New blog on humanitarianism and human rights

I've been meaning for some time to draw attention to a lively and informative new blog run by colleagues of mine on the history of humanitarianism and human rights.

But through forgetfulness (and, yes, overwork) I've so far neglected to do so.

But no longer.

So, by all means, do go check them out.

And feel free to tell them that I sent you.

Zazie

This is, I can testify, quite a good choice for a Friday evening film:



Zazie dans le métro, Louie Malle, 1960.

[UPDATE] I have realised, thanks to The Wife, that the German Wikipedia entry on the film is much more extensive than the English-language one.

Missing Norm already

Like many other people, I was very saddened last night to learn of the death of Norm Geras.

I was about to write something like 'I didn't know him personally', but then it occurred to me that in some way I did. What I mean is that I only ever communicated with Norm electronically--via our blogs and sometimes through email and Facebook--since we 'met' some time after I started this blog in 2006. (I forget now how it happened: it might have been at about this moment, in August of that year.)

This is worth mentioning, I think, because Norm frequently argued for the value of the internet as a new way of bringing people together. (And his commitment to this medium is remarkable: despite his illness, only a little more than a week ago he posted a list of book recommendations.)

He was himself, certainly, (in the face of much counter-evidence) one of the best arguments for the internet being a good and worthwhile thing. With all the fluctuations in my internet habits over the past 7 years, stopping by normblog was among the most consistent parts of my daily online routine.

And, equally consistently, it was one of the most rewarding. Norm's was a voice of reason and sensibility in a world that is all to often the opposite of these things. It was a pleasure to read his reasoning on many issues, even if I found myself not always convinced. (There are, it occurs to me, all too few people with whom it is a pleasure to disagree.)

But I usually did find myself in agreement with Norm, at least eventually.

I know that, for me, his death creates a particular absence that will be difficult to fill. And that is also a strange thought to have about someone I've never met 'personally'.

Condolences, of course, go above all to his family and closest friends.

But the internet is surely left a poorer place without him.

[UPDATE] Tributes to Norm are being collected and reposted at 'normfest'.

Once again...

...I am reminded why I find Japan endlessly fascinating.



[UPDATE] Even better: they do their thing in Washington, DC (now reopened for business).

Would you like some tea with your Kulturpessimismus?

I think that Fareed Zakaria is a tad too optimistic about the likelihood of a certain breed of American right-winger deciding to abandon his fears of the impending liberal-socialist apocalypse.

But he makes some perceptive comments about the pre-history of the Tea Party phenomenon and its role as a bearer of a distinctive kind of cultural pessimism. 

Modern American conservatism was founded on a diet of despair. In 1955, William F. Buckley Jr. began the movement with a famous first editorial in National Review declaring that the magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” John Boehner tries to tie into this tradition of opposition when he says in exasperation, “The federal government has spent more than what it has brought in in 55 of the last 60 years!”

But what has been the result over these past 60 years? The United States has grown mightily, destroyed the Soviet Union, spread capitalism across the globe and lifted its citizens to astonishingly high standards of living and income. Over the past 60 years, America has built highways and universities, funded science and space research, and — along the way — ushered in the rise of the most productive and powerful private sector the world has ever known.

At the end of the 1961 speech that launched his political career, Ronald Reagan said, “If I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” But the menace Reagan warned about — Medicare — was enacted. It has provided security to the elderly. There have been problems regarding cost, but that’s hardly the same as killing freedom.

For most Americans, even most conservatives, yesterday’s deepest causes are often quietly forgotten. Consider that by Reagan’s definition, all other industrial democracies are tyrannies. Yet every year, the right-wing Heritage Foundation ranks several of these countries — such as Switzerland — as “more free” than the United States, despite the fact that they have universal health care. 

One might also stipulate that Zakaria is a bit too one-sidedly triumphalist about all things bright and beautiful in post-war America. 


Still, he makes an important point. 

But do I think that reasonable arguments like this will matter to the true-believers? For an answer, I offer some comments from Bruce Sterling on the Tea Party that I posted last year (which somehow seems like an eternity ago):

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

Of course, this kind of paranoid fear-mongering isn't historically unique to the US: in 1945 the Daily Express was warning readers against a Labour Party victory in 1945 with editorials under titles such as 'Gestapo in Britain if Socialists win'. More recently, your average reader of the Daily Mail (which I could definitely imagine using that 'Gestapo' headline during the next British elections) has also decided that the only good things about Britain exist in the dimly remembered past.

Nor, naturally, is cultural pessimism exclusively the property of the political right.

But it is not encouraging -- as I happened to be saying to a colleague earlier today -- that a mere five years after he left office George W. Bush seems, in retrospect, so...moderate.  

The really interesting development in Washington, I think, is not the conflict between the Tea Party and the Democrats -- which, as loud and fun as it is, makes for pretty predictable theatre -- but rather the signals that the grown-up business types of the sort that used to dominate the Republican Party I remember in my youth just might be getting a bit nervous about what one of them calls 'the Taliban minority'.

I mean, American politics has now become a distant spectator sport for me. I live in a country where the main conservative party has its eye firmly on the nation's economic interests and where a laughable figure like Ted Cruz would have little chance of being taken seriously as a Kanzlerkandidat.

Believe me: I am thankful -- every day -- for the generally boring sensibility of German politics. 

And, hey, even the Germans are showing the odd sign of optimism these days...

It's a funny old world.

The unbearable goodness of reading

Emanuel Castano and David Comer Kidd claim that "reading literary fiction enhances 'mind-reading' skills" (by "mind-reading" they mean, of course, our ability to make inferences about other peoples' intentions, beliefs and desires on the basis of their actions - empathy, in short, or "theory of mind").

This is one of the many recent attempts by representatives of the cognitive sciences to prove the inherent perfectibility of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. If you ask me, it's all part of one huge plot against Richard Dawkins.

I'm not only not so sure about the rather unmotivated distinction between "literary" and "popular fiction" underpinning Castano's and Comer Kidd's research. I also could offer anecdotal evidence a-plenty of sociopathic behaviour in literature departments at universities here and abroad.

Especially in literature departments at universities. Maybe Castano and Comer Kidd should redo their experiments with a new test group.

Triteness is all (selections from the LRB)

The typical knee-jerk reaction I get when explaining to people (that is, colleagues) that my interest for years has been to apply the findings of the cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology to the study of literature is: "Oh, but that sounds so ... reductive."

In response I tend to smirk: "Read any post-structuralist criticism lately?"

Such facetiousness has resulted in some colleagues ceasing to speak to me. Honestly, if you ever want to feel like an intellectual leper, just say "Steven Pinker" at a humanities conference. Or confront people who think that their fantasies about texts qualify them to also fantasise about the world with something as banal, trite and ... reductive as "facts."

The current LRB provides facts supporting the point for which I have been ostracised so often: Hal Foster's review of Jacques Rancière's Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. Foster summarises:

The key, for Rancière, is the notion of different ‘regimes’ of the seeable and the sayable, or, as he puts it in The Future of the Image (2003), ‘different articulations between [artistic] practices, forms of visibility and modes of intelligibility’. In his view the Western tradition has experienced only three regimes on this grand scale, which he calls ‘ethical’, ‘representative’ and ‘aesthetic’ respectively. The ethical regime, first articulated by Plato in The Republic, aimed to ensure that all images (this was an age before art was considered a distinct order) were properly founded and appropriately directed, that is, that they were concerned with ideal forms and served the ethical development of the community. In the representative regime, outlined by Aristotle but codified only in the 17th and 18th centuries, ‘the intelligibility of human actions’ became the central criterion of art, which made the refinement of mimesis its essential task. To this end the liberal arts were separated from the mechanical, the fine arts from the applied, and representations were ordered in a strict hierarchy of subjects and genres, with epic poetry and history painting at the top. The aesthetic regime then emerged as the representative order broke down in the revolutionary transformations of the late 18th century. In the aesthetic regime, Rancière writes in The Future of the Image, ‘the image is no longer the codified expression of a thought or feeling’; ‘words no longer prescribe, as story or doctrine, what images should be.’ There developed a new equality among the subjects that could be represented, and a new freedom in the styles that could be used. As a result, the hierarchy of subjects and genres was overthrown, and even the division between fine and applied arts was challenged. Art as a privileged category of its own was finally secured.

Millenia (and more) of human cultural production and only three 'regimes' of the seeable and the sayble? Now if that isn't a wee bit ... reductive? Foster thinks so, too, though he manages to phrase the peanut-buttered ire I splattered across the breakfast table after reading the above in much more hygienic terms:

How useful is the notion of regime in any case? Although Rancière broke with Althusser, he retained an Althusserian fascination with epistemological orders. Like Althusser, Rancière wants to avoid a grand Hegelian arc to history, and opts for the category of regimes in resistance to the ‘teleologies inherent in temporal markers’, as he puts it in The Future of the Image. This approach does help him to taxonomise the artistic discourses of the modern period, but it also makes it difficult to understand how they are determined. It is an old complaint about this method – often made against Foucault – that it turns discourse not only into its own cause but also into an agent in its own right. A related complaint is that it does not grasp historical change very well: epistemes, regimes and the like seem to come from nowhere, and to vanish just as suddenly, as if catastrophically. Finally, they can have the odd effect of explaining a lot and a little at the same time, which is to say that the insights are often so general as to appear at once momentous and obvious.

A good man, Hal Foster, but maybe a bit careful. Rancière seems to deserve more of a metaphorical thrashing. Something like Adam Phillips' comment on The Hamlet Doctrine by Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster (in the same issue of the LRB):

[Critchley and Webster] introduce their book by telling us that it is ‘the late-flowering fruit of a shared obsession … we are married and Shakespeare’s play, its interpretation, and philosophical interpreters have been a goodly share of our connubial back and forth over the last couple of years.’ We can sort of imagine what that might be like. Later on, by way of qualification, they make it as clear as they can that even though, in their view, Goethe and Coleridge saw themselves as Hamlet, ‘We do not see any aspect of ourselves or each other in Hamlet.’ Any? This is not, I think, quite as clear as they might want it to be. By the very end of the book they have something to confess, and as in all confessions something is claimed and something apparently regretted. ‘We write as outsiders, for shame, about Shakespeare, with the added shame of doing so as husband and wife with the implicit intent of writing about love. Perhaps we have completely betrayed ourselves. Perhaps this book will be the undoing of our marriage.’ ‘Completely’? ‘Perhaps’? The outsider thing can be a bit wearing; real outsiders don’t keep telling you that they are outsiders: they just do something unusual and other people call them outsiders. Shame, by contrast, is something the book is unusually interesting about (‘At its deepest,’ they write, ‘this is a play about shame, the nothing that is the experience of shame’). Still, we are left wondering, as perhaps we are supposed to be, what this marriage, their marriage, really has to do with the Hamlet Doctrine.

Wonderful: "The outsider thing can be a bit wearing; real outsiders don’t keep telling you that they are outsiders: they just do something unusual and other people call them outsiders." Of course, as a well-heeled American academic you are about as far as it gets from outsiderdom, which is probably why the concept must become your mantra.

Both reviews well worth reading, which is unusual for the LRB.

And there's gonna be a party when the wolves come home

A recent Mountain Goats live performance. For your delectation.

0:16 - Up the Wolves
4:27 - Animal Masks
7:22 - You Were Cool
11:00 - Cubs in Five

An unintended conflation

Somehow it strikes me that this is one of the best correction notices I've read in a long time:

This article was amended on 26 September to correct a conflation of Sid Caesar and Ed Sullivan.

And the interview that forms the actual article itself -- with Woody Allen -- is worth reading too.

Hotel Art #5

Part of an occasional series.

A renovated farmhouse somewhere in the vicinity of Bruges, Belgium (September 2013). 

A 'rich and textured archaeology' of a murder trial

At the blog for my (still new, I'd say) book, The Most Remarkable Woman in England, I have noted a few recent reviews from the academic journals.

Academics are often a finicky bunch, but I've picked out some of the nicer things they've said about the book.

Among the words to be found there: 'engaging', 'impressive', 'thoughtful' and 'readable'.

What, you haven't yet gotten around to buying a copy? Why wait?! If you act fast, you'll have time to read it yourself and then give it to someone as a Christmas gift, all in the thrifty spirit of our austerity-ridden times!

(A comprehensive reviews page can be found here.) 

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!