In life we search, and some of us find

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

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

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

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

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

That, it seems, was enough.

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

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

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

Hit it George...

On a defensive note

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

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

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

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

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

On Chesil Road

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

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

Hence, I rather like this plan:

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

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

A bridge: too far?

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

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

What'll I do without you

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



TMG, 'Woke Up New'

Was it good for you?

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

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

(Photo via Spiegel Online)

Happy solstice!

Musik, zwei, drei, vier!

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



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



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

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

Away, away, (I was bound)

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

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

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

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


Cake, 'Bound Away' from Showroom of Compassion

Here's to mad decisions.

A critical comment

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

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

Flippant, dumb and utterly gratuitous.

Palingate cancelled

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

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

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

It's his GCSE history wot did it

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

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

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

Early harvest

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

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


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

Roll over Beethoven, usw.

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

The horror....



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

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

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

The pinnacle of pointlessness

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

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

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

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

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

"You would come to me then without answers"

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



Fleet Foxes, "Grown Ocean"

Echoes from the past

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

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

Part 1:

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

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

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

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

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

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

EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN

Part 2.

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

BEAT SCHOOL

Enjoy!

Random association re: G8

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

Together. Again.

This calls for an appropriate soundtrack.



But what will Carla say?

Apocalypse delayed

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

That little souvenir of a terrible year

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

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

Which means I'm...old.

Or oldish at least.

Still: beautiful song.



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

On being selective

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

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

Priorities, priorities....