Fascists Stole Cliff's Euro Victory (But Ex-Fascists Apparently Liked It)

Or how else are we to interpret the fact that this Express article on "The Greatest Eurovision Fraud Ever" - claiming a Francoist conspiracy against every British mum's dream son-in-law - ends with this reference to the success of Cliff Richard's "Congratulations" beyond the bespeckled isle:

The song stayed at number one in Germany for seven weeks and sold more than one million copies.

An appreciative slap on the back of the former enemy? Or a self-congratulatory reminder of Britain's finest hour - thanks to which a major musical war on two fronts was prevented? (The German Eurovision entry for that year was a pompous hymn by Norwegian-born Wencke Myhre - and what a fascinating combo this and the Spanish song would have been). And why the hell should this be an issue today?

At least, thanks to the research conducted in connection with this Matter of Great Concern, I know that the artist originally entered to sing the impostor song "La La La" was withdrawn because he wanted to sing it in Catalan.

“¡No Pasaran!”

I'm sorry if this is a trifle banal. I'm too tired to come up with anything deep at the moment.

Well, I'm willing to learn it if you are...

Via Orcinus (original source)

Happy dance

Seeing as I've written about death and vengeance in the last week, I thought I should perhaps lighten up a bit.

So, with many thanks to The Wife for sending it to me, I present Claude François's song, 'Belle, Belle, Belle'.

It's a lovely tune. Really. I like this kind of thing.

But the really fun bit begins about 40 seconds in, when Mr. François is overcome by the urge to dance.

Or, it may be that he's overcome by a series of powerful and debilitating muscle spasms, I'm not sure.

In any case, it's wonderful. If this does not at least make you smile, you have no capacity for joy in your heart.

So...cheer up!

Keeping an eye on an-eye-for-an-eye

Jared Diamond's recent New Yorker article on the revenge culture of New Guinea clans ('Vengeance is Ours') is--like most things he writes--well worth your time. Diamond takes a particularly close look at the story of Daniel Wemp, who had responsibility for avenging the killing of his uncle by a rival clansman.

The specific details of Daniel's story and the winding course of his quest for revenge (involving, ultimately, 'three years, twenty-nine more killings, and the sacrifice of three hundred pigs') are fascinating, and Diamond considers them at finely observed length.

The general dynamics within which that story unfolded are also worth noting:

The war between the Handa clan and the Ombal clan began many years ago; how many, Daniel didn’t say, and perhaps didn’t know. It could easily have been several decades ago, or even in an earlier generation. Among Highland clans, each killing demands a revenge killing, so that a war goes on and on, unless political considerations cause it to be settled, or unless one clan is wiped out or flees. When I asked Daniel how the war that claimed his uncle’s life began, he answered, “The original cause of the wars between the Handa and Ombal clans was a pig that ruined a garden.”

This is the kind of comment that often provokes a laugh; however, in a society in which pigs (and gardens for that matter) are serious resources, it is hardly surprising that such an event could lead to an escalating conflict that might--at some point--turn deadly, thus setting in motion the reciprocal vengeance obligations that Diamond describes.

He continues:

Surprisingly to outsiders, most Highland wars start ostensibly as a dispute over either pigs or women. Anthropologists debate whether the wars really arise from some deeperlying ultimate cause, such as land or population pressure, but the participants, when they are asked to name a cause, usually point to a woman or a pig.

I'm not, actually, surprised. (Were you ?)

And there is little need to separate the 'ultimate' causes from the more direct (or 'proximate') ones that clansmen mention. They are most likely connected: seemingly excessive male touchiness about their public status and honour is apparent in all societies, as is their tendency to use violence to defend them. It seems likely (to me anyway) that there is some underlying, 'ultimate' connection to the way that evolution has shaped their brains.

(This is, of course, not my idea, but I do cite and discuss some relevant work in my article 'The Limits of Culture?', which is freely available.)

At stake in such conflicts are not simply resources, but creating and maintaining a reputation that will ensure access to those resources and help dissuade others from taking advantage of oneself or one's group. Behaving in what is apparently a crazy manner has an underlying logic that--while unpleasant and prone to sometimes going off the rails--makes sense.

Having a reputation for being someone not to fuck with means you will be fucked with less often. It's an obvious point, but it's an important one.

In his excellent book War Before Civilization, Lawrence Keeley has emphasised how serious an issue maintaining a credible deterrent was likely to have been in tribal societies: groups ran serious risks--and might have faced being wiped out--if they let their guard down. Total war was probably not an invention of the twentieth century.

In a more general way, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson have described a close relationship between justice and vengeance:

Everyone's notion of 'justice' seems to entail penalty scaled to the gravity of the offense. As we suggested earlier, deterrence and retribution are not simply alternative objectives: Effective deterrence is the ultimate function behind the human passion for measured retributive justice--it is the reason why that passion evolved. But our passion for evening the score has thus become an entity in its own right, an evolved aspect of the human mind. Our desire for justice fundamentally entails a desire for revenge. (Homicide, 1988, p. 251)

Now, this apparently inherent tendency toward using violence both as a deterrent and as a means of revenge is not just simply fixed by genes.

As some researchers have pointed out (and as I have discussed here before) violence rates are quite widely variable. What is perhaps the most interesting question about violence is not where it comes from. This is, actually, not all that complicated a question. (Daniel's story suggests one simple recipe: take several young men, divide them into clans, add pigs and women, simmer and stir, adding spice according to taste.)

It is more interesting to consider what role violence plays in different societies (and at different times) and even more interesting to see how--in many societies--that role has been significantly reduced in a relatively short span of time.

At one point in his essay, Diamond observes:

Before there were states, Daniel’s method of resolving major disputes—either violently or by payment of compensation—was the worldwide norm. Papua New Guinea is not the only place where those traditional methods of dispute resolution still coexist uneasily with the methods of state government. For example, Daniel’s methods might seem quite familiar to members of urban gangs in America, and also to Somalis, Afghans, Kenyans, and peoples of other countries where tribal ties remain strong and state control weak. As I eventually came to realize, Daniel’s thirst for vengeance and his hostility to rival clans are really not so far from our own habits of mind as we might like to think.

Absolutely.

This comment was very much on my mind when I read Alex Kotlowitz's absorbing article on modern urban feuding. Far more vivid than its somewhat functional title ('Blocking the Transmission of Violence') would suggest, the piece looks at the work of a Chicago-based group called CeaseFire which employs former gang members as 'violence interrupters' to intervene when it seems a cycle of vengeance is about to be triggered off.

Now, the people involved are far from starry eyed do-gooders. All understand the violence of the streets, most have participated in it in some way and a few have done some time for it. And, the article makes clear, there are plenty of opportunities for the 'interrupters' to do their thing. And what they do is quite remarkable.

The opening vignette introduces us to Martin Torres, whose nephew was shot and killed on a Chicago street. Although separated by vast cultural differences, I think Daniel Wemp (from Diamond's essay) would have little difficulty understanding Torres's reaction:

Torres, who was especially close to his nephew, got on the first Greyhound bus to Chicago. He was grieving and plotting retribution. “I thought, Man, I’m going to take care of business,” he told me recently. “That’s how I live. I was going hunting. This is my own blood, my nephew.”

One of the interrupters (who knew Torres from shared time in prison) seems to successfully have dissuaded Torres from taking revenge.

The contexts are, clearly, different: in Daniel's society such a reaction would be seen as the normal one and there are elaborate social conventions for organising vengeance; the modern US, however, has a police force and legal system that is supposed to pre-empt and make such acts unnecessary. Most people in most places might think about personal vengeance (and even enjoy thinking about it, hence the popularity of this motif in literature and film), but it has become relatively rare for people to act upon it, particularly in such a deadly way.

But even that is a fairly 'recent' phenomenon, as Diamond points out. Indeed, my own work on nineteenth-century England highlighted the vitality of a 'customary mentality' that put high value on retribution and autonomy. (A selective Google preview of the book seems to now be available.)

This was far from a unique finding. One of the books that I found very helpful--Martin Greenshields's An Economy of Violence in Early-Modern France--examined this issue in an earlier period and different country. Thomas Gallant has looked at how this worked in nineteenth-century Ionian Islands--in an excellent, highly recommended book called Experiencing Dominion.

You'll find similar patterns, essentially, wherever you look, and there are far too many such works on this topic to note here. (You'll find them in my footnotes, and the reviews I've written of some works are available freely online. A relatively brief summary of such work in the English context is also available at History Compass.)

Suffice to say that over the last few decades, historians have increasingly been focusing on this topic, looking at violence rates and 'cultures of violence' and trying to grasp how they change.

Despite many differences in approach, the development of institutionalised forms for working out disputes and helping to 'settle scores' in less violent ways while also suppressing their traditional alternatives--so, the expansion of court systems and policing--seems, no matter where you look, to be key.

As sociologists Elijah Anderson and Loic Wacant have noted, however, the weakening of social resources and the absence of institutional alternatives to violent score-settling help to ensure that even within relatively pacified societies, patterns of personal deterrence and vengeance re-emerge.

The results can clearly be seen in Kotlowitz's article. Referring to the presence of two of CeaseFire's 'violence interrupters' at a Chicago hospital, he observes:

Advocate Christ [Hospital] has come to see the presence of interrupters in the trauma unit as essential and is, in fact, looking to expand their numbers. “It has just given me so much hope,” Cathy Arsenault, one of the chaplains there, told me. “The families would come in, huddle in the corner and I could see them assigning people to take care of business.” Mack and Stone try to cool off family members and friends, and if the victim survives, try to keep them from seeking vengeance.

Considering such episodes both cross-culturally (e.g. by comparing modern Chicago with modern New Guinea) and historically (e.g. the works mentioned above) helps to reveal both how much can change with regard to violence but also how much work (and how many different circumstances and resources) that change involves. It brings out the particularity not only of cultural contexts but also of individual psychology and action (retribution is an extremely personal matter) while at the same time pointing to those things that universally make us human.

The relentless calculus of vengeance--and the emotions that it provokes--might be one of these deeply built-in parts of our psychologies.

Given reasonable assurances of security and confidence that violations will be dealt with by other means, it seems that people are relatively willing to adopt higher levels of self-restraint. I have referred to this as the 'civilizing bargain', and given the high costs of personal revenge it is a very good deal (as Daniel Wemp's story shows, carrying on a feud is not only dangerous but can also be a logistical nightmare.)

But as Diamond and Kotlowitz, in different ways, show, it is difficult to create and maintain the circumstances that make that bargain seem attractive to everyone.

Birdwatching

This is not about anything important or of world-historical significance, so please click away if that's what you're after.

Via this post by Dave Hill I noted that the image of a farthing that he had used included a familiar-looking bird. The wren.

Among the many bird species we're happy to say appear in our garden on a daily basis (blackbirds, various tits, finches, sparrows, redstarts, robins, a blackcap, the occasional woodpecker), a wren (we think it's a particular individual) shows up rather often.

He or she (I'm not up to telling the difference) is a delightful creature. Tiny, mouse-like, but very, very loud.

As Simon Barnes has noted, wrens 'can be pugnacious birds, to other wrens and to other small birds: you'd fancy them to pick a fight with anything. They are wonderfully indomitable--adaptable, clamorous, vehement--tiny birds with a quite colossal presence.' (A Bad Birdwatcher's Companion, 31)

Moreover, they have probably one of the best binomial names ever: Troglodytes troglodytes. How cool is that?!

We have become great fans of the wren.

It is quite pleasant to know that British currency designers have occasionally gotten it very right: not only have they put Charles Darwin on the tenner, but they once put the wren on the farthing.

Well done.

OK, that's all.

That might, on reflection, have seemed a bit twee.

If it helps at all, I was listening to Motörhead at full volume while I wrote this.

Seems appropriate to the wren, somehow.

May Day Mayday

Ok, so one might want to downplay the self-proclaimed triumph of the organisers of yesterday's Neo-Nazi rally in Hamburg, which escalated into full-scale riots featuring levels of violence not seen for a long time. However, police reactions to the brown mob's sheer viciousness affirm the overall sense that what happened yesterday should give us serious pause.

According to Hamburg Police Superintendent Werner Jantosch, without the interference of the police, there might have been fatalities. The fascist mob not only engaged in a battle with the left-wing counter-demonstrators that took several hours, but also hounded journalists deemed "left-wing" and subsequently hijacked two commuter train cars on the line between Pinneberg and Hamburg, using the train's intercom to broadcast racist messages.

How come, then, that all the Bavarian President Günther Beckstein has to say about things is to repeat the old chestnut of the growing danger of "left-wing violence" and the need to "put a stop to their games" in advance (by keeping known "Gewalttäter" -- perpetrators of violence -- from travelling to demonstrations). The problem is: not only are many so-called "Autonome" of dubious political affiiliation -- more hooligan than radical ; he's also either not recognising, or deliberately avoiding the fact of the violence coming from the extreme right (not least in his own backyard).

When will they ever learn?

No, May Days in Germany aren't quite as charming as those in Britain.

Friday Rant

Well I’m ratty. It was a bad running day.

Actually, it is perfect running day: sunny, fresh and clear, so I thought I would make it all the way up the hill behind the house, to the point at which, somewhere below, “ruhig fließt der Rhein” in a way that always strikes me as a flimsy imitation of the Mekong delta. I had hoped that this blissful experience would prepare me for another long day at the desk.

If only each and every suburban dog owner had not had the same idea.

Now, my favourite (please note the pungent sarcasm here) type of dog owner is the one who drives his beast to a nice spot with a view where the animal can have a good crap on the greenery, while he or she sits smoking and/or texting behind the wheel (sometimes with the engine running). This way, he or she usually doesn’t notice in time when their slobbering Cerberus has spotted the unassuming runner and gone for the prey.

This is not to say that I hate dogs on principle. I just hate dogs that quite obviously serve as penile extensions for their moronic owners. And that goes for female owners, too!

Dear God – would you please make it so that dogs know that swiftly moving creatures on two legs, sheathed in Gore-Tex (trademark) and Lycra (trademark), are not rabbits? That would be awesome, thank you.

As I said, I was getting ratty by having my run cut short by the presence of black, sniffing things in seek-and-destroy mode, and began to think myself into a frustrated rage … about the course prep for next week and the various exam theses I have to read and comment upon and the fact that the bathroom needs cleaning – and the absolute imbalance between the work that needs to be done and the hours available to do it.

For instance, I really ought to be making headway with a novel an MA-student of mine is working on: Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995). The problem: The book bores me stiff. You know, I’m not that young any more and really have to be a tad more discerning about my reading matter (this is also the reason, in case you have been wondering, why I have weaned myself off my daily dose of the Daily Mail).

Not every book needs to be read, especially when it contains passages like this one:

The superstore was quiet with most lights out to save electric. That fly devil Creeping Jesus would be in his office with the one-way glass. I knew he would be looking at me through the mirrors.
I stacked the Delicious in shiny piles. I put all the soft fruit and perishable veg in customer service trolley then shoved them twoat a time down the tunnel into the fridges. I covered the tatties with sacks to slow down shooting and I swept the section. I washed the shelves, tipping the buckets down the drain in the meat-cutting room. You could see the pale yellowy maggots still there under the grate.
I used to work in the meat. You cleaned up each night. Afterwards you smelled of blood and it was under your nails as you lifted the glass near your nose in the pub. You pulled the bleeding plastic bag of gubbins, cut open by bones, to the service lift. Blood spoiled three pairs of shoes. You were expected to supply your own footwear (11-12).

Of course, stacking shelves in the supermarket is not all there is to the protagonist’s life, and by the time we read the above we know that drama - in the form of a boyfriend who has slashed his throat – has entered her life. In the novel's opening sequence we see her standing in a pool of her boyfriend’s blood, frantically fiddling with her fags and the kettle – yes, life’s a bitch.

Now, we all know that, among other things, literature is about rendering the ordinary extraordinary. But does the ordinary really have to be that banal? Do we really need the cheesy little trick of self-immolation to breathe a little significance into this protagonist’s insignificant life? Upton Sinclair did a better job with The Jungle, sentimental though this novel may be (but then I’m a sucker for realism and unashamedly admit – see my profile—that I love “The Bourgeois Novel”).

And what the heck do we do with these sly little theory pointers at “The Lacanian Mirror Stage” (“I knew he would be looking at me through the mirrors”) and “Julia Kristeva’s Concept of Abjection” (“You could see the pale yellowy maggots still there under the grate”), inserted, no doubt, to lend this book of depressing banality some kind of deeper meaning? Of course, one could write an essay along those lines about this novel – but surely that is not what novels are all about in the first place.

Maybe the current fad for shallow Spartanism laced with superficial theoretical insight will sort itself out in the long run, what with people all over the globe starting blogs about their banal existence (note the pungent sarcasm directed at myself). One lives in hopes.

The other kind of book that I find infuriating at the moment is the exact opposite to the narrow-minded little tales exemplified by the aforementioned novel: 835-page tomes written by prodigal 24-year olds whose parents work in advertising/publishing/"the media." They are usually set in Paris, (increasingly) Dresden during the bombing of the city, an unidentified Bulgarian concentration camp and a lovely brownstone just on the right end of Harlem on the morning of 11 September 2001. They typically feature frustrated suburban transsexuals, unusually intelligent gay pets and African-American grandparents who’ve spent their lives passing for white, thereby developing a major depression that manifests itself in aphasia/dermatitis/irritable bowel syndrome. At the end, all these different plot strands miraculously come together in an epiphanic conclusion, to which the reader is meant to go “Aaahh!”

What these books are trying to say is: Dude, isn’t life complex? It's so complex I've composed nearly one thousand pages about it. But really, because their youthful authors don’t have a clue about the complexity of life (having spent theirs in a lovely brownstone just on the right end of Harlem and/or an Ivy-League campus) they typically amount to little more than novelistic versions on the undergraduate essay topic “What I’ve learnt in Literary Theory 101.”

It seems that some readers get a kick out of all this, gobbling down one door stopper after the other and going “Aaahh!”

Aaahh! – isn’t this … no, aren’t I clever because I could trace this passage on page 456 back to one in A Thousand Plateaus that sounds almost exactly like it? I'm told that these are deep books about the fragility of life, the inevitability of death and the sheer complexity of being. Our existence is so fragmented – we don’t know who we are …. I'm covered in zits and Clearasil (trademark) won’t do the trick any more …. Wasn’t 9/11 terrible? Wasn’t it our personal Holocaust? And aren’t we the most traumatised generation ever?

Oh, go away you spoilt, blackberried and amexed egotists. You are nowhere near being traumatised.

So there. Got it off me chest. Now I don’t feel so ratty anymore. To work!

It's Thursday .... it's five o'clock .... and it's Christival!

2008 sees the fifth coming of Christival, a congress where open and tolerant young believers gather to share opinions about the Bible, receive scriptural advice regarding the relationship between the sexes, sway together to Sacropop and have their homosexuality healed. No, I won't extend my commentary about this event, which I am not sad to miss, especially since Begrenzte Wissenschaft has already busily been scathing.

However, I thought I provide a brief soundtrack für die Daheimgebliebenen. Sadly, this is a mere snippet of a great song by German singer-songwriter Funny van Dannen. The lyrics are important, which is why you find them underneath. Ladies and Gentlemen: "Junge Christen Unterwegs" (Young Christians on the Road):




Junge Christen Unterwegs

Du hast Pech in der Liebe, du hast auch Pech im Spiel
Du wirst nie fett erben. Hast Du überhaupt ein Ziel ?

Die Welt ist aus den Fugen, die Menschen sind bankrott
Auch Du bist echt am Ende doch du fragst mich :
Wer ist Gott ?

Gott ist unser Sponsor. Uhhhh
Er gibt uns Sauerstoff von früh bis spät
Er öffnet unsere Augen, er öffnet unsere Ohren
Und alles für ein kleines Gebet
Ja wir sind auf Achse von früh bis spät
Ja wir sind auf Achse bis die Welt vergeht
Mit Fanta und mit Butterkeks
Ja, wir sind junge Christen unterwegs

Du hast Orgasmusprobleme
Du schläfst vor dem Fernseher ein
Du hast Durchblutungsstörungen
Und noch immer kein Eigenheim

Dann denk doch mal an Jesus,
Der war besser als Du
Er mußte so jung sterben,
Sag mal was dazu !

Gott ist unser Sponsor. Uhhhh
Er gibt uns Sauerstoff von früh bis spät
Er öffnet unsere Augen, er öffnet unsere Ohren
Und alles für ein kleines Gebet

Ja wir sind auf Achse von früh bis spät
Ja wir sind auf Achse bis die Welt vergeht
Mit Fanta und mit Butterkeks
Ja, wir sind junge Christen unterwegs.

Hale.. Hale.. Halelulia

Putting things in perspective

So apparently there is a bigoted troglodyte with a peroxided mop of hair running for Mayor of London (and it's not Ken L.). Apparently the chattering classes are up in arms. Zoe Williams at The Guardian gathers sound bites from weighty political commentators like Alan Rickman, Bianca Jagger and Mark F. Ravenhill, who has the following super duper deep thing to say:

Johnson doesn't have a strong instinct for a city that's as multicultural as London. He's not an inclusive politician in that way.

Have I already said that I -- like others out there -- really don't like Ravenhill? I guess I'm not an inclusive person in that way.

Zoe Willams, herself, in a moment of British self-obsession, imagines

... what a laughing stock we'd be, internationally, if we elected Boris Johnson as mayor.

Laughing stock? Internationally? Dear Zoe, let me tell you one thing: The world doesn't care about the Mayor of London. And guess what: Most people on this planet haven't the foggiest who Boris Johnson even is. Aren't we lucky?

(With thanks to Geoff for alerting me to this important article. And with apologies to people who -- for obvious geopolitical reasons -- have to care about this more than we do).

You see a rainbow, I see a dark cloud...

Just because.



Billy Bragg, "I almost killed you".

This too.



Billy Bragg/Kate Nash. "Foundation/A New England"

Where in this world....

A video from the new Notwist album.




'Where in this world'

Concentrating the mind, wonderfully

Almost exactly a year ago, I ended a rather long silent pause here with a post about death.

Although I didn’t feel like mentioning it at the time, I had, in fact, just returned from a two-week stay in the US, where I had witnessed the conclusion of my mother’s battle with lung cancer. Mortality was, as you might imagine, not so much an abstract issue for me at that time.

But as with all terminal illnesses, 'the end' was – by definition – hardly a surprise; in the months leading up to it, I had done a lot of thinking about what was coming. One of the things I reached for was Norbert Elias’s book, The Loneliness of the Dying. I had come to know Elias’s work through my research on the history of violence and crime, and it had come to play an important role in my thinking about the world. I suppose it might strike you as odd to consult a sociological theorist when dealing with a personal sorrow; on the other hand, maybe it is a sign of quality theory that it tells you something useful about real life.

In any case, The Loneliness of the Dying is quite a remarkable little book. It betrays, in parts, Elias’s tendency to express himself in a somewhat dry, sociological language, but there are other insightful and almost poetic passages.

I quoted one last year:

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

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

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

In the brief comments I managed at my mother's funeral, I quoted another passage. ‘Death’, Elias wrote, ‘is a problem of the living. Dead people have no problems.’

My mother was born into a poor-but-respectable family in Stanley Baldwin’s Britain, and she finished school at 14 to go to work, which was typical of a girl in her class and time and place. And despite crossing an ocean and ascending into the relatively comfortable lower reaches of the post-war American middle class, she remained indelibly marked by those origins, which only seemed to emerge more and more during the last decade and a half of her life.

One might think it odd, then, to remember her with words borrowed from an academic, the founder of figurational sociology – and a German no less. (Albeit one who was a victim of the Nazis and eventually became a British citizen.)

However, I was pleased to find that the words I had groped for turned out not merely to be the unfortunate affectation of a son with Too Much Education: in talking to the woman who had supervised my mother’s hospice care, I discovered that Elias’s book – with its condemnation of the ‘veil of unease’ modern society had thrown around death and the resulting isolation of the dying that this caused – had been one of the works that had inspired her to do what she was doing.

And what she and her colleagues were doing was impressive indeed. Like my mother, my father (two decades earlier) had died at home, cared for by my mother with the assistance of hospice.

Watching the relentless approach of his death over 18 months had made a strong impression on my teenage brain, as you might guess. In any case, since I came late in my parents’ lives – they were in their mid-40s when I surprisingly arrived on the scene – this meant that by the time I was in high school many of their friends (the adults I was closest to) were in their 60s or older, and the usual attrition was already well under way. By the time I graduated, I had carried the coffins of some half a dozen people whom I had loved very much.

What I suppose I’m trying to say is that, fairly early on, it had become clear to me that death was a fairly normal part of life.

(I have no wish to exaggerate my experience: obviously, violent death is something I’ve no direct experience of, something that far too many young people in far too many parts of the world have to deal with. I am not comparing myself to them.)

In any case, I had to think about a lot of the above a couple of weeks ago, when I visited a remarkable exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London.

In ‘Life Before Death’, German photographer Walter Schels offers a powerful meditation on the experiences of dying people. Schels contacted people at hospices and found several who were willing to be photographed shortly before and immediately after their deaths. The result is a series of portraits combined with stories (written by Schels’s partner Beata Lakotta) that – I think – express in a manner that is all too rare the curious mixture of profundity and banality that inheres in the experience of death.

In their low-key way, they manage to pull back the veil, at least a little bit, on the mysteries of the dying.

Joanna Moorhead’s profile of Schels and Lakotta for the Guardian makes clear what an emotional and logistical challenge this kind of project posed. Schels was motivated by his own fears regarding mortality (and his comments about his early life demonstrate that early exposure to death doesn’t necessarily inure one to its terrors). The essay also points out something that echoes Elias’s words that I quoted above:

But, horrifying though photographing the bodies was, more shocking still for Schels and Lakotta was the sense of loneliness and isolation they discovered in their subjects during the before-death shoots. "Of course we got to know these people because we visited them in the hospices and we talked about our project, and they talked to us about their lives and about how they felt about dying," explains Lakotta. "And what we realised was how alone they almost always were. They had friends and relatives, but those friends and relatives were increasingly distant from them because they were refusing to engage with the reality of the situation. So they'd come in and visit, but they'd talk about how their loved one would soon be feeling better, or how they'd be home soon, or how they'd be back at work in no time. And the dying people were saying to us that this made them feel not only isolated, but also hurt. They felt they were unconnected to the people they most wanted to feel close to, because these people refused to acknowledge the fact that they were dying, and that the end was near."

They both feel altered by their work on the project:

Both Schels and Lakotta feel the experience of being close to so many dying people has changed how they feel not only about dying themselves, but how they feel about living - and also, how they would support a friend or relative through terminal illness. "I know now how important it is to be there, or at least to offer to be there, as much as possible - and to not be afraid of asking questions, and of listening to the answers," says Lakotta.

She’s absolutely right. It doesn’t make death any less real or painful, of course. Here we reach, as in so many cases, the limits of discourse. But the end of life is one of those times where small gestures and simple honesty can have an enormous value.

Over the last few years of her life, my mother and I spoke quite openly about death. We had some different views on the matter of the afterlife, but, once acknowledged, that mattered far less than you might think. (As Moorhead observes of Schels, ‘He remains, as he has long been, an agnostic, having noticed that believers and non-believers alike showed the same fear of the unknown that awaited them.’)

Although no stranger to self-dramatisation, she faced her end with a clear-eyed stoicism that was remarkable. Don’t misunderstand: she was terrified. But somehow she managed to exude both calmness and a dark sense of humour almost to the end. And then there followed an awful period in which she could no longer express anything coherently. There were occasional moments of lucidity and recognition in her eyes. What was going on behind them, though, remains a mystery. The peaceful expression that, eventually, marked the end of her struggle is difficult to describe in words. But I believe I recognised it in many of the images that Schels captured.

The exhibit runs to 18 May. For those in London, I recommend that you go. Leave yourself some time. This is not something to rush through. Spend a good long time looking at the faces. And read all of their stories.

It is unsettling and saddening and uncomfortable. But it also generates, in the end, a curious sense of hushed tranquillity. (A similar set of emotions, I note, that accompanied my reading of Jim Crace’s powerful novel, Being Dead. Something, as The Wife has pointed out, that is rather more complicated than 'joy'.)

If you’re not in London, a sample of the images is available.

This has become far longer than I intended, so I'll conclude by leaving the last word to Schels (and by thanking him and Lakotta for their powerful work):

"What I was used to," says Schels, who has taken hundreds of portraits during his career, "was people who smiled for the camera. It's usually an automatic response. But these people never smiled. They were incredibly serious; and more than that, they weren't pretending anything any more. People are almost always pretending something, but these people had lost that need. I felt it enabled me as a photographer to get as close as it's possible to get to the core of a person; when you're facing the end, everything that's not real is stripped away. You're the most real you'll ever be, more real than you've ever been before".

Breakfast Exercise

"The press photograph is a message", Roland Barthes wrote in 1961 (in his essay "The Photographic Image"). In his view, this message consists of two meanings, the denotative meaning (i.e. that representing the world, "literal reality" - the analogon) and the connotative meaning (i.e. that expressing the photographer's take on the motif as well as, possibly, social attitudes and prejudices). While the former is a message without a code, the latter is thoroughly encoded, thereby representing "the manner in which the society to a certain extent communicates what it thinks of it [i.e. the topic]." This leads to what Barthes calls "the photographic paradox" (that a coded message is based on a message without a code) ... but let's not go into that.

Rather, let us all together apply Barthes' distinction between denotation and connotation to this photograph from yesterday's Independent, accompanying an article entitled: "The brain drain: What if all the Poles went home?" (a good, reasonable, liberal piece defending the fundamental worthiness of all those eastern European labourers without whom little Britain could not be):


Whatever basic, uncoded message we might find in this picture ("three people al fresco"), it is completely submerged by its social encoding - this picture is an obvious piece of unflattering propaganda. As in Pre-Raphaelite photo-realism, each and every detail in this picture is heavily symbolic - from the careful arrangement of the three bodies, to the mossy slabs on which they stand, to the dramatic skies: ordinariness rendered outstanding by the photographer's attentive, arty eye. This little group is a sign of our troubled times of intolerance and xenophobia, where brave reporters from the Independent, like knights in shining armour, come to the aid of the downtrodden victims of the British tabloid press.

But don't they also look a little like a cross between Romero's living dead (or suchlike horror fare: especially the sturdy little girl, who resembles the zombie children in the 1950s movie where all the kids in a little town are possessed ... can someone remind me of the title, please?*) and the kind of eerie creatures that people the illustrations of the Jehovah's Witnesses' Watchtower? Looking ahead and up (but also outside of the picture), benevolently smiling - possibly already aware of a promised land somewhere else, where they can do their plumbing and laundering and toilet cleaning in peace.

That's what those eager, benevolent Polish faces are saying (whom the hypocritical article asks us - not? - to love): "Please, please let us clean toilets in peace!"

And the image responds: "Yes, but not here. And would you please turn off the lights before you leave."

[UPDATE] Someone did remind me! Thanks to Ario I now know that I was thinking of Wolf Rilla's Village of the Damned (1960).


Kind of apt, I believe.

(The) truth and (its) consequences

Ah....the solution to my find-a-publisher problem is becoming so clear to me now. It's so simple: make shit up! (Thanks to The Wife for the link)

The publication of a biography of Louis XIV has now been held up because one of its primary sources was not exactly...er,...primary.

To be fair, of course, in writing non-fiction there is always the danger of making factual mistakes (a recurring nightmare here), and the author in question seems to have been merely(!) sloppy rather than devious.

Still, I would agree with at least the general drift of this:

"Thirty years ago this never would have happened. Then, people who wrote biographies were trained in how to carry out archival research. The same cannot be said of Veronica Buckley or many others like her," said Jerry Brotton, professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary, University of London. "There is a whole industry now around historical biographies. Publishers know that they sell, but at the same time they will knock back book proposals unless an author promises something really racy."

Brotton was a lone voice of dissent on Buckley's first book, which he criticised in the New Statesman for "anachronistic, novelistic speculation in place of genuine historical detail" and relying on "outdated and unreliable historical sources".

"I've been reviewing these sort of books endlessly for a few years now, and they're getting worse," he commented. "One the other day was filled with "might haves" and "could haves"; by the time you would get to the end of a chapter all of a sudden these coulds and mights had been turned into facts."

While we're on the topic of facts -- and before I get back to trying to flog my humble little manuscript (a cross, of sorts, between biography and cultural history, with lots of old-school endnotes and the like) -- let us enjoy a little interlude on black-cab epistemology:

(Stewart Lee, via Geoff)

Words and Music

Are there fans of The Notwist out there? If so, here's some reading matter!

And here's some music to accompany it:

As the Humph put it...

Already mentioned here once.

"As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from dessication."

Absolutely.

We -- both of us -- agree.

Stay silly, people.

Getting tired of that shit.

Via Terry Glavin.

As someone who is in favour of more bicycle paths and fewer plastic bags, I still find this to be both hysterical and meaningful.



Dig it!

Read before you type. Please. No, really.

Over the last week or so, it so happens that I've been having an interesting e-mail discussion with a recently made friend that has involved evolution, human behaviour, Richard Dawkins, 'spirituality', the possibility of 'group selection' and related topics. It has become clear that we have different perspectives on these various issues, however -- as in all high-quality discussions amongst people with varying viewpoints -- I feel as if it's been a worthwhile use of my time and that I've actually learned something. Or, at least, when we finally differ, I continue to maintain my full respect toward the person with whom I disagree. It has, in fact, been a pleasure to exchange viewpoints.

It's not very easy to define, but I have had precisely the opposite feeling after reading an article by Pat Shipman, a 'professor of biological anthropology', published in the New York Sun. (Via A&L Daily)

Dr. Shipman, it is quite clear, does not like Richard Dawkins's book, The Selfish Gene.

Unfortunately, she shows no sign of having actually read it.

(I know: this is an accusation that appears rather often at this blog; however, I must say that it so frequently seems apposite that I can't help but make it. I would be pleased to receive any evidence to the contrary. Believe me, I would.)

In fact, she seems to dislike Dawkins so much that she can't bring herself to refer to him by his title. Dawkins has a D.Phil and a D.Sc., which in many places would lead to him being called 'Dr.' She denies him this privilege, referring throughout her article to 'Mr. Dawkins'. This might be acceptable in some contexts -- I mean, I don't always insist on my own title-- however, on her departmental website, she prefers being referred to by her title.

Fair is fair, Dr. Shipman. Thus, your insistent repetition of 'Mr.' seems in some way dismissive.

Anyway, in her brief, crappy article 'Reconsiderations: Richard Dawkins and His Selfish Meme', Dr. Shipman essentially argues that Dawkins's book is not only wrong-headed but has actually has had a malevolent effect on science and human morality.

However, it is actually her own ridiculous analysis of Dawkins's book that proves to be laughable.
The hilarity begins on the first page of her article, where she claims:

In Mr. Dawkins's view, the organisms containing those genes are merely "lumbering robots" or "survival machines" that house and carry genetic information. The implication is that, in these terms, selfishness, even ruthless selfishness, pays off, and altruism does not.

This is, not to mince words, utter nonsense.

The word 'selfish' has led to all kinds of misunderstandings of Dawkins's theory, but he has explained at length (including in The Selfish Gene itself) that the metaphor he chose to describe gene-level 'motives' did not require relentless selfishness on the level of individual behaviour. In the thirty years since his book's publication, he has taken ample opportunity to try to correct this misunderstanding. (Beyond even the clarifications in the book itself.)

But even as explained in the first few pages of the original edition of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins made clear that he was interested in the origins of altruism. Even more in the revised version (with a couple of extra chapters emphasising even further the theme of altruism), Dawkins illustrates repeatedly -- how could Dr. Shipman have missed this?! -- how simple ruthlessness does not pay off in most evolutionary stakes and how some degree of altruism (at least that oriented toward kin- or based on reciprocity) does.

Does the phrase 'tit-for-tat' ring a bell, Dr. Shipman? If you have even a glancing familiarity with Dawkins's work, then it should.

If not, then, please, hold your tongue until you have done some required reading. Such as, say, the book you're pontificating about in the New York Sun. At least that should be on your required reading list.

Because Dawkins -- even in the book that Shipman critiques but doesn't seem to have read -- dealt with this issue quite clearly:

The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior. However, as we shall see, there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals. 'Special' and 'limited' are important words in the last sentence. Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense. (p. 2, emphasis added)

Dr. Shipman might not like this latter conclusion (the 'limitations' bit), but to argue that Dawkins ignored altruism is wrong, wrong, wrong.

In the revised version of The Selfish Gene that I own (the 1989 Oxford edition) there are even further chapters discussing the topic of altruism.

Moreover, considering the flippancy with which she refers to 'lumbering robots' and 'survival machines' on the first page of her misbegotten screed, you might think that Dawkins never considered the difference between genes and beings with more subtlety.

However, in The Selfish Gene (yeah, the book that Shipman, you'd have thought, had read), he observed,

Some people object to what they see as an excessively gene-centred view of evolution. After all, they argue, it is whole individuals with all their genes who actually live or die. I hope I have said enough in this chapter [Chapter 3, 'Immortal coils', and, indeed, he did] to show that there is really no disagreement here. Just as whole boats win or lose races, it is indeed individuals who live or die, and the immediate manifestation of natural selection is nearly always at the individual level. But the long-term consequences of non-random individual death and reproductive success are manifested in the form of changing gene frequencies in the gene pool. (p. 45)

Didn't you manage to read as far as page 45, Dr. Shipman?

In contrast to Dawkins's view, Dr. Shipman advocates a recent article by E.O. Wilson and D.S. Wilson that has sought to revive a notion of 'group selection'.

Now, I am a great admirer of E.O. Wilson for many reasons (his book Consilience is one that I would recommend to anyone interested in unifying the humanities with the natural sciences and his environmental advocacy has been consistently inspiring...moreover, he manages to impart the way that ants are endlessly fascinating. Who'd have thought that possible?), though I'm rather more sceptical about the other (non-related) Wilson.

In any case, I'm not sure that Dr. Shipman has done much to benefit group selectionism, as she seems to think that this simply means 'the good of the species' (her article, page 1).

Even advocates of group selection (or, more accurately, multi-level selection) are careful enough to emphasise a more nuanced version of the theory.

However, here again, Dr. Shipman lets provides yet another embarrassing howler. Speaking of Wilson and Wilson, she states,

The pair asserted persuasively that altruism and cooperation can be adaptive if they are directed toward relatives who share a suite of one's genes (kin selection) or if relationships can be established within a group in which cooperation is rewarded with future reciprocity.

Having (apparently) not read The Selfish Gene, she is clearly unaware both 'kin selection' and 'reciprocal altruism' are central features of Dawkins's book. (See, particularly, Chapter 6, 'Genesmanship', for the former and Chapter 10, 'You scratch my back, I'll ride on yours' for the latter.)

Indeed, Dr. Shipman appears to present 'kin selection' as somehow in opposition to Dawkins's work, whereas Dawkins very much saw himself as popularising the work of Bill Hamilton, who put the notion of kin selection on a more stable mathematical footing.

For all her blathering on about kin-selection and the altruistic behaviour of meerkats, Dr. Shipman overlooks the fact that Dawkins -- in his revised 1989 edition of The Selfish Gene -- discussed the altruistic behaviour of vampire bats.

In conclusion: to suggest that 'selfish' genes invariably mean 'selfish' behaviour is to fundamentally misunderstand Dawkins's book.

For a professor of 'biological anthropology' managing to avoid that simple error should be a doddle; however, Dr. Shipman appears to not be up to the challenge. She should be ashamed of herself.

Not only does she present the theories of John Maynard Smith as somehow opposed to those of Dawkins (who makes extensive use, for instance, of his notion of the Evolutionarily Stable Strategy), but she oddly lumps kin and group selection together, as if Dawkins had not made abundant arguments in favour of the former.

One of the crowning insults of Shipman's little package of intellectual trash is to claim that Dawkins has in some way assisted the spread of the 'Intelligent Design' movement:

The picture of evolution offered by [The Selfish Gene], and others by Mr. Dawkins, which many found bleak, also contributed to the growth and stridency of the intelligent design movement to undercut the teaching of evolution in public schools.

What?!

Shipman doesn't even begin to explain what she means by this, and she should be deeply ashamed of linking Dawkins's work with any presumed success of 'Intelligent Design', a movement that Dawkins has been intensely focused on combating.

She even has the gall to argue that the book has provoked a 'backlash against science'.

I don't know much about the work of Dr. Pat Shipman, and for all I know she writes brilliantly and insigtfully within her own field. But having examined this piece of intellectual nothingness alongside her depthless article on violence in the wake of September 11th, I have to say this: I'm not impressed.

She definitely has some more reading to do. And in the meantime, she should keep her mouth shut.

And, I suggest, she should refrain from using the word 'biological' in her title until she demonstrates that she has the ability to read, understand and recapitulate works on that topic.

And, for what it's worth, A&L Daily should take a bit more care in the articles that it recommends.

R.I.P. Humphrey

This is sad: Humphrey Lyttleton, host of Radio 4's "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue" has died. I really liked that show and know that somewhere in the depths of one of the many boxes in the basement that have survived several changes of address unopened I have a bunch of tapes (tapes!) with recordings of "I'm Sorry ..." from the 1990s. In fact, I think I have a CD of Lyttleton and his band somewhere.

I know, I know, I'm an old-fashioned girl at heart ....

Guardian obit. here.

Forbidden books?

Süddeutsche Zeitung reports that the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (Central Council of Jews in Germany) defends the idea -- put forward by the Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände in Nuremberg -- of an annotated critical edition of Hitler's Mein Kampf. It seems a pity that the Free State of Bavaria, the copyright holder (no, I wasn't aware of that either), resists what appears to be a timely project of pulling the rug out from under this shitty piece of propaganda and combating its ongoing mystification (in certain ... "circles") and potential misuse once copyright runs out in 2015.

The new edition would be provided by the respectable Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich. The Bavarian government, however, claims that such a publication would violate the memory and respect of victims of the Holocaust, thereby potentially betraying those it seeks to defend. Not a good idea, given recent figures revealing that Bavaria has, over the past years, become something of a neo-Nazi stronghold.