilize the excesses they were staging.

Available now from Rodopi.

Don't need a weatherman to know which way the (martian) wind blows

Thanks to Geoff, I have discovered a very useful guide to climate change produced by New Scientist.

It's a very good tool for dealing with misinformation.

And it contains an answer to one climate change myth that I wasn't even aware of: apparently, there have been arguments that greenhouse gases have not caused global warming since...wait for it...Mars and Pluto are also warming up (and, as far as we know, neither of them is served by Easyjet.)

Apparently, though, that line of analysis is even less convincing than it initially sounds...

Having grown up in what I was repeatedly told was a nine-planet solar system, however, sentences like the following are somewhat jarring:

Our solar system has eight planets, one dwarf planet and quite a few moons...

Alas, poor Pluto. Vertically challenged, but no less beloved for all that.

(Besides, I thought there were actually, three dwarf planets...)

In the line of fire

I've much admired Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's reports from Iraq (and two of them have featured in posts on this site), so I was sad to hear that he had been injured by a grenade in recent fighting in Lebanon between the government and Islamic radicals. (From the Guardian, scroll down to the bottom of the article.)

He had followed soldiers into a building on the outskirts of Tripoli when a grenade was hurled down the stairwell, injuring him and one of the soldiers. He was released from hospital last night after being successfully treated for wounds sustained when three small pieces of shrapnel lodged in his arm and thigh. Abdul-Ahad, who studied architecture at Baghdad University, has been twice shortlisted for foreign correspondent of the year at the British Press Awards. He has won a number of awards for his reporting from Iraq, including the Martha Gellhorn prize last year, in which judges praised his "vivid, humane, independent and brave" reporting.

Here's wishing him a quick and full recovery.

Domino Dancing

Somewhere along the line, I picked up this song from Fujiya and Miyagi (a band from Brighton, England, as the name would lead you to believe) and quite liked it.

Now I see there's a video.

Which is also interesting.

Help the aged

There is quite an enormous amount of material I now have backlogged with regard to Recommended Reading, but I so far haven't gotten around to posting it. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps next week. Perhaps never. Alas....

In the meantime, I would like to recommend something dealing with a topic I've not referred to in a while: design.

More specifically, the aesthetic of 'old', 'used', 'authentic', 'second-hand', 'resale', 'antique' stuff.

The sort of stuff that, I think, maybe with...um...age, I'm coming to appreciate more and more. But I'm also, as it were, coming to appreciate the complexities of my appreciation.

In his post 'Secondhand best: the point of not designing at all', Momus takes a look at some old stools and along the way makes some intriguing comments about 'the patina aesthetic', class, ethnicity and contradictions.

A sample:

At a barbecue in Gorlitzer Park last weekend I got talking to an Israeli girl about generation gaps which are also class gaps. Our parents think they're higher class than we are because they have newer furniture, clothes and so on. What they don't realize is that we think we're higher class than them because we've moved past consumerism as the be-all and end-all of life. We wear our secondhand clothes -- and present our retro furniture -- as a badge of honour, a cache of cultural capital. You don't spend your way to a better future when spending is precisely what's going to cancel the future!

In Berlin, at least, the style of the progressive bourgeois class is totally defined by patina. Most cafes for these people have mix-and-match retro chairs, shabby and comfy. People's houses have 50s, 60s and 70s furniture, often communist ostalgie pieces, each one with a tale to tell. The less you paid, the cleverer you are.

In Berlin, at least, this is essential class signalling. What distinguishes a cool cafe from McDonald's, or a cool house from a house furnished by Ikea, is patina. Busy working people often admire your handpicked thrift clothes apologetically: "I'd love to wear that kind of stuff, but I just don't have the time to hunt it down, so I just buy new." New has become second-best, secondhand best. It may be hard to explain to your parents, but to your peers it's second nature.

[...]

Of course it all gets very complex and contradictory. The creative class in Neukolln are slumming Slow Lifers, whereas the immigrants are on the up-and-up, enterprising, hard-working, stressed. One group is pre-materialist (in other words, aspirational and ambitious), the other post-materialist (so over Rolexes and bling). They pass each other midway without so much as a nod.

There's also a fascinating paradox in the attitude to work -- the dignity of labour -- that emerges in the patina aesthetic. Sure, old stuff is cool because you can see how it's been worked and reworked. You enjoy -- and fetishize -- labour in the piece. Other people's labour. People you never met, people far away in space and in time. Dead craftsmen, previous owners. Yet you opt out of consumerism, and buy pre-owned stuff, as part of opting out of precisely the kind of productive culture that created this stuff in the first place. You admire, from your Slow Life, the "fast life" of someone overworked, back in 1920, or over in China.

Do read the rest. It's better in context.

'A bigot, a reactionary, a liar, and a fool.'

There I was, just about to move on into the next and more demanding stage of mourning (due the passing of Jerry Falwell), when I was rescued at the very last minute by Timothy Noah, at Slate.

Noah not only provides what might be a perfect epitaph for the late founder of the Moral Majority (the words that adorn the title of this post), but he also does the great service of assembling a list of the great man's wit and wisdom.

How very insightful he was.

A selection:

On Sept. 11 [links to an mp3 audio file]: "The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.' "

On feminists: "I listen to feminists and all these radical gals. ... These women just need a man in the house. That's all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they're mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They're sexist. They hate men; that's their problem."

On global warming: "I can tell you, our grandchildren will laugh at those who predicted global warming. We'll be in global cooling by then, if the Lord hasn't returned. I don't believe a moment of it. The whole thing is created to destroy America's free enterprise system and our economic stability."

On Jews: "In my opinion, the Antichrist will be a counterfeit of the true Christ, which means that he will be male and Jewish, since Jesus was male and Jewish."

So long Jerry, you will be missed.

By somebody.

I'm sure.

Somewhere.

Thinking about...zombies

Although not really a fan of the horror genre, I loved 28 Days Later, and am very much looking forward to seeing its sequel 28 Weeks Later when it is finally released in Germany.

While the film certainly looks exciting, viewing the trailer and other excerpts that I've been able to find online, inspires feelings of...well, dread, I suppose. And an odd sadness.




Perhaps it's the real-world references to the situation in Iraq, for instance (the deceptive security of a green zone, the seemingly inevitable slide toward chaos and destruction, the free-firing snipers), or perhaps it's contemplating an apocalyptic plague loosed upon a city I know relatively well and which has increasingly seemed haunted by a latent aura of vulnerability.

OK, I know, we are only talking about a zombie film here.

But 'zombies' have always been excellent symbolic tokens representing all kinds of real processes, fears, and darker corners of human psychology. The very notion of the 'undead'--not quite living, not quite dead--is inherently ontologically disquieting. Great horror films (or fiction, such as that from H. P. Lovecraft) have always generated a feeling that is really...unheimlich ('uncanny').

This is a feeling that, in another sense perhaps, underlies Haruki Murakami's fascinating book Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, which I'm currently reading. As Murakami notes in his preface, he was partly inspired to write the book by a letter he ran across in a magazine from a woman whose family had been affected by the sarin nerve gas attack carried out in 1995 by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult.

'How on earth did this happen to us...?' she wonders, a question that Murakami recalls 'stuck in my head like a big question mark.'

And indeed, it is the essential everydayness of the stories of the people affected by the attack (along with the sinister fact that, unlike in a sudden explosion, it took hours for many victims to realise what had happened to them) which makes reading their experiences so...uncanny. That, as well as the maddening contingency of the semi-random circumstances that brought certain people to certain subway cars at certain times.

For their part, the perpetrators of the attack, the members of the Aum cult, seem strangely detached in their methodical, affectless determination.

Indeed, at times they resemble nothing so much as...zombies.

Perhaps its the very impersonality and relentlessly all-devouring nature of the killer virus (and its carriers) in the '28' films which makes them so shattering to contemplate. No negotiation is possible; reason is powerless.

The same could be said about death cults.

Philip French concludes his review of the film this way:

But the movie is ruthless and not only in the way it spares no one from plague and bullet. The chilling theme is that the road to hell on earth is paved with good intentions, starting with the well-meaning scientists and the animal activists who light the fuse, and continuing with those inspired by compassion and moral decency.

As in so many things here in the real world: there is no pony.

Which is, indeed, dispiriting.

Perhaps I should wait for the DVD.

So, it's maybe a good thing that Jonathan Coulton is around to add some much-need levity to the whole topic of brain-eating zombies. Here is his excellent song, 'Your Brains'.

I wish I had answers to random questions that were this cool

Perusing the excellent blog Some Men are Brothers I ran across a reference to an interview with Will Sheff, the lead singer of the band Okkervil River. I happen to have a song by this band on my mp3 player ('Black'...and quite a rocking little number it is). So, I was intrigued.

The first question in the interview was the following:

'So the first thing I wanted to ask you was if you’ve ever been in a fight.'

Fair enough...I mean, it's nice to start out with something unexpected, something that, the interviewer thinks, might nicely break the ice and usefully unsettle the interviewee.

However, the answer was far more interesting than -- I assume -- the questioner expected:

WILL SHEFF: Oh. I was in a knife fight just a couple months ago, believe it or not. I was at a party—kind of a hipster party in Austin. It was New Year’s Eve. And there were lots and lots of people there. I dropped Scott [Brackett, Okkervil’s trumpet and keyboard player] off and I drove back to the party for no good reason. I was really drunk, walking around, and I turned a corner and saw two gentlemen having a fight. One of them pulled a hunting knife out of his jacket. It was like a ten-inch-long hunting knife, and he swung it at the other guy’s throat! And the other guy turned his head at the last minute and he got cut on the back of his neck. But if he hadn’t turned his head he would have gotten his throat cut.

The guy who got the back of his neck cut shouts, “He’s got a knife! He’s got a knife!” So I see this guy swinging this hunting knife around and in a blind, drunken impulse I grab the guy’s hand—the guy with the knife—and I was going to try and pull the knife out of his hand. But the instant I grabbed his hand, I looked down at this knife and I realized that this is a real, very sharp, very metallic knife—and it could very well stab me in the gut or something like that. And so I thought, All right, well, I really have to pull this knife out of this guy’s hand or else something bad’s going to happen. He was holding it really, really tight and for just a second, he loosened up his hand. I saw that as my window, so I pulled as hard as I could to get the knife out of his hand—I actually cut my hand in the process of it. I pulled so hard, and it was such a crowded party, that in the process of pulling the knife out of his hand I stabbed somebody in the leg.

BLVR: Oh my god.

WS: So I stabbed this guy in the leg and he goes [abruptly] “Ow!” And I said, “Hold on a second—I’ll be right back.” And I ran and hid the knife somewhere the knife’s owner wouldn’t find it. But where, in the morning, the person who had been assaulted could find the knife and use it as evidence.

BLVR: That was very responsible of you.

WS: When I got back, the guy who had pulled the knife was long gone. The guy who I stabbed was still there. And he was just sort of drinking a beer. And I said, “Man, I’m really, really sorry I stabbed you in the leg, but a guy pulled this knife…” And the guy said, “Oh, no, no, it’s OK. I’m fine.” And his girlfriend said, “No no no, you’re not fine—you have blood all over your hand.” He had his hand over the wound, and when he lifted it, his hand was slick with blood. There was blood all over his hand.

As it turns out, he was on ecstasy, so he didn’t really care that he had been stabbed in the leg. So I said, “Well, go to the bathroom, look at the wound, and see if you have to go to the hospital, I’ll pay for it or whatever.” So he goes to the bathroom and the news quickly spreads that this guy’s been stabbed in the leg. No one realizes that the other guy actually was assaulted and there was a fight. They just heard there was somebody who pulled a knife and stabbed somebody in the leg.

BLVR: It was you.

WS: Yeah. So I go to the bathroom to check on this guy and there are all these girls in the bathroom and they’re all like [girl voice], “We’re taking care of it! We’re taking care of it! Go away!” And then the host of the party comes out and goes: “Everybody out. Somebody pulled a knife. Everybody out of here.” He’s called the police. I say, “I don’t want to leave. I’m the person who actually inflicted the wound and I feel I should pay for it if he has to go to hospital.” And he says: “You’re the one with the knife?! What kind of sick fuck brings a knife to a party? What the fuck is wrong with you? Get out of here!” And I was like, “But it wasn’t my knife!” And he said, “I don’t want to hear it. Just get the fuck out of my house.” And then the police showed up, so I was like—I’m not sticking around. So I left.

It turns out that the guy who pulled the knife now has criminal charges pressed against him. And the guy who I stabbed was not that gravely injured.

So that was the last fight I got in and it involved a large hunting knife on New Year’s Eve.

BLVR: And for the rest of your musical career, every song will be based on that.

WS: Well, the funny thing is, it’s become this thing in Austin that people talk about—and nobody really knows the story. People think that I brought the knife to the party. And one person said to Travis, our drummer, “Hey, I heard your boy was trying to get fresh with some girl in the bathroom at a party and she wasn’t having it, so he stabbed her in the leg with a knife.” So in a sense I have been typed, now, as a kind of knife-wielding psychopath.

Read the rest at The Believer if you like. But I think the remainder is rather a let-down after this.

Texas is a lot more interesting than I thought.

Adding a decibel or two

As Ophelia suggests, now might be the time to make a little noise. Bangladeshi journalist Tasneem Khalil has been arrested by a government (one of several) that has demonstrated it is not reluctant to arrest and torture people at will. From the press release by Human Rights Watch:

Bangladesh’s military-backed care-taker government should immediately release Tasneem Khalil, an investigative journalist and part-time Human Rights Watch consultant, who was detained by security forces late last night, Human Rights Watch said today.

Khalil, 26, is a journalist for the Dhaka-based Daily Star newspaper who conducts research for Human Rights Watch. According to his wife, four men in plainclothes who identified themselves as from the “joint task force”came to the door after midnight on May 11 in Dhaka, demanding to take Khalil away. They said they were placing Khalil “under arrest” and taking him to the Sangsad Bhavan army camp, outside the parliament building in Dhaka. [...]

“The Bangladeshi military should be on notice that its actions are being closely watched by the outside world,” Adams said. “Any harm to Tasneem Khalil will seriously undermine the army’s claims to legitimacy and upholding the rule of law.”

Absolutely.

[Update]: Tashneem Khalil has been released. Details available here.

More thoughts on rampant pathologies, modernist ziggurats and countless rabbits

For those who are interested in J.G. Ballard (or for those of you interested in getting interested in him), some further reading...

Simon Sellars has a far more comprehensive run-down of last weekend's conference. As he points out, the venue was both entirely appropriate and subtly absurd:

I provided myself with other breaks by wandering around the UEA grounds and the ziggurat halls of residence, in particular, a series of pyramidical, mirrored structures ringing a lake and woodland, resembling nothing less than a Ballardian Concentration City. All around, the Brutalist architecture was superbly integrated into art and aesthetic, into functionalism and living, so much so that I thought a garbage skip was in fact an art work along the lines of the industrial sculptures dotted around the grounds. There was a swarm of rabbits darting around my legs, too, and hundreds, maybe thousands of interconnected rabbit holes – an animal kingdom version of the ziggurat – and one couldn’t help but compare these hyperactive beasts to the usual activities of university students after a few lagers.

Along with his keen observations (and excellent photos), Simon provides summaries and links galore on many of the topics covered.

Elsewhere online, Owen Hatherley also interprets the event (and helpfully provides a link to his own contribution), though in rather more discordant terms. He registered some kind of 'tussle' between rival gangs of literary theorists to decide who could 'claim' Ballard's writing as their own.

I didn't notice that, which is odd, since my ears are usually attuned to the dulcet sounds of intellectual bloodshed.

However, perhaps under what seemed on the surface to be a remarkable openness to other points of view and a refreshingly collegial atmosphere, I missed out on some subtle aggression amongst the intellectual tribes gathered.

Not only am I not as up-to-date on academic turf battles as perhaps I should be, I may have been distracted by all those charming bunnies.

I do, though, have a sneaking suspicion that the following might have been directed at me (or, more precisely, my own contribution), partly since I was one of the few to take a sociological perspective:

So there were some strange recuperations here, most memorably an attempt to read High Rise as some sort of sententious Family and Kinship in East London style anti-Modernist critique.

Well, you can't please everybody (and at least the attempt was memorable).

Having never had my intellectual efforts be reduced (or elevated, take your pick) to a recuperation before -- let alone a 'strange' one -- and since neither I nor Ballard (nor the sociology I was employing) could be even vaguely seen as 'anti-Modernist', I suspect I've been misunderstood.

I will certainly have to speak more loudly next time.

And use more diagrams.

Or perhaps this was directed at someone else...

[Update] It was directed at someone else. So, I feel better now.

A cavalcade of anger and fear

'This Year' by the Mountain Goats.

(The video seems to load slowly, so you may wish to pause it till it's well ahead of itself.)

Nightmares at Noon

I'm still recovering somewhat from last weekend's conference on British author J.G. Ballard at the University of East Anglia. This is not only because of its particular subject matter but also the inevitable components of conference attendance (exhausting travel, finding one's way around strange cities, the creation of a social space in which conversations are brief but intense, the necessity to concentrate intensely on wildly diverse -- and possibly contradictory -- interpretations, and the enjoyable but tiring post-conference evening in the pub...)

Nonetheless, I'm very happy to say that my experience of the conference was a very positive one. This is especially so since I'm a relative novice when it comes to Ballard (or, indeed, to literary analysis), and I had gone to Norwich as much with the aim of learning something about Ballard's writing as presenting my own humble efforts at interpreting it. As at any conference, each paper had its own qualities, and some were better than others, but I must say that the overall quality of debate and discussion was very high.

Considering that Ballard's writing is probably most generally known for its violence and dark perversity (adapting a review by Ballard himself, one speaker referred to his stories as 'nightmares at noon'), the atmosphere at the conference was nothing if not cheerful and convivial. I was struck by the diversity of people who seem attracted to Ballard's work, and I have never attended a conference, I think, at which the boundaries between 'academic' and other forms of knowledge were so hard to define and, indeed, at which the distinction itself was so insignificant.

It is a rare and genuine pleasure to meet so many very fine and enjoyable people in such a short span of time.

Just to quickly make a few impressions...

It seems that that, after a long period of either being (relatively) ignored by literature scholars or of being (frequently) shoved into one of a series of all-too-simple categories, Ballard is rapidly on the way not only to being taken seriously outside his long-extant community of admirers but also to being analysed in terms of a much broader spectrum of theories and philosophies. As one plenary speaker noted, the new academic popularity of Ballard raises the spectre that his writing will be hemmed in by a series of 'closed and obsessed theory worlds', each claiming him as its own.

This is true; however, given not only the kaleidoscope of literary theories available today but also the lack of objective criteria for comparing their results, this is more a function of literary analysis itself than a comment on Ballard. Nonetheless, despite the inevitable theoretical cacophony, growing scholarly interest means a potentially greater awareness of the nuances and complexity of Ballard's fiction. And that's a good thing.

My own contribution, which sought to analyse two of Ballard's novels in terms of Norbert Elias's theory of the 'civilising process', seems to have been well received. That was gratifying, particularly as I'm not a literature person but rather a historian. I also feel that I've successfully learned a great deal not only about Ballard himself but about some of the broader contours of current literary criticism. (Some of these are very enlightening; some of them strike me as not very helpful, but this is not my field, so I don't feel so eager to expand on that point just now.)

Over the course of the conference, I felt a few half-formed intuitions that I had been developing about Ballard's work becoming more defined. I'm still not sure whether I'm on the right track or not, but when I said things along these lines, I did get some positive feedback. (Rather than a sign of insight, of course, widespread agreement can also signal banality, so that's always an alternate possibility. So, I'm not claiming any particular genius in pointing these out, and since I'm unfamiliar with a lot of the previous interpretations of Ballard's fiction, I may be unwittingly re-stating other people's observations.)

First, for example, the media undoubtedly plays an enormously important role in Ballard's fictional work and his commentary; however, in reading his novels I have found over and over again a vivid depiction of the limits of culture and mediated experience. As much as fantasy, text, image and language, I think Ballard (quite rightly) emphasises those things lying beyond them which structure real life, i.e., physics and biology.

Second, and on a related note, where some might see Ballard as celebrating the potential of technology or media to effect a transformation (or transcendence) of human nature, I find as much (if not more) a consistent message in his work about the ultimate impossibility of fundamentally changing or escaping who (and what) we are. Perhaps he is less definite than this, but at the very least he places firm emphasis on the unlikelihood of fundamental change or on what we might call the inertia of both reality and our mammalian heritage.

Third, in response to my paper, I received a very good question about how seriously we should take Ballard as a social critic. That's something about which I'm still thinking, but my immediate answer (which, so far, I still think is right) was that Ballard's sociology should be taken seriously but used carefully. For instance, as my paper sought to suggest, while not presenting a realistic 'map' of modern violence -- which, as at any other time in history, has mainly mundane and fairly straightforward causes -- Ballard's seemingly bizarre texts present a jarring vision of social life that contain useful (and accurate) insights into historical, social and psychological processes.

(Most fictional depictions of violence give a quite distorted image of its reality. I recently ran across this succinct paper by an Australian criminologist making just that point. Curiously, Ballard's fiction -- while on the surface so much more odd than, say, a typical crime novel -- might contain truer messages about violence than ostensibly more 'realistic' books.)

Fourth, and finally, while the specificities of the post-war world and its culture and technologies are vital parts of Ballard's writing, I think it is possible to put his work within a longer historical context. Some of the issues he deals with (the struggles between impulsivity and self-control, the role of violence in social relationships, the influence of technology on human life) did not simply emerge post-1945. (Although, obviously, the last half century has seen important and meaningful shifts in those topics, ones with which Ballard has presciently and poetically engaged.)

All these points, in one way or another, were in some rudimentary form in my head when we set off to travel to Norwich (via the quintessentially Ballardian atmosphere of Stansted Airport), and, along with some other interesting questions to think about, they are what is going to continue to shape my efforts to understand the work of an author who seems, at last, to be getting the attention he is due.

So, greetings and gratitude are certainly due to the organisers and other participants for a pleasant and stimulating weekend.


(The photo, by the way, is one I took of a former Second World War military emplacement near Le Hourdel, France, which, due to erosion, has since fallen on its side. Ballard himself commented on such structures in his article 'The Architecture of Death'.)

The nucleus of belief

Sticking, if only tangentially, with the topic of death for a moment...

Perhaps this reveals a serious gap in my education, but I was very surprised (via This Modern World) to find that atheism apparently has some kind of officially recognised symbol.

And, at least according to the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, which has established a list of 'available emblems of belief for placement on government headstones and markers', it is this:


How bizarre.

Who decided that? And, more intriguingly, I do wonder precisely how many government headstones and markers this symbol adorns.

(Even more strangely, one of the V.A.-accepted Muslim symbols, a five-pointed star, is listed but is 'Not shown because of copyrights'. So, who exactly owns those copyrights, I wonder?)

Into the dark

Well, I'm back.

To celebrate: some not-so-idle thoughts about death.

From Sam Harris, who is quite right to point out that 'what one believes happens after death dictates much of what one believes about life':

You could die at any moment. You might not even live to see the end of this paragraph. Not only that, you will definitely die at some moment in the future. If being prepared for death entails knowing when and where it will happen, the odds are you will not be prepared. Not only are you bound to die and leave this world; you are bound leave it in such a precipitate fashion that the present significance of anything -- your relationships, your plans for the future, your hobbies, your possessions -- will appear to have been totally illusory. While all such things, when projected across an indefinite future, seem to be acquisitions of a kind, death proves that they are nothing of the sort. When the stopper on this life is pulled by an unseen hand, there will have been, in the final reckoning, no acquisition of anything at all.

(The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, 2004, pp. 37 and 38 -- thanks to Anja for pointing this out to me.)

From Norbert Elias:

Death is not terrible. One passes into dreaming and the world vanishes -- if all goes well. Terrible can be the pain of the dying, terrible, too, the loss of the living when a beloved person dies. There is no known cure. We are part of each other. [...]

There are indeed many terrors that surround dying. What people can do to secure for each other easy and peaceful ways of dying has yet to be discovered. The friendship of those who live on, the feeling of dying people that they do not embarrass the living, is certainly part of it. And social repression, the veil of unease that frequently surrounds the whole sphere of dying in our days, is of little help to people. Perhaps we ought to speak more openly and clearly about death, even if it is by ceasing to present it as a mystery. Death hides no secret. It opens no door. It is the end of a person. What survives is what he or she has given to other people, what stays in their memory. If humanity disappears, everything that any human being has ever done, everything for which people have lived and fought each other, including all secular or supernatural systems of belief, becomes meaningless.

(The Loneliness of the Dying, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 1985, pp. 66 and 67).

From Julian Barnes:

When my mother died, the undertaker, from a nearby village, asked if the family wanted to see the body. I said yes; my brother no. Actually, he said (to me, when I passed on the question), “Good God, no. I agree with Plato on that one.” I didn’t have the text he was referring to immediately in mind. “What did Plato say?” I asked. “That he didn’t believe in seeing dead bodies.” When I turned up at the undertaker’s—which was more like the rear extension to a haulage business—the funeral director said apologetically, “I’m afraid she’s only in the back room at the moment.” I looked at him questioningly, and he expanded: “She’s on a trolley.” I found myself replying, “Oh, she didn’t stand on ceremony,” though I couldn’t claim to know whether she would, or wouldn’t, have wanted to do so in the present circumstances.

She lay in a small, clean room with a cross on the wall; she was indeed on a trolley, with the back of her head toward me as I went in, thus avoiding an instant face-to-face. She seemed, well, very dead: eyes closed, mouth slightly open, and more so on the left side than on the right, which was just like her—she used to hang a cigarette in the right corner of her mouth and talk out of the other side. [...]

At the undertaker’s, I touched her cheek several times, then kissed her at the hairline. No, she didn’t look awful: there was nothing overpainted about her, and her hair, she would have been pleased to know, was looking good. (“Of course, I never dye it—it’s all natural,” she once boasted to my brother’s wife.) Was she so cold because she’d been in the freezer, or because the dead are naturally cold? Wanting to see her dead came more, I admit, from writerly curiosity than from filial feeling, but there was a bidding farewell to be done, for all my long exasperation with her. “Well done, Ma,” I murmured.

('The Past Conditional', The New Yorker, Dec. 2006)

A period of silence

It's going to be very quiet here for the next few weeks, as I have to be away.

However, sometime in early May, I should be back.

In the meantime, you may wish to read and consider Steven Pinker's thought-provoking article 'A History of Violence' (which originally appeared in The New Republic but has fortunately been reprinted by the good people at Edge).

Pinker, quite rightly, argues that in many ways the history of violence is not one of (simply) increasing (or purely innate) barbarity, and he points out that on many different timescales trends in violence have been (over the long term and with several qualifications that I don't want to go into right now) quite positive. (This obviously depends to some extent on where you are...and when you're there. Furthermore, in some places at several times in the past--or the present, for that matter--these trends can be reversed.)

He concludes:

Man's inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralization. With the knowledge that something has driven it dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, "Why is there war?" we might ask, "Why is there peace?" From the likelihood that states will commit genocide to the way that people treat cats, we must have been doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.

Indeed, it would, and I think this shift in emphasis--while small--is important.

It so happens that while he was working on this piece, I contacted Pinker to discuss an earlier and far more brief comment he had made in response to an Edge question. What resulted was a very fruitful exchange on the topic of violence.

In many ways, for the last twenty years or so, some historians have increasingly been coming to similar conclusions regarding violence as those reached by some of the anthropologists, psychologists and evolutionary theorists that Pinker cited in his original comments about 'optimism' regarding violence. (Much of the statistical basis for this historical work is presented in an excellent article by Manuel Eisner on long-term trends in European violence. More information on that is available here.) Partly for this reason, the work of Norbert Elias--in particular his notion of a 'civilising process'--has become far more significant in the historiography of crime and violence (though not an uncontroversial one). He has certainly played a central role in much of my own writing on those topics.

I am pleased to see that some traces of my input are visible in Pinker's final article, not least since his views on violence and evolutionary psychology have been increasingly influential to the ways I have come to think about violence in recent years.

Being able to return an intellectual favour is a fine, if rare, experience.

A recent version of my own thoughts on the history of violence--one which seeks to bring together social, cultural and biological perspectives and which also presents a lot of the qualifications that I didn't mention earlier--can be found in an article of mine which has just recently seen the light of day, 'The Limits of Culture? Society, Evolutionary Psychology and the History of Violence', which appears in the current issue of Cultural and Social History (Vol. 4, no. 1, 2007: pp. 95-114).

And that should be enough reading to keep you occupied until I return.

Beach reading

At the Independent, Boyd Tonkin recently interviewed Ian McEwan about his new book On Chesil Beach.

The result is intriguing and very effectively whets the appetite for reading it.

More than that, though, McEwan's observations on things such as the balance between culture and biology or the place of science in shaping one's view of the world are well worth reading.

In particular, one senses a continuation of the themes McEwan discussed in his contribution to the excellent and thought-provoking book The Literary Animal, where he noted:

Literature flourishes along the channels of this unspoken agreement between writers and readers, offering a mental map whose north and south are the specific and the general. At its best, literature is universal, illuminating human nature at precisely the point at which it is most parochial and specific.

From the interview:

"So there have to be two elements running side by side," McEwan continues. "One is that, this is particular: these are characters frozen in history, limited by psychology, by class, by private experience. But on the other hand, this is a universal experience that is differently dressed up by different people at different times." Youth always has to cross that line, even if it would no longer run through the starched sheets of a marriage bed in a dowdy Dorset hotel.

A further excerpt emphasises that his turn toward science was more than a momentary gesture, and illuminates at least a couple of the places (and ways) in which science and literature meet:

"Among cultural intellectuals, pessimism is the style," he says with a tinge of scorn. "You're not a paid-up member unless you're gloomy." But when it comes to climate change, he finds (quoting the Italian revolutionary Gramsci) that scientists can combine "pessimism of the intellect" with "optimism of the will". "Science is an intrinsically optimistic project. You can't be curious and depressed. Curiosity is itself a sure stake in life. And science is often quite conscious of intellectual pleasure, in a way that the humanities are not."

He loves the spirited playfulness evident in places such as John Brockman's celebrated website Edge, where "neuroscientists might talk to mathematicians, biologists to computer-modelling experts", and in an accessible, discipline-crossing language that lets us all eavesdrop. "In order to talk to each other, they just have to use plain English. That's where the rest of us benefit." Science may also now "encroach" on traditional artistic soil. McEwan recently heard a lecture on the neuroscience of revenge, in which the rage to get even - that inexhaustible fuel for tragedy and comedy alike - illuminated parts of the brain via "real-time, functioning MRI [magnetic resonance imaging]. What was demonstrated was that people were prepared to punish themselves in order to punish others: negative altruism."

(A quick search dug up this brief article concerning research on the psychology of revenge, which is also interesting.)

The revolting middle-classes

It might just be because I've been getting ready for a conference on J. G. Ballard, but this article on the Ministry of Defence's vision of the future certainly caught my eye:

"The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx," says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: "The world's middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest". Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the "sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism".

Shades of Millennium People, perhaps...

Making nice (while also making us sick)

Right on time for Easter, Christopher Hitchens considers the recently concluded power-sharing agreement in Northern Ireland.

He raises a difficult question: how much praise do people deserve for putting out fires which they themselves were instrumental in helping to set?

Which is a good question. As is this one:

So, what did all those Irishmen and Irishwomen (and Englishmen and Englishwomen) get killed for? Mostly, if the truth be told, they were slaughtered for no reason at all, or murdered by gangs bent on extortion and profit, or simply gunned down or blown up because they were, say, walking to the wrong school at the wrong time. I repeat: There is nothing in the latest Northern Irish agreement that was not easily available to both sides way back in 1967 or '68. And in the meantime, a whole province of a European country has been subjected to terror, clerical madness, and economic and social retardation that will take yet more decades to repair.

All accurate enough, and, indeed, there are few things more maddening than either undeserved praise or hypocritical, theatrical self-righteousness.

On the other hand, I also find myself thinking of a different question: in the face of all the gruesome misery that Hitchens reminds us, to what extent does the simple fact that this particular fire seems well on the way to being finally snuffed out make the questions how? and by whom? (however vomitous) of secondary importance?

Here it goes again

The spirit of Tapeheads lives on.

I know I'm catching up on this somewhat late, but still.

This video (by OK Go) has made me smile. Enjoy it if you haven't already.

Time out of mind

A fascinating article by Carl Zimmer is reposted from the NYT at RichardDawkins.net on the topic of animals, memory and foresight. It's well worth reading.

An excerpt:

"We tested squirrel monkeys to see if they could anticipate the future, and to our surprise it looks like they could," said Dr. William Roberts, a comparative psychologist at the University of Western Ontario. He and his colleagues ran a test in which they offered squirrel monkeys a choice between one piece of date or four. Not surprisingly, the monkeys took four.

But the scientists then began to take away water from the monkeys before they offered the choice. If the monkeys took four pieces, the scientists kept the water away for three hours. If the monkeys took one, the scientists returned the water in half an hour. The monkeys learned to choose one date. Even though they were not thirsty at the time, they anticipated becoming thirsty in the future. (If the scientists stopped withholding water, the monkeys went back to picking four pieces of dates instead of one.)

Smart monkeys.

What strikes me, as it so often does with articles like this, is what seems to be increasing evidence that the characteristics that we take as so fundamentally human (like morality) are shared--at least in more rudimentary forms--with other animals.

And this is something I find not only fascinating, but also deeply moving.

(For a more extended discussion of this topic, see primatologist Frans de Waal's excellent book, The Ape and the Sushi Master. )

A lesson in applied evolutionary biology

At the New York Times, J. C. Bradbury looks into a phenomenon that, in the eyes of many of its fans, has 'ruined' baseball. In particular, he's referring to the sudden and vast increase in home runs, something that has often been blamed on the spread of performance-enhancing drugs:

To many baseball fans the game has been ruined — hallowed records toppled, managers playing less small ball as they wait for that three-run homer.

Now, it's been years since I've seen a major league game (the same number of years that I've lived in Germany, in fact), but this is a discussion I remember going on in the 90s. (Indeed, it seems to be a perennial complaint that the game has been spoiled by something. Baseball fans seem to be more attached than most to the idea of a 'golden age'.)

Anyway, whether the game's actually gotten worse or not, Bradbury has an interesting explanation for the changes in its dynamics:

The origin of the modern home run era can in fact be traced to the expansion of the league. In the 1990s, Major League Baseball grew to 30 teams from 26 — the Marlins and the Rockies joined in 1993, the Devil Rays and Diamondbacks in 1998. The influx of inferior talent filling those new roster spots fundamentally altered the competitive environment: it allowed elite players, especially hitters, to excel.

The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, an avid baseball fan, hypothesized that in competitive environments, as the variance of the quality of participants shrinks, opportunities for great performances diminish. For most of its history, the major leagues were progressively populated by better and better baseball players — through natural population growth, racial integration and immigration — which meant that opportunities for achievements like hitting .400 were decreasing. As superior players replaced the weakest ones, even the very best had fewer chances at turning in remarkable performances.

Expansion abruptly reversed the trend; today, the variance in quality of major league pitchers, based on E.R.A., is at an all-time high. By letting in the riffraff for baseball’s elite to exploit, expansion increased the likelihood of great achievements. Without even bringing steroids into the discussion, it is no surprise that some already fine hitters performed even better after the early 1990s.

[...]

In the expansion era, home runs per game are up 30 percent over the previous decade, strikeouts 15 percent and hit batters a whopping 70 percent. All are likely the result of expansion’s dilution of pitching talent.

Without denying the scourge of steroids (and without having thought about it all that much) this seems convincing to me. Indeed, the dialectical relationship between mediocrity and excellence seems obvious when you think about it...and not only with regard to baseball.

Nonetheless, as a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan, I can attest that in baseball--unlike in nature--being an adorable loser seems to be an adaptive strategy.

After all, as an article from today's NYT points out, despite having a grim record--their last World Series win was in 1908, their last World Series appearance was in 1945--they've been successful in other ways:

On Forbes magazine’s 2006 assessment of franchise values, the Cubs ranked fifth among baseball’s 30 clubs at $448 million, with revenue of $179 million and a $7.9 million operating profit. (The team had been valued at $247 million in 2001, representing 12 percent annual growth.) ... [T]he Cubs are expected to fetch $600 million or more. In 2002, the Boston Red Sox were sold for a league-record $660 million to a group led by John Henry.

Winning, so it seems, ain't everything.

It doesn't grow on trees...does it?

Since it's April 1st, I thought I'd mention one of my favourite hoaxes, which occurred fifty years ago today.

The year is 1957. The culprit, the BBC, who convinced -- through the reassuring and authoritative voice of David Dimbleby -- a seemingly large number of viewers that spaghetti is harvested from trees.

As the BBC reported at the time:

Spaghetti is not a widely-eaten food in the UK and is considered by many as an exotic delicacy.

Mr Dimbleby explained how each year the end of March is a very anxious time for Spaghetti harvesters all over Europe as severe frost can impair the flavour of the spaghetti.

He also explained how each strand of spaghetti always grows to the same length thanks to years of hard work by generations of growers.

This is believed to be one of the first times the medium of television has been used to stage an April Fools Day hoax.

Please note, this is within living memory...when spaghetti could be referred to as an 'exotic delicacy'.

Only months later, Harold Macmillan would tell the British people they had 'never had it so good'...

Sort of puts things in perspective, dunnit?