Remembering

Given that it's the day that it is, I wanted to mention two veterans that we've talked about here previously:

My (maternal) grandfather John W. Dennis:



My grandfather (by marriage) Johann Lamm:

Post-...um...brevity

Just in case you were looking for a one-sentence description of post-structuralism (and I know you were), Adam Shatz provides one in an LRB review (which is also otherwise worth reading) of a new biography of Claude Lévi-Strauss:

Inverting Lévi-Strauss’s favoured terms, Derrida and his allies celebrated diachrony over synchrony, events over structure, the exception over the rule, the periphery over the centre, the variable over the invariant. 

I hope to have cleared a few things up.

It's not so much a policy, it's more like free verse

Prospective Republican candidate for president Herman Cain (who is apparently leading the party's polls), responding to a question at last night's debate about how he would respond in the face of a possible European financial meltdown:

"Just like a dollar must be a dollar when we wake up in the morning, just like 60 minutes is in an hour, a dollar must be a dollar."

That's very reassuring.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung helpfully informs us today that a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination embarrassed himself in last night's debate.

I wouldn't have been surprised if it had been the Governor of Texas; however, it seems to have been some other chap.

This race is even more crowded than I thought it was! I should start paying more attention.

And so, it seems should the FAZ.

Krieg den Palästen!

I note briefly that the Communist firebrands at The Economist--citing a Congressional Budget Office report--have chimed in on one aspect of the 'Occupy' protests: the 'we are the 99%' slogan.

Their comment:

"Whatever the cause, the data are powerful because they tend to support two prejudices. First, that a system that works well for the very richest has delivered returns on labour that are disappointing for everyone else. Second, that the people at the top have made out like bandits over the past few decades, and that now everyone else must pick up the bill. Of course it is a little more complicated than that. But this downturn ought to test the normally warm feelings in America of the 99% towards the 1%."

And if there's anything I like, ladies and gents, it's having my prejudices supported.

Thank you, Economist, for bringing so much joy to my lunch break.

In case you were wondering where Helmut Kohl learned his moves

Today's Grauniad, after referring to Wolfgang Schäuble as one of those conservative politicians who might have succeeded Helmut Kohl:

In the end a younger mentor of Kohl's – Angela Merkel – became the next CDU chancellor seven years later.

She certainly looks young for her years, I must say.

German Atlanticism of times past: No snakes in this here Garden of Eden

Something I ran across while looking up British press responses to the work of Oswald Spengler: a review of Ohne Amerika Geht Es Nicht (roughly: 'It won't work without America') by Emil Müller-Sternheim.

OHNE AMERIKA GEHT ES NICHT. Von E. Muller-Sternheim. (Vienna: Amalthea-Verlag.)—This is a curious book. Imagine all the criticisms of the United States which have recently been put forward by various writers, and then imagine a decided, even enthusiastic refutation of all of them, and one would have some idea of this volume, which is dedicated to President Hoover.

As the title implies, the writer holds that without the active assistance of America Europe is doomed, not only in the economic sphere but in culture, art, morals—almost in every respect. The thesis is developed in a very lively fashion and, incidentally, contains criticisms of Malthus, Karl Marx, Ricardo and Oswald Spengler, who is treated as a representative of European snobbery. All the less favourable aspects of American civilization are passed over, and at the end one wonders whether there can be any snake at all in this Garden of Eden.

The American woman has a laudatory chapter to herself; American State-education is analysed, entirely to its advantage as compared with German. The Kellogg Pact and the League of Nations are described as supreme achievements of American statesmanship, and America is strongly defended against charges of “denationalization” of its immigrants, which had been brought against her by German critics.

As a reaction against superficial condemnation the book certainly is of interest, but one doubts whether even the most patriotic American would care to accept all Herr Muller-Sternheim’s assertion [sic] without qualification.

The Times Literary Supplement, 6 November 1930, 918. (Paragraph breaks added)  

The book certainly sounds interesting (not least for the dedication to President Hoover); however, ...minor quibble: I happen to know some rather patriotic Americans, and, pace the (unnamed) reviewer, I think they'd eat this sort of thing up 'without qualification'.

[UPDATE]

While we're dealing with the topic of American-style German love:


Olli Schulz und der Hund Marie, 'America-Ibiza Connection'

Spreading one's person over the territory of the little man; or, notes on loving thy fellow passenger

New research interests (the origins of which I've been meaning to write about) have led me to examining Anglican thinking about society and international relations in the 1930s.

Said research has led me to the Guardian, which refers not to the better known contemporary paper of that name but rather an Anglican (more specifically, Anglo-Catholic) newspaper. In looking through the volume for 1935, I ran across the following comment which has nothing to do with my project but  -- since I have spent some fair amount of time on British trains in my life -- I found interesting.

Comfort for the Third-Class

The third-class railway traveller is being better cared for than he was twenty-five years ago, and at Euston Station last week visitors were able to compare a typical train of 1910 with one of the best of 1935. The improvement in the third-class accommodation proved the eagerness of the railway companies to consider the needs of the poorer traveller.

The best of all reforms is the provision of arm-rests; no longer will the bulky traveller be able to spread his person over the territory of the little man, for each will get the space that he has paid for. It is a pity, however, that while the long-journey traveller is being thus considered the unfortunate passenger on the suburban services is but little better off than he was forty years ago. On some lines, indeed, he is worse off, for whereas once upon a time the rule was ‘five a side,’ to-day, by a slight widening of the coaches, six are packed in.

‘Six a side’ in trains to-day has been the cause of more bickering and ill-feeling on the way to work or on the homeward struggle than any amount of political argument. Moreover there are often about eight other passengers standing in a compartment, to the discomfort and irritation of all. It is difficult for a man to love his neighbours on a journey from, say, Liverpool Street to Ilford.

'An Onlooker's Diary', Guardian, 10 May 1935, p. 304. (Paragraph breaks added)

A question to those who might know this kind of thing: when did 'third class' rail travel disappear?

I mean as an explicit category, of course, and not as a subjective experience.

(The 'historical bycatch' series; explanation.) 

'I will not allow violence against this house'

One of my all-time favourite movies is Straw Dogs, Sam Peckinpah's gripping 1971 film that pits a sensitive academic played by Dustin Hoffman against a group of Cornish country boys bent on a bit of -- in the term used in another film released the same year, A Clockwork Orange -- ultraviolence.

The film is often described as 'controversial' and is frequently condemned, above all for a (in my view, unjustly) much criticised rape scene; however, I find it to be a compelling (and to some extent timeless) exploration of the position of the 'civilised' man in 'uncivilised' contexts.

The fact that the original has been remade is, in my view, both interesting and appalling. Since I find the original to be almost perfect, I'm sceptical about the re-make. However, Melissa Lafsky at The Awl offers a relatively positive review of the new version that highlights the strengths of the old.

E.g., commenting on Dustin Hoffman's peformance in the original, Lafsky notes:

There's something baseline archetypal in the plight of a small man. His struggle is the struggle, the inescapable fight to triumph over one's immutable circumstances. He can do whatever is in his power—obtain expensive degrees, make bank, build up intellectual capital—to raise his social valuation. But he's never going to be the guy you veer away from on the sidewalk.

Man, how have I wished at times to be 'the guy you veer away from on the sidewalk'.

Unfortunately, it's just not in my character (or physique).

I guess I'll have to be content with 'intellectual capital'.

Lafsky's review is worth reading. And (at least the original) is worth watching.

All for now: I need to get back to cleaning my guns.

(Title reference)

Fire for effect

So it seems the Pope has just arrived in Berlin.

As this video shows, German artillery was unsuccessful in halting the advance of His Holiness from the beachhead he'd immediately established upon exiting Vatican One.

Benedict then moved decisively forward, and it appears that the German political leadership was quickly driven into submission without the slightest struggle.

Welcome to the occupation. 

All good things...

...come to an end.

Which is good: otherwise you turn into the Rolling Stones.

It astonished me to think just now that the (one and only) concert at which I saw R.E.M. live was just about 25 years ago.

Just a few years after this.



Thanks, guys, for all the great music.

[UPDATE]

Dale explains something important to the kids of today about music fandom in the dark ages:

I write this within physical reach of seventeen REM CDs, almost all of them worth cherishing, the others merely well above average. Modern-day readers will understand CDs as sort of a primitive version of blu ray disks made especially for music -- no video signal at all -- and meant to carry upwards of 80 minutes of music. People paid money for them in stores, frequently without having heard a note of the music encoded on them beforehand, then trudged back to their hand-built log cabins to build a fire against the forbidding night's cold and for cooking cornbread or biscuits or thinnest gruel, depending on the quality of the recent harvest. The cows would need to be milked at dawn, the potatoes dug thereafter. Then school would start.

This is certainly helpful, but it occurs to me that I only bought my first R.E.M. CD in 1994 (Monster).

How am I supposed to explain cassette tapes?

Anyway, Dale's reference to school starting and to buying albums without ever having heard the music on them also reminded me of how it was that I first found out about this band.

In what must have been 1985 (before the band was really getting radioplay on anything other than 'college rock' stations), a girl sitting in one of my high school classes (I have an inkling it was 'social studies' or history) had worn a Fables of the Reconstruction T-shirt.

Finding the graphic design interesting and the title words evocative -- and, though I can't now recall but remembering how the mind of a fifteen-year-old boy works, perhaps finding the girl pretty -- I biked up that afternoon to a now-defunct 'record store' near my house (which was adjacent to something then known as a 'video arcade') and bought the tape.

I can still recall hearing that opening riff of 'Feeling Gravitys Pull' on my Sears all-in-one stereo unit. (It included, believe it or not, an 8-track player along with the turntable and tape deck. Having siblings of a certain age, it got some use, I assure you. This was an age before bit-torrent: you took your music where you could find it.)

There it was in all its analog glory, as I squatted next to the fire and sipped gruel.

Good times.

[UPDATED UPDATE]

To bring the whole clash-of-technologies theme full circle, an obsessive R.E.M. tour archive reminds me of exactly where and when that concert I saw took place and what songs they played:

4 November 1987 - Circle Pavillion, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL
support: The dB's
set: Finest Worksong / These Days / Harborcoat / Disturbance At The Heron House / Fall On Me / Exhuming McCarthy / Orange Crush / Feeling Gravitys Pull / King Of Birds / White Tornado / Cuyahoga / Tired Of Singing Trouble / I Believe / Maps And Legends / Superman / Auctioneer (Another Engine) / Oddfellows Local 151 / It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) / Begin The Begin
encore 1: Strange / Wolves, Lower / Driver 8 / Just A Touch
encore 2: The One I Love / Pop Song 89 / See No Evil
encore 3: Harpers / Crazy / After Hours

I forgot the dB's opened. But now remembering, they were excellent too.

Milestones

Yesterday, my hometown major league baseball team, the Chicago Cubs, won their 4,000th victory at Wrigley Field.

Perhaps not the biggest story in the world.

But a chance to play another Mountain Goats song that has not, as of yet, been played here.


'Cubs in Five', the Mountain Goats

"they're gonna find intelligent life up there on the moon
and the Canterbury Tales will shoot up to the top of the best seller list
and stay there for 27 weeks

and the Chicago Cubs will beat every team in the league and the Tampa Bay Bucs will make it all the way to January and I will love you again I will love you, like I used to"

Faith and the 'drunken-faced knave'

The London Review of Books (25 Aug 2011) has an interesting review (sadly behind the subscriber wall) of what sounds like a fascinating book about early-modern English Christian beliefs.

Part of its fascination comes from its interest in explaining what we might call everyday belief, so how ordinary English people approached the Christian faith. Because it is based upon ecclesiastical court files it sounds like it has -- like all books based on court records -- a tendency to focus on situations in which, in one way or another, things go awry.

Hence, along with whatever else it tells us, the book apparently adds to our knowledge of early modern insults.

From the review:

Ecclesiastical courts enforced church attendance, Sabbath observance, the payment of tithes and sexual morality. In their records we overhear the voices of hundreds of ordinary men and women. A Somerset churchgoer in 1632 complains that ‘there was nothing done at prayer time in the said church of West Lidford but tooting upon the organs, and that it delighteth him as much to hear his horse fart as to hear the said organs go.’ In an argument with the parson of Dogmerfield in Hampshire over a tithe in 1581, Rowland Bowrer declares: ‘Thou art a covetous man … Go take Mother Canning by the cunt again!’ Haigh spends several pages on the insults suffered by clergymen, such as ‘stinking knave priest’, ‘scurvy, stinking, shitten boy’, ‘totter legged and pilled priest’, ‘Scottish jack’, ‘jack sauce and Welsh rogue’, ‘a runagately rogue and a prick-eared rogue’, ‘polled, scurvy, forward, wrangling priest’, ‘wrangler and prattler’, ‘black-coat knave’, ‘drunken-faced knave’ and ‘copper-nose priest’. 

I, for one, plan to incorporate '‘totter legged and pilled' into my arsenal of insults.

I mean: nobody (except perhaps certain early-modern scholars) is going to be expecting that.

'I hope we all die'

Given the quality of the live recording and the fact that this was the first Mountain Goats song that I ever heard (on a train trip from Bayreuth to Trier, as I recall it, circa 2003) I find it's acceptable to post another video from this concert.



So there.

Learning: or, 'hacking your way through the jungle of unintelligibility'

I'm not an expert on British education policy, though having been an employee of an institution of higher education on that blessed isle for going on six years now, I have had had more than a little experience with its coal face (at least with regard to research).

Stefan Collini has a lengthy article critical of recent British educational reforms. I can't comment on all the details, but this passage hit the right note:

The paradox of real learning is that you don’t get what you ‘want’ – and you certainly can’t buy it. The really vital aspects of the experience of studying something (a condition very different from ‘the student experience’) are bafflement and effort. Hacking your way through the jungle of unintelligibility to a few small clearings of partial intelligibility is a demanding and not always enjoyable process. It isn’t much like wallowing in fluffy towels. And it helps if you trust your guides rather than assuming they will skimp on the job unless they’re kept up to the mark by constant monitoring of their performance indicators.

Translating this into 'policy', I know, is not easy.

But I would largely agree with Collini that perhaps too much is being tinkered with in a system that, in its previous state, hasn't been doing all that badly.

Affenschande

Noted, over lunch, in a post at Blood & Treasure about Rudolf Herzog's recent book on humour in Nazi Germany:

Nazi actions are, at times, the funniest things in the book. For instance, when a circus performer taught his apes to give the Hitler salute, a law was passed forbidding apes from doing so on pain of death.

This rang a bell, as the other day I was reading about another group of apes who, in certain circumstances, seem compelled -- as if by an irresistable force -- to give such salutes.

We held on to hope and better days coming, and when we did we were right

If I were a rat in some kind of Skinner Box experiment, I would want pressing down on my little positive-reinforcement lever to lead to something like this: a video combining The Mountain Goats, a live performance in Chicago and a bitter-yet-hopeful song about high school.



Man, I would press that lever all day long.

Justice delayed but not denied(?)

There is an intriguing report from the Telegraph today regarding the investigation into the killing of Police Constable Yvonne Fletcher in 1984 in London while she was policing a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy:

Following the collapse of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, Scotland Yard, which has kept the case open, is planning to send officers to Libya in the hope of bringing the suspected killer and his alleged accomplices to justice. Mr Ameri was identified by a witness in a 140-page secret review of evidence conducted at the request of the Metropolitan Police. The report, seen by The Daily Telegraph, was written by a senior Canadian prosecutor and addressed to Sue Hemming, the head of counter-terrorism at the Crown Prosecution Service. Pc Fletcher was killed by a single bullet that hit her in the abdomen. An 11-day armed siege followed that ended when 30 Libyans from the embassy were deported. No one has ever been charged with killing the officer.

Here, also via the Telegraph, is an original report from ITN on the incident:



There are various kinds of justice to be done with the (apparent) collapse of the Gaddafi regime: the death of PC Fletcher -- and the wounding of several demonstrators -- is only a part of it, but an important one nonetheless.

Not so much a garden, more a defensive perimeter

The Combat Garden Gnome:

Available from Etsy, found via Boing Boing.

German autumn fashion already cashing in on speckled isle riots

Fashion newsletter received today:





How avant-garde!

Old school rioting. Very old.

Interestingly enough, a few weeks ago, a BBC radio series based on records from the Old Bailey Sessions Papers considered riots in the eighteenth century.

Among the commentators is my friend and former colleague at the Open University, Prof. Peter King, now at Leicester, along with another historian I've shared more than a few drinks with, Tim Hitchcock.

Worth a listen if you're interested in 'tumults and riotous assemblies'.

And I know you are.

Not to be forgotten...

Very much liked Shuggy's comment on the (so far solely) English riots:

Why do people go on the rampage? Really have to insist that the right doesn't get a monopoly on having a pessimistic view of the human condition. People do this sort of thing because they are arseholes and because they can. As Chris says, you need structures where the the costs of rioting outweigh the benefits. The difference between left and right is the former traditionally does not see the costs solely in terms of putative criminal justice. But the left has traditionally seen a role for criminal justice and it's a tradition worth maintaining. Or alternatively you could pretend a bunch of feral scumbags stealing DVD players are at the vanguard of the English revolution - if you want to go on looking like a complete tit, that it.

(And speaking of looking like (or rather sounding like) a complete tit.)

Norm, too, had a (rather more cautiously worded) comment worth reading.

Career opportunity

For any of our British friends who are looking for a new and highly challenging job with (I imagine) a decent salary and good benefits, I noted this announcement at the BBC newsticker:

So, dust off those CVs, people!

And for anyone looking for something a bit more light-hearted about something which is thoroughly depressing, you could do much worse than Photoshoplooter.

These people, after all, deserve to be mocked.

Getting it together

A few things run across this morning with regard to the rioting in London that restore my faith in British society.

• The tradition of community self-organisation meets technology to start tackling the clean up.
• Community self-policing seems, at least sporadically, to be having an impact. 
• And this woman:

"If we're fighting for a cause let's fight for a fucking cause. You lot piss me the fuck off."

That about sums it up.

Dip your scarves in iron

"These are troubled times and so."

And so:


 "13 & God", "Armored Scarves," Own Your Ghost.

We saw this excellent band just before we disappeared on vacation.

Album arrived last week.

Was played on way to work today.

Seemed to fit.

Fighting them on the beaches...and at the carpet stores

Along with providing evidence for how a new generation of politically aware youth is finding creative ways of Sticking it to The Man by, er, torching a carpet store, this image reminds us again that the Daily Mail is always capable of finding the Second World War reference in any story.

In a world that's gone mad, it's good to see that some things can still be relied upon.

Wishing our London friends a quiet night.

Police and thieves

I don't really have much to add to the discussion about the riots in various parts of London over the last couple of nights (other than finding them pretty appalling and pointless...as are the infinitely more costly riots going on in today's financial markets).

But in reading coverage about events in Tottenham, Enfield, Brixton and elsewhere (such as this interesting piece about the role of Blackberry Messaging service in helping to organise the mayhem) I've stumbled more than a few times over a bit of terminology that I hadn't expected and which, because of my interest in the history of policing, intrigues me.

Since when have cops in Britain been referred to as 'the Feds'?

E.g.

Mark Duggan, whose shooting by police sparked the disturbances, used Blackberry Messenger to send his last message to his girlfriend, Semone Wilson, 29, writing: “The Feds are following me." 

Since the UK is a unitary (and not a federal) state, this doesn't really make sense (not that slang ever really has to), and I'm assuming that it's borrowed from the US. (Transmitted by...what, music? The Wire?)

Having written about another instance of the transfer of policing-related slang from America to Britain in the early twentieth century (i.e., 'the third degree'...it seems the original article is freely available at the moment, so get it while you can), I'd be interested to know whether anyone who is a bit more hip to what the young people are saying these days might be able to enlighten me.

In life we search, and some of us find

Once again, you may have noted, we’ve hit one of those work-related vortexes that has sapped us of either time or inspiration for broadcasting our thoughts and grievances to the world. This may change soonishly (if so, though, on the other side of an upcoming vacation), so please, dear readers, don’t abandon us completely. There will be some interesting stuff on the other side of this silence.

There have, obviously, been no shortage of things worth commenting on in the last few weeks, from the Women’s World Cup to the Euro crisis, though I have to admit not having a great deal original to say on either score (either than, respectively, ‘wow!’ and a series of incoherent, anguished screams).

There is, however, something far more important that I wanted to note today: our tenth wedding anniversary.

This seems hard to believe, as it feels like not all that long ago that we gathered with a few friends for a small, low-key ceremony in the charming registry office in Trier where we tied our particular knot. (Said office is found in the 11th century ‘Turm Jerusalem’ (Jerusalem Tower) which has in its foyer, as I recall, a first edition of Das Kapital in a glass display case...Marx was a hometown boy, you see.)

I didn’t, in fact, understand a great deal of the ceremony (I had only arrived in Germany a month before and was somewhat ill-prepared, linguistically); however, I made sure to say ‘Ja’ at that point when all the German-speakers in the room looked at me expectantly.

That, it seems, was enough.

When I think about what we (and the world) have been through since that day, I find it makes me want to sit down and take a few deep breaths, as it has been quite extraordinary. (Though it’s all gone rather better for us personally than for the world at large.)

So, I just wanted to say -- before the whole world, now and forever -- that there’s no one with whom I’d rather walk through this life than the wonderful woman I found so many years ago (or who found me, I’m not so sure any more).

Happy anniversary, my dearest wife, partner, friend and lover.

Hit it George...

On a defensive note

A few weeks ago I was both inspired and irritated by Stefan Collini's review in the LRB of John Hall's intellectual biography of Ernest Gellner (unfortunately the article is only available online to LRB subscribers): Inspired because reading it made me want to know more about Gellner's "critical rationalism" (of course I had heard of him, but he's not exactly amongst the usual suspects cited in your run-of-the-mill textbook, anthology or Super-Extra-Short Introduction favoured by the discerning academic publishing house these days), irritated because Collini made Gellner appear like some kind of intellectual klutz insensitive to the higher forms of theoretical thinking (such as Oxford linguistic philosophy).

I reckon it's the weather: The London Review has been unusually mean and cantankerous recently.

So I was glad to find R.W. Johnson write in defence of Gellner in the latest LRB:

[Gellner]generated, to a degree unequalled by any other social scientist I have met, a feeling of "look, what we are doing is trying to figure out how the modern world works and this is a deadly serious task, in fact it is the most serious thing there is." He was never really off duty. Collini sounds a little too English to feel quite comfortable with that Germanic intensity and seriousness.

Granted, in the day and age of the Guttenberg-syndrome, references to "Germanic intensity and seriousness" may sound a tad inappropriate (if not ironic), but of course one can always go back to one's roots.

On Chesil Road

For work reasons, I spend a fair amount of time in London, and whenever I'm there I spend a fair amount of time along Euston Road (largely because the British Library and St. Pancras Station are located on it).

The Wife and I have come simply to refer to it as The Worst Road in the World, as it is perpetually jammed and loud and crossing it can take what seems like an eternity if you wait for the lights (like good Germans do) or like some kind of crazy death-defying stunt if you don't.

Hence, I rather like this plan:

From 22 September the installation White Sound, created by the American sound artist Bill Fontana, will fill the street with the sound of the sea and the unique beach, an 18-mile long pebble bank which is part of the Jurassic Coast world heritage site.

Now, if were possible to navigate Euston Road with one's eyes shut, this would be perfect...

A bridge: too far?

My first reaction to these images (via Spiegel Online) of the new, enormously long sea-spanning bridge in China was amazement.

My second was to wonder what J. G. Ballard might have made of it. And part of me is now sad to think that a water-borne sequel to Concrete Island will never be written. 

What'll I do without you

This one's for Mike of..wherever...and all ye of little faith.



TMG, 'Woke Up New'

Was it good for you?

Like our friend Francis, we greet in most pagan fashion the summer solstice (which is being welcomed here in Germany with a rather rainy week, but anyway).

Still, I wanted to greet it with this photo from Der Spiegel, which not only seemed totally appropriate but also reminded me of my mother.

(Photo via Spiegel Online)

Happy solstice!

Musik, zwei, drei, vier!

Since we are on to Cake: I do like their new album. I especially like this track, which has just the right kind of fuck-you-all-stomp to invigorate the seriously exhausted:



I also like it because it reminds me of my favourite Beatles B-side (the most underrated song ever):



One of my future projects might be to prove that Showroom of Compassion contains a Beatles reference in every track (I really think it does).

But this might have to wait until after I have finished the socks I started knitting around Christmas.

Away, away, (I was bound)

Today marks the tenth anniversary of my relocation to Germany (from Baltimore), which rather astounds me. The intervening decade -- though it's seen its share of joys, sorrows, struggles, defeats and victories -- has flown by in a way that makes me more than a bit uneasy about the decade to come.

I think if I were to meet that rather younger man who disembarked from some plane or other on 21 June 2001, I'd not entirely recognise him as myself. Though I would certainly congratulate him on having taken a step that would lead to his life becoming better, richer and more exciting than he ever could have expected. (This, of course, was not only down to the move itself but also to the main reason for it. You've all met her, I believe.)

Anyway, at the moment, I'm too sunk in preliminary research on a new project (about which you'll be hearing more when I get a chance to surface) to really give this personal milestone the attention it deserves.

But thanks to one of The Wife's recent purchases, this song came on the car stereo this morning, and it seemed somehow appropriate.


Cake, 'Bound Away' from Showroom of Compassion

Here's to mad decisions.

A critical comment

I am rather irritated by Colin Burrow's review of David Lodge's A Man of Parts, his biographical novel of H.G. Wells, in the new LRB (16 June). It is quite obvious that Burrow likes neither novel nor author, but what bugs me most is the way he uses this vehicle to slip in a few other pet hates - from Rebecca West's odd metaphors to popular neuroscience:

[Wells] was very interested in the mechanics of the human brain. Were he alive today, he would be happy to believe that the mind is the same as the brain, and would present TV programmes in which he wired himself up to a brain-scanner in order to show bits of his cortext lighting up when he thought of Rebecca West.

Flippant, dumb and utterly gratuitous.

Palingate cancelled

No, Sarah Palin's emails are not particularly exciting. Well, who would have thought it. Even the Guardian has abandoned its initially hysterical reportage ("Join the fray! Comb the mail! Make the scoop!") and turned to ... I don't know, Glastonbury or whatever. The Syrian man blogger.

The most insightful thing to learn from "The Palin Emails" so far has been her exasperation at the claim that she believed that humans and dinosaurs coexisted at one point in the Earth's history.

Well didn't they - I mean, coexist? Here's a little tune to restore your faith, Sarah (Sorry, I just couldn't help it):

It's his GCSE history wot did it

That's the only way I can explain why ("student") Darren, 19, from somewhere in Norfolk, turned his parents' shed into an "incredible shrine" to Dad's Army (and installed an Anderson shelter in the garden).

Of course The Traily Shprail loves the chubby-cheeked lad with the unhealthy obsession for a TV show that even forty years ago was fundamentally unfunny.

Don't get me wrong: I love the detail of his display, and that he's collected all those Bisto ads and mint condition ration cards and authentic (though by now congealing) gobstoppers, I honestly do. But don't British kids have anything else to think about but WWII?

Early harvest

It is only Pentecost and yet here I am plucking tomatoes and cutting courgettes grown on the balcony (which is one hell of a suntrap: in the garden, we're still on to the strawberries and the currants).

And pumpkins. These will soon be turned into a yummy stew or creamy soup:


Picture taken around 7am this morning, as the sunlight was flooding into the kitchen. More evidence of the gloriousness of the day:

Roll over Beethoven, usw.

An interesting article at the Guardian on the now fifty-year-old dance known as the Twist led me to something unknown to me until now: the musical monstrosity that conscripted Friedrich Liszt's Liebestraum kicking and screaming into the twisting craze.

The horror....



More amusing was the way that twisting was analysed with great seriousness, as Time magazine noted in 1962:

If he could hear what has happened to his schöne, weltbekannte melody, Papa Liszt no doubt would be writhing, not twisting. And he would have plenty of company—solid German doctors who warn against "accelerating one's hips and legs in opposite directions," parents and churchmen who deplore "the overt sexual implications of the dance." But some German intellectuals defend the twist. It is, says one Munich psychiatrist, "a proper cure for working off frustrations." And a psychiatrist in Berlin, where the cold war takes the rap for all sorts of aberrations, sees it as a byproduct of an anxious age. ''The twist craze," says he, "can be attributed to Atomangst".

I suspect a twisting revival can't be too far, then, over the German cultural horizon.

The pinnacle of pointlessness

In idle moments, I sometimes contemplate what might be the ultimate symbol of uselessness.

Up to this point, my leading contender was an empty ice-tray in the freezer.

But I think this tops that: a headline from Spiegel Online that reads (my translation) "Catholic Doctors Want to Cure Homosexuals with Homeopathy".

Amazing: doctors trying to cure something that is not a disease with something that is not medicine.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new champion in the world of meaninglessness.

"You would come to me then without answers"

This is very nice for a Saturday evening. And for other times...



Fleet Foxes, "Grown Ocean"

Echoes from the past

While looking up something else recently, I ran across the excellent British Pathé film collection, more specifically a filmed edition of the BBC radio show, 'The Brains Trust'. The show started in 1941 and was based on the concept 'get a bunch of smart people together and make them spontaneously answer random questions from the public'.

This version, from 1945, was the first episode that was filmed. It's pretty fascinating.

Part 1:

THE B.B.C. BRAINS TRUST ANSWERING "ANY QUESTIONS?" Reel 1

For the rest of it: Part 2, Part 3.

There are a few rather slow moments in these videos, I'll admit (this is clearly an age before intellectuals learned to play to the camera, but I find this makes them all the more charming).

As a general comment, I think that most of the participants come across rather well, except for C.E.M. Joad, who seems a bit of a reactionary loudmouth. (His answer to the question about 'what makes a happy marriage' in part one might be partly explained by his own experiences in this area.) Both Jennie Lee (a key figure in the foundation of one of my present employers, the Open University, among other achievements) and Julian Huxley do, at least in my view, especially well.

Other interesting things I then ran across while hanging around the Pathé site were:

1. A fascinating documentary about women's emancipation in Britain, probably from the early 1970s (judging by the reference at the end to Arthur Marwick -- also of the Open University -- as academic consultant). It's terribly old-fashioned in terms of its voice-over (not that this is a bad thing...); however, the images are fascinating.

EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN

Part 2.

2. A 1961 documentary entitled 'Beat School' about Burgess Hill school, at which students were allowed to do...well, essentially what they wanted to. Including -- gasp -- smoking and listening to records. Smoking, after all, 'calms the nerves'.

BEAT SCHOOL

Enjoy!

Random association re: G8

I couldn't help myself. Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy are in Deauville.

Together. Again.

This calls for an appropriate soundtrack.



But what will Carla say?

Apocalypse delayed

And a good thing, too. But for all those disappointed unraptured brethren (and sisters) out there, here's an image that looks mildly apocalyptic to me:

That little souvenir of a terrible year

I'm going through a bit of musical nostalgia recently, which I may be inflicting on you all in the coming days.

This, for instance, came on my mp3 player today: can it really be (slightly over) twenty years old? I saw them on the tour for this album when I was in college.

Which means I'm...old.

Or oldish at least.

Still: beautiful song.



The Sundays, 'Here's Where the Story Ends', Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, 1990

On being selective

George Orwell, about 70 years ago, describing the actions of himself and his wife after their building was (in the end only slightly)damaged by a bomb:

We slipped on some clothes, grabbed up a few things and went out, at this time imagining that the house might be seriously on fire and it might be impossible to get back. At such times one takes what one feels to be important, and I noticed afterwards that what I had taken was not my typewriter or any documents but my firearms and a haversack containing food, etc., which was always kept ready.

Priorities, priorities....

Wednesday Flower Show

Of course I didn't really need this, especially as I'm not even a sucker for gadgets.

And I do realise that purchasing bright plastic objects with a seriosly limited halflife gives the lie to my whole sanctimonious talk about sustainability.

But it is cute in the way all miniatures are cute.

And since the quality of a camera does not improve my photographing skills (for I am a wobbler and really only good at creating blurs), I thought that I might as well embrace my lack of talent and resort to taking pictures with a memory stick without viewfinder, which merely requires me to point in a very general way, press the button and see what happens.

So, see what happened:

When words hit the road

I steered the Jensen into the slow lane of the M4, and began to read the route signs welcoming me to the outer London suburbs. Ashford, Staines, Hillingdon - impossible destinations that featured only on the mental maps of desperate marketing men. Beyond Heathrow lay the empires of consumerism, and the mystery that obsessed me until the day I walked out of my agency for the last time. How to rouse a dormant people who had everything, who had bought the dreams that money can buy and knew they had found a bargain? (J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come 1)

If you've ever wondered (as I did in my girlish naivety) whether a "Jensen" is a real existing car and not another technological chimera from Ballard's eutopic suburbias, today's Spiegel has a whole photo series of the "Jensen Interceptor III."

Just enjoy the pictures and don't read the text (and don't - DON'T - think about fuel efficiency). According to the comments (I only ever read the comments, really), it's full of unforgiveable mistakes about the intricate inspirational conduits of international auto design.

Ah, love

Along with being Europe Day, today is my parents' 63rd wedding anniversary.

They're no longer around to celebrate it.

But I am.

Here, the happy couple in 1960, about a decade before I appeared on the scene.

And since yesterday was Mother's Day, here's a bonus photo from the archives, taken sometime in the early 1960s when my mother had just gotten her driver's license.

She looks pretty pleased with herself. As she should, having passed her exam in a country that drives, from her perspective, on the wrong side of the road. (She was British before becoming American, you see).

Of course, it may also have something to do with that awesome car she's leaning against....

Something: still better than nothing

Today, thanks to Francis for the reminder, is Europe Day.


Admittedly, the old continent is at the moment a bit tied up in unpleasant matters such as wrangling over how much bailing out Greece is going to cost or whether the borders should (temporarily, they say) go up again. 


So, perhaps a good time to recall something I posted a bit more than a year ago: a quote from Tony Judt.

To their own surprise and occasional consternation, Europeans have begun to do this: to create a bond between human beings that transcends older boundaries and to make out of these new institutional forms something that really is a community. They don't always do it very well, and there is still considerable nostalgia in certain quarters for those old frontiers. But something is better than nothing; and nothing is just what we shall be left with if the fragile international accords, treaties, agencies, laws and institutions that we have erected since 1945 are allowed to rot and decline -- or, worse, are deliberately brought low. As things now stand, boundary breaking and community making are something that Europeans are doing better than anyone else.

Well...'better'...um...maybe not at the moment, but one can always hope for improvement. 

Happy Europe Day!

The fluffy husband and the firebomb

Just coincidentally, following my last post which included a clip from Werner Herzog's Antarctica documentary, I ran across an interesting interview with Herzog about his most recent film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (via A&L Daily).

Discussion turns, almost inevitably, to Klaus Kinski:

In the documentary that Herzog made about Kinski after his death, My Best Fiend, he alludes in passing to one other time when he sincerely entertained murderous thoughts toward his leading man, when he planned to firebomb Kinski's house until deterred by Kinski's dog. I'd like to know more.

"We had plans to kill each other, strangely enough, at exactly the same time," Herzog begins, a little hesitantly. "But you have to see it as these beautiful plots, like in a detective story, and those were mostly plots, I would say, in sheer fantasy. But at some moment it got closer than just a pure fantasy."

What were you going to do?

[pause] "Well, as I said, I plotted to kill him."

Did you actually have the firebomb?

[long pause] "I can't answer that. I only can answer that he had this very vigilant shepherd dog, and the presence of the shepherd dog dissuaded me."

Herzog insists, though, that he's mellowed since then:

"But let me say one more thing. Those were the times decades back. In a way I have matured. And I'm a very fluffy...at least a fluffy husband. You have to ask my wife."

Filmic wanderings

It's funny how the internet leads you places. Just today, for example, while looking up something quite different I ran across two very interesting videos.

The first, an excerpt from Werner Herzog's Antarctica documentary Encounters at the End of the World:



The second, the trailer from the upcoming Terrence Malik Film, The Tree of Life, which looks excellent:

Set your sights on good fortune

I'm a bit of a sucker for songs with firearm metaphors.

Good thing John Darnielle writes so many of them.


The Mountain Goats: 'For Charles Bronson'.

Save the date

Perhaps wanting to get their apocalypse in before the Mayan one due next year, a band of Christians is apparently seeking to let the world know of their conviction that the world will end in a couple of weeks.

More specifically 21 May.

At around 6 p.m.

Their RV Caravan of Doom pulled into Washington, DC this week to spread the word about the predictions of Harold Camping, who, it seems, already predicted (in 1992) that the world would end in 1994.

A nice detail from the Washington Post article:

...by lunchtime Thursday, about 50 area residents joined up with the caravan to support his message. Among them was Gary Vollmer, who took a leave of absence from the Department of Homeland Security to spread the word. He’s supposed to go back on May 23. “But I’m not going back,” he said. “I’ll be gone on the 21st.”

Still, not all of them seem quite so certain:

Another man was so perturbed by the May 21 message that he brought over a woman he found on the street who needed money. He asked whether the Camping followers would give her some cash, because there was no need for them to keep money with the world ending. They did not.

Oh, and as to that 6 p.m. timing, don't worry about figuring it out in relation to your own time-zone, as God has worked out this apocalypse to be as convenient as possible:

The end will come sometime around 6 p.m. on May 21 — not 6 p.m. California time or New York time or Hong Kong time. The world will end at 6 p.m. only when it is 6 p.m. locally, Camping said, citing his calculations. “People will see this coming to them from around the world,” he said. “It will follow the sun around.”

Cool.

A job well done

I really have no informed content to add to the debate about the headshot-heard-round-the world.

I'm also aware of all the ambiguities in the War on Terror, and I'm certainly not one to go a whoopin' and a hollerin' through the streets.

Still, it is, to my mind, an unreserved good that the world is now one mass-murdering terrorist mastermind poorer.

And I wanted to congratulate those who made it work like such clockwork, from the Commander-in-Chief on down to the units on the ground.

This article from the New York Times offers a pretty good run-down of this remarkable story.

Well done.

Interesting

 To quote Walter Sobchack, 'I did not know that':

All told, Obama-era choices account for about $1.7 trillion in new debt, according to a separate Washington Post analysis of CBO data over the past decade. Bush-era policies, meanwhile, account for more than $7 trillion and are a major contributor to the trillion-dollar annual budget deficits that are dominating the political debate.

Of course, once we're in a world where the word 'only' and the phrase '$1.7 trillion in new debt' can be brought into close relationship with one another, I admit that I'm a bit out of my depth, counting-wise.

Still, I can see the difference between 1.7 and 7.

Food for thought in considering the current debate.

Like this.