A few recent publications

Last week, I received a pre-press proof of an essay I wrote a couple of years ago. It has had a relatively long gestation process as a result of what sounds like some challenging financial issues faced by the editor, which appear now to have been solved. In any case, the surprise was a pleasant one, and I'm happy that the not insignificant amount of work I invested in it will at least result in a publication (which will not only be the first publication related to my new research project but also my first German-language entry on my publication list).

It then occurred to me that, since a few other things of mine have recently seen the light of day, I might note them briefly here, in case you're interested in this sort of thing.

1. First, I contributed a chapter to the new collection Moral Panics, Social Fears and the Media: Historical Perspectives, edited by Sian Nicholas and Tom O'Malley (Routledge, 2013).

The chapter is titled 'Watching the Detectives (and the Constables): Fearing the Police in 1920s Britain', and it is one of the last of a series of publications to emerge out of a research project I was involved in a few years ago that focused on a series of British policing scandals in the late 1920s and how they were discussed in the press . (I first stumbled upon these scandals in the context of my research on the Pace murder trial, which became my second book, The Most Remarkable Woman in England.)

A final draft version of the chapter is available for reading or download at my pages at academia.edu or ResearchGate, and here is  a brief excerpt:

There were specific worries about the reliability of police evidence, the rough handling of demonstrators, the over-zealous policing of ‘indecency’ and the possible use of intimidation during questioning. The press gave significant attention to allegations of wrongful arrest and poor treatment, especially when they involved socially prominent or even simply ‘respectable’ people.

An Evening Standard cartoon inspired by the police scandals.

Anxieties peaked in 1928 with two sensational scandals, the Pace and Savidge cases, described in more detail below. These events were given exhaustive press coverage and provoked commentary regarding an apparent crisis in police-public relations. A 1928 Daily Mirror editorial observed, ‘the impression has long been prevalent that, once a man or a woman falls foul of the police, there is no possibility of struggling out of the net that evidently catches the innocent as well as the guilty’.

An essay by A. P. Herbert entitled ‘Stopping People from Doing Things’ [Sunday Express, 27 May 1928, 2] captures the tone of such criticism well, seeing police misconduct as a symptom of wider problems: ‘The habit of the governing mind at the present day is one of continual interference in things that do not matter to the neglect, very often, of the things that do, a habit of meticulous insistence on petty rules and prohibitions; and, naturally, the police have caught the fever from their masters’. Herbert argued:

‘The petty tyrannies of policemen are only the natural and logical consequences of the large policy of social tyranny for which our rulers are responsible. We fondly thought that we fought the Great War for Liberty, but conquered Berlin is a free city, and London is as free as a kindergarten school.’

2. Secondly, the contribution I wrote to a collection on the reception of the ideas of Oswald Spengler (he of Decline of the West fame) that I had previewed earlier this year came out a couple of months ago. The collection, Oswald Spengler als europäisches Phänomen: Der Transfer der Kultur- und Geschichtsmorphologie im Europa der Zwischenkriegszeit 1919-1939 was ably edited by Zaur Gasimov and Carl Antonius Lemke Duque, and it considers Spengler reception in several countries. I was responsible for Britain, and in '"German foolishness" and the "Prophet of Doom": Oswald Spengler and the Inter-war British Press' (one of three English-language contributions to the collection), I focus, as the title suggests, on how Spengler's ideas were discussed in a range of major newspapers and magazines.

A brief excerpt: 

Oswald Spengler, looking jaunty as usual.

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]
----------
* 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.  

3. Finally, a couple of my reviews have also come out this year.

• One at the open-access journal Law, Crime and History on Shame, Blame and Culpability: Crime and Violence in the Modern State, edited by Judith Rowbotham, Marianna Muravyeva and David Nash. (Issue here, direct link to review [pdf] here.)
• Another at Reviews in History on Haia Shpayer-Makov's excellent new police history: The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England. (Link to review.)

I have, incidentally, uploaded most of the reviews I've written over the last ten years or so to both academia.edu and ResearchGate.

Happy reading!

Somewhat belated late summer reading list

There were several things that contributed to the relaxation and enjoyment we shared during our recent holidays on the French and Belgian coasts. One of them was the complete absence of any internet connection and, in our second week, of any media source whatsoever.

Another key thing was doing a lot of reading, but, importantly, for the most part reading that had little or nothing to do with 'work'. Given the absence of any forms of multimedia distraction and the presence of either a quiet beach or an even quieter semi-remote farmhouse, it was a relief to rediscover that now all-too-rare commodity of deep focus. 

My reading list for those two weeks ended up being shorter than I had hoped, but I might have been a bit ambitious:

• Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (I had started this one before we left: given that it's a bit of a slog -- an interesting slog, yes, but still pretty heavy going -- I was happy to have plenty of time to race through the last few hundred pages) 
• Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
• Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide through the American Status System
• James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime
• Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (first time, I must admit)
• James Salter, Light Years
• James Salter, All That Is
• and, more or less intermixed among them all, Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder.

As usual with holiday reading, I tend to mix in things I know and like quite well (Light Years, Class) with new things that are long-time entries on my meaning-to-read list (Brideshead) combined with a few random choices that more or less occur to me in the weeks before we leave (everything else).

I thought everything was worthwhile and absorbing, but the main reading joys of this journey were Judt and Snyder's collection of interviews on twentieth-century intellectual history and the novels by Salter.(And, I'd give an honourable mention, Paul Fussell's Class, which I've now read three times at different points in my life: while a bit dated in terms of some of its specifics -- it is, after all, now 30 years old -- it gets a vast amount fundamentally right. It's an unsettling experience, though, to have so many of your own family's class signifiers described in such unrelentingly perfect detail by a complete stranger.)

For an overview of several streams of twentieth-century thought (especially those having to do with Marxism, which, however you feel about it, is an essential part of understanding the twentieth century), I would highly recommend the Judt and Snyder book. It is, however, partly biographical and loosely structured around different phases in the life of Tony Judt, who -- very sadly -- died a few years ago at a far too young age. This mix might put some people off (especially if you're not familiar with Judt's other work). He had an interesting life, however, and as the book is about the intellectual development of various thinkers and interpreters of society, culture and history, the two streams in it tend to mix quite smoothly, I thought.

That is, if you're interested in two historians talking about intellectuals. I happen to like that kind of thing. (Further commentary on the book in this brief piece at the New Yorker.)

The Salter novels are in a very different key. I had read Light Years a couple of years ago and enjoyed it very much. But reading these three novels was much more of a serious plunge into Salter's very unique style.

I can do no better than to point you to James Meek's recent LRB essay on Salter, which is actually what inspired me to re-read Light Years and to try out the other two.

This is the section that focuses on Light Years:

In Light Years, Salter’s mastery of time, his themes of nobility, ruthlessness and failure in the quest for love and glory, his interest in the erotic and the aesthetics of pleasure, achieve their richest realisation. To the portrayal of moments, seasons and years is added the portrayal of entire adult lives, Viri’s and Nedra’s, in a long marriage and its aftermath. [...]

But the story, what the book is ‘about’, matters less than what the book is: an extraordinary replication not of the experience of a marriage but of the memory of the experience of a marriage. For while we remember stories, memory is not a story. Salter strips out the narrative transitions and explanations and contextualisations, the novelistic linkages that don’t exist in our actual memories, to leave us with a set of remembered fragments, some bright, some ugly, some bafflingly trivial, that don’t easily connect and can’t be put together as a whole, except in the sense of chronology, and in the sense that they are all that remains. Over these surviving fragments of the past, where the distinction between the unique and the repeated is blurred, Salter sets the characters’ reflections hovering, in the way our present thoughts will flutter back to burnish and brood over, and find connections between, the same small set of memories we get to keep....

(I think it was this rather melancholic, fragmented sense of memory that made me think, while reading all three books, of the films of Terrence Malick, which I like very much and about which there was also recently a strikingly good LRB essay by Gilberto Perez.)

I think that Light Years remains my favourite of the three.   

We've actually been back for a few weeks, and the reading material has since been much more work-related.

Which is also interesting, though in a different way: one that I hope to get around to talking about here at some point.

But reader, I tell you: being offline for a few weeks was good for my soul.

There might be more periods like that in the future.

Hotel Art #4

Part of an occasional series.

Ibis Budget hotel, Liège, Belgium (August 2013).

'For goodness sake, grow up'

I'm not, to be sure, on ex-Archbeard Williams's 'side', but there are a few things he said here which are definitely not wrong.

Such as on the issue of words and their use.

Words, that is, like 'persecution':

"When you've had any contact with real persecuted minorities you learn to use the word very chastely," he said. "Persecution is not being made to feel mildly uncomfortable. 'For goodness sake, grow up,' I want to say."

True persecution was "systematic brutality and often murderous hostility that means that every morning you wonder if you and your children are going to live through the day". He cited the experience of a woman he met in India "who had seen her husband butchered by a mob".

Or, 'spirituality':

He added: "Speaking from the Christian tradition, the idea that being spiritual is just about having nice experiences is rather laughable. Most people who have written seriously about the life of the spirit in Christianity and Judaism spend a lot of their time telling you how absolutely bloody awful it is."  

It's striking how similar some of the comments he made here are similar to those sometimes made within a group of (mainly Anglican) Christian intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s that I'm currently researching. 

Especially things like this:

"The risk of being reduced to an NGO, another woolly, well-meaning liberal thinktank or ambulance service – that's not a fate I would relish for my church," he said.

I can see that, I have to say. 

Silent Posting

'Initiative in a world afflicted with comprehensive helplessness'

That Bruce Sterling, he does have a way with words.

This time about Messrs. Assange, Manning and Snowden and the the consequences that have followed in the wake of the secrets they have revealed.

It’s a wrestling match of virtuality and actuality, an irruption of the physical into the digital. It’s all about Bradley shivering naked in his solitary cage, and Julian diligently typing in his book-lined closet at the embassy, and Ed bagging out behind the plastic seating of some airport, in a jetlag fit of black globalization that went on for a solid month.

And, those tiny, confined, somehow united spaces are the moral high ground. That’s where it is right now, that’s what it looks like these days.

You can see that in the recent epic photo of Richard Stallman — the Saint Francis of Free Software, the kind of raw crank who preaches to birds and wanders the planet shoeless – shoulder-to-shoulder with an unshaven Assange, sporting his manly work shirt. The two of them, jointly holding up a little propaganda pic of Edward Snowden.

They have the beatific look of righteousness rewarded. Che Guevara in his starred beret had more self-doubt than these guys. They are thrilled with themselves.

People, you couldn’t trust any of these three guys to go down to the corner grocery for a pack of cigarettes. Stallman would bring you tiny peat-pots of baby tobacco plants, then tell you to grow your own. Assange would buy the cigarettes, but smoke them all himself while coding up something unworkable. And Ed would set fire to himself, to prove to an innocent mankind that tobacco is a monstrous and cancerous evil that must be exposed at all costs.

And yet the three of them together, they look just amazing. They are fantastic figures, like the promise of otherworldly aid from a superhero comic. They are visibly stronger than they’ve ever been before. They have the initiative in a world afflicted with comprehensive helplessness.

And there’s more coming. 

Lots, lots more.

I can't judge whether Sterling is right about his conclusions.

But can say that this essay is certainly one of the most interesting things I've read on this topic.

And that, for the moment is enough.

Well that and another another killer line from the same essay: 'Personal computers can have users, but social media has livestock.'

Well said, sir.

(Thanks to Simon at Ballardian for bringing this to my attention.)

Hotel Art #3

Part of an occasional series.

Lindner Hotel & Spa Binshof, Speyer, Germany (July 2013).

Foul language

Philip Oltermann considers German obscenities:

Linguist Hans-Martin Gauger spent several years comparing swearwords in 15 different languages and concluded not so much that Germans were inordinately obsessed with faecal matters, but that there were inordinately reluctant to use sexual metaphors to express negative sentiments.

Look up "motherfucker" in the Langenscheidt dictionary and you get Arschloch (arsehole). In German you don't say: "Verfick dich (fuck off)," but "Verpiss dich (piss off)"; you don't feel "fucked off" but "beschissen (shat upon)". Even Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was happy to use the filthy German equivalent of "kiss my arse" in his 1773 play Götz von Berlichingen: "Er aber, sag's ihm, er kann mich im Arsche lecken!" Only the Swedes share a similar reluctance to use sexual metaphors as swearwords.

Gauger admits that, with the globalisation of German, that reluctance is starting to wear off, but he insists that Germans should, at any rate, not be ashamed of their linguistic habit, but proud of it. "I find it much more troubling when we use sexual organs as terms of abuse." 

I can see that.

On the other hand, the amazingly easy, effective and somehow elegant all-purpose obscenity of the f-word is one thing I do miss in German.

Exhibit, uh, 'F' (caution: harsh language):

Important anniversary

We actually do have a wedding anniversary later this month, but that's not what I mean here.

The one I'm referring to is an anniversary of a rather different nature.

Tomorrow is the 85th anniversary of the opening of the trial of Beatrice Pace for the alleged arsenic murder of her husband Harry. Although the case has, today, largely been forgotten, it was a massive press sensation in the late 1920s and even led to political debates about the fairness and functioning of Britain's justice system.

My recent book, The Most Remarkable Woman in England, examines this dramatic case from several angles and sets it within the fascinating cultural context of inter-war Britain.

As I suggest in a short post at my book-related blog, it might be something that belongs on your summer reading list.

Now that summer, it seems, has finally arrived.


Happy reading!

When I'm 64. And the rest of it.

At the end of a Guardian article which is a bit tiresome in its generational navel-gazing there are a few interesting passages on how to best manage that inevitable process of getting older:

In his 2003 book Aging Well, George Vaillant, an American psychiatrist, drew lessons from three longitudinal studies that followed 824 people – the parents of the baby boomers – for more than 60 years. He was fascinated by why some became "sad sick" as the years progressed and others "happy well". One of the studies selected a Harvard group for their soundness of mind. Yet a third had suffered mental illness by their 50s. "They were normal when I picked them," one researcher told Vaillant, "It must have been the psychiatrists who screwed them up." Childhood isn't decisive. How you start out, Vaillant learned, is no indicator of where you will end up.

He looked at those people, male and female, who had fared well emotionally as octogenarians and saw patterns in their 50s that gave signals. They were in a stable relationship, did not smoke, drank little, exercised, had a normal weight and had the maturity to handle emotional issues well, "and make a lemon into lemonade". Comfortable in their own skins, they would not have mouthed the words of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman: "I still feel kind of temporary about myself."

It is this "social aptitude" or emotional literacy that Vaillant discovered, not intellectual brilliance, or income or parental social class or genes that leads to successful ageing – that is being rich in well being and not alone.

Some of the wealthy in his studies died alone, prematurely and miserably just like a number of the poorest.

As you age, Vaillant advised: "Don't try to think less of yourself … try to think of yourself less."

Moderation, consistency, loyalty, a lack of self-obsession and being a Mensch. Not exactly a surprising list.

But I've heard worse advice. 

The view from afar

From today's Guardian: Germany, land of armed road rage and annoying pseudo-English.

Rest assured, it's only partly accurate.

Hotel art #2

Part of an occasional series.



Hotel Stadt Hannover, Göttingen, Germany (June 2013)

If we had to take up arms again, my heart would shed a tear

Am just getting ready to head off to Göttingen to give a talk (pdf) on my new project.

I've never been there before.

But this song about it sure is pretty.


(English translation of lyrics)

"I think not"

 A striking passage from Iain Banks's last interview:

"I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to accept that you're just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like brane-theory [of multiple dimensions] … really, it's not about you. It's what religion does with this drive for acknowledgement of self-importance that really gets up my nose. 'Yeah, yeah, your individual consciousness is so important to the universe that it must be preserved at all costs' – oh, please. Do try to get a grip of something other than your self-obsession. How Californian. The idea that at all costs, no matter what, it always has to be all about you. Well, I think not."

I think not too.

On loving thy archbishop as you suggest he loves himself

Some harsh words, at least by Anglican standards, are brought to our attention by Barbara Ellen at the Guardian: 

This week, a somewhat unusual religious story. After Justin Welby's recent anti-gay marriage speech, Rev Marcus Ramshaw went on to Facebook to denounce him as a "wanker" (yes, you did read right). Saying that the archbishop did not speak for him, Ramshaw also called Welby a "massive mistake" and said he was getting up a petition for him to resign.

Some of us took a moment at this point: did a reverend just call the archbishop of Canterbury a "wanker"? Was it a communal hallucination, or perhaps a long-lost Chris Morris sketch? Could somebody step in and control this situation please! As if on cue, Church of England director of communications Rev Arun Arora went online to admonish Ramshaw, saying: "Calling another Christian a wanker doesn't work for me as a priestly response." An agreement was reached for Ramshaw to delete his comments. Arora added: "I think any right-minded person would find a priest calling his archbishop an onanist to be utterly outrageous." 

Or, of course, a right-minded person might find it utterly amusing. 

Not least since the church has now done its bit to resurrect the under-used word 'onanist'.

Silent Posting

Shopping and praying

An interesting historical comparison at Blood & Treasure regarding the current unrest in Turkey:

Historically, the whole thing has a 19^th century French feel to it, in the sense of government dominated by a pious, provincial bourgeoisie wanting to tame the big city antinomians. But reading about this stuff it’s amazing how well a certain type of – in this case – Islamic piety dovetails with neoliberal concepts of modernization. Maybe that shouldn’t be so surprising when you look at places like Dubai, but it’s remarkable how exact the comparisons are. The same basic suspicion of ‘urbanity’ in the widest sense of the word, the dislike for forms of life, commerce and culture perceived to be messy or low prestige, the way in which a form of commercial standardization seems to complement or substitute for a repressive moral code and the way in which the only unthreatening secular activity that the economic, political and in this case religious establishment can imagine is shopping.

I am in no way competent to address the complicated political situation in Turkey (the list of various grievances cited in the above-linked post is pretty illuminating), but this makes it seem like something more immediately graspable.

Speaking in tongues

The guardians and shepherds of the French language have, at least according to the Telegraph, apparently decided to officially recognise a new word for what the anglais and américains have long referred to as 'French kissing'.

It sounds a bit...surprisingly unromantic.

Sadly, they have not preserved the 'French' in the kiss, choosing instead 'galocher' - to kiss with tongues - which sounds a bit too close to 'galoshes' for my liking, which are something a bit like Wellington boots, only they go over your shoes instead of in place of them, and is very definitely Not Sexy. 

It is odd, I think, that their version takes no national credit for the practice of kissing with tongues.

You'd think you'd want your country's name on that particular activity.

Minor digression: I think the above-noted author sorely underestimates the sexiness of Wellington boots.

Though whether we need a special verb for that sort of thing is another issue altogether.
 

On "Panzerschokolade" and other fun German inventions

Not least because a couple of friends have pointed me to it, I thought I would pass along a reference to this fascinating little article from the English-language version of Spiegel Online that explores the origins of 'crystal meth', finding it in late 1930s Germany.

When the then-Berlin-based drug maker Temmler Werke launched its methamphetamine compound onto the market in 1938, high-ranking army physiologist Otto Ranke saw in it a true miracle drug that could keep tired pilots alert and an entire army euphoric. It was the ideal war drug. In September 1939, Ranke tested the drug on university students, who were suddenly capable of impressive productivity despite being short on sleep.

From that point on, the Wehrmacht, Germany's World War II army, distributed millions of the tablets to soldiers on the front, who soon dubbed the stimulant "Panzerschokolade" ("tank chocolate"). British newspapers reported that German soldiers were using a "miracle pill." But for many soldiers, the miracle became a nightmare.

As enticing as the drug was, its long-term effects on the human body were just as devastating. 

And 'devastating', of course, remains an accurate term for the drug's impact.

On discovering that yet another major illegal drug has its origins in German chemistry I was reminded of an earlier post I wrote at this blog pointing out that, in the early 20th century, my adopted homeland was the leading global supplier of cocaine.

The above facts combined with another recent online reference pointed out to me by a friend -- to a Bayer-branded bottle of heroin -- got me thinking.

If we -- as in we Germans -- ever need a new motto to replace 'unity and justice and freedom' (which is, I will admit, not bad), can I now just suggest that the following might be appropriate for the country that invented heroin, cocaine and crystal meth: 'Germany: getting the party started since 1855'.


  

Tiny visitor

We found this little fellow -- a baby blue-tit -- on our front doorstep when we came home from work this evening.

He fluttered around there for a while (actual flying still seems beyond his abilities) before hiding in some ivy in our back garden.

While we ate our own dinner, we watched him (we've rather spontaneously named him Ferdinand) be fed by his parents.

Shortly afterwards, we noted two other baby birds on a branch in another part of the garden. We think they're redstarts, but they might be finches.

It's all gotten very lively in the garden all of a sudden.

We're just hoping that they survive the neighbourhood cats. 

Fingers crossed.

[UPDATE]: They are redstarts. The Wife just saw the parents feeding them what seemed to be grubs. Yum!

Hotel art #1

An occasional series: art in hotel rooms I (or we) have slept in.

Hotel Ullrich, Elfershausen, Germany (April 2013).

The present is a foreign country

I haven't been reading too much in detail about UKIP -- because, well, really, who wants to spend time thinking about these people? -- but the relative success of the anti-EU, anti-immigration party in Britain's local elections last week has brought forth a new round of attention to them.

Via Max Dunbar, I discovered Andrew Rawnsley's analysis of the UKIP phenomenon, which concludes with these striking passages:

All the main parties have cause to be anxious about Ukip and so all have been trying to understand the rise of the Farageists. One way they do this is to put together focus groups of voters who have switched to Ukip to try to fathom why these people are attracted to Nigel Farage's gang. One senior party strategist says he listened in some wonderment as his focus group of Ukip voters spent an entire 90-minute session wailing and gnashing their teeth about the state of Britain. Not a good word did they have to say about the country today. At the end of the session, he thanked them for their time, and said he had one more question. Was there anything about Britain that made them feel proud? There was a silence. Then one man leant forward and said: "The past." The rest of the group nodded in agreement.

The Ukip manifesto is a nonsense of contradictions. David Cameron, Nick Clegg or Ed Miliband would be torn to shreds by the media if they ever tried to offer anything similar. Mr Farage promises tax cuts for everyone and spending increases on just about everything from building more prisons to restoring the student grant to more generous pensions. But strategists from the main parties tell me that they get nowhere when they try to discuss policy with sample groups of Ukip voters. Even when they agree that the Ukip prospectus doesn't make sense, reports one party pollster: "They just don't care about that."

A Ukip vote is not mainly, if at all, about making a choice based on an assessment of policy. More than anything, it is about expressing an emotion – usually a feeling of intense rage about how Britain has changed and how they are served by the established political parties. It is a howl against the modern world, a scream against the establishment. There's no arguing with that. Or, if there is a way of dealing with it, none of the main parties has yet discovered what it is.

The politics of Kulturpessimismus have a long and not very encouraging history.

Dunbar, by way of addressing a claim made by Dan Hodges at the Telegraph that the results disprove the existence of a 'progressive majority' in the UK, himself points to grounds for a different kind of pessimism: that about finding an effective response to Farageism:

In fact, there are plenty of progressives in this country. They’re just not in politics. As I’ve argued recently, British politics is not a place for reasonable people anymore. Smart progressives who want to make a difference don’t go into politics, they go into public policy or advocacy or journalism or law or the police or the Royal Marines. Because smart people are leaving politics, the field is left clear for maniacs, illiterates, thieves, neo-Nazis and toytown power merchants. This is particularly true at local level.

And it’s not true, by the way, that UKIP represent an ‘anti-politics party’. UKIP are more pro politics than anyone. They encourage huge unrealistic expectations of what politics can deliver. Vote for me and I’ll give you everything you want or need, your darkest fear, your fondest dream.

I don't know enough about the contemporary British political scene to make any deeply reasoned judgements about the above claims.

But I must say, I'm not feeling very optimistic.

Coolness is overrated

Though I haven't yet heard more than the two tracks that have so far been released (one of which I previously noted), I'm pretty excited about the new Vampire Weekend album, since I love their first two.

(There are albums for which I want to be in the right state of mind before I hear them, and I just haven't gotten there yet in this case.)

There's a passage from today's Guardian review of the album and interview with the band that has only reinforced that anticipation:

Ezra [Koenig] speaks like a throwback from 1920s New York: clipped, nasal, articulate. It could come off as an affectation, and read like standoff-ish arrogance in print. But in person, he is quietly charming and intelligent with an undefinable star quality. There are no errant words in his sentences, no gauche contemporary "likes" or "y'knows". Despite being the product of an age where over-stimulation and lack of attention span has apparently made it impossible for us to be bored (and therefore, the theory goes, be creative), he philosophises a lot, too. About what it means to be in a band; about wanting money ("I'm not ashamed to say it"); about accepting it's OK not to be "cool". For instance: "It's great to be like everyone else, it's great to be able to identify what's important to you and respect what's important to other people and find a middle ground where you feel connected to people. There's something narcissistic about thinking you're special and everyone else is boring, and if you end up doing normal things you're a loser. You have to find your way around that otherwise it will just fuck you up." 

That quote reminded me of something I recently read in a not-so recent interview with John Darnielle, of The Mountain Goats:

Pitchfork: You started putting out Mountain Goats albums in the midst of 1990s indie culture, which some associate with generational cynicism.

JD: People are afraid of not looking cool, which involves dismissive and exclusionary stances. I grew up in Claremont, Calif., and when we would all go to L.A., we'd always worry that we weren't fitting in. When our bands would try to play there, we'd get a big "no" from all the clubs. We didn't know any of the right people. So we constructed our own scene where there were bands that you could not, for the life of you, try to figure out what they were trying to accomplish-- but you'd find the beat and nod your head to it. There's been a movement over the past few years toward focusing on good-hearted things that bring pleasure. Thrash kids back in the day talked about being badass, wicked, and evil. Those were all positive terms in that scene. You learn to present dark things without including their ability to harm, treasuring them for what they are.

To which I can only say: 'Cool'. 

Investigating the investigators

For those of you interested in this sort of thing, my review essay on Haia Shpayer-Makov's fascinating new book on the history of police detectives has just been published at Reviews in History.

It starts like this:

‘A detective’, wrote a crime-fiction reviewer in 1932, ‘should have something of the god about him’:

It was the divine, aloof, condescending quality in the old great ones of Poe, Gaboriau, Wilkie Collins and Sherlock Holmes that made their adventures so glamorously irresistible. A writer of detective stories might have a style as brilliant as Poe’s, as consummately competent as Collins’s, as pompously absurd as Doyle’s – it did not matter: what mattered was whether he gave us a detective whom we could worship.

Even the most ardent fan of crime fiction might think ‘worship’ an overstatement; nonetheless, by the time those words were written, detectives had indeed become among the most popular figures of modern literature. In the decades since that ‘golden age’ of crime fiction, police detectives have often even managed to hold their own against their previously more celebrated private counterparts, whether in print, on television or at the cinema. As The Ascent of the Detective makes clear, such trends are remarkable in view of the suspicion that greeted real-life police detectives in their early years and their frequent literary belittlement.

I hope you find the rest worth reading: both the review and the book.

George Jones, 1931-2013

One of the greats, no longer hurtin'.

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.