Changing perspectives on the history of violence

One shouldn't, perhaps, take such things too seriously, but I was interested to see the results of Prospect magazine's 'World Thinkers' list last week.

More specifically, I was pleased to find a few of my own favourite authors placing highly and equally glad to have some potential new favourites brought to my attention who are now on my -- sadly ever-expanding -- to-read list.

There they are, Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond and a few others: people who, while I might not agree with everything they've argued or written, have nevertheless positively influenced how I see the world.

They're people with whom I find it's even worthwhile disagreeing, and you can't say that about everyone.

(There are some people on the list for whom that doesn't apply...but I've been trying to focus on the positive recently, so I won't go into that.) 

Coming in at number three is Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, whose most recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, surely needs little introduction, seeing that it was both a bestseller and generated a substantial amount of debate and discussion.

I'm particularly pleased about that, for a few reasons. 

His earlier book The Blank Slate was one of those works that began shifting my views on violence from being more or less at home within 'cultural theory' toward trying to integrate cultural history with what might be called 'biological', 'evolutionary' or 'behavioural science' perspectives. (The others being works by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Richard Dawkins, E.O. Wilson, Robert Wright and Frans de Waal.) 

An early version of that shift can be glimpsed in a 2007 essay that I wrote on violence and cultural change; the most recent culmination of my thinking on the matter was in an article that appeared as part of a special issue in the British Journal of Criminology in 2011.   

Steve and I engaged in several mutually rewarding email discussions of violence, psychology and history while Better Angels was taking shape (it is humbling to find myself in the book's acknowledgements), an exchange that we were finally able to take up in person a couple of times in recent years in Bern and London.

Bern, Switzerland, September 2011

We also exchanged our most recent books as gifts. Going by weight and page length, I fear that Steve might feel he got the worse of this deal, but it was very nice to find him recommending my new(ish) book, The Most Remarkable Woman in England, on Twitter as 'A fascinating real-life murder story.'

So, for all these reasons -- and like some other people -- I feel inspired to add my personal congratulations on yet another public recognition.

Then, relatedly and coincidentally, last week I received (from the author) a copy of a review essay in the current issue of the English Historical Review that that considers Better Angels together with some other recent works on violence history.

In the article, Gregory Hanlon -- author of the pioneering Human Nature in Rural Tuscany: An Early Modern History -- offers some constructive criticism of Better Angels from the perspective of an early modern historian; however, he argues that historians will 'learn a great deal' from the book's analysis of the psychological abilities that encourage and restrain violence.

He then critically considers some recent broad-scale analyses of long-term changes in European which have emerged from a more traditional social/cultural history perspective and concludes by pointing out a few more recent contributions to the debate that have begun (whether on a more theoretical or empirical level) to seek some degree of methodological integration.

For those historians interested in (though even for those perhaps sceptical about) behavioural-science approaches to violence history, this essay should certainly be on your reading lists.

And it occurs to me, once again, that I am very fortunate to know such fascinating people. 

Congratulations, Steve!

Well done, Greg!

Doing her bit

Inspired by my last post -- as the image is used as the cover of the book I quoted -- I thought I would post this British Second World War poster.

I have always loved it since I first saw it.

This is not least, I suppose, since my mother actually did, during the war, work in an aircraft factory (one that, if I recall correctly, built and repaired Bristol Beaufighters.)

But it's also just beautifully designed.

If I remember her words accurately, my mother didn't take up that job because she was inspired by such a poster or out of some surfeit of patriotic fervour but rather because the labour exchange suggested it to her, after her father forbade her from taking up the other recommended employment: bus conductress.

He was himself a bus conductor, you see, and was concerned, as she put it, about the (im)moral influences to which she might be subjected in such a job.

Though, from her other reminiscences, I didn't have the impression that the factory was actually that much better. 

Lion, Unicorn, Hammer and Sickle

Here's something interesting I just ran across while doing background reading for my current project. From Sonja Rose, a portrayal of the popularity of Soviet Russia in Britain during the Second World War (after the point when Britain and Russia became allies in June 1941):

Numerous celebrations across the country were organized throughout 1942 and 1943. There were, in addition to Anglo-Soviet weeks, International Woman’s Day rallies, Red Army Day celebrations, and commemorations of the day the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.

In early January 1942, for example, Coventry staged an Anglo-Soviet week. It began on a Sunday at the Opera House, with the Mayor of Coventry presiding over the opening ceremonies. Sharing the platform with the Mayor was the Bishop of Coventry and the MPs for Coventry and nearby Nuneaton. A respected historian and the author of numerous books on Russia, Sir Bernard Pares, spoke. The programme was designed to ‘appeal to every class of the community’, according to the Coventry Evening News announcement of the week-long gala.

Each day there were public functions scheduled featuring aspects of Russian life including the showing of numerous Russian films. The week-long festival included school programmes, lectures, and a concert by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Sargent playing an Anglo-Russian programme of music; there was a woman’s rally and an education rally. The week concluded with a parade of local organizations including civil defence workers, members of the National Fire Service, and a salute by the Mayor from the Council House steps. Opening during the week and on display for the month was an exhibition of Soviet life and books.

The exhibition was positioned behind a frontage that featured the British Lion and the Hammer and Sickle, surmounted by the flags of both nations. There were large photographs displaying aspects of life in the Soviet Union as well as charts and posters demonstrating, according to the press, the ‘tremendous strides’ made in the Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plans.

Sonya O. Rose, Which People's War?: National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939-1945 (Oxford: OUP, 2003), p. 50. (line breaks and highlighting added for clarity)

Equalising dialogue

This comment from an interview with Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski does a pretty good job of summing up one problem with the internet:

The net has a way of equalizing dialogue in ways that run counter-intuitive to our powers of perception. They’re just words on a screen, one subset of words no more valid than the other...even though one may be written by an expert, and the other by a guy who wears an orange fright wig and lives in his mother’s basement where he tortures Barbie dolls for fun. Seeing one or the other, you would know to let one close and the other not so much (unless you had strong anti-Barbie tendencies). But absent being able to see them, you don’t know what you’re dealing with and tend to apply equal credibility until the day the monster bares its teeth. 

OK, back to those Barbie dolls.... 

(Via Io9)

News you can't use

My friend Andrew brings to my attention an article by Rolf Dobelli, who raises various doubts about the value of avidly following the news.

One of Dobelli's reasons for being sceptical:

News is irrelevant. Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognise what's relevant. It's much easier to recognise what's new. The relevant versus the new is the fundamental battle of the current age. Media organisations want you to believe that news offers you some sort of a competitive advantage. Many fall for that. We get anxious when we're cut off from the flow of news. In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the bigger the advantage you have.

I have to say that, although I've been a pretty compulsive news reader for a long time now, I see the point of what Dobelli's on about here, and I have recently felt a pretty strong urge to withdraw from the day-to-day information overload and try to focus on things that are more important to me.

I did a pretty good job toward the beginning of the year in filtering things out and trying just to focus on the half-dozen or so information sources that I really do find valuable. 

Dobelli has inspired me to perhaps redouble my efforts.

"Draughts of pure thought from the fountain-head of some abstruse philosopher"

Although I have been hitherto mainly a historian of crime, violence, criminal justice and policing, I'm in the midst of a reorientation of sorts toward something that I'm still working out a concise description for but involves a mixture of cultural, intellectual and religious history focused on the period of the 1920s to the 1940s.

An element of continuity in all this is my interest in media history, particularly the history of the inter-war press.

Anyway, I'm pleased to announce that one of my first publications as part of this new direction will soon be seeing the light of day: a study of the reception of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West in the inter-war British press.

It will be part of a forthcoming collection of essays edited by a couple of my colleagues that will consider Spengler's reception in various countries. 

A pre-press version of my essay, '"German foolishness" and the "Prophet of doom": Oswald Spengler and the Inter-war British Press' is now available on academia.edu. 

A brief passage, from a section on Spengler and 'Germanness':

Although Spengler's work was highly controversial in his homeland, British commentators tended to depict it representing something typically German. On this basis, in a radio broadcast titled »Spengler–A Philosopher of World History« (reprinted in the Listener in 1929), popular philosopher C.E.M. Joad sought to explain national differences related to Spengler's reception: »The Germans have an appetite for ideas which rivals, if it does not exceed, the English appetite for emotions«*. Referring to then-popular authors of romance novels and histories, he observed: »While the Englishman is enjoying a feast of passion at the luscious boards of Miss Dell or Miss Hull, the German refreshes himself with draughts of pure thought from the fountain-head of some abstruse philosopher«**. Spengler's sentences, he continued, »seem to be the necessary accompaniments of German philosophy in the grand manner: Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, all wrote them and worse; they sound the authentic German note«. [166-67]

Note: If I've been successful in achieving the aim I set out with, you don't even have to know a lot about Spengler to enjoy the article.

Though that might be a big if.

I will, in any case, provide another update when the collection is released.

--------

* Listener, 27 February 1929, p. 250.
** »Spengler, the most abstruse German now writing, is also the most popular. He belongs, it is clear, to the grand tradition of German philosophy«. Ibid. Ethel M. Dell was a romance novelist and Eleanor Hull wrote Irish history. See also: »[F]or whereas the success of the Anglo-Saxon best-seller depends upon a facile acceptance of emotions, the Teutonic best-seller demands of the reader an equally facile acceptance of ideas«. New Statesman, 3 July 1926, p. 332.

Speaking the unspeakable, again

As with events not all that long ago in Newtown, I find myself again haunted by a single sentence that encapsulates, for me, the immediate horror of yesterday's attack on the Boston marathon.

It's at the beginning of an article from the New York Times on the explosions' direct aftermath:

“These runners just finished and they don’t have legs now,” said Roupen Bastajian, 35, a Rhode Island state trooper and former Marine. “So many of them. There are so many people without legs. It’s all blood. There’s blood everywhere. You got bones, fragments. It’s disgusting.”

Had Mr. Bastajian run a few strides slower, as he did in 2011, he might have been among the dozens of victims wounded in Monday’s bomb blasts. Instead, he was among the runners treating other runners, a makeshift emergency medical service of exhausted athletes. “We put tourniquets on,” Mr. Bastajian said. “I tied at least five, six legs with tourniquets.” 

'These runners just finished and they don't have legs now.'

I am, myself, someone for whom running has become a vitally important part of life (though I'd never make a marathon).

This doesn't, of course, give me any special insight into the suffering that has resulted from -- and will continue long after -- yesterday's events.

But I think it, somehow, has heightened my horror even beyond where it would otherwise have been.

Which seems scarcely possible.

Nature and nurturing tolerance

David George Haskell considers the sex lives of various living things within a short walk near the Supreme Court, and concludes:

A wide, living rainbow arcs across the natural world. Diversity rules in sexuality, just as it does in the rest of biology. This natural variety does not provide ready-made moral guidance. But to claim that the only natural forms of sex and pair bonding occur between unambiguous males and females is to ignore the facts of human biology. Let those who wish for marriage to be “founded in nature” take note: the view outside the Supreme Court is full of life’s beautiful sexual variegation.

Quite.

Rock-and-roll hostage taking is pretty cool. Actual hostage taking, of course, is not.

The Thermals have a new album, and this is the video for the first single, 'Born to Kill'.

I like it a lot, as I do most of the stuff that The Thermals produce.

But as you might tell from the title, it's not the most gentle song, either musically or lyrically.

Or, for that matter, in terms of the video.


While watching it I couldn't help but think of a video for one of my favourite songs, 'This Year' by The Mountain Goats.

It also features a hostage taking as its main visual theme, which can be seen as a metaphor for the song's actual topic, which revolves around stepfather-stepson tensions in an abusive household.


But The Mountain Goats certainly use less blood.

I'm still trying to work out whether this makes their video better or inferior. 

Waiting for my man

In a very fine LRB review of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire and the first two series of the related television show Game of Thrones, John Lanchester refers to -- and then questions -- the resistance that many people have to reading fantasy literature:

When you ask people why they don’t read fantasy, they usually say something along the lines of, ‘because elves don’t exist’. This makes no sense as an objection. Huge swathes of imaginative literature concern things that don’t exist, and as it happens, things that don’t exist feature particularly prominently in the English literary tradition. We’re very good at things that don’t exist. The fantastic is central not just to the English canon – Spenser, Shakespeare, even Dickens – but also to our amazing parallel tradition of para-literary works, from Carroll to Conan Doyle to Stoker to Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, Pullman. There’s no other body of literature quite like it: just consider the comparative absence of fantasy from the French and Russian traditions. And yet it’s perfectly normal for widely literate general readers to admit that they read no fantasy at all. I know, because I often ask. It’s as if there is some mysterious fantasy-reading switch that in many people is set to ‘off’. And it’s this that leads to the mayor of Des Moines syndrome, because part of the point of Stephenson’s remark isn’t just that people who don’t live there don’t know who the mayor is, they couldn’t care less. The information is of no use to them.

He also describes his own activities as a 'drug pusher' with regard to Martin's fabulous series of books (which I've read through twice, now):

This sense of unsafety and instability is at the heart of the books. I’ve been acting as a kind of low level pusher or drug dealer for the series, shoving recommendations and occasionally box sets in the direction of friends. I tell them to forge past their elves-don’t-exist resistance at least until the end of the first episode. And that, generally, is all it takes. After that initial act of drug-pushing, I follow up on my new clients to ask how they have got on with the series. Everyone is addicted, and everyone reports the same moment as being the one that got them hooked.  

I have to admit that I've played this role myself a couple of times.

And like the other addicts, I'm pretty eagerly waiting for The Winds of Winter.

I need a fix, man.

Another area in which Europe has definitely fallen behind

Blood and Treasure brings our attention to the formidable talents of Peng Liyuan, China's new 'first lady'.

She can, indeed, belt out a jaunty tune:




(Note: the visuals really get going at about 1:25.)

The B&T comment:

Yes, it’s a bit militaristic. But it still beats the hell out of Samantha Cameron and her mimsy little boutique jewellery business type thing.

It is, definitely, more...stirring.

And it's made me aware of how vast the massed-ranks-scary-patriotic-musical gap between Europe and China has become.

Someone may have to look into this.

I mean: this is something we used to do well.

Er ist ein Roboter...

The current issue of Die Zeit has a very worthwhile article on the musician Karl Bartos, who was, among other things, a former member of Kraftwerk.

Alongside interviews with Bartos, the article also profiles Bartos's latest album, Off the Record, which contains re-worked sounds and musical elements he developed during his time with Kraftwerk.

If this track--'Without a Trace of Emotion'--is representative, I think this something I need to get.

The 'hacker superiority complex'

A couple of questions from an interview with Jaron Lanier in the Spectator, to which he provides interesting answers.

You criticize the culture of the tech world several times throughout this book, but you are also part of it: can you explain this paradox?
There are a lot of very positive things about the tech world. It’s remarkably unprejudiced and I’ve never encountered racism in it. There are a lot of good qualities, so I don’t want to criticize it too much. I remain in it, and I enjoy it. However, there is a smugness, or a kind of religious aspect to it. There is a sensibility that says: we have skills that other people don’t, therefore we are supermen and we deserve more. You run into this attitude, that if ordinary people cannot set their Facebook privacy settings, then they deserve what is coming to them. There is a hacker superiority complex to this.

Do you think this culture of superiority in the tech world is making society less democratic?
Well I think this culture really undermines our discipline because to me the only proper way to describe the profession of engineering is to serve people, otherwise it’s not a sensible activity. There is no rational basis without people as the beneficiaries. Just in order for me to function sensibly I need to believe in people, not robots. When we don’t put people at the centre of the world, I think we create rather bizarre technologies that don’t tend to make sense.

On putting houses in order

I noticed the trailer for Ken Loach's new film The Spirit of '45 the other day, which I'm looking forward to seeing.

I had to think of it just now when, while doing some research for my new project, I ran across an editorial from The Times titled 'The New Europe' that seems to fit well with it and that has not, I think, lost any of its power.

Agreeing with Churchill's comment that Britain's only war aim was 'victory', The Times argued that it was necessary that 'victory for our arms will point the way to a new social and international order in Europe'.

It was important that the values defining that order not be defined 'in purely nineteenth-century terms':

If we speak of democracy, we do not mean a democracy which maintains the right to vote but forgets the right to work and the right to live. If we speak of freedom, we do not mean a rugged individualism which excludes social organisation and economic planning. If we speak of equality, we do not mean a political equality nullified by social and economic privilege. If we speak of economic reconstruction, we think less of maximum production (though this too will be required) than of equitable distribution. … The European house cannot be put in order unless we put our own house in order first. The new order cannot be based on the preservation of privilege, whether the privilege be that of a country, of a class, or of an individual. (The Times, 1 July 1940, 5)

Well said.

Gloom and doom?

As someone who had indeed spent a fair amount of time researching and writing about the darker side of human life, I thought there was much to think about in Mark Mazower's FT review of David Cannadine's new book. (Though I've not read the book yet and can't say whether Mazower is fair to it or not.)

Such as this:

It is true that many historians will find themselves occasionally pondering why they spend so much time describing human nastiness and so little on virtue or beauty. Yet the best example we have of a genuinely cosmopolitan history with an ameliorist agenda – Unesco’s History of Humanity – hardly constitutes strong evidence of its intellectual viability. On the contrary, it was way back in 1965 that historian Jack Plumb described one of the volumes in that series as having the effect of “an encyclopaedia gone berserk, or re-sorted by a deficient computer”. As for the European Union’s own efforts to fund cheerleading histories in the spirit of e pluribus unum, they have been a complete waste of money and certainly don’t seem to have furthered the cause of integration.

The Plumb quote alone is worth the price of admission; however, the rest is definitely worth reading as well, even if there is a substantial amount of history being written that emphasises 'virtue and beauty' and stresses some (at least long-term) good news about the human race.

Historians aren't really all that grim a bunch.

Honest. 

'The gloves are off, the wisdom teeth are out'

New Vampire Weekend!

I've listened to this three times in a row and am still in awe of it.



Very nice.

Alfie (and Jasper) turn 80

Today is Michael Caine's 80th birthday. As Robbie Collin notes, Caine's career has definitely had its ups and downs in terms of quality, though the late 1960s were certainly a time when he established his iconic status.


But the film I had to think of immediately when I saw the article was a more recent one, the dystopian Children of Men (2006), in which Caine has a brief but important few appearances as 'Jasper', an old-school lefty and marijuana entrepreneur.


Happy Birthday, Sir Michael!

The only thing worse than visibility is invisibility

So there I was this morning on my way to work, waiting at a coffee shop in the Hauptbahnhof for my order to arrive when I realised I was surrounded by a group of people who were all staring down intently at little portable glowing rectangles.

Nothing unusual there, of course.

But for whatever reasons (and they're probably partly irrational, I admit) this flashy ubiquity of 'devices'--and the frantic tappey, swipey, scrunchey finger movements that accompany it--somehow gets on my nerves.

I've often thought that if there were some way to make this stuff all less...visible...it'd be a meaningful improvement in our everyday lives.

A few days ago, appropriately enough, I ran across a blog post (via Bruce Sterling's Wired blog) by Timo Arnall on what I discovered was an actual trend: 'invisible design'.

‘The best design is invisible’ is the interaction design phrase of the moment. The images above are from my ever-expanding collection of quotes about how design and technology will ‘disappear’, become ‘invisible’ or how the ‘best interface is no interface’. 

Taking off from my comments at the beginning, this would seem just my kind of thing; however, what is interesting in Arnall's fascinating and informative post are the various doubts he raises about this trendy idealisation of the invisible.

For example:

1. Invisible design propagates the myth of immateriality

We already have plenty of thinking that celebrates the invisibility and seamlessness of technology. We are overloaded with childish mythologies like ‘the cloud’; a soft, fuzzy metaphor for enormous infrastructural projects of undersea cables and power-hungry data farms. This mythology can be harmful and is often just plain wrong. Networks go down, hard disks fail, sensors fail to sense, processors overheat and batteries die. 

The idea that the internet embodies some kind of transcendence of the material (and of all the messy limitations it brings with it) is one of the most enduring and irksome myths that has accompanied it from the beginning, and it's nice to see it get a gentle kicking here.

(In a similar vein, Die Zeit currently has a nicely sceptical take on the naive evangelism of a new internet-driven 'sharing economy' as a viable alternative to Kapitalismus.) 

And, Arnall observes:

2. Invisible design falls into the natural/intuitive trap

The movement tells us to ‘embrace natural processes’ and talks about the ‘incredibly intuitive’ Mercedes car interface. This language is a trap (we should ban the use of natural and intuitive btw) that doesn’t give us any insight into how complex products might actually become simple or familiar.
Invisible design leads us towards the horrors of Reality Clippy. Does my refrigerator light really go off? Why was my car unlocked this morning? How did my phone go silent all of a sudden? Without highly legible systems for managing and understanding all of this ‘smartness’ we are going to get very lost and highly frustrated. The tricky business of push notifications and the Facebook privacy train wreck is just the tip of the iceberg.

There's a lot more of interest in Arnall's post, which I recommend highly.

I hope Arnall is an influential guy in design circles.

At the very least, anything, in my view, which will reduce the frequency with which I have to encounter excited burbling involving words like 'cloud' and 'intuitive'--which probably annoy me even more than the omnipresent glowing rectangles, to be honest--is a good thing.

RIP Peter Banks

Founding member of Yes and subsequently influential prog-rock guitarist, Peter Banks (1947-2013).

Fishers of, er, men (or even of bears)

As noted by the Independent, the papal conclave is meeting is taking place in close, curious (and one is tempted to say convenient) proximity to what is purported to be Europe's largest gay sauna.

The sauna’s website promotes one of its special “bear nights”, with a video in which a rotund, hairy man strips down before changing into a priest’s outfit. It says Bruno, “a hairy, overweight pastor of souls, is free to the music of his clergyman, remaining in a thong, because he wants to expose body and soul”. 

Offered without further comment, as anything that occurs to me would be far too obvious to mention.

(Link via Umberto via Facebook)

Making the saving throw against inauthenticity

I know, I know, I know: there are few things more tiresome (and many things more important) than the debate about whether someone is a 'genuine' geek or not.

And I'm certainly not one of those people who wants their special little cultural obsessions to remain obscure: indeed, I like the fact that several things that tended to lead to social marginalisation in my youth (computer programming, comic books, fantasy novels, role-playing games) have become fairly solidly mainstream pastimes, not least since this means that young people who are interested in them don't have to quite risk their social standing among their peers in the way that once tended to be the case.

Nonetheless, I thought Tim Wu's discussion at Slate of the new film Zero Charisma -- the plot of which features a tabletop role-playing game as a central element -- was insightful with regard to one of the central issues in this (fairly marginal but for me still personally relevant) little culture war.

The plot of the film seems to revolve around a group of gamers -- in particular the DM, Scott -- whose regular dungeon-diving sessions are thrown into chaos (and Scott into an apparent existential crisis) when one group member's departure leads to his replacement by a 'hipster' figure named Miles.

As Wu describes:

Scott, to put things mildly, does not deal well with changes to his routine, and he cannot handle the arrival of Miles. The great injustice is that Miles, while he has never paid his dues, is actually a very talented gamer. He threatens everything Scott stands for, and indeed the very idea that you need suffer for art (or nerd cred), the idea that paying dues matters.

You may or may not take seriously the idea that 'paying dues' might have any meaning when it simply means having spent a lot of time around tables while rolling dice and discussing with great seriousness the respective merits of different magical weapons and thereby suffering some degree of social ostracism.

Still, I couldn't help but think that Wu was on to something in his conclusion:

A debate has raged online for a while about the meeting of coolness and nerdiness, with the “fake geek girl” meme and Portlandia’s “nerd council” sketch notable recent entries in that discussion. But Zero Charisma asks bigger questions than whether hipsters are ruining perfectly good subcultures with their version of poverty chic. Buried here among the saving throws is something deeper. Scott suffers for his obsession, while Miles takes the path of detached imitation. We want Scott to win, and for all his suffering to be worth something. But the slightly depressing insight in this film is that sometimes suffering doesn’t make you better. As co-director Andrew Matthews says, it’s about his “greatest fear … that someone else is doing exactly what you do, but is just better.”

Here is the trailer for the film, which I look forward to seeing someday when the DVD finally becomes available in Germany (though the film arguably perpetuates the stereotype of gamers as overgrown man-children who can't cope with real life...which is, you know, only half true).




 

Lost at sea

Charlie Stross considers some of the likely results should Britain decide to actually leave the EU.

It's not a pretty thought.

The overall picture, then, is dismal: a flight by the investment banking sector, probable currency speculation directed against the (isolated and vulnerable) sterling market, re-emergence of tariff barriers hampering UK exports to Europe, a collapse in trade with the Commonwealth (at least, on terms favourable to the UK), and the final collapse of UK diplomatic/military power to second- or even third-rank status on a global scale.

But, on the upside I suppose, at last their cucumbers could be a crooked as they wanted them to be.

I can almost taste the liberty already. 

Off to the Forest

Last weekend I spent a few days in Gloucester and the Forest of Dean for events related to my new book, The Most Remarkable Woman in England: Poison, Celebrity and the Trials of Beatrice Pace.

This was, in a sense, bringing the case back home to where it started: the curious death of Harry Pace that was the beginning of the whole mystery occurred at his home in Fetter Hill, in the Forest of Dean, and the trial of his widow Beatrice on a charge of having murdered him was held at the Shire Hall in Gloucester.

As some of you who have been following the matter might know, the book has been well-received, but it meant a lot to me to be able to present something about the case in such a local context.

On Friday, I gave an interview to BBC Radio Gloucestershire host Anna King. The interview ended up being a full quarter of an hour, and can be heard online till, I believe the end of the week. Info, links and an accompanying photo are available at the book-related blog.

On Saturday, I spent some time in Gloucester at the Waterstones on Eastgate Street, just down the street from the trial venue (the Shire Hall).

After that, I headed off to the Forest itself to give a talk to the Forest of Dean Local History Society (FODLHS) at its meeting in Bream.

I hadn't been quite sure what to expect from the FODLHS, but I went away being utterly impressed not only by their commitment to local history but to their organisational skills. Partly due to good promotion, there were nearly ninety people in attendance, and I spent a very enjoyable afternoon fielding questions from locals who were very interested in a sensational murder case that had had happened in their backyard.

Some more details on those events a (as well as a few photos) can also be found at the book-related blog.

To find out what people have been saying about The Most Remarkable Woman in England, see this page.

Europe and the 'muddy middle of variable geometry'

As someone who pretty regularly reads the German financial press (well, at least the FAZ and the now late-and-much-lamented Financial Times Germany), there were moments last year when I felt like I had stumbled into an alternate universe when visiting Britain (which--for research reasons--we often did).

The euro crisis, of course, was a press obsession both (here) in Germany and (there) in Britain, but what struck me was the confident expectation auf der Insel (tinged with more than a bit of Shadenfreude in many cases) that the single currency was doomed.

'So', I remember a friend in London saying, 'how do you feel about the euro breaking apart?'

My statement that it was a bit premature to say that and suggestion that eurozone governments--though not exactly experiencing their finest hour--would probably find a way of muddling through in classic EU fashion, were greeted with scepticism.

Thus, I had to laugh yesterday when we heard a radio report on the way back from work in which at least one financial analyst expressed concerns that the euro was now too strong, potentially weakening European exports.

And -- though I'm far from an expert on this and am well aware that problems remain (and that the whole thing may, indeed, some day fly apart) -- I thought that Philip Stevens's article in the Financial Times about Anglo-Saxon gloom-mongering was well worth reading.

The end point for the eurozone looks likely to be a much tighter economic union but one falling short of political federalism. Nemat Shafik, the deputy managing director of the IMF, put it well at a recent gathering in Paris of the Franco-British Colloque. Europe’s destination probably lay in the “muddy middle of variable geometry and hybrids between federal and intergovernmental solutions”.  

The euro still confronts formidable political and economic challenges – though those who blame everything on the single currency must also explain why Britain is in a bigger mess. No one can be sure the currency will survive in perpetuity. History says that monetary unions often break up. But at least we know now that the politicians will not give up without a pretty ferocious fight.

Which is, I think, good news. 

A most remarkable year

One of the nicest things for me last year was to see the positive (and almost immediate) response my book, The Most Remarkable Woman in England: Poison, Celebrity and the Trials of Beatrice Pace, received.

It takes a while for reviews to appear (especially the academic ones), so there will be some more in 2013, and the odds are that they won't all be upbeat.

Still, considering it's only been out for four months, I'm quite pleased with the crop of comments and reviews this book has attracted. (See below.)

For more information and updates, see the book-related blog, 'like' the book on Facebook or follow me on Twitter.

And, by all means of course, do buy the book.

OK, on with the (2012) comments...

'A fascinating analysis of one woman's domestic disaster, the power of the press and public opinion. Loved it!' -- Jenni Murray, host of BBC Radio 4's "Woman's Hour" (for my interview on 'Woman's Hour' see here.)

'Sometimes life is better than fiction. Is there any novelist who could have got this extraordinary story so perfectly right, inventing it: the violence at the heart of it, the suspense, the succession of revelations, the passions so raw and inchoate that they have a mythic force? And then there's the grand sweep of the narrative, beginning in the bleak poverty of an obscure cottage in the Forest of Dean, acted out finally on the national stage. [...] John Carter Wood's book about the Pace trial works because of his sober and scrupulous assembly of the evidence, quoting the words that were spoken and written at the time so we can feel the textures of the material for ourselves – the found poetry of precise reportage.' -- Tessa Hadley, in The Guardian (26 October 2012)

'A fascinating  real-life murder story.' -- Harvard Professor Steven Pinker, on Twitter.

'Just for once, my crime book of the year isn’t a novel, but a factual account. In 1928, a quarryman called Harry Pace died of arsenic poisoning and his wife, Beatrice, was tried for his murder. John Carter Wood’s account of the case and trial has it all: suspense; surprise; and a searing account of one woman’s life, marriage, and journey from poverty and obscurity to celebrity and notoriety. Wood is brave enough to allow much of an incredible story to tell itself through newspaper accounts, letters and Beatrice’s private papers, and the book is all the richer for it. And because it’s a true story, he has no choice but to include some of the more incredible plot elements that a novelist might lose courage with! A fascinating snapshot of interwar England, brilliantly brought to life.' -- Nicola Upson, Faber website

'This book will be an invaluable aid to those interested in the history of criminal justice and British society in the 1920s.' -- June Purvis, in the Times Higher Education (22 November 2012)

A 'splendid piece of historical detective work...immaculately researched, fluently written and utterly compelling'. -- Dominic Sandbrook, Literary Review (Dec 2012-Jan 2013)

'John Carter Wood writes with verve and elegance, weaving insights into the broader social ramifications of this trial without losing the thread courtroom drama that makes the book such a compelling read. He has also done much original research, clearing up questions that previous accounts left unanswered and providing dozens of illustrations, some of which have come from previously-inaccessible private archives. The result is a vivid portrayal not just of one woman's fate, but of a society in transition. Highly recommended!' -- Andrew Hammel, Amazon.co.uk review

'This is history as murder-mystery. John Carter Wood tells a spellbinding story of murder, using the trials of the accused (Beatrice Pace) to reflect the nature of celebrity culture, the legal system, and gender relations in 1920s Britain. The fundamental question remains: did Beatrice Pace kill her husband? You will have to read the book to find out!' -- Joanna Bourke, Professor of History, Birkbeck College [book jacket blurb]

'The trial of Beatrice Pace was one of the most sensational news stories in inter-war Britain. In this thoroughly researched and clearly-argued study, John Carter Wood is not solely concerned with the usual question of whether or not Mrs Pace was guilty. Rather he also focuses on the period's celebrity culture, the role of the press, the development of public interest and the police. In so doing, he has produced a model for modern social and cultural historians.' -- Clive Emsley, Professor Emeritus, Open University [book jacket blurb]

"Bienen und Böller, leuchtende Propeller"

New year greetings from one of our house bands, Erdmöbel, with 'Erster Erster' (i.e., 1.1., also known as January 1st):



And, while we're at it, 'frohes neues Jahr' from both of us as well.

Bruce Sterling on 'prepper graveyards', death and a 'poetic priest-warrior gangster chieftain'

At the Well, Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky engage in this year's version of their now-traditional 'State of the World conversation/rantfest'.

It's a lengthy conversation (to which more than the two named hosts contribute), but, as in previous years, I find it one of the more readable contributions to the inevitable round of year-end musings.

Sterling, for example, cites a few of the groups that he sees as having had -- all in all -- a good year. You might be surprised (given other verdicts) to find that he includes the Tea Party among these.

I'm not sure that he's right, but I find his reasoning worth considering:

It's always "the worse, the better" with these Trotsky-style fanatics. Every failure, rejection and common-sense setback galvanizes them to new extremes of faith-based ideological weirdness. As someone who hangs out in Europe, I'm used to bizarre political movements, but the Tea Party is truly impressively strange by anybody's standards. Acidheads have had more coherent thinking than these Creationist Randite gold-bar-eating pro-coal zillionaire market fundie people. They lost the American election, but winning one and governing a superpower never seemed to be on their agenda. That hasn't discouraged them, though. They've got ladder notches and fallback positions all the way to the prepper graveyard.

Sterling, who lives in Belgrade, also raises some thoughtful points about what he sees as the differences between 'civil society' and 'social capital':

The Balkans has always been pretty low on "civil society," because most political decisions are made in smoke-filled rooms by angry drunk guys. But in terms of "social capital" they're quite keen on looking after one another. The populace is very polite and considerate, by American standards. Hold-ups, muggings, drive-bys, gang rapes, maniacal outbursts by guys with automatic weapons, they're all practically unheard-of.

The feeling on the streets of Belgrade is vastly calmer and cozier than, say, Los Angeles. By the standards of Belgrade, you'd think that LA was a para-militarized civil war zone, even though LA has got "civil society" like nobody's business.

He also makes some interesting points about death:

I lost a favorite uncle this holiday season. He was elderly and frail, and he had a good life -- a remarkably jolly character, really, the life of many a party -- so it's not a tragic loss, but I find that the grief touches everything I see.

Grief is a worldview all its own. Grief gives reality a lunar glow. It's healthy to be placed in touch with the tragic side of life, the losses that make life's value so clear. It's like winter daylight.

My uncle wouldn't want me to be all upset about his passing, and to tell the truth I'm not "upset," but I am diminished. Changes in the state of the world are marked by absences as well as by novelties. The year 2013 will be the first year of my life that does not contain my uncle.

It'll be different.

Finally, in the course of the discussion, someone brings up the idea of art as a (socially) transformative activity; Sterling admits admiring the 'very bohemian approach' and 'cool notion' of the artist as this 'the mental-liberationist Greek trickster figure who steals most of his material', but he sees it nevertheless as limiting, which inspires some thoughts on Montenegrin literature:

That's why I enjoy art such as Petar Njegos' epic of early Montenegrin literature, "The Mountain Wreath."
http://www.rastko.rs/knjizevnost/umetnicka/njegos/mountain_wreath.html

Here we've got this very intelligent and determined hillbilly aristocrat, a poetic priest-warrior gangster chieftain, out of a half-forgotten province of the Ottoman Empire. His people are pre-literate; he's one of the first to read and write his own language.

This poem, the "Mountain Wreath," is mostly about tribal patriarchs flying into a righteous rage and cutting each other's heads off. It's very like the Iliad in that way; it's full of noble perorations that are mostly along the line of, "Rascal, you've done something unbearable for years now, and I was constrained to get involved in this awful mess you've created; but this time it's personal. So, prepare yourself: I'm taking your head, your pistols, your horses and all your women, and I may even burn your farm." In the context of this artwork, it's certainly the right thing to do. It's the definitive thing to do; it's how you know you're alive.

Then you compare that artwork -- written by an aristocrat, an authority figure in deadly moral earnest -- to this kind of ontological-trickster writing, this kind of "What is Reality, Mr Njegos," postmodern gendankenexperiment, of which me and my sci-fi colleagues are so enduringly fond... Well, keen as I am to write that stuff, it can seem like pretty thin soup.'

And...

Brian Aldiss once told me that science fiction was full of guys who would write about Martians without ever visiting Indonesia. But visiting Indonesia is one thing -- if you actually *hang out* within Indonesia, you *become* Indonesian. You don't visit it, or steal it, you are it.

You have to get past the stark fact that Njegos is an Ottoman Christian-sect hillbilly on horseback who knocks people down with spiked clubs and cuts their heads off as trophies. He is, but he's also a great poet. Njegos even has a wry sense of humor; it's just not what Americans would consider "wry" or even "humor." When you understand his jokes, when you know they're genuinely funny, that's a bigger mental yoga-stretch than we're supposed to allow ourselves within the USA; it makes a "galaxy far far away" look like a Hollywood backlot in Southern California. Which is what it is, pretty much.

Synchronicity

So I read via Esquire that today's Republican Party is not in good shape, as is apparent by the position of John Boehner, House leader:

Last night, he couldn't get the votes to pass a truly horrid plutocrat's wet dream. He couldn't get the votes to gut Obamacare or Wall Street reform. He couldn't get the votes to throw children off food stamps and he couldn't get the votes to throw the elderly off meals-on-wheels. He couldn't get the votes for a simple, vicious stunt.  He couldn't  get the votes because he couldn't budge enough Republicans to support a tax increase in the upper .01 percent of taxpayers. He couldn't do it because he had nothing with which to threaten people who look on governing the country as though they are running an evening-drive talk-radio program in Bugtussle. He couldn't do it because he is a Republican pretending to be a fanatic who went hat in hand to a bunch of fanatics pretending to be Republicans.

Which sounds accurate enough to me, but then I'm partial to hearing gloom and doom predictions for the American right wing, so I tend to doubt my own satisfaction on this score.

But then I hear something similar (if less...expressive) from a member of said right wing:

Persuading a majority of Republicans to cast a politically treacherous vote to allow higher taxes could have enhanced his leverage with Obama in future talks to rein in the national debt, Republicans said. But failure could imperil his hold on power, said Craig Shirley, a Republican consultant who wrote a biography of former president Ronald Reagan.

“If this was a parliamentary system, tonight’s dissent on Plan B would be seen as a vote of no confidence in Boehner,” Shirley said. “The national GOP is now simply a collection of warring tribal factions.”

Well I have to say that the prospect of that particular Somalia-on-the-Potomac sounds like fun.

Though I can't see that shooting the fiscal Niagara is going to be that pleasant, either for the US or the rest of us.

Merry, merry

With Christmas not too far away, I hope that yours proves much happier than one that occurred in a cottage in Fetter Hill, Gloucestershire eighty-four years ago.

It featured moments like this one: 

After a pause, he took a straight razor from the cupboard and told his family to ‘clear out’ or else he would kill them.  

Yes. Not exactly festive.

Still: it might make an interesting gift for the fan of historical mysteries in your life.

And remember: in German, 'Gift' means 'poison'....

Speaking the unspeakable

'Unspeakable violence' is a well worn phrase, and, clearly, there is an extent to which certain violent acts prove to be difficult, if not impossible, to entirely put into words.

However, while never capable of complete expression, there are some moments when violence becomes, if you will, 'speakable': when words allow certain aspects of it to be driven home with a particular emotional intensity.

I found, today, in looking through various kinds of press coverage of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, that the two comments that made the horror of this particular incident of horrendous violence most speakable were not those deliberately aiming at the highest degree of pathos but rather those that seemed most matter of fact or spontaneous.

Both were in the same article, at the Washington Post.

First, the comments from the state medical examiner, H. Wayne Carver II:

Carver described the children’s injuries, which he said ranged from at least two to 11 bullet wounds apiece.

He had performed seven of the autopsies himself. A reporter asked what the children had been wearing.

“They’re wearing cute kid stuff,” Carver said. “I mean, they’re first-graders.”

Second, though more significantly in some ways, I was struck by the comment of Rabbi Shaul Praver, whose congregation included one of the first grade victims:

“His little body could not endure so many bullets like that.”

Reconsider that, just a bit longer: 'His little body could not endure so many bullets like that.'

I wish, in some way, that I could un-read those words, as they have been echoing in my brain all day.

But, to my mind, there is something in Rabbi Praver's words that prove that the unspeakable can indeed be spoken.

Some kind words in the Literary Review

For those of you interested in such things, there is a very nice review of my new book in the current Literary Review (Dec-Jan).

It is described, for example, as an 'immaculately researched, fluently written and utterly compelling book'.

Ahem.

There's more where that came from at this post on the review at the book blog for The Most Remarkable Woman in England.

And I have also created a summary of comments so far on the book.

Charlie Brooker on bleached gargoyles, Anders Breivik and rectangular fireflies

I'm not a parent, but I did spend a lot of time squinting at what by today's standards are tiny television screens from a distance imposed by my mother to ensure that I didn't 'ruin' my eyes.

Hence, there is a lot to enjoy about Charlie Brooker's column today:

Call me a paranoid parent, but I stopped leaving the TV on the rolling news channel by default round about then because I didn't like the way Savile stared at my baby son, as though he was going to lean through the screen and eat him. The boy himself wasn't bothered, but then he doesn't fear the same things as you or me. A few weeks ago, he saw Anders Breivik on the screen and found the sight of him hilarious. A convicted mass murderer is literally the funniest thing my son has ever seen.

And, man, is Balok ever scary.

Perilous Albion

Christopher Walken reveals a number of fears in this Guardian interview.

One of them, rather surprisingly, is Britain:

"I don't like flying at the best of times," he says. "And as I get older, I like it less and less. I don't much like driving either. I prefer to be driven. And, when I'm in London, I don't even like walking on the street. I can never get used to looking the right way when I cross the street. When we're over there, I always say to my wife, 'Stay in the hotel. Don't go out there. It's too dangerous.'"

The rest of the interview is worthwhile.

I didn't realise, for example, that Walken's father was a German baker.

And I'm thankful for the reminder of his great moves in the 'Weapon of Choice' video. The man has grace.

From the thrilling days of anti-bluebell bolshevism

If for no other reason, I am thankful Facebook exists because I may not otherwise have been made aware (by my friend Chris) of this wonderful quote from the diaries of the late Queen Mother (recently published, edited by William Shawcross), apparently from 1924, when she would have been in her early 20s:

“I am extremely anti-Labour. They are so far apart from fairies and owls and bluebells & Americans & all the things I like. If they agree with me, I know they are pretending – in fact I believe everything is a pretence to them.”

This seems a tad extreme: given her extensive list of likes and dislikes -- many of them quite sensible --  I'm sure that there would have been at least some common ground to be found with Labour, even with its radical anti-bluebell faction:

“I like so many things”, the Duchess of York enthused in an early letter to [D'Arcy] Osborne, “fairy stories, fat butlers, porters, the smell of tangerines, suave Orientals, a good tune, lovely colours, French accents, puppies, bath salts, & a million more”. She disliked fewer things, but heartily. “Tactlessness annoys me – also rudeness . . . crass stupidity, & people who are pleased with themselves. Also spiders, caterpillars, slugs, frogs, toads, loud voices & nasty coughs”. 

I mean, who doesn't like puppies, suave Orientals and French accents?

Radio interview on my new book

For those of you interested in such things, I'll be interviewed about my new book -- The Most Remarkable Woman in England: Poison, Celebrity and the Trials of Beatrice Pace -- tomorrow (Wed), ca. 4pm GMT on Ireland's Newstalk 106-108 FM. 

[UPDATE]: for those who might have missed it, you can hear the interview here (from 6:40).

Reviewed in higher places

There is a quite positive review of my new book, The Most Remarkable Woman in England, in today's Times Higher Education.

You'll find the link and a couple of signal quotes at the book-related blog.

A full list of comments and reviews is available here.

The psephological calculus

The US presidential election now seems like ages ago, but this Guardian interview is a good reminder of why analysts like Nate Silver are important.

Political commentary could use a lot more cool-headed analysis and less tendentious windbaggery.

Or, as Silver puts it:

"Numbers aren't perfect, but for me, it's numbers with all their imperfections versus bullshit. You had people saying, 'You can't quantify people's feelings through numbers!' But what's the alternative? Me sitting at my Georgetown cocktail party saying that I know how people in Toledo, Ohio, are going to vote better than the actual people of Toledo, Ohio, who answered a survey? It's incredibly presumptuous. And truth is an absolute defence. So if they got it right it would be one thing, but they didn't. They're consistently quite wrong."

Quite remarkably, reading this interview makes me want to take a statistics class.

On building a vehicle from the defeated pieces of the thing you survived

A new video has appeared for the first song released from the new Mountain Goats album, Transcendental Youth.


What the song -- and, I suppose, the video -- is about was explained by John Darnielle at the Mountain Goats website in a post back in July:

This here album track, anyway, is called "Cry for Judas," it is about survival but that's kind of an oversimplification, it's also about building a vehicle from the defeated pieces of the thing you survived and piloting that vehicle through the cosmos, it's kind of complicated but people who know what I'm talking about will kind of intuitively get the idea and the rest of you will I hope be able to get a sense of it through the song.

I think I get it.

The Mountain Goats, "Cry for Judas"

(Lyrics and chords)

Sticking with our apocalyptic theme for the evening

While pondering the scientific wonder that is the ability to watch internet video from the International Space Station as it passes over hurricane Sandy, I was struck by the advert that popped up.

Well, I suppose you find your comfort where you can.

And if you're down their under those clouds, perhaps some handy tips on ark-building might come in handy right about now.

Anyone remember offhand how long a cubit is?

(The space station video, by the way, is quite interesting.)

Mrs Pace and "the found poetry of precise reportage"

There's a very positive review by Tessa Hadley of my new book, The Most Remarkable Woman in England: Poison, Celebrity and the Trials of Beatrice Pace, in today's Guardian.

I'm not only pleased that she liked it but also that her very thoughtful review highlights a few specific things that were in fact very important to me while I was writing the book, such as capturing as far as I could the language of the time (or, rather, as she notes the various languages reflecting the specificities of class, region and profession).

Trying to imagine the past, it's the language we don't get right. Translating experiences out of the idiom of another era into contemporary expression is as fraught with loss as any translation between languages. John Carter Wood's book about the Pace trial works because of his sober and scrupulous assembly of the evidence, quoting the words that were spoken and written at the time so we can feel the textures of the material for ourselves – the found poetry of precise reportage.

She also emphasises the dramatic qualities of the (true) story, which is not only gratifying in itself -- that was, after all, what drove me to write the book in the first place -- but also particularly pleasing because, in the fairly arduous trek to finding a publisher, I heard doubts expressed on that very issue, along with the the opinion that nobody would be interested in the case as they didn't know about it already.

Yes, you hear a lot of odd things when you're trying to publish a book.

In any case, that helps to explain why this passage at the beginning of Hadley's review is such a joy for me to read:

Sometimes life is better than fiction. Is there any novelist who could have got this extraordinary story so perfectly right, inventing it: the violence at the heart of it, the suspense, the succession of revelations, the passions so raw and inchoate that they have a mythic force? And then there's the grand sweep of the narrative, beginning in the bleak poverty of an obscure cottage in the Forest of Dean, acted out finally on the national stage.

I don't expect all the reviews will be this positive (you can't, after all, please everyone), but after investing so much of myself in researching and telling this fascinating story, this is certainly a good start.

Obscene Desserts on the radio

For those of you interested in such things: I will be appearing tomorrow (Wednesday, 17 October) on BBC Radio 4's programme 'Woman's Hour' to talk about my new book, The Most Remarkable Woman in England.

The programme will be available live ('Woman's Hour' is broadcast between 10 and 10.45am GMT) online via the BBC website. If you can't make time to listen live, however, it will be available on the iPlayer soon after broadcast.

Whether that's something that pleases me or I regret depends, I suppose, on how things go....

The universal truth of punk: "Everybody feels beleaguered at some point"

Speaking of punk...

Here are the Mountain Goats talking about and then covering Jawbreaker's "Boxcar".


"My enemies are all too familiar."

Sounds familiar.

(Lyrics)

Remembering life in the stone age, circa 1977

Comments from a Wired interview with William Gibson, who reflects on how new music styles (in this case punk) spread in a pre-Internet age.

I suspect — and I don’t think this is nostalgia — but it may have been able to become kind of a richer sauce, initially. It wasn’t able to instantly go from London to Toronto at the speed of light. Somebody had to carry it back to Toronto or wherever, in their backpack and show it, physically show it to another human. Which is what happened. And compared to the way that news of something new spreads today, it was totally stone age. Totally stone age! There’s something remarkable about it that’s probably not going to be that evident to people looking at it in the future. That the 1977 experience was qualitatively different, in a way, than the 2007 experience, say.

Whether it was a 'richer' or otherwise better way of discovering what was new, I can't say.

But it was certainly different.

Still, like Gibson, I'm certainly glad to have discovered Gangnam style, which in 1977 I no doubt would have missed...

Turn me around so I can be everything I was meant to be

We heard this on the way to work this morning. And wanted to listen to it all day long.

 Michael Kiwanuka, "Tell Me a Tale"

History, nonsense and atheists (interesting and boring)

Not least because I'm someone whose new historical project focuses on an aspect of religious history, there were several parts of this interview with historian Quentin Skinner where I found myself nodding.

Art of Theory: Under the influence of your methodology, a number of scholars including some of your former students have sought to put religion back in the picture as a crucial part of the intellectual context in which texts must be understood. You yourself have emphasized the importance of theology in the Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Yet you’ve been criticized in your later work for downplaying the importance of religious considerations. What do you make of these criticisms?

Skinner: Yes, a very interesting point to me because I think I’ve been insensitive to it. One of the most extraordinary things to anyone of my age is the re-sacrilizing of the world. If you were brought up on Weberian—to say nothing of Marxist—social philosophy, then the secularization image of modernity was absolutely central to our self-image. And that has gone into reverse in a way that completely mystifies me.

It’s true that in the Foundations of Modern Political Thought book there’s a great deal of theology and a great deal of discussion of religious principles in relation to political change. There are chapters which are entirely about Lutheran, Calvinist, and Scholastic theology, and I try to tell a story in which they are intimately meshed with politics. I can remember, when I was writing that book that my wife, Sue [James], said she began to worry that I was going to become a convert! So I certainly don’t feel that I underplayed the role of religion in that text, although so important has religion become to people’s sensibilities again in our time that that is something that is widely said about it.

As to my more recent work, I am conscious and even self-conscious about the fact that I do try to focus my historical attention on issues in respect of which my feelings about religion and theology don’t have to obtrude.

I am not a religious person. Of course, that doesn’t mean I am not a spiritual person. I really resent the assumption that you are not a spiritual person unless you are a religious person. But I have no religious beliefs and much worse than that, I’m a kind of boring atheist.

I think there are two kinds of interesting atheists. There are those who think like Feuerbach, that religion is the deformation of very deep human feelings and aspirations. Or else, there are those who think that although religion may be false, it may be very useful as a binding force in society, in the way that someone like Hobbes thinks. I just think that, as far as I can see, there is no good reason to espouse any of the tenets of the religious hypothesis in any of the forms that I know of it. For me, it’s nothing but nonsense.

That’s what I mean by being a boring atheist, and in consequence I’m not very interested in the history of religion. It’s difficult to be interested in the history of something that you think is nonsense.

"In old movies people scream, choking on their fists when they see shadows like these."

There's a new Mountain Goats album, Transcendental Youth, coming out very soon. This is on it. I like it.

 

The Mountain Goats, "In Memory of Satan"

Dollar Makes me Holler: Honey Boo Boo's Critique of Post-Capitalist America

As I said in my previous post, I've just been to a cultural studies conference. In one of the papers, the speaker condemned HBO for producing slickly unambigous fodder for the educated bourgeoisie, thus shamelessly affirming the debilitating forces of post-Capitalism (in the US and elsewhere).

So. There. All I can say is that I won't ever be a fan of Game of Thrones anyways. But I'm glad to have discovered that subversive alternatives abound, especially on the more discerning educational TV channels:


Proposed thesis: "The subaltern cannot only speak, it can also let rip!"

Or: "A spectre is haunting capitalism: The spectre of Honey Boo Boo"

Post-conference trauma (again)

Have just returned from a conference. One of those conferences where my humble and harmless ideas are greeted with baffled silence, theatrical eyerolling and straight-out spite. It is astounding how reliably the mere suggestion that some (a few) human attitudes and behaviours might be universal leads to the spontaneous collective performance of shaming rituals like avoiding eye-contact or denying verbal communication. An evolutionary psychologist would interpret all this as evidence of the old cheater-detection mechanism. Stupid, just-so story-telling evolutionary psychologist!


That is not so good. But on the positive side: I'm far less palpitatious in these situations than I used to be. What is more, these days I even manage to come up with halfway sensible ripostes (even when feeling under the weather!). In fact, I think that this time I managed to make points that are not dissimilar to those made by Terry Eagleton in a recent review of an academic study of John Cleland (of Fanny Hill fame) - only maybe not quite so eloquently.

So this is what I kind of said today:

In postmodern eyes, sexuality is at its best when deviant, since the normal and conventional are thought to be on the side of power. This is the reason words like 'normal' and 'natural' are nowadays swathed in scare quotes, as they are in this study. Yet crooked bankers and serial killers are deviant, while sunlight, death, panic and arthritis are natural. Whatever else they may be, human beings are natural material objects. Normality and convention can be on the side of enlightenment; if being allowed to go on strike isn't normal, it ought to be; convention dictates that you shouldn't kick vagrants who ask you for money. Postmodernists celebrate the marginal, while failing to note that neo-Nazis fall into that category. They also take the side of minorities, a group which includes tax evaders. In any case, those who prize the deviant should also cherish the normative, since there would be no deviancy without it.

Thank you Terry. I only wish I'd read your review before the conference.

The poetry of the police log

At the end of the written record (published today in the Telegraph) of a series of events that happened at the main gates of 10 Downing St. not too long ago -- which involved some colourful language from the Tory Chief Whip Andrew "Thrasher" Mitchell directed at the police officers guarding the gate -- one finds these delightfully deadpan words:

"I write this for your information as Mr Mitchell's last comments would appear to indicate that he is unhappy with my actions."

Indeed, Officer Pleb, he's probably, in retrospect, most unhappy about your action of writing it all down.

Book launching

At the blog for my new book, The Most Remarkable Woman in England, I have posted a few photos from the recent launch event for it and two other criminal justice histories that was held at the third British Crime Historians Symposium a couple of weeks ago.

A very good time was had by all, as I think is apparent.

The book, as a reminder, is now available in the UK and Europe and will be released on 2 October in North America.

Down the Property Ladder

Even people who enjoy a reputation of bohemian quirkiness can have a bad day on the home purchasing front.

This "mediterranean" atrocity reminded me of Fred MacMurray's comment, in Double Indemnity, as he is about to enter the Dietrichson pile where lurks the fatal Phyllis D.:

"It was one of those California Spanish houses everyone was nuts about 10 or 15 years ago. This one must have cost someone about 30,000 bucks - that is, if he ever finished paying for it."

To buy that house - now that would be hip and neatly self-referential in a Baudriallian sort of way!

The Most Remarkable Woman in England: Now available

My new book, The Most Remarkable Woman in England: Poison, Celebrity and the Trials of Beatrice Pace is now available in the UK (North American release: 2 October).

More information here.

"I have no fear of anyone, I'm dumb and wild and free"

And, appropriately enough for a Sunday, something else from the Mountain Goats:

Alles ist so neu und aufregend

A song that has dug itself into my brain in the last week:

Introducing the "most remarkable woman in England"

To mark the one-week-to-go stage before the UK release of my book on the sensational Pace poisoning case of 1928, Manchester University Press has posted a brief introduction to the book and its themes.

If you can't wait for the release, by all means check out the book-related blog I've been writing (and plan to continue updating after the book is released).

There should be plenty there to keep you busy.

Rock 'n' roll excess ain't what it used to be

In the Guardian, Justin Hawkins, of the Darkness, explains his band's video for 'Everybody have a Good Time', from their new album, 'Hot Cakes'.

It was going to be a monkey, but animatronic monkey faces were too terrifying. So we came up with the bear. Unfortunately, the record company said it would be too expensive to have an animatronic one, so it had to be a guy in a bear costume. With a bra on.

In an age of austerity, I suppose, such corners must be cut.

From "a dash of the Rhine and the Oder" to the "age of passports"

I have, on and off over recent months, been reading J. B. Priestley's 1934 travelogue English Journey.

It's the kind of episodic book that lends itself to returning to bit by bit. Priestley was a somewhat prickly character (I rather doubt that I'd have liked to join him on his travels) and a few of his opinions are pretty offensive (especially with regard to the Irish; I might get round to discussing that at some point).

However, the book is worth reading if only for the glimpses it gives of a 1930s England in the process of transformation; or, to put it more precisely (since all modern societies are always changing to one extent or another) in a particularly interesting historical moment of transformation.

In Priestley's personal perspective, one finds a mixture of ambiguity about the emergent, 'modern', 'Americanised' England (a combination of curiosity, wonder and fear) and a somewhat nostalgic look backward at an England in the process of disappearing.

There's an interesting passage that combines these perspectives, starting with a reflection on Priestley's own youth in Bradford and then using changes in that city to comment on the wider world situation in the 1930s. (I noted a citation of a sentence or two from this passage a few years ago, but it's more interesting in its complete form.)

It's rather long, but I think worth reading.

Bradford was, as Priestley puts it, 'always a city of travellers' affiliated with the worsted industries:

Some of its citizens went regularly to the other side of the globe to buy wool. Others went abroad, from Belgium to China, selling yarn and pieces. They returned to Market Street, the same sturdy Bradfordians, from the ends of the earth. You used to meet men who did not look as if they had ever been further than York or Morecambe, but who actually knew every continental express. They would go away from months, keeping to the most complicated time-tables. When they returned they did not give themselves cosmopolitan airs; it was very dangerous in Bradford to give yourself any airs, except those by tradition associated with solid wool men.

And then there was this curious leaven of intelligent aliens, chiefly German-Jews and mostly affluent. They were so much a part of the place when I was a boy that it never occurred to me to ask why they were there. I saw their outlandish names on office doors, knew that they lived in certain pleasant suburbs, and obscurely felt that they had always been with us and would always remain. That small colony of foreign or mixed Bradfordians produced some men of great distinction, including a famous composer, two renowned painters and a well-known poet. [...]

I can remember when one of the best-known clubs in Bradford was the Schillerverein. And in those days a Londoner was a stranger sight than a German. There was, then, this odd mixture in pre-war Bradford. A dash of the Rhine and the Oder found its way into our grim runnel—"t'mucky beck." Bradford was determinedly Yorkshire and provincial, yet some of its suburbs reached as far as Frankfort and Leipzig. It was odd enough. But it worked.

But the war changed all that. There is hardly a trace now in the city of that German-Jewish invasion. Some of the merchanting houses changed their names and personnel; others went out of business. I liked the city better as it was before, and most of my fellow Bradfordians agree with me. It seems smaller and duller now. I am not suggesting that these German-Jews were better men than we are. The point is that they were different, and brought more to the city than bank drafts and lists of customers. They acted as a leaven, just as a colony of typical West Riding folk would act as a leaven in Munich or Moscow.

These exchanges are good for everybody. Just lately, when we offered hospitality to some distinguished German-Jews who had been exiled by the Nazis, the leader-writers in the cheap Press began yelping again about Keeping the Foreigner Out. Apart from the miserable meanness of the attitude itself—for the great England, the England admired throughout the world, is the England that keeps open house, the refuge of Mazzini, Marx, Lenin—history shows us that the countries that have opened their doors have gained, just as the countries that have driven out large numbers of its citizens, for racial, religious or political reasons, have always paid dearly for their [in]tolerance.

It is one of the innumerable disadvantages of this present age of idiotic nationalism, political and economic, this age of passports and visas and quotas, when every country is as difficult to enter or leave as were the Czar's Russia or the Sultan's Turkey before the war, that it is no longer possible for this admirable leavening process to continue.

Bradford is really more provincial now than it was twenty years ago. But so, I suspect, is the whole world. It must be when there is less and less tolerance in it, less free speech, less liberalism. Behind all the new movements of this age, nationalistic, fascistic, communistic, has been more than a suspicion of the mental attitude of a gang of small town louts ready to throw a brick at the nearest stranger.

J.B. Priestley, English Journey (London: William Heinemann in association with Victor Gollancz, 1937 [1934]), pp. 160-61.

You find a few nice turns of phrase in this passage that suggest why, apart from the social observations, Priestley is still worth reading.

Da da dum, da da dum da dum dum...

Happy 65th birthday Ian Anderson!