Who reads the readers?

There are, off the top of my head, several hundred things I'd rather do than read Tony Blair's memoir.

This isn't out of any particular dislike for the man; indeed, I find it difficult generating any significant emotion toward him one way or another, at least one strong enough to make me want to wade through more than 600 pages of political prose and...yes, sex scenes.

But I've found it can be very enjoyable to read people who have been reading him, such as this post and ensuing discussion at Blood & Treasure.

In particular, I like the suggestion that the book may reveal Blair's 'hidden shallows'.

Thought for the day

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth's centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

What puzzles me most about the Humanities in general and "my discipline" in particular is that, for decades now, they have been pawning off an Orwellian nightmare as liberation.

How ever did that come about?

'Germany does not stand alone in organizing for good looks'

I'm not entirely sure exactly what sparked this item from the editorial page of The Times in 1929, but it seems likely to have been a move by Berlin doctors to offer cosmetic surgery to disfigured people; somehow (at least in the mind of The Times's editorial writer) this was generalised into an 'anti-ugliness league' and provided inspiration for the following (paragraph breaks have been added):

An Anti-Ugliness League

There is plenty to be said for the newest movement in Germany. To form a League to raise the standard of human looks is but to apply to a very important field that principle of cooperation which has worked so well elsewhere. Nothing will strike posterity as more absurd than the way movement after movement is started in England to preserve or beautify buildings or places that are only seen at rare intervals, while nothing whatever is done to improve the faces which everybody sits opposite in tramcars and omnibuses or passes in procession in the street.

For town dwellers the face of England is a human face endlessly repeated, and we shall do well to watch the new League in Germany and to regard with eager expectancy each slight improvement it brings about in the national face and figure over there. It is an old and deep-rooted belief that ugliness and sin go hand in hand, and that the beautiful face goes with the beautiful nature. Remembering this, we may find the motive power behind the new League in Germany in a recent announcement by the Berlin police of their next step in the war against crime.

Hitherto they have broadcast finger prints, but that is boring work and the patterns on fingers rarely give much aesthetic satisfaction. They seldom suggest a new and successful wallpaper and the fun of tracing their unique differences soon palls. So the Berlin police are going to broadcast faces, and they have a double inducement to raise the standard of the German face. If a nation can be produced whose most hardened criminals are good to look at, the policeman who spends his days scrutinizing countenances, broadcasting them and measuring them, will live his life amid beautiful surroundings, which is well known to be worth a large salary in itself. A more beautiful nation will enjoy a cheaper police force.

What is more, it will need fewer policemen, for it is the teaching of psychology, which the Germans at any rate are not likely to disobey, that the way to gain a good character is to behave cold-bloodedly as if you had it. Men of noble mien, such as the League will aim at producing, will find their lower natures overcome by their fine faces and will cease first to do wrong and then to wish to do it.

Germany does not stand alone in organizing for good looks, for there has been talk in Italy of providing free plastic surgery at the state’s expense for those who think that alterations would improve their prospects in business or marriage. Nothing has yet been said about how many signature of neighbours, hotel proprietors and the like, will be needed to bring about compulsory alterations in the interests of the locality where an ugly person resides, but the highly controversial question will soon arise who is fix the norm of beauty and lay down the German, or Italian, or English face.

Aesthetics generally lead to blows from lack of fixed standards, and the best solution will probably be a strict adherence to the standards of antiquity. The arms of the Venus de Milo are still being fished for in the Aegean, and if they are found it will be a great help. The future in this, as in other matters, must be built upon the past, and it will only be by starting with the ship-launching features of Helen of Troy as the type that we shall learn to build the two-thousand-ship face of the future.

The Times, Saturday, 6 April 1929, p. 11

"Crazier than the craziest satirist’s dreams"

There are lots of responses that are possible to today's march for 'honor', or whatever, in Washington, DC.

One of the ones I've found most insightful comes from MGK:

These guys have found the exploit that allows them to game the system of civilized conduct. That’s why irony is dead: Stephen Colbert and his fellow comedians are trying to make an absurd statement in a serious way, but all they can ever hope to do is match the stuff Glenn Beck is trying to say for real. You can’t even make fun of these guys, because they’re crazier than the craziest satirist’s dreams. All you can really do is hope that people get smart enough to see through their bullshit, and that’s a pipe dream.

Someone broke human behavior. We need a patch.

Sadly, I don't think such a patch is going to be available soon.

Further insight.

Milton Keynes: Satan's Lay-by

Sticking for a moment with our heavy metal theme and with reference to a town I know all too well:

The metal concert at the end of the universe, and other poems

As is oft his wont, John Darnielle has been writing poetry about metal bands.

I've quite enjoyed a couple of his recent offerings: 'the temple at the end of the cosmos' (on Ride for Revenge) and 'sacred worlds' (on Blind Guardian).

Related: JD talks such topics with The Believer.

And explains here, that death metal rules.

"The togetherness of modern technology"

As if summoned from a novel by J.G. Ballard: "China traffic jam stretches 'nine days, 100km'"

The title of this post comes from a 1979 Penthouse interview with Ballard on the prescience of science fiction in which he observed:

I suspect it will also turn out to have been extremely accurate in the way in which it is now predicting or anticipating the peculiar affectless quality of life in the 1980s and 90s.

Penthouse: What kind of things?

Ballard: Well, for example the way in which the traditional togetherness of the village is giving way to the inbuilt loneliness of the new high rises, or the peculiar fact that people nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It's a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it's the togetherness of modern technology, and the science fiction writers of the 40s, 50s and 60s picked it out unerringly as being a dominant feature of the future - often without realising what they were doing.

Not that that togetherness is all that cozy, at least going by the Chinese example:

The drivers have complained that locals are over-charging them for food and drink while they are stuck.

Clearly, our Chinese friends have that capitalism thing down pat. Yet, the real traffic jam seems to nevertheless lack, how shall we say, the rampant psychosexual perversion of the Ballardian original.

You can't have everything. 

I won't let go, I won't let go

Friday night music.



'This is the Dream of Evan and Chan', Dntel feat. Ben Gibbard

And while we're talking Ben Gibbard:



'What Sarah Said', Death Cab for Cutie

Getting it all wrong

There are moments when, at least in a political sense, I find that I'm glad I'm several thousand kilometres away from the land of my birth.

One of them came today: according to a current poll, 18% of Americans believe that openly Christian Barack Obama is a Muslim.

Not, of course, that being a Muslim, in itself, would be anything to be ashamed of.

But since we can imagine that probably nearly every person among that 18 per cent thinks it is something reprehensible -- and since the belief is simply wrong -- it's hardly a good day for those who would want to defend the sanity of the American world of media and politics.

[ADDENDUM]: 'Also, 19% of Americans believe that the sun goes round the earth. Ignorance, probably, though the proposition that truly radical distrust – why, I can see it moving with my own eyes - has permanently lodged itself in a fifth of the US population is quite intriguing.'

From here.

Moral victory

From a comment on the likely membership of the bottom half of the upcoming Bundesliga season in Der Spiegel (my translation):

The real winner of the German championship last season was Mainz, because no other team exceeded their financial potential as much as the one led by Thomas Tuchel. The former second league team had less financial clout than any of the other clubs but ended up in ninth place. That was not only unbelievable but also the greatest success in the club's history.

Just saying, like.

Wir sind nicht nur ein Karnevalsverein!

I am the (minty fresh) law?

Discovered while searching for discussions of police powers in the summer of 1928:

Mr. HAYES asked the Home Secretary the grounds upon which the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis has prohibited the use of chewing-gum by police while on duty?

Sir W. JOYNSON-HICKS: The Commissioner has prohibited the use of chewing-gum by police officers on duty because the practice seemed to him not only to invite unfavourable comment, but also to be likely to impair an officer's capacity to deal promptly and efficiently with many of the situations which are constantly arising in the course of his duties.

Mr. HAYES: Is the order prohibiting the use of chewing-gum to be extended to a prohibition of the consumption of chocolates by the Commissioner; and, if so, will it have any effect on the administration?

Viscountess ASTOR: Is it not much more difficult to answer questions properly when you are chewing gum?

Sir W. JOYNSON-HICKS: That is one of the reasons why the Commissioner has prohibited the practice. I am also informed that in blowing a whistle you may blow the gum into the whistle.

Mr. HAYES: There is a serious question involved here. Is the prohibition of the use of chewing-gum extended to a prohibition of the purchase of chewing-gum? In fact, the purchase of chewing-gum has been prohibited in the service canteens, and, that being so, why is an officer, who may not drink beer while on duty, allowed to buy beer in the canteen when he is off duty?

HC Deb 05 July 1928 vol 219 cc1550-1

It sort of reminded me of something I posted last year, about the dangers of orange peels and anarchists.

"Geht raus nach neben deinem Haus"

Today is the first anniversary of my becoming a German citizen.

It's also the 50th anniversary of the first concert the Beatles played in Hamburg.

I thought I would draw the two themes together. As ever, das Internet has proven very helpful in this regard.



Ja, Jackie.

Sommerloch* à la LRB

In tune with the overall summer lull, the current issue of the London Review of Books opens on an unusually frivolous note, with Steven Shapin's review of Michael Steinberger's Au Revoir To All That: The Rise and Fall of French Cuisine.

Now don't mock - the review is far more interesting than one might think and after reading it I feel almost inclined to get Steinberger's book. Being a somewhat indifferent eater myself (and a lousy cook to boot), I tend to be intrigued by the exaggerated significance that food seems to have in the lives of so many people. I therefore enjoy a slice of the culinary hyperbole when it's put on a plate before me:

Nouvelle cuisine was betrayed, Steinberger says, by the media-savvy chef Paul Bocuse, wrongly identified as a leader of nouvelle cuisine. The new cuisine revolution needed its Trotsky, but what it got in Bocuse was its Stalin.

Bye, bye, Brie de Meaux, next stop, McDo. Sounds like Steinberger's book is some kind of Fast Food Nation for gourmets:

What Bocuse did was to erode culinary creativity by taking its human source away from the stove. He established a new conception of what it was to be a successful "executive" chef: abandoning the kitchen, launching frozen food lines in France and Japan, and turning himself into a global brand.

But what is at stake here, I wonder: The demise of food appreciation by pragmatic European chefs (or indeed the quality of eating in Europe) or the loss of a powerful source of symbolic capital for a certain type of sophisticated Yank?


*"Sommerloch" = The dearth of newsworthy events, usually political, during the summer months

Love and taxes

Stirring stuff from Eric, from the dark days of 1940:

Towards the government I feel no scruples and would dodge paying the tax if I could. Yet I would give my life for England readily enough, if I thought it necessary.

I get this sentiment...I even like it.

But then he follows up with...

No one is patriotic about taxes.

...which, yes, I can see the point of, but which also seems an overgeneralisation.

Isn't it possible, after all, to indeed have a certain patriotic feeling about taxes (even grumbling as one pays them...), as long as one has the knowledge that a significant portion of them goes toward maintaining what is -- all things considered, comparatively, by historical and international standards, in spite of the trailer-load of qualifications that I'm not going to bother considering just now -- a decent society?

Or am I just a bit of a freak on this point?

The latter is entirely plausible, I realise.

Farewell Tony Judt

No less saddening for being hardly a surprise: historian Tony Judt has died.

He's been praised here before, especially for his excellent book of essays, Reappraisals, which I can't recommend highly enough.

He had a knack for bringing things to a point.

"History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another," he once declared. "It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.

"And if you can't find a meaning behind history, what would be the meaning of any single life? I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can't see a meaning in it at all."

Being someone sensitive to the influence of chance on history (and the historian), I have to say that this speaks to me.

Volumes.

[UPDATE:] a somewhat older video of Tony Judt, at the Guardian, talking about living with motor neurone disease.

Staring death in the eye and not blinking...much

There are many ways of facing mortality; I mean, in the way that it becomes real and immediate.

I'd like to think that I'd face this situation with defiance and optimism and quiet confidence.

But if I can't, grim determination will do:

Myself, I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

Once again, wishing Christopher the best.

The Third Degree

I've just been informed today that an article of mine has made an appearance in an 'advance access' online version. It derives from a project I've been working on about the media and concerns about police powers in 1920s Britain. I'm quite pleased with it (for a change...) and it's been very enjoyable to research and write.

As it will be, I hope, for you to read.

The abstract:

The late 1920s saw a dramatic upsurge in popular concern about the abuse of police powers in Britain, the end result of a longer-term trend. Various aspects of policing were seen as worrying, but the most important concerned illegitimate forms of questioning. The phrase ‘the third degree’—imported from America—came to encapsulate this unease. Before the First World War, the terminology began to be used in British coverage of American crimes and their investigation, typically accompanied by disparaging commentary on American methods as well as the confident assertion of the superiority of British policing. The wartime growth in police powers and broader state regulation caused some to see an erosion in the ‘liberty of the subject’, and a series of scandals seemed to reveal serious problems with police procedure. The popularity of crime dramas featuring ‘third-degree’ interrogations also shaped public images of the police. Scandals in 1928 generated enough of an outcry to force the calling of the Royal Commission on Police Powers and Procedure (1928–29). Even though few concrete procedural changes were undertaken, it appears to have successfully calmed worries about the police, which receded and did not reach a similar level until the late 1950s.

The article: full-text; PDF. 

(For those of you interested in such things: when the published, paginated version appears, the links will, I am informed, be updated.)

A few things that I learned on vacation

1. It’s good to get away. Away, in particular from the computer. We spend probably a majority of our waking hours every day staring at screens and typing. While in France, however, we were online for about a total of an hour over 2 weeks. This is partly because of the curious absence of internet cafés in this part of the world, which has mystified me ever since I started going there some years ago.

I found the withdrawal difficult for the first two days but then I spent long periods forgetting that the internet exists.

And, as much as I love the internet, this was a Very Good Thing.

But nothing personal, you understand.

2. Jacques Demy was a genius. Not only did he make mind-bendingly beautiful The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) but -- thanks to Arte -- we can also report that his The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) is just the thing for getting into that summer vacation state of mind.

Just take a look:



I mean, really: what more do you want?



3. Beaches are a wonderful invention. One has a very different outlook on life when, well, the outlook is like this.

Or this.

And when the most exciting thing that happens all week is the occasional docking of a dredger, you can be reasonably sure that you’re achieving the right level of relaxation.

(Sharp eyes will note that this vessel is the brilliantly named ‘Britannia Beaver’. Further comment, I think, would be superfluous)

4. Reading is a joy. This may seem obvious; however, I mean 'reading' in the sense of ‘reading something from beginning to end for the pure enjoyment of doing so and being able to linger over the better parts for as long as you like while pleasantly lost in thought’ and not, ‘desperately skimming a book or article to get what I need out of it in the shortest time possible.’

I (and we) spend a lot of time doing the latter and not nearly enough doing the former.

And they are very different experiences.

The joy is only increased by being able to focus on beautiful prose, of course, and I thank Erich Kästner, Ian McEwan and Thomas Mann for providing it.

(And, in Herr Mann’s case, in such enormous quantities: Buddenbrooks is pretty epic, and its German – parts of which are in local dialect or a bit archaic or both – is not the easiest for a non-native speaker used to humbler fare. However, it’s a gripping read, both deeply moving and very, very funny. I’m now encouraged to take on Magic Mountain: any advice? For those of you who're looking more simple -- but still beautifully written -- German reading, I can't recommend Erich Kästner's Emil books too highly. They're meant for children, apparently, but I found them to be a delight.)

Finally: The French, in their creativity, civilisation and love of state-supported civic life, have managed to combine point #3 and point #4 by putting libraries on the beach.

How awesome, dear reader, is France!?

Très awesome!

If you're wondering...

...why it's so quiet round these parts, there's a simple answer.

We're on holiday.

In the usual place.

Abnormal service will resume shortly.


À la semaine prochaine!

Viva la Revolution!

A Franconian exiled in Mexico reminds us via his blog that 2010 marks the centenary of the Mexican revolution.

Which allows me to post a possibly related song by way of joining in the celebrations:



Townes Van Zandt, "Pancho and Lefty"

Pancho in the song might or might not be revolutionary hero Pancho Villa. Well, who cares. It sure is a great song when you're on the road.

Liberté, liberté chérie

Gives me chills, every time...



...but most of all on 14 July.

(Un)just desserts?

A front-page commentary from the current issue of Die Zeit refers to Joseph de Maistre's famous comment that 'every nation gets the government it deserves'.

This would be a rather cruel observation about Germany at the moment, where word has been making the rounds that the Conservative-Liberal coalition in power since late last year is doomed; however, the paper notes with some satisfaction, there is another side to this coin: 'every nation also has the national football team that it deserves'.

This, naturally, would go down rather better here, as -- despite having to settle for third place -- the German team played some surprisingly inspiring football.

Of course, this would be less pleasant, if true, for, say, England and France.

But I'm wondering whether this whole connection between national character and style of play actually holds up.

Just consider the top three teams -- Spain, the Netherlands and Germany -- who played, respectively, with almost inhuman efficiency, brutal thuggishness(*) and exuberant joie de vivre.

None of these, it seems to me, corresponds very well at all with their respective national stereotypes. (Certainly not with regard to Germany, where, say, a relaxed, graceful and easy-going Lebensfreude -- while not unheard of -- is not exactly overabundant. We have our virtues: this is not one of them.)

Which, to turn this back to Die Zeit's politics-football comparison, is, perhaps, comforting: maybe, after all, we don't deserve the government we have.

Nor, one might say at the moment, the trains we have.

But that is another issue altogether.


(*I'm referring here to the final: How does one sing 'everybody was kung-fu fighting' in Dutch?)

Land der unbegrenzten (Essens-)Möglichkeiten

America is certainly a land in which every conceivable want or need is met by the endlessly inventive efforts of the men and women of the private sector.

Who also manage to meet a few of the inconceivable wants and needs as well.

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring to you (via BoingBoing) the 'Candwich': the sandwich in a can!

Yum!

"Katie Price - Jordan - me mates and my beautiful face"

Inspired by an article in today's Guardian I've been spending some time researching the child beauty pageants revered by the white-boots-wearing segment of British and American society. This is all work-related, of course, as the beauty pageant is of course a perfect illustration of the standardisation processes of the "Kulturindustrie" described by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectics of Englightenment. Which I'm rereading as a part of reworking a lecture.

However, it being another tropical day, I'm currently more inclined to turn H&A's ardurously rendered ideas into a visceral emotion of cultural pessimism by recapping on topical BBC3 fly-on-the-wall documentaries.

So there is "dumb" (her word) Sasha Bennington from bluddy Burnley, who desperately wants to be Katie Price (according to herself, the most important person in her life):



(Dad is a right alpha male, too, isn't he?)

If you think that's a freakshow, go stateside, where you find the vicious American munchkin who "channels" (my favourite item of "cool" patois from the Snaily Grail) Eddie Izzard.

My favourite, however, is Moira, the born-again pageant mum - who simply channels ... Jesus:



Talk about the "obsessively mimetic relationship between consumer and cultural commodities" (Horkheimer and Adorno). Talk about "opium for the people."

Manliness-ness, the sequel

This is interesting:

What if your million copy-plus bestselling inspirational book calling on men to act more manly, aggressive, even violent became a key source of inspiration for a ruthless cultic Christian paramilitary fundamentalist crime syndicate that controls most of the Crystal Meth traffic in the US and is fond of tossing severed heads into Mexican discos ?

The awkward confrontation between a religious conservative's celebration of a more aggressive manliness and the actual horror of real aggressive manliness reminded me of something I wrote back in the early days of this humble blog, in which I concluded:

Those who do long for a return of the 'real man' should be careful what they wish for.

The rest.

As an addendum, those interested in the reality of more traditional male violence cultures in the US should check out Randolph Roth's recent book American Homicide (UK/US). I'm going to be commenting on the book at a panel at a conference in Chicago in November. It's thoroughly compelling.

(via Blood and Treasure)

Notes on notes

There is an essay by historian Sir Keith Thomas at the London Review of Books on the subject of note-taking, and -- as unlikely as this may sound, given the topic -- it is delightful.

Although, I'm aware that its appeal may be limited to those who spend their days keeping track of obscure bits of information in the hopes of turning them (someday, maybe, fate willing) into a coherent historical narrative.

In any case, Thomas (now 77) is definitely old-school when it comes to methodology:

When I go to libraries or archives, I make notes in a continuous form on sheets of paper, entering the page number and abbreviated title of the source opposite each excerpted passage. When I get home, I copy the bibliographical details of the works I have consulted into an alphabeticised index book, so that I can cite them in my footnotes. I then cut up each sheet with a pair of scissors. The resulting fragments are of varying size, depending on the length of the passage transcribed. These sliced-up pieces of paper pile up on the floor. Periodically, I file them away in old envelopes, devoting a separate envelope to each topic. Along with them go newspaper cuttings, lists of relevant books and articles yet to be read, and notes on anything else which might be helpful when it comes to thinking about the topic more analytically. If the notes on a particular topic are especially voluminous, I put them in a box file or a cardboard container or a drawer in a desk. I also keep an index of the topics on which I have an envelope or a file. The envelopes run into thousands.

And then he has a passage that sounds, a bit painfully, familiar:

This procedure is a great deal less meticulous than it sounds. Filing is a tedious activity and bundles of unsorted notes accumulate. Some of them get loose and blow around the house, turning up months later under a carpet or a cushion. A few of my most valued envelopes have disappeared altogether. I strongly suspect that they fell into the large basket at the side of my desk full of the waste paper with which they are only too easily confused.

I myself struggle with keeping track of everything I run across and am constantly haunted by the fear of forgetting something and not having it to hand when I need it. Indeed, I've often had the experience of finding ideal pieces of evidence for a particular argument shortly after the relevant article has gone into print; more worryingly, I sometimes come across extensive notes on something that I have forgotten taking.

These problems have only become worse as my research interests have diversified, perhaps particularly so since I've begun to delve into the history of the press in the 1920s. Exploring a period's culture via newspapers is tremendously rewarding and interesting (as I hope my historical bycatch series shows); however, it's also a terribly bitty process, with short passages from here or there needing to be organised into ever-larger agglomerations to actually mean something. (This is not unlike other kinds of sources, but my own experience has been that focusing on newspapers -- at least if you're going to do it across several papers, which you should -- compounds the problem, especially as you have to take into account, say, each paper's target audience and editorial line.)  

My academic training stretches back far enough to a time when notecards and typewriters were still the standard tools of the trade; of course, the computer has been playing an ever-larger role in my work: accompanying the piles of paper that infest my shelves and a goodly portion of my office's floorspace, I have (like most younger historians I know) gigabytes of notes, articles as PDFs and digital photographs accumulated in the archives. The facility to word-search within documents has saved me from suicidal despondency on many occasions, as I've desperately tried to track down something that I know I have read (or even written) somewhere.

Despite our age difference, though, I'm relieved, somehow, to read that Thomas developed his historical methodology haphazardly, as I could say something similar (and, in a different context, have). It's even more encouraging, since he writes such excellent books.

But I recognise that there are some passages that I feel can only have been written by a historian of an earlier generation:

Christopher Hill believed in reading everything written during the period (provided it wasn’t in manuscript), and everything subsequently written about it. He used to buy every remotely relevant monograph when it came out, gut it and then sell it. 

So: read everything written during the period and everything subsequently written about it. The former maybe works for periods when less was written, though even here the expansion of social and cultural history has meant that ever more things can now be counted as 'sources'. And by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the potential source base for this style of broad-brush cultural history becomes incomprehensibly vast.

Moreover, the latter suggestion (reading 'everything written about' a period) is, I think, no longer really a serious option for a historian, unless you're going to limit yourself to a very narrow period and topic indeed. The expansion of the production of history is in large measure a good thing: but it's meant that things are very difficult to keep up with: I find it impossible to entirely keep up with what's being written in British crime and justice history, though the publication of some new (or re-issued) synthetic overviews certainly helps.

Nonetheless, Thomas's method ('soak[ing] myself in the writings of the time') and advocacy of G.M. Young's advice to 'go on reading until I can hear the people talking' remains a valid description of what cultural history, essentially, boils down to. As does this:

Even when all the necessary precautions have been taken, the result will still lack anything approaching scientific precision. For what my method yields is a broad-brush impression of beliefs and behaviour over long periods of time. I am a lumper, not a splitter. I admire those who write tightly focused micro-studies of episodes or individuals, and am impressed by the kind of quantitative history, usually on demographic or economic topics, which aspires to the purity of physics or mathematics. But I am content to be numbered among those many historians whose books remain literary constructions, shaped by their author’s moral values and intellectual assumptions. When writing history, there are rules to be followed and evidence to be respected. But no two histories will be the same, whereas the essence of scientific experiments is that they can be endlessly replicated.

Note (because it is all too easy in these post-modern times to be misunderstood) that the concluding line does not advocate methodological randomness or a denial of the reality of the past; indeed, if there is one thing that has -- fortunately -- kept history safe from the more extreme theoretical currents of recent decades it is its unavoidable dependence on evidence.

Which helps me, anyway, to think that Thomas's conclusion might not be too far off the mark:

That, I think, is a very kindly account of what I try to do: to immerse myself in the past until I know it well enough for my judgment of what is or is not representative to seem acceptable without undue epistemological debate. Historians are like reliable local guides. Ideally, they will know the terrain like the backs of their hands. They recognise all the inhabitants and have a sharp eye for strangers and impostors. They may not have much sense of world geography and probably can’t even draw a map. But if you want to know how to get somewhere, they are the ones to take you.

Well, at least some of them, and you could do far worse than asking historian (and humanist) Sir Keith to tell you the way.

Zum Weinen

Scheiße.

Clearly, Spain was a better team.

Good enough to make German children cry.

So, I hope they're happy with themselves.

Still, we can take comfort in those areas where we're still ahead of Spain.

Like, maybe...well...our bond rating.

And we have one eerily psychic octopus.

Whose life, I fear, may now be in danger.

Bad luck, Jungs: well done in getting much further than expected, and thanks for so many fine moments.

Now: let's take third place! (When our Ringo Starr look-alike will again be on the pitch.)

Random associationism

Ringo Starr is 70 today. Happy birthday, Richard! Who'd have thought that you'd outlast (almost) them all?



But maybe it's the power of the doppelgänger? There is, first of all, our cultural materialist friend Terry Eagleton:



But closer to home, there is of course our own bomber Müller, who sadly misses today's match.

Just music

Opinions on the following song (heard as the Obscene Desserts collective was driving into town this morning) are divided:



Nouvelle Vague, "Blister in the Sun"

After watching this video I'm sort of tempted to kind of like it.

Waiting for Steve Jobs

There was something about passages from Charlie Brooker's current column -- on the iPhone, or what he calls the 'Jabscreen' -- that reminded me of something by Becket:

But once I had a Jabscreen of my own, I soon discovered the novelty lasts six months, tops. There's a limit to how many conversations you can have about it before you reach burnout. Have you seen the app which takes your photo and makes it look like you're really fat? Yes. And the game where you land all the planes on the runway? Yes, that too. Hey, how about this thing with the funny red monster that repeats everything you say? Please leave me. Please just leave me here to die.

Though there were other parts that reminded me more of something by Pasolini:

Best of all for Jabscreen 3 owners, however, is the news that the Jabscreen 4 also has a minor flaw. According to some reports, it can appear to lose reception under exceptional circumstances, such as a nuclear winter, or someone holding it. Apple zealots were quick to point out that you can get around the problem entirely by placing the device on a velvet cushion and gazing at it and breathing through your nose and masturbating instead of making any calls.

These are kinds of despair, I'm pleased to say, that we have avoided entirely.

Scenes from 'the war against legs', 1928.

Given the heatwave that seems to have struck parts of western Europe recently, it's entirely appropriate that I ran across the following article today, which I originally discovered while researching a debate about police powers in the late 1920s.

Critics Shocked by Scanty Dress of Bathing Girls

Protests from Seaside and River: New Job for the Police

Special to “Reynolds’s”

Women’s dress—or, rather, the lack of it—is again a subject of excited discussion.

“Leg-mania” has arrived with the heat wave. One cannot be quite sure all the time, whether it is the effect of the heat on those who show their legs, or on those who criticise them.

Here is the latest list of places whence rise woeful protests at the display of the “female form divine.”

London
Southend
Paris
Arizona (where the wild men are)

In each centre the war against legs is being carried on with different tactics. In Arizona, for instance, where they don’t trust these matters to Watch Committees, the youths of the town declare that it is a “fight to the finish.” But in Southend the police have been ordered to keep a watch on girl bathers.

Did somebody say that the policeman’s lot was not a happy one?

This problem of legs has been in the public eye for a long time—since skirts showed a tendency to end soon after they began—but its present acute form began a few days ago, when a Thames Conservancy official ordered a boating party to put on more clothing.

A high official then stated: “We are not censorious of proper university costumes, but there are people who like to be a little daring and go to the extreme.”

Some of those people have been boating around Hampton Wick evidently, for this is what happened when the Joint Committee of the Port of London Authority met.

SCENES ON THE RIVER

Mr. G. Hammerton drew attention to what he called the “indecent clothing” worn by men and women on the river during the weekend.

“It was simply disgraceful, especially at Kingston Regatta, where parties were in the scantiest of bathing costumes making a disgraceful exhibition of themselves,” he declared.

Mr. W. Sanger attacked the modern two-piece bathing costume, and Mr. H. Hewitt, the Conservator, agreed that the scenes were very bad, particularly on Sunday.

Mr. Hammerton asked if the Thames Conservancy had any jurisdiction in the mater or was it one for the police.

The chairman, Mr. T. Ryan, said that no harm had been done by raising the matter, but he thought it sufficient if the Conservator informed the Conservancy that the matter had been discussed by that committee.

A KNIGHT, NOT IN ARMOUR

Mr. Sanger said that the members sitting round the table were all over a certain age, and therefore did not appreciate the mode of attire worn by those who frequented the river, especially in the hot weather. He wanted to know who the people were who complained about the dress.

Then up spake Mr. R. H. Berry. Like a chivalrous knight of old, he sprang to the defence of the fair ones in distress.

“I admire a well-shaped figure in a bathing costume,” he said.

Mr. Berry added that he was on the river during the week-end, and he saw a man, his wife, and children all in bathing costumes, and it was a very pretty sight.
Many will say, “Bravo, Mr. Berry!”

UNDRESSING ON THE BEACH

And now the scene moves to Southend. The following message was received from “Reynolds’s” correspondent last night—

The way in which girl bathers undress and dress themselves on the cliffs and on the beach at Southend-on-Sea, many of them without any attempt at secrecy, has offended the susceptibilities of some members of the Town Council.

Alderman Martin urged that steps ought to be taken without delay to put an end to the practice.

It is no uncommon thing, whilst walking along the beach by the pier, to encounter girls and young women donning or removing their bathing costumes with no tent or bathing wrap to conceal them from the public view.

Similarly, on the cliffs between the pier and Westcliff, they can be seen at week-ends divesting themselves of their ordinary attire on the grassy slopes and preparing themselves for the sea below.

In some cases, cars parked on the sea front serve the purpose of bathing huts.

The trouble is especially bad at weekends, when large numbers of trippers come down from London.

The police have been ordered to keep a watch for especially bad cases.

That the leg problem is as disturbing in America as it is here is revealed by the news that the men in the University of Arizona have decided to “shame” their girl colleagues into wearing more clothes. This is how a New York paper prints this exciting bit of news:

“Tuscon (Ariz.).—‘Steady there, young feller, jes’ keep your shirt on.’
The classic cry of the country constable echoes now on the University of Arizona campus. First, the girls took off their stockings and the lordly males took off their shirts in protest.

’Sfact! The sun-tanned, clear-eyed beauties of these windswept spaces recently took up the latest collegiate fad. Merrily pulling off their stockings, they came to class with bare brown limbs flying in the morning breeze.

The strong, silent men of the sun-baked plains regarded them with steady, level gaze and then muttered some collegiate equivalent of ‘That’s plum disgraceful, pardner.’

Wherefore, reprisals were started. When as and whenever a brown and fetching calf went flitting across the campus that soon were manly limbs exposed for all to see.

From assembly hall to dormitory went the call, ‘To arms!—and ribs and chests and backs—for modesty and for shame.’"

So that’s that. And now for Paris.

BISHOP’S DRESS BAN

A late Reuter telegram from the French capital says that a strong pronouncement against modern fashions has been made by the Bishop of St. Brieuc (Brittany), who protests against what he describes as the growing immodesty of women and girls, and even children.

The Bishop forbids any woman with bare arms, legs, or shoulders, or with too short a skirt, and even boys with shirts open too low at the neck, to enter any church or presbytery in his diocese.

Perhaps, after all, it is time this heat wave ended.

Reynolds's Illustrated News, 22 July 1928, p. 18.

Keep cool, people.

(The historical bycatch series.)

Philipp Lahm: centre of the Internet universe

Thanks to Geoff, I'm now aware of the statistics function that Blogger has integrated into all its blogs.

It's only been operating for the last few days, but it seems that the World Cup is having an impact on our traffic, humble as it is (click for a larger view):

What is it about Philipp Lahm that's setting the world on fire?

Is it the eyebrows?

Oh yeah: 4-0 against Argentina!

I had not expected that.

And I expect the people currently driving up and down our street with horns blazing and flags waving hadn't either.

Capture the flag, auf Deutsch

Overheard this morning while driving The Wife to the train station: a radio commentary on the World Cup by a German sociologist who could not (my translation) count himself among those fans who 'who sing the national anthem, bellow the German war cry or wave the black-red-gold flag'.

'I can't do that', he continued, 'after Auschwitz'.

I think my eyes nearly popped out of my head, but, fortunately, I somehow managed to maintain control of the car and to listen to the rest of the commentary, on how good it is that many players in the Nationalmannschaft have an 'immigration background' (Migrationshintergrund), i.e., who are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants.

The commentator's identification with the German team, thus, was only possible to the extent that it was not (in the traditional sense) 'German'.

Now, the German neurosis about patriotism is well known -- indeed, almost legendary -- and it is most acute in well-educated, left-liberal circles.

Those are circles to which I, actually, belong; however, I can't share in the over-the-top Angst about 'Nationalismus'. Admittedly, my own Migrationshintergrund was in a culture with a more, shall we say, relaxed attitude toward patriotism; of course, that could be said about every country in the world other than Germany.

I can't help thinking that some of us immigration-backgrounders might be a bit further along than the German intelligentsia in puncto national identity, as another World-Cup-related story made me think last week.

He will not stand for any ridicule. "I will defend the German flag," says Ibrahim Bassal resolutely, hitting the glass counter three times to make his point. Over the past few days he has been through a lot and what he has experienced has only strengthened his resolve. "I won't let anyone get at it," he adds.

Herr Bassal, you see, is proud of the German team's performance, and he has no hesitation about waving the black-red-gold banner:

"We have hung little German flags outside for years," Bassal explains. But this year, he and his cousins decided they would do something different. They placed a special order with a textile company, and soon a giant German flag worth €500 ($616) was hanging on the outside of the building where Bassal's store is located. Measuring 22 meters tall and 5 meters wide (72 feet by 16 feet), the over-sized banner covers five stories. For Bassal, a German with Lebanese roots, the flag is a symbol of cultural integration. "We live in Germany and we also belong to Germany," he explains.

"We live in Germany and we also belong to Germany." A better and more moving statement of successful integration, you might think, is hard to imagine.

But not everyone, you see, is happy.

Over the past few weeks, ever since the start of the football World Cup, the neighborhood has been the scene of what local media are calling the "Neukölln flag fight." Left-wing activists have called on sympathizers to destroy the German flags which can be seen everywhere, arguing that they are a symbol of German nationalism. There has been a rash of thefts of small flags attached to car windows. Some of those who decorated their vehicles with flags say they now only display the flags when they are actually driving their cars.

As for the giant flag, Bassal and his friends, who have all donated money to the cause, have already had to replace their flag twice. Since they adorned the building in black, red and gold, the colors of the German flag, they have become the target of attacks, presumably from members of the radical left-wing scene, and someone even tried to set fire to the flag.

Ah, the ironies of some ethnic Germans -- whether liberal Gutmenschen or left-wing Autonomen -- casting doubt upon (or even seeking to prevent) the same expressions of patriotism that immigrant ethnicities (often condemned by conservatives for insufficient identification with Germany) are engaging in enthusiastically.

Now, I've become German by choice rather than birth, and experience over my nine years in this country has taught me that I'm far more enthusiastic about Germany than most Germans, most of whom (right, left or centre) seem to think their country is in a state of terminal decline or, alternatively, poses a constant potential threat to the world.

Immigration and national identity are never going to be easy issues (they aren't anywhere and never have been), especially in Germany where remnants of the Blut und Boden tradition linger on; however, a less constipated relationship with patriotism might be a very good thing for this country, not least for its immigrants.

Tomorrow, I'll be joining Herr Bassal and his friends in waving the flag and backing our team, regardless of whether their surnames are Özil, Podolski, Gomez or, yes, even Müller.

(Photo source)

Putting up, one hopes, a good fight

Oh, no.

The news that Christopher Hitchens has cancer is...well, depressing. I've not always agreed with him (especially in recent years), but I've always been an admirer of his writing ('always' in my case means since the period I became more-or-less politically aware, i.e., the late 80s).

Even when I've disagreed with his point, he's made me confront and think more clearly about the reasons why. And there was a brief period in the late 90s when we got to be on a first-name basis, and a friend and I enjoyed a memorable evening of warm hospitality at his home in Washington, DC.

Ever since, I've looked askance at those personal attacks that have dismissed him as a washed-up drunk.

No doubt, there'll be more than a little Schadenfreude among the Hitch-haters out there.

But I wish him (and his family) well.

On not blowing your cover

Russian spies in New Jersey?

Maybe. Maybe not:

"They couldn't have been spies," said Jessie Gugig. "Look what she did with the hydrangeas."

Sounds logical to me.

Brontës are go!

This is so brilliant:



(Via Faith in Honest Doubt)

Of quarks and carrots

The Large Hadron Collider is doing...something. Something that I don't thoroughly understand.

However: it's clearly, really, truly, genuinely amazing.

Still, I'm not sure whether the metaphor chosen by one of the top scientists in charge is really doing that...something...justice:

"Protons are complicated particles, they've got quarks, [and other small particles], and colliding them is like colliding two garbage cans and watching carrots come out," he told BBC News. [Emphasis added]

I imagine the imagery used in the funding bids to build this enormously expensive (and, did I say it already, amazing!) thing was a little more...expressive.

But, then, you know, I'm not in the natural sciences. They seem to do things differently there.

See you in the penalty area!

Having followed The Wife's link to a Daily Mail article on the impending Germany-England match, I was struck not only by the stirring words from Herr Battenberg Windsor, but also by the immediate reference to the war.

The Boer War.

Biggest invasion since Boer War: 20,000 England fans arrive in Bloemfontein

Sigh. [Dammit: they've changed it since I commented. I should always, always, always do screenshots on these things.]

It occurred to me among all this martial breast-beating that there is another association that comes to mind when adding the words Germany + England + Football + War: the 'Christmas Truce' from 1914, when, for a brief period soldiers on both sides of the lines put down their arms and shared some kind words, alcohol and, legend has it, an impromptu football match or two.

The football bit isn't in this excerpt from Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), but it's still wonderful.



I know it's too early for Christmas.

And certainly -- in football terms -- for a truce.

Schland!

(PS: I know that some of the soldiers in that excerpt are Scottish rather than English. But not all of them.)

Straight from the royal horse's mouth

My favourite shitty Britrag cites one Prince Harry doing his bit for an English victory in the historical football clash that will start at 1-6-0-0 today:

I just hope we beat Germany because there has been a bit of a past history between England and Germany, but you know as long as our guys do their best, the country will be hugely proud of them.

Which "bit of a past history" (whatever that may mean anyway) is he referring to, I wonder. The House of Hannover? The House of Coburg Saxe-Gotha? The royal House formerly known as The Battenbergs?

From a monarchist perspective, today's match is merely another family get-together, no matter how plebeian the English players might be.

OK, I think we got the message

44 years of hurt...and with any luck, four more

Quite apart from the sporting relevance of Sunday's England-Germany match, I'm really looking forward to the next few days of commentary from the English tabloid press and from English fans.

Matches involving ze Germans have always tended to bring out their best instincts.

If nothing else, it gives them an opportunity to try out the dimly remembered pidgin German they learned from endless reading and re-reading of black-and-white war comics.

Earlier this month, a Sun article (otherwise full of praise for the German team) responded to Franz Beckenbauer's criticism of England's performance hitherto in the World Cup by referring to him '[putting] the jackboot in'.

Class.

Not that one need be overly sensitive about this stuff, but still: how ridiculous does this verbal goosestepping become when most of those on the German side, with an average age of under 25, would struggle to remember the Cold War let alone the one with Britain's finest hour or two?

With that background in mind, I found this advert from South African telecommunications company MTN as good a comment as any:



As to what might happen a few days hence in Bloemfontein, I have no idea. But I'm cultivating a Teutonic Zweckpessimismus and expecting a Zitterpartie.

But I believe it was an Englander who said, 'Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win.'

Schland!



[UPDATE]: An explanation of the above video for non-Germans.

These wrinkles masterfully disguise the youthful boy below

I turn 40 this week.

It's neither with a sense of despair nor a sense of dread that I face the beginnings of my fifth decade on this planet; however, I must admit to a certain disbelief.

I mean: have 40 years really gone by since I looked like this?


Not to mention the fact that I still have quite vivid memories of being this little boy, at about the time of the Watergate hearings.


Thanks to a thoughtful gift from a sibling, I now have a larger collection of photos from what we might call The Awkward Years (also known as the 1980s), but I'll be keeping those to myself for now.

I can't imagine I'm the only one who looks at past pictures of oneself and struggles to believe that it's really them in there.

On the other hand, I look at something like the following, and remember almost exactly what it felt like.


A scraped knee, some unflattering sandals and a tricycle several sizes too small: no wonder that little guy seems to be having an insight into the absurdity of existence.

Anyway: onward!

Title reference:



Death Cab for Cutie, 'Brothers on a Hotel Bed'

[UPDATE] While we're getting all nostalgic and all (and maybe picking up on Francis's 'heart still in Illinois' comment), here's Wilco, missing the innocence they've known.



Wilco, 'Heavy Metal Drummer'

Grattis till bröloppet!

I simply love royal weddings. They always provide wonderful opportunities for the deployment of long-forgotten lexical treasures dug up from the murky depths of our linguistic unconscious.

Underused words such as "Schaluppe." As in "Die königliche Schaluppe" (i.e. "the royal sloop"). Like the one visible in the background of this wedding snapshot:


Now this is, you will agree, a mighty fine word. And the boat itself isn't bad either - the kind of object you won't ever get at IKEA's.

There's only one song to go with this, of course, which I hereby dedicate to Princess Victoria of Sweden and Commoner Daniel:

A picture and a thousand words

Oh, yes....



...that pretty much sums it up.

But, still, it was a more dynamic showing (despite the end result) than England.

But all credit to the US for a good show today.

Concentrating the mind. On...Middle Earth.

Quite apart from the issue of the rights and wrongs of capital punishment, I must confess to a strange fascination with how the condemned spend their last moments:

The meal included steak, lobster tail, apple pie, vanilla ice cream and 7-Up, all prepared and served at the Utah State Prison, where the execution took place, about 20 miles south of Salt Lake City. After being moved to an observation cell on Wednesday night, Mr. Gardner spent his time sleeping, reading and watching the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, the Utah Department of Corrections said on its Web site.

Now, I'm quite an admirer of both the book and film versions of The Lord of the Rings, but I'm trying to imagine what it would feel like to watch all three films knowing they were the last films I'd ever watch before dying in a hail of bullets.

I'm not sure there's a word for that feeling.

Even in German.

Germans being (musical) Germans

After a long train trip home, I thought a selection of music Made in Germany (tm) might be called for. (Although, these are all a few years old...)

So.



The Notwist, 'One With the Freaks' (i.e., 'Have you ever been all messed up?')



Tomte, 'Schreit den Namen meiner Mutter' (i.e., 'da ist zu viel Krebs in deiner Familie, da ist zu viel Angst in meiner Welt')



Tocotronic, 'Hi Freaks' (i.e. 'dein Gesicht ist eine Welt, deren Umriss mir gefällt')



Erdmöbel, 'In den Schuhen von Audrey Hepburn' (i.e., 'Sie singt stapfend Sachen wie, "If you are feeling fancy free, und ihr Glück endet nie"')



Olli Schulz und der Hund Marie, 'Der Moment' (i.e, 'der Augenblick, in dem du stehenbleibst und nicht mehr wegrennst')



The Robocop Kraus, 'After Laughter Comes Tears', (i.e. La la la la la.)

And, you know, we're going to destroy (in football terms) Serbia tomorrow.

Or not.

I don't know.

But I hope so.

Born to be...um...wild

Funniest headline this week this month ever: 'German student attacks Hell's Angels with puppy'.

I mean: we're not quite in Sophie Scholl territory, but still, it takes some guts to attack a violent motorcycle gang armed with nothing but a puppy.

(Said puppy, it is to be noted, is 'now in safe hands', hence my ability to be so flippant about this weird story.)

(via German Joys)

Bild Bikini Blockage

There I was -- in the bar in the hotel where I'm staying in London tonight before heading back to Germany tomorrow morning -- innocently checking, as part of my trawl through the German press, whether Bild had anything interesting to say about, say, football or the current (though still somewhat low-key) political crisis back home, when I encountered the following:

The key line being that www.bild.de is disallowed on this network as it was categorised as 'News/Media, Lingerie/Bikini, Nudity'.

I'm assuming that the blockage derives more from the 'Lingerie/Bikini' and 'Nudity' parts of the description (thought Bild's politics are, all on their own, reason enough).

It's not that this is an inaccurate description of Bild's contents (apart from the absence of 'sport', 'cars' and 'interminable griping about everything'); still, I would note that other 'Bikini/Lingerie' and 'Nudity' specialists as the Sun and the Daily Mail are freely available from the same network.

Was it something we said?

Ach, die Englander....