Monday, 1 December 2003
World Aids Day »
Or you could listen to the Pope and just abstain because sex is like sinful and everything. Unless you’re married. And not gay. And the sex is with the person who married you, but not the vicar. Even if she’s a woman. And even then, as St Paul said, it’s still pretty bad.
Hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:0pm GMT.
Tuesday, 2 December 2003
Habeas Corpus »
Jim Henley (we could have said “the ever-excellent Jim Henley”, but that would be a little gross) has a couple of superlative posts on crackpots and more on the Iraq ambush (also for BBC-sceptics, in the Torygraph). I really can’t improve on Jim’s analysis. I remember the casualty toll rising with each news bulletin I heard yesterday, and whatever else is true, these estimates aren’t based on bodies. According to the Telegraph, “local people and a hospital doctor reported only eight dead, who they insisted were mainly civilians, including an Iranian pilgrim.”
The skills a life in the army develops best are
- killing people, and
- blowing things up
which seems good training for a demob career in bank robbing if all else fails. I see no reason to conclude that this is part of some coming insurgency, rather it looks like some ex-feyadeen desperados taking their skills to the private sector, and the reason that attacks are increasingly effective is that the ‘officers’ are getting used to thinking for themselves. I’m sceptical that there is a serious counter-revolutionary movement, so this could be good news, then again, as it points to a growth in organised crime, it could be bad news. It still seems that Rumsfeld wanted to do this on the cheap, and it’s getting very expensive.
Speaking of expense, one left-wing theory I don’t agree with is floated on Calpundit by Keanu Reeves (no, really) — it’s the 5th comment:
Anyone besides me ever wonder how different the world would have been if we would have just offered the Taliban $6 billion in cold hard cash to hand over bin Laden and a dozen of his deputies to a world court for judgment?
There are two objections: Guantanamo] Detainees: Kidnapped for Reward Money, and that despite there being a heavy price on his head, no one has yet turned in Saddam Hussein. He’s probably dead, but that would be better as a known known than an unknown unknown.
Hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:23pm GMT.
Canard Watch »
I should know better by now, but I do still read Andrew Sullivan. Call it broadening the mind, or testing one’s beliefs, plain masochism, or whatever. As William Blake says, opposition is true friendship. Meme watch promised a “useful debunking of the latest anti-Bush canard: that he doesn’t go to soldiers’ funerals.” Now my dictionary (Chambers, 1988) defines ‘canard’ as “a false rumour: a second wing fitted near the nose of an aircraft…” I have to assume that Sully uses the word in the first meaning, so “he [Bush] doesn’t go to soldiers’ funerals” is a false rumour, ie he does go to soldiers’ funerals. Naturally, Andrew being a busy blogger doesn’t elaborate: we have to go to John Cole for that.
Now, I access the interweb thing over an old-fashioned modem which mostly does its modulating and demodulating a lot slower than the advertised 56,000 bits per second. To cut a long story short, I am part of the World Wide Wait. Waiting, apart from its usefulness in also serving, is good for meditation. I meditated on this false rumour while my phone-line communicated with server hubs across the Atlantic in its R2D2 whistles and fricatives. I knew that Bush was a quiet American who liked to show up without fuss, slipping into the UK with a modest 25 limousine escort and a frugal contingent of five chefs, braving the wilds of London with only the protection of the Secret Service and the entire Metropolitan Police Force and without any of the helicopter gunships that lesser world leaders would not leave home without, so it seemed reasonable that he had turned up at a burial service with the sort of reticence that would make the discreet entrance of Jeeves sound like the charge of a wounded rhinoceros. The press, dozy as ever, would have missed the story en masse.
1st Mourner: Who’s that guy over there?
2nd Mourner: Which one? The one behind the Marine Platoon?
1st: WHAT? I CAN’T HEAR! THAT HELICOPTER IS BACK!
2nd: WHAT?
1st: WHAT?
2nd: It’s gone again. Which guy?
1st: The one with a face like a chimp.
2nd: I’m not sure, but he has a lot of security. Prehaps he’s one of those warbloggers who linked to a “Saddam sucks” story, and is now part of the real front-line of freedom.
1st: Wow! Maybe it’s Lileks!
2nd: Lileks! Should we ask for an autograph?
1st: WHAT!!
There would go Bush, no one ever even noticing he had been, not even leaving the form of the mountain hare on the mountain grass.
Anyway, the page loaded, breaking the reverie. It’s not short. It starts attacking the left for repeating the lie that Bush does not attend funerals, but stops at the simple proof that they’re wrong with an example. Aha, you think, this is the long wind-up of the successful prosecution lawyer. Expose the folly, examine it, mock it at length, and then! the fatal stab. Except there is no fatal stab. Bush, it seems, does not attend funerals, but neither did other recent Presidents, according to History News Network as interpreted by John Cole. Follow the link, and make your own mind up, but I like this one:
George H.W. Bush — President George Herbert Walker Bush does not appear to have attended any funerals for American soldiers. (The NYT, citing Marlin Fitzwater as a source, indicated that the president did attend several such funerals. But no details were provided.)
I was joking about the press being ‘dozy’ earlier, now I’m not so sure. Adumbrated, it comes to this:
According to the Johnson Library, LBJ attended two funerals for soldiers who died during the Vietnam War.…
Richard Nixon does not appear to have attended the funerals of any soldiers killed in Vietnam. He did award posthumous medals of honor to the families of several soldiers on 22 April 1971 and on several other occasions.…
According to the New York Times, Jimmy Carter attended a memorial service for the soldiers killed in the failed rescue of America hostages in Iran in 1980.
Ronald Reagan attended memorial services on several occasions for American soldiers.…
Bill Clinton attended a service in October 2000 in memory of the 17 sailors killed in the attack on the USS Cole.…
Like many other presidents he visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
I make this: Carter, decent, as expected. Johnson and Nixon, lax, as expected. Reagan and Bush Snr, pretty good, as expected; Clinton, not bad, but open to criticism on Kosovo. My interpretation is that it is a canard that Presidents do not attend funerals. It’s clearly not incumbent on them to attend every one, however, after campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq with 441 casualites in the latter (I can’t find figures for Afghanistan), the time for a gesture might have arrived.
Canard? Just one of the things you have to believe to be a Republican today.
Hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:46pm GMT.
Wednesday, 3 December 2003
Guessing Games »
It is not the first time that they have said that something was gobbledegook when it was not gobbledegook, just difficult.
on the Plain English Award for Donald Rumsfeld. But which was the first time? The award was first given in 1993, but this is only the ninth presentation as there were no winners in either 1995 or 1996. So, with a shortlist of eight, your guess is as good as mine.
Mine, should you care, is that Ms Solent considers Richard Gere’s prize acceptance piece (which passeth my understanding) merely difficult.
Hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:22pm GMT.
Worth Reading »
Token effort today. You want commentary? Read someone else, I’m out. However, I did find a couple of excellent, if demanding (or am I just dim?), articles: The War on Higher Education by Stanley Fish and Carl Jung: the Madame Blavatsky of psychotherapy by Anthony Daniels (not the C3P0 one).
Hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:27pm GMT.
Thursday, 4 December 2003
AS (Not AS) »
Arthur Silber is on great form on Andrew Sullivan. Sully first:
The publicity surrounding Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” will center on depicting closeted McCarthyite Roy Cohn as the true soul of modern conservatism. (I wonder why they don’t cite uncloseted McCarthyite Bobby Kennedy, but never mind.)
Arthur kindly reminded me why they don’t.
I just suspect, dearest Andrew — but mind you, I can’t be sure of this, it’s just the whisper of a suspicion in the back of my mind — that perhaps the reason people don’t cite Kennedy as “the true soul of modern conservatism,” particularly with regard to the AIDS crisis which surfaced in the early 1980s, is BECAUSE HE WAS KILLED IN 1968.
Just consider it, Andrew. It might be relevant, you never know. Besides that not-so-minor fact, there are about 20,000 other reasons that Bobby Kennedy might not be cited as “the true soul of modern conservatism,” particularly in this context — and I would think they are obvious to anyone other than irreparably brain-damaged three-year-olds.
When Arthur gets his anger right, as he does here and the post written a few hours earlier on the ban on gays in the military, which he calls a disgusting, ignorant policy, there is no one who can match him.
Hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:36am GMT.
Inkblots On The Landscape »
Just heard a very good report on PM on the general bogusness of the Rorschach Inkblot Test. This is one of the shameful episodes of psychology’s pre-history that ought to studied only by philosophers of bad science. I can’t believe anyone uses it. But then, one of the test’s defenders called it as robust as IQ, and I can’t believe that’s still around either.
Hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:4pm GMT.
Friday, 5 December 2003
Bare Your Blog At The Guardian »
Harry breaks out of the blog ghetto and into The Guardian where he observes that
…a quick glance at the sites of Bush, Howard Dean … or Wesley Clark … will reveal that in reality the politicians aren’t making much, if any, contribution to the blogs that bare their names — others produce the links and the comment. The in-house blogger has become part of the campaign staff.
Hmmm. Is this a new spin on Bare Your Bum at Bush? If anyone asks why a nice leftie like me reads the old Torygraph, it’s because they employ sub-editors who actually read. Maybe I should apply for a job at the Grauniad:
I should be a Guadrian sub-editrp becaus I got A for Beckham studies from school. I drew a pitcure of Becks an come top along with everyone else becayse Discrimnation in good an we all eqal.
Funny how the spelling and grammar on Harry’s own site is quite acceptable; it just takes a dive when transferred to the dear old Grauniad.
I’m not sure this is possible, but judging by the reaction to his views on the apostrophe, Kevin Drum comes close to trolling in a post on his own site. I read and enjoy Shaw and Kerouac as much as anyone but the apostrophe is not “a piece of punctuation that serves no purpose at all.”
Hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:34pm GMT.
Know When To Hold ‘Em »
Nick Barlow has beaten me to the Twenty Most Annoying Conservatives of 2003 link, but by way of compensation, here is Deal-with-it, “Our card deck and web site is devoted to defending American democracy against an unprecedented attack by the Radical Right on our electoral system, media, courts, religious institutions, and government.”
The simpler way of telling if someone is worth trusting goes like this: if they tell you they are ‘moral’ (or someone they support is), vote for Ozzy Osbourne first.
Hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:57pm GMT.
Saturday, 6 December 2003
Swanning Around »
Which Historical Lunatic Are You? (From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.)
Found on Chris Brooke who is also Ludwig II. I think this is on account of the question about “electric light and poetry,” but that’s just a hunch.
Hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:13pm GMT.
I’m A Fascist »
At last I get to go out in my self-designed kinky uniform. I should award myself some medals first. Valiantly blogging under duress, that sort of thing.
At least, I appear to be a fascist. I have two fascists on my blogroll (Jim Henley and Kevin Drum); three if you count Matthew Yglesias, who started this whole thing after reading Roger Simon, so I can’t be aligned against them. I even voted for Kevin on the Wizbang poll, but then I voted for A Fistful of Euros and Crooked Timber as well, so they might be damned by association.
I know what Roger is getting at, and I am sympathetic. I just happen to have moved in the opposite direction. I used to think South Africa was a fascist country, and we ought to swan in there and forcibly end apartheid. Although I still think that apartheid was utterly wrong, I think that it’s a good thing that we didn’t. Generally, being an anti-fascist is not much better than being a fascist. If you go around looking for fights and breaking heads, you’re a thug in my book. And if you want to go around invading countries, and hanging the ruling class from lamp-posts, you’ve got to be ready to sort out the underlying mess that they took advantage of to take power in the first place. I could be wrong here, but I suspect that fascism is rather more complex than a few bad men seizing power — there is always a deeper problem which allowed them to.
I’m against invading other countries, fascist or not — partly because I suspect our rulers will always cock up and invade comparatively benign (in the cancer sense) states for their own bad reasons. I’m also against selling weapons to fascists.
Since I’ve mentioned Jim Henley. If I’m going to cite him, I ought to read him a bit more carefully before tearing off and drawing exactly the opposite conclusions. I’m still sceptical about the Ba’athist resistance, but Jim’s logic (robbing a bank would be a lot easier than taking on the US army, so either the ambushers were very stupid or …) is convincing. But then, everything I know about stategy I learned playing chess.
Hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:11pm GMT.
Sunday, 7 December 2003
Facts Are Sacred »
Like letters home from abroad, blogs get written in periods of social withdrawal which the borderline-autistic may call “happy moments of profound contemplation of the universe,” and the rest of us, like the poet Shelley, refer to as “dejection.” So it is that one notices that a marked tendency to bile and ill-humour surfaces among blog entries. Indeed, there are many for whom laughter and gaity show up with the frequency that the Loch Ness Monster poses for Hello or that facts trouble a Julie Burchill column.
This drear December day finds Backword in curmugeonly mood, barely able to string two words together without a epithet or at least a ‘bah’ or a ‘humbug.’ I ought to throw on a few layers of woolies and fleeces and at least bother to look at the organic market up the road, but I can’t be arsed. This has no bearing on the fact that after a few weeks of near-total withdrawal from exercise I decided after a curry to join my friends DL and DP for a run yesterday, having forgotten that both are building up for the Paris Marathon and wanted to run for two hours.
In the fine tradition of Oliver Kamm (pet hate: liberal democracy, er, Liberal Democrats) and Harry Hatchet (pet hates: socialists and workers, er, Socialist Workers) I take out my pain on my current pet hate, one made all the more painful because like Ben Hur the object used to be my beloved. (Of course, like Charlton Heston in that epic, my love was of a manly kind. No other kind, certainly not the Gore Vidal kind, is implied by these words.) I am not going to tire the reader with a list of my romantic tragedies, I am simply going to slag off the Guardian.
Before I begin, I feel bound to say that I love Mark Lawson, in an appropriate, manly way, of course. He is exactly the sort of columnist the Guardian ought to employ. He is brilliant on Front Row and Late Review and I can hear his voice whenever I read him. (I do know that on TV he is reading his own words on an autocue; he still writes the way he speaks.) Everything he writes is stamped with his personality which is the definition of style. (Le style est l’homme mème, as Schopenhauer used to say rather a lot.) His column yesterday starts well, citing The Ploughman’s Lunch, the Richard Eyre/Ian McEwan film which ought to be shown at least twice a year on Channel 4.
After that, sadly it is all downhill. I think the President’s visit to Iraq was all spin and no substance, but big deal, I get all I want of that sort of thing from Atrios, who does it better. Mr Lawson’s cynicism is well-suited to Absolute Power, but research still has its uses in journalism, even the Guardian. There may well be better things to spend tax-dollars on than a venture to the moon, even better things in space, but if President Bush does reignite the space race, Mr Lawson is wrong to consider it “not a space race but a space lap-of-honour or training run for America” for the simple reason that China says it is planning to establish a base on the Moon to exploit its mineral resources. I consider myself a (very pale green) environmentalist, but Mr Bush rises in my estimation if “environmentalists have already accused him of planning to rob the moon of mineral deposits or light.” It’s no concern of environmentalists: the moon has no environment: it’s dead.
On the same page of the print edition, the paper accuses the Farrelly brothers of “going too far with conjoined brothers caper.”
Lewis Spitz, professor of paediatric surgery at Great Ormond Street hospital, London, and an authority on the separation of conjoined twins, said such a disability “should not be subject of a humorous movie”.
Of course the professor is entitled to his opinion, but he is “an authority on the separation of conjoined twins” not on what other people should or should not watch. (Not that we’d be much swayed if he were, of course.) And the Guardian, being the Guardian, naturally braved the film to report on it.
However, after viewing a trailer for the film, to be released in Britain next year, Avis Johns, the head of communications at the disability charity John Grooms, described it as a “crass snapshot” of the lives of conjoined twins.
This is particularly surprising as the piece was filed by “Rebecca Allison and Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles.” If both writers were in the US, who interviewed Mr Grooms? Or did the paper fly him out specially? (A ten hour flight each way to see a two-minute trailer almost makes Dubya’s Iraq trip look worthwhile.) Not that we suspect that the Guardian took him to the trailer for the in the hope of a censorious quote.
The Farelly brothers have a talent for getting the best actors. I can live without Matt Damon, but Greg Kinnear is one of those marvellous character actors (like Steve Buscemi) which Britain is supposed to produce, but America does so much better. No film with him can be a dead loss as no film can be a dead loss with both Jim Carrey and Rene Zellweger. (I passed on Bridget Jones, despite the divine Texan’s presence, as even she cannot provide enough ballast to make any film with Hugh Grant bearable. Just as I intend to miss Love, Actually which has the added disincentive of Martine ”Goad, look a all those words! I might need to tyke a bit of a sickie. On Eastenders, rye, you just sigh wha-ever came into your breakfast (‘breakfast-in-bed’) so long as you doan sigh ‘fuck.’ But them posh people in theatres, rye, they get awful uppity if you wanoo stop and do it agine or have a fag. TV is much be-er” McCutcheon.)
The Guardian used to be a liberal paper. Movies aren’t funded by the tax-payer (unless they’re the crap Channel 4 likes to make); they are an entrepreneurial risk. You only pay for a movie if you go to see it, or rent it, or buy it: none of these are compulsory. Neither the next draft of the Patriot Act nor the proposed EU Constitution will make the attendance at movies contrary to one’s private beliefs mandatory. Mary Whitehouse used to specialise in criticising things she knew nothing about. Guys, you are reporters. If you write about a film, at least go to see the fucking thing first and not the trailer and a website.
Hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:45pm GMT.
Let’s Drop The Googlebomb »
George W Bush is a miserable failure.
Jimmy Carter was competent and compassionate.
From links on blodgex: Bush, Carter — the latter seems to be a counter-revolutionary measure by all of, oh, four conservatives. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Update: Good grief! Really? You don’t say!
Reagan over FDR? The guy who cut a few taxes, presided over a recession, and ignored AIDS over the man (with polio!) who led us through the Great Depression and World War 2? Crazy talk.
As Ezra at Pandagon reminds us, these guys are crazy.
Hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:11pm GMT.
Monday, 8 December 2003
Entirely Pointless Adminstrative Post »
I’m not sure what I’ve done. This isn’t a hugely popular blog. Once I trick out all the various robots which visit the site, the front/index page gets at most 40 hits a day, and not all of those are people. I don’t even aspire to the dizzy heights of success of Mike at Troubled Diva (who compared said success to being “roughly the equivalent of being at #38 in the Albanian singles chart” in his final post).
Being lazy, and not overly bothered with hits per day, I wrote a script to track how often every hundredth hit occurred. The first hundred hits took two-and-a-half-days. So far the 100 counter (which can be found here) looks like this.
6200: 11:08 pm 4 December 2003
6300: 12:07 am 7 December 2003
6400: 1:29 am 8 December 2003
6500: 3:03 am 8 December 2003
6600: 5:10 am 8 December 2003
6700: 7:59 am 8 December 2003
6800: 11:32 am 8 December 2003
6900: 4:38 pm 8 December 2003
What happened? I haven’t the faintest idea. It may have been a denial of service attack. It came just after my server log rolled over, so I won’t have details until tomorrow. Whatever caused this upsurge in popularity, it didn’t show up in the referrers.
Hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:30pm GMT.
Last Chance To Vote For The Big Read »
I’ve given up on The Big Read (which closes this Thursday). It’s been a Big Yawn, if you ask me. One of the problems was that many of the books have had quite decent movies made from them, but possibly for copyright reasons, or out of misguided sense of fairness, the BBC decided to film each one themselves — and every one of these stank mightily. It would all have worked better on radio. I even missed Lorraine Kelly (all the more alluring with the discovery that Garry Bushell doesn’t like her, and if that sexist neanderthal hates you, you have a friend for life in me) on Jane Eyre, the whole process is too depressing.
Several books have a reasonable claim to being the nation’s favourite. Winnie-The-Pooh is a constant source of joy. Catch-22 is a work of genius. But only one deserves to win. Only one captures our times. Nineteen Eighty-Four.
‘For Hate Week. You know — the house-by-house fund. I’m treasurer for our block. We’re making an all-out effort — going to put on a tremendous show. I tell you, it won’t be my fault if old Victory Mansions doesn’t have the biggest outfit of flags in the whole street. Two dollars you promised me.’
Part 1, Chapter 5. This world we live in house-by-house funds, the Two-Minute Hate, the Junior Anti-Sex League. So Vote!
It’s a quiet day. That joke’s been wanting out for ages.
Hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:25pm GMT.
Tuesday, 9 December 2003
Mystery Solved »
The mystery of the rampaging hit counter that is. Not “where is Saddam?” or “are there more ‘known unknowns’ or ‘unknown unknowns’?” or “does the existence of Nicholas van Hoogstraten prove the non-existence of a benevolent God?”
There is a spider called QuepasaCreep v0.9.14 which, according to Webmaster World is a Spanish language search engine robot, and looks for Spanish language pages. It has become rather fond of my site, although there is no Spanish here beyond what I learned watching Fawlty Towers and I don’t use that very often. If you know me, you’ll know that I can of course order a beer in Spanish, but I have had no cause to in the history of this blog. That’s it. No Spanish here. Nothing to see. A good robot, a useful robot would learn that, but QuepasaCreep v0.9.14 does not seem to want to. Anyway, I banned it a long time ago. It just seems to waste bandwidth. Not that I can be sure what other users do with the bandwidth, but I live in hope that it brightens their dull lives in some way.
QuepasaCreep v0.9.14 has since come up with a new improved version with a modified user-agent string, and new IP addresses. These are 69.28.130.229, 69.28.130.230, and 69.28.130.231, and the user-agent string is QPCreep Test Rig ( We are not indexing, just testing ) which may explain why they had to make 684 visits in 12 hours.
I’ve reset the hit counter. And for a moment, I thought I was popular.
The End Of The Beginning »
For some reason GreyMatter died during the last post. It corrupted quite a few files too. I’ve managed to restore most of them, but it still won’t work.
This is good and bad news. Good because it forces me to wheel out my own CMS (Content Management System); bad because I’m still tinkering with it. There are lots of things I want which no existing system seems to have. A way of inserting quotations at the beginning of posts. Archived entries to be in chronological (not reverse chronological) order. Archives to be daily, rather than per entry. Separate directories for each month to make finding old entries easier. And other stuff. It’s only half-worked out. My old method was, “put it off until tomorrow”. Tomorrow has finally come.
I may be some time.
Today’s Little Bit Of Politics »
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded.
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed. Everybody knows the war is over. Everybdy knows the good guys lost. Everybody knows the fight was fixed: the poor stay poor, the rich get rich.
Leonard Cohen Everybody Knows
I’m rather impressed by Kucinich (800+KB Flash file).
That’s How It Goes »
Salam Pax writes about the similarities of Iran as depicted in Persepolis (first published in France! Quick, light the bonfires!). Found through Jim Henley who also links to this straw man, as does Glenn Reynolds (who calls him “interesting” — Instyspeak for “I never said ‘good’”), Nick Barlow and Pandagon. The comments are priceless.
Update: I ought not to have called Adam Yoshida a “straw man” because even if he is fictional (and he seems too prolific for that) a ‘straw man’ is one’s own creation, not that of someone else. All the same, he does seem to be pretty young, and attacking him is like attacking a parody right-winger. A lot of people seem to enjoy it though. And as he was linked to by Instapundit, a lot of them must have been his readers, which says something, even if I have no idea what.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 5:29 pm GMT
Thursday, 11 December 2003
Blogger On The Radio »
Quite a few fellow bloggers link to Ken MacLeod, so you may be interested in a third-party account of his writing career, by Iain Banks in Radio 4’s Book of the Week.
Greymatter is definitely dead on this site, so comments and things probably don’t work. The new system is a bigger headache than expected, the number of files you have to rewrite with each update seem to multiply like rabbits, but it’s getting there.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 10:00 am GMT
Friday, 12 December 2003
A Long Week »
It’s been a week for problems. Pandagon had problems with Greymatter, and lost comments for a while. Norman Geras fell out with blogger and moved to his new site. And Greymatter has died on me (not it fault, it was some server glitch, and files that were being written at the time became corrupted. Naturally, I’ve been backing up copies on my home computer, but then I downloaded the corrupted files and wrote them over the working versions, so it’s all gone to pot.
As far as the new system goes, I’ve given up on the idea of daily posts — posts will be archived individually; if there are comments, the whole thing gets too ugly. As for the number of files which get written to with each post, it looks like this: new post html file; monthly archive html file; index page html file; last post html file (solely for link to current post); list of posts so far html file; recent posts php file (for inclusion on home page, and perhaps inclusion elsewhere); list of monthly archives html file; rss file; rdf file; and, as the whole reason I’m doing it this way is because I don’t have a database on this site and I don’t want to pay £15 for one (as I’m thinking of changing hosts since my last major data losing crash), raw data files for each entry. Greymatter has other files to keep track of files, but they look superfluous to me so far, though I’ve been wrong before.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:00 pm GMT
Gratuitous Linux Post »
Well fuck me, there is life after M$. Who’d a thunk it? Brazil bets on Linux cybercafes.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:10 pm GMT
Appropriate, No? »
I forgot to mention yesterday, that I didn’t even cheat on the quiz. The illustration is particularly apposite: it looks like the old Penguin Classics edition of Thus Spake Zarathustra (Penguin quite rightly insisted on consistent translation, hence my copy of Anna Karenin), with cover illustration by Percy Wyndham Lewis. And as for talking about society…
Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:30 pm GMT
A Metaphor »
The house diagonally behind mine to the right is nearly finished. I didn’t blog its progress, because I had no idea it would take so long or become so fascinating.
I think they started about eight weeks ago. Now, if I’d blogged it, I would know, but I didn’t, so I don’t. It seems to be a part-time thing, and what they’re doing is obscure. They started by taking the plaster off the outside walls. They were using some kind of loud pneumatic drill and it didn’t seem to work well. Some plaster flaked off easily, but large patches were more obstinate. Then they left it like that for a few days, the back walls brinded grey and off-white, like a hybrid cow. Then they took the windows out and put them back. They looked exactly the same. Maybe the new ones are double-glazed but I didn’t see anything being taken away.
About three weeks ago, they built a scaffold and attacked the outside plaster with renewed effort, and most of it succumbed this time. Then they seemed to play with the windows again, and then two of them began plastering. Builders in winter dress like art students. Who else wears hats these days? They didn’t seem to agree on technique. The one working on the side seemed to comb the wet plaster into horizonal furrows, while the one working on the back preferred a smooth finish. And of course, there was the one piece of old plaster which would not move, looking like the top corner of a page ripped out of an exercise book and hanging on by the last staple. Apart from the weathered white of the old, the back of house was now battleship grey.
I think they have finished, though the scaffolding is still up, and the plaster has dried in three shades. Apart from the new colour, I can’t see any difference.
So it’s a lot like my progress on the CMS.
Saturday, 13 December 2003
Headbangers »
Norman Geras has an excellent post on the French government proposed ban on headscarves. First off, a secular state should mean just that: there is no state religion, and there are no proscribed religions. Citizens should be free to believe whatever they wish, whether it is obvious chicanery like the Moonies or the Scientologists, splinter group religions like the Amish, or the major world religions. (And atheism should be no bar to anything.) A ban on religious symbols in schools should not only offend France’s putative majority Catholic population; it also oppresses Jews.
However, the issue, if I interpret it correctly, is not one of dress, it is of the influence “religion” plays in education. A modern secular state ought to be committed to minimally educating every citizen regardless of sex, parentage, religion, or economic status. There are Muslim sects (as there are Christian and Jewish sects) which believe in withdrawing girls from education. The ability to read and write, an experience of debate: these are essential to democracy. They can believe what they like; living in “the West” should entail accepting our laws. At risk of offending the home schooling crowd (and I have a memory of John Stuart Mill complaining that his education never gave him experience of “a bat and ball"amongst other things), a certain degree of schooling should be compulsory over and above religious belief. If headscarves are a coded way of implying non-acceptance of school disciplines, then they are a problem.
Professor Geras asks some rehetorical questions:
What about a wristband bearing the Star of David? Or a glove? Still small enough, or already too big?
I think his approach is wrong: schools (and mine was over the top, in my opinion, with rules on sock colour and hair length; both of which I violated at times) should be allowed to set their own standards on jewelry and clothing; and if they allow head scarves or skullcaps, they should be free to insist on school uniform colours: in both cases a head covering is specified, but not its colouration.
A ban, as Norman says, is wrong, but so is genuflexion to a minority’s rights. As he says:
This is a freedom of belief issue, and for freedom of belief to mean anything people need to be able to articulate their beliefs, short of incitement to violence or other provably harmful instances of their doing so.
I would include withdrawal from education or limiting state education (by insisting on withdrawal from classes in sex education or evolution) as harmful. I don’t think that dissent from this definition is illiberal; nor do I think insistence on it is illiberal. I think that discussion of what others should or should not do, especially where we would find such acts distasteful, is the hallmark of liberalism: it is pragmatic, it is realistic and responsive to events, it is ad hoc, it is not bound by precendent.
In short, the headscarf thing is froth: at issue is the acceptance of the conventions of the state. Democracy is not inconsistent with insistence on norms. France would be wrong to insist on a national ban. Schools should be free to make their own rules. Parents should be allowed many freedoms from the state; the freedom not to educate children to a minimun standard should not be among those.
Sunday, 14 December 2003
Stop The Internet: Saddam Captured »
Tom Coates has already found a fistful of links. The BBC seems the most reliable source so far. All sources agree that it’s him.
Unusally for news these days, which is about 99% speculation to 1% actual reportage, no one has suggested what will happen next. I can’t see how the US can try him, but I can’t see the UN doing so (this decade anyway) either. I suspect that the interim government would just like to hang him, but I think the Iraqi people are due a proper trial, even if like Soham the result is more confusing than cathartic.
These 104 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:37pm GMT. Comments.
Bad Writing »
Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Marlowe, Dr Faustus
Ophelia Benson has an already much-linked to Guardian article on bad writing. There are, however, more kinds of bad writing than the academic: any kind motivated by bad faith or intentional doublethink qualifies as bad. This Guardian editorial led me to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor in the Spectator. Now this is what I call bad writing:
The election takes place in the most precious jewel of the Vatican Museum, the 15th-century domestic chapel of Pope Sixtus IV, known as the Sistine Chapel.
How can anyone who has visited the Sistine Chapel describe it as ‘domestic’? Anyway,
Here, twice a day, the Cardinals assemble and one by one place their vote in a silver urn for the one whom they truly believe is the best person to assume the mantle of Peter.
Hold on one minute there Cardidnal. Don’t they vote several times because candidates have to be eliminated? Surely the honest thing to do when ‘the one whom [you] truly believe is the best person to assume the mantle of Peter’ isn’t on the ballot is to abstain? And unlike us unwashed masses on the outside, Cardinals vote for what they ‘truly believe’ — we just place our messy crosses in a box.
In his book, The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis puts it well. ‘You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys…’
That rather depends on how much you own, if like the good Cardinal, you have the trappings of wealth, perhaps not. Jesus seemed to travel light.
In all of our lives we have constantly to choose between right and wrong, good and evil, this road or that road — heaven or hell.
Well surely we end up at one place or the other, so some choices have to be greater than others. This really makes no sense. If I chose hell years ago, all my choices since are void.
There is a wonderful passage in the Book of Deuteronomy, when Moses is giving his last profound teaching to his people.
Presumably he gave some shallow teachings afterwards, when he went a little Reagan-like.
He tells them that they should obey the Commandments of the Lord, loving the Lord and walking in his ways and observing his commandments; and that if they do, they will live and the Lord will bless them. But Moses warns they will perish ‘If your heart turns away and you do not hear and are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them.’
Now I’ve never got this: how many gods are there? I was brought up in a monotheistic tradition (protestantism), and we were taught that God created the world, the Garden of Eden and all that. When did these other gods appear?
Anyway, the Speccie is a very variable publication, but still better than the Staggers. Green Fairy confesses that she fancies Boris Johnson after Friday’s Have I got news for you? which was one of the funniest things ever televised. I know Boris comes across like a CD of Hugh Grant which has been buried at the bottom of the garden and just jumps continuously, ‘Ah ah ah ah ah’ but he’s hellishly endearing. And the Spectator carries an antidote to all those over-caffienated Mark Steyn articles with Why al-Qa’eda is winning by Correlli Barnett.
These 564 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:29pm GMT. Comments.
Monday, 15 December 2003
More To Ethics Than White Stilletoes »
I’m not sure about the Ethical Philosophy Selector. (My scores are below.) Of the bloggers who have taken it, most score very highly for John Stuart Mill. I originally thought that my 100% score must hang on a single question: the options being all or nothing, but it seems that scoring, however it is done, is more subtle. Or there could be a random number generator making things up.
These are other bloggers’ scores for Mill: Missykit (47%), Quidquid Requiritur (100%), A.E.Brain (94%), Lawrence Solum (not saying), Norman Geras (100%).
These are my results:
- Jeremy Bentham (100%)
- Jean-Paul Sartre (93%)
- Aristotle (86%)
- Epicureans (84%)
- John Stuart Mill (79%)
- Kant (73%)
- Ayn Rand (72%)
- Stoics (69%)
- Thomas Hobbes (69%)
- Aquinas (67%)
- David Hume (62%)
- Prescriptivism (61%)
- Plato (60%)
- Spinoza (56%)
- Nietzsche (53%)
- Nel Noddings (41%)
- Cynics (34%)
- St. Augustine (30%)
- Ockham (29%) Send your comments or questions to the author.
I’d love to know how scoring works. I didn’t know Ockham was famous for anything except the razor (or was that someone else?). I can’t see how with 12 questions, Norman Geras can be in 74% agreement with Immanuel Kant, while I manage only 73%. What does it all mean?
I’m quite pleased with the high score for Sartre.
There’s not even a nice graphic to display on your site.
UPDATE: More scores in the comments for Matthew Yglesias. Consensus moving toward: junk.
These 221 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:47pm GMT. Comments.
Roderick Spode »
I’m upset, but not surprised, by the result of the Big Read. Both His Dark Materials and Lord of the Rings are trilogies and therefore a bit of a cheat. A win for Jane Austen would have been fine by me: it’s clearly the outstanding novel of the lot, though my top three would have been a more boyish choice of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Catch-22, and The Catcher in the Rye.
I did think about a best non-fiction list, but that’s a little less subjective, a non-fiction book can be judged on how true it is, and even great books like Darwin Origin of Species have increasingly obvious flaws as science progresses.
Following Johann being called a troll by Instapundit, mentioning Tolkien at all is clearly controversial, but didn’t his grandson look as though he was born to play Roderick Spode?
These 140 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:08pm GMT. Comments.
Tuesday, 16 December 2003
Axis Of The Willfully Obtuse »
Norman Geras finds a few good links; although reading them leads me to draw the opposite conclusions from him.
Item 1: Anthony at Black Triangle.
When John Humphries [sic] suggested that any trial of Saddam Hussain might be embarrassing for America because it might show up involvement of the US with Saddam, he perhaps betrayed what seems to have been an underlying current on the Today Programme. He could have chosen to note the potential embarrassment for countries like France, Germany and Russia — all of which have more recent dealings with Saddam — but no the capture of Saddam has been turned into a stick to beat the Americans with.
John Humphreys is not alone: Gene, from the pro-war Harry’s Place, asks Can Rummy sleep at night? It doesn’t matter if what Saddam says under interrogation or in court damns France, Germany, and Russia, they’re not asking that he be prosecuted. It doesn’t matter what they think; it does matter what Blair and Bush think. And the issue doesn’t have to be turned into a stick, it is a stick. Saddam’s worst atrocities were before the Gulf War, when we supplied him. Not just our countries, but the US sent envoys, like Rumsfeld, to shake Saddam’s hand. The French sold nuclear reactors. That is business. The US conducted politics.
Gene mentions Alan Friedman’s Spider’s Web: Bush, Saddam, Thatcher & the Decade of Deceit (1999, the 1993 subtitle was The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq). Gene also links to Peter Beinart (NB subscriber only New Republic link).
But, by August 1988, the war between Baghdad and Tehran was over. And yet Saddam continued his genocidal “Anfal” campaign against the Kurds, which by late 1988 had resulted in close to 100,000 deaths, most of them civilian. So, in September 1988, then-Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island introduced the Prevention of Genocide Act, which would have ended all U.S. aid to Baghdad. The bill passed the Senate, but the Reagan administration helped scuttle it in the House. And, when George H. W. Bush became president the following year, he doubled U.S. agricultural loans to Iraq — money that, it would later be revealed, Saddam was partly diverting to the military.
Bet he didn’t pay those loans back either, the miserable bastard.
Item 2: Grauniad letters. Norman considers this up his comical alley:
The extraction of a haggard Saddam from a hole in the ground is only more evidence that Iraq never posed a serious threat to the US.
I can’t see a problem with the logic. That the president is reduced to two handguns and a laptop, no supplies of anthrax, no surface-to-air missiles, no superguns in sight, does make one suspect that he never was capable of putting up much of a fight. There are lots of dictators grateful populations would do anything to have removed, Mugabe, Putin, Karomov in Uzebekistan.
There are far more interesting letters.
Gary Knight of London:
Since the Guardian has supported Saddam so steadfastly during the war, why doesn’t it take a leaf out of his book and just give up quietly?
Well, I remember the Guardian and the Independent (though not the rest), being critical of Saddam before the Gulf War. So, it seems, does Bob Rait of Harlepool:
With the capture of Saddam, perhaps it’s time to resurrect the old 1943 political pamphlet, The Trial of Mussolini, by Cassius (Michael Foot), in which Mussolini defends himself by dragging up as witnesses all those people who for so long saw nothing wrong with his regime.
Norman’s final Guardian link, Now the difficult bit, is the most interesting. I blush to find myself in agreement with a neocon, Thomas Donnelly.
…it is fair to expect that confronting Saddam’s past — his legacy — will be important in helping to create a solid basis for a durable democracy in Iraq.
But then, I also agree with Gitta Sereny and Michael Portillo on the same page. The one person I disagree with is the one Norman chooses to quote, Ian Kershaw, biographer of Hitler.
Should he then be condemned to death, many in the west (though not in Iraq) will face another moral dilemma. I won’t lose any sleep over it myself. I’m against the death penalty, but if ever there was a candidate for it…
I don’t understand why ‘not in Iraq’. Are they on a lower moral rung from us in the West? And why do those in the West face a dilemma? A dilemma is a choice: do I have tea or coffee? blog or watch The Simpsons? I’m not a bad-faith blogger; I know that what I think or say has no impact on the outcome. It isn’t my choice. (But if you must know, I’m always against the death penalty.)
These 801 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:00pm GMT. Comments.
Thursday, 18 December 2003
Get Yourself Some Teeth »
He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth.
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
Everyone has so far treated the putative trial of Saddam Hussein as if it were a foregone conclusion that the Iraqis must try him. (I say ‘putative’ because I strongly suspect that he will not come to trial, it being too embarrassing all round.) However, unless I misunderstand international law and the Geneva Convention (which is admittedly likely), it seems that Iran has reasonable grounds to try Saddam for crimes during the Iran-Iraq war, which, after all, he started.
Now, I’m no expert, but both sides used gas, and chemical weapons are specifically prohibited by the Geneva Convention. If this sort of law is to have any effect, it must be used against someone sometimes, and Saddam seems like a good candidate. However, sympathy for the Iranians (who also used gas) seems to be in short supply. While the Iranian mullahs and generals may be guilty, the families of soldiers who died may be owed something here.
I’m not so happy that the UN seems to have been ruled out of the process of jurisdiction.
It seems to me that the UN needs to be taken seriously by the US, the sole superpower for the moment. If I were asked what I would do with it, I think the next Secretary-General has to come from the US, possibly an ex-president, like Carter, though as it is the Republicans who have issues with international relations, Bush Snr, or Colin Powell might be better choices.
These 243 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:05am GMT. Comments.
Sweet Foucault »
Crooked Timber discussion thread award for Wednesday goes to … Kevin Drum. The “PoMo” comments are particularly recondite/confusing/interesting. I don’t understand the comments on chess: it hasn’t become any easier since computers started beating grandmasters, and what’s wrong with it being deterministic? That’s the point. Criticising top players, like Kasparov, for studying the game is like picking on Jonny Wilkinson for training. It’s bizarre.
Kevin is, of course, right about cats.
These 72 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:26pm GMT. Comments.
CMS Update »
Like anyone cares, but I seem to have crashed something serious on the server, and — for now — comments don’t work.
When they do, giving either email or url will be optional; giving a name will be compulsory. Published emails will be spam protected in the form a@b.com becomes aATb.com_REMOVE_THIS, which is widely rumoured to fool spambots in the was that character encoding does not. Certain urls will not get published, if your url contains words like Paris or Hilton (and to think I thought all that spam referred to a hotel in France!), it just won’t show up.
When it works, line breaks will be changed into paragraphs, and links will be allowed in comments. (I spent ages vacillating about this, and I’m still not happy.)
These 127 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:54pm GMT. Comments.
Friday, 19 December 2003
Blogmire »
I’ve admired Rebecca Blood since I started blogging, and she is the only blogger worth reading in the Guardian following that paper’s slew of awards. The best thing about her piece by far is the cartoon, though (by Hugh Macleod). Something about the Grauniad these days (it really has declined since Peter Preston left as editor) seems to down contributors down:
Weblogs are just too varied, too idiosyncratic, to fit into an existing box.
Fah. You could say that about film.
Tom Coates is surprisingly benign about this year’s awards.
…although I’m surprised by a good few of the sites who made it onto their lists, generally the standard’s pretty good.
I think the end of the Million Pound Property thing drew his supplies of ire. Will BBC4 show a special Grumpy Old Queens at 3pm on Christmas Day for him to rant about?
Jackie D, writing in the comments of PolitiX, is as cogent as the post-awards debate gets.
I’m still formulating my thoughts on this… but doesn’t it seem a bit wrong for there to be more emphasis on the format than on the content?
Well, IMNSHO, not until there are separate Oscars for thrillers and weepies. But that is the Graniad for you. Blogs — trendy, websites — last year’s beige.
These 217 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:48am GMT. Comments.
Controversial »
No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.
Samuel Johnson
Gert wrote a cod letter to the Grauniad and an angry post on the weblogging awards. Peter of Nakedblog seems to agree. As per usual, I’m of two minds. I don’t think that Belle du Jour is anything like the best written blog around. OTOH, I’ve nothing against prostitution per se; I go along with the feminist line that (a certain type of) marriage is merely legalised prostitution. The Guardian, being the Guardian, is looking for controversy. It seems to have found it.
(This comment by Tia on Peter’s blog ‘Idly wondering whether "best written" is shorthand for "most likely to become a guardian-published book"?’ puts the controversy bet for me. Cynical? Moi? And yes I entered, and yes, the grapes are sour.)
Definitions of blogs are trite. There are perfectly good blogs without comments -- there is the excellent Jim Henley and Instahack (link available from any friendly right-wing blogroll). Norman Geras doesn’t have comments -- though I think he should have. There are blogs like Crooked Timber, Kevin Drum, and Matthew Yglesias where comments are part of the pleasure, although particularly in Kevin’s case, they can get so long as to lead to serious time wasting. On the right (sorry that these all seem to be political, but ‘war is justified’ is a debatable proposition; ‘what I had for breakfast’ is not) Roger Simon has some good discussions.
Comments threads can go to the bad. See John ‘Ballon-Juice’ Cole (and I’m not going to link to the original thread).
The Guardian glossary misses the all-important term for someone dim enough to try to code his own CMS.
By way of compensation, here are Backword’s annual awards (an irregular series, which may not happen at all next year, or may be in some other month altogether).
Best drunken posts: Geraldine Curtis, special judge’s award for the Christmas Dinner one.
Best discussion thread without threats of violence: Kevin Drum on chess, post-modernism, and, of course, shy cats.
Best blog series on dead socialists: Chris Brooke.
Best ranting bearded gay BBC employee: Tom Coates.
Best blogger’s cat, my cat Gordon.
All other awards including best-looking, smartest, best-written, and tea-drinker of the year go to me. Judges decision is final. Awards cannot be exchanged for cash (or cat food).
These 378 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:45pm GMT. Comments.
Saturday, 20 December 2003
Even Educated Fleas Do It « »
I think people should mate for life, like pigeons or Catholics.
Woody Allen, Manhattan
The ‘gay marriage’ thing (please shoot me if I ever use the word ‘meme’) certainly seems to have provoked the moralistic right from their ideological slumbers, although with less beauty and clarity of thought than David Hume awakened in Immanuel Kant. I’m going to bang on about ‘morality’ elsewhere, but for now I only want to note that moral philosophy is no more than telling other people what to do. I think Sartre had it about right in Existentialism and Humanism: keep the way you act toward others to the way you think everyone should act, and otherwise shut up.
I am — surprise, surprise — in two minds over gay marriage. On the one hand, I think the obvious solution is to abandon marriage althogether, as part of the old superstitious past, and live like ‘free bloody birds’. I like the idea of living like Sartre and de Beauvoir, although this is clearly more appealing if you are Sartre rather than de Beauvoir. Goethe got married when his son was 18. Joyce never married Nora Barnacle. Socrates was married (to Xanthippe; they had three daughters), but he seemed to spend his time charming the handsome male youths of Athens. (And why not?) On the other, I’ve actually been to a ‘committment ceremony’: gay marriage not being legally recognised in Texas, where I was a best man (always the bridesmaid, etc). Yes, I live in the UK, and yes, it is a long story. (As people like Norman Geras and David Aaronovitch keep telling me how anti-American I am, perhaps I didn’t really go.)
None of the objections to gay marriage show any deviation from Wittgenstein’s aphorism, ‘philosophy is finding bad reasons for what we know already’ and that all of them seem quarantined from reality. Melanie Phillips is, well her usual self, more barking than Battersea Dogs’ Home at dinner time. This particularly shoddy piece by Jennifer Roback Morse in The National Review (never the sanest of publications) is dissected over on Crooked Timber. What more can one add? If you want philosophy, I should note that the Symposium talks about gay couples. (I was sure that I had a copy, but I can’t find it.) There is so much that is wrong with Morse’s argument that bothering feels unsporting. I don’t know what ‘nature’ as used by Morse is. I’m not sure that, in any useful sense, human nature exists. Obviously there are things which are outside human nature; we don’t bite our mates’ heads off after coitus, but the fact that the number ‘2’ exists does not disprove that there are an infinite number of real numbers between 0 and 1. I’ve always regarded human nature as infinite in a similar way; however many things you list that are ‘natural’, there are always more.
Nature is not intentional. Believing that it is, is a mistake which goes back to the reification of the Greek word for ‘twitching’ (because things which are alive have the property of movement) into a concrete noun ‘psyche’. Anyway, potential far outstrips actual behaviour. Members of species have many untested, unthought of, abilities. Feathers evolved for one purpose (those with them had better temperature regulation that those without, and hence better chances of procreating), and developed into another (flight, for the same reasons). Variation, enormous variation, is the norm.
Maybe marriage is an institution, and no one should want to live in an institution. All the same, legalise it.
These 576 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:53pm GMT. Comments.
Interview With The Vampire »
As the old Jewish saying, which my father was rather of, has it, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” So, as no one is going to interview me, I may as well do the job myself. Questions are based on the Grauniad Questionnaire (which I vowed never to read again after they asked Derek Jarman, who had AIDS at the time, how he would like to die), and Norman Geras’s questions.
Why do you blog? > It keeps me off the streets.
What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > Find another hobby, it’s like Grand Central Station in here already.
What are you reading at the moment? > Swallows and Amazons (the product of a 3 for 2 book buying spree in Waterstone’s and The Big Read), and I’m about to re-read I F Stone’s The Death of Socrates, because I came across it looking for something else.
Who are your cultural heroes? > Larry David, Shelley, Joe Strummer.
What is the best novel you’ve ever read? > I don’t do bests — I change my mind too often. But I suppose, Slaughterhouse 5 keeps coming up when I think about lists like that.
What is your favourite poem? > I think it’s The Wasteland/Prufrock/The Hollow Men. But it could be something by Auden, or This Be The Verse by Larkin.
What is your favourite movie? > Storm Warning which is an anti-Klan propaganda movie with Doris Day, Ginger Rogers, and not a black face in site. The first KKK man to be unmasked looks rather like the young Elvis, which gives away the period. Naturally the evil bigots are vaniquished by the lone hero, ex-sportscaster, union organiser, and ah, future president. Incredible. More seriously, The Seventh Seal, Apocalypse Now, 2001.
What is your favourite song? > Right now, Elvis Costello’s ‘Girls Talk’ (recorded by Dave Edmunds), for the line “You may not be an old-fashioned girl, but you’re going to get dated.”
Who is your favourite composer? > Beethoven wins most of the time.
Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you’ve ever changed your mind? > I’m not sure I ever go to bed believing the same things I get up with, but I’m less environmentally pessimistic than I used to be; the issue seems more confused, though I still think that we’re headed for disaster. And I used to think pressure groups, single issue attacks on issues were more likely to be ‘politically clean’ than party politics with horse-trading, but, for me, Greenpeace pushing the GM thing, is like the new Coke of radical politics — they’re just looking for ways to grow, and I think they should stick to whales, and if they ever win, quietly fade away.
Who are your political heroes? > 1 None of them, they’re all cunts.
2 The Goodies, especially Bill.
3. I prefer writers, so Voltaire, Koestler, Orwell, Camus.
4. I’d like to say Trotsky, but see 1. I suppose, Nye Bevin.
5. If I had to name a current politician, Dennis Skinner. Alan Clark liked him too (in the diaries).
What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > Ask someone else.
What do you consider the most important personal quality? > Everyone thinks they have a sense of humour, so I mean a sense of humour with a degree of perspective.
What personal fault do you most dislike? > Farting in lifts.
In what circumstances would you be willing to lie? > I never tell lies, unlike my friend here who never tells the truth. Mind you, he says the same thing.
Do you have any prejudices you’re willing to acknowledge? > How long have you got? I am George Costanza.
What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Complaining; small talk.
What, if anything, do you worry about? > Do superstrings exist? And if so will they come to get me in the night?
What would your ideal holiday be? > It would probably involve touring vinyards, possibly on a bicycle, anywhere warm; California, France, South Africa. The only problem with France is that it’s probably easier to find good music in the other two.
What is your most treasured possession? > I really don’t have one.
What talent would you most like to have? > I’d love to play the piano, but I’ve been told that I’m tone deaf; I certainly can’t carry a tune in a bucket.
Who are your sporting heroes? > Lance Armstrong, Haile Gebreselaisse, Emil Zatopek. Muhammed Ali (the boxer).
If you could have one (more or less realistic) wish come true, what would you wish for? > I’d love a reputation as hard-to-impress, but possibly-bribable, influential wine critic.
If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be? > I’m vegetarian, so I’d like three fellow non-meat eaters, and I think Shelley, Nietzsche, and either Franz Kafka or Mr Spock.
What is your idea of perfect happiness? > Delivering a paper on Morrisey’s “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” to a convention of Smiths fans.
What is your greatest fear? > Never getting a chance to deliver my paper on “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”. After that, Daleks.
Which living person do you most admire? Tie between Larry David, Noam Chomsky, and Lance Armstrong. (And all Americans, sheesh!)
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? > Not being Marlon Brando. Pretty much everything at times.
What vehicles do you own? > Now near worthless Peugot 106, bike, legs.
What is your greatest extravangance? > My morning bath in asses milk. And having every woman I sleep with executed the following morning if they don’t know any good stories.
What objects do you always carry with you? > The Oxford English Dictionary.
What is your most unappealing habit? > Incessantly standing on my head.
How did you vote in the last election? > It’s very easy: they give you a pencil, you make a cross. Schools these days…
How will you vote in the next election? > Well, I’m expecting David Blunkett to outlaw elections and rival political parties as ‘undemocratic’ any day now, but apart from that, see above.
What words or phrases do you most overuse? atrabilious, bicameral, caesura, haruscipate, hortatory, philoprogentive, plenipotentiary, piaculative, phthisis, zeugma. Phrases: What Ho, Jeeves! (And I don’t even know anyone called Jeeves)… I’m an eliminative materialist… Society is to blame…
What is your greatest regret? > Turning down that offer to deliver a paper on “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.”
What would your motto be? > Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters! Or don’t quote others when you can think for yourself.
How would you like to die? > John Entwistle has the right idea. Failing that, Billy Conolly said that Jim Morrison had a heart attack after a wank in the bath: that would be my second choice… the only problem is surviving. Doctor: so what the fuck were you doing? Me: haven’t you read Ulysses?
Do you believe in life after death? > In Philip K Dick’s last novel, A Scanner Darkly, a character dies after a drug overdose, and learns that the afterlife is a great big insect eating you or something. Don’t be silly.
How would you like to be remembered? > I’ll never forget old whatisname, he was less cuntish than most.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you? No one gets our of here alive.
Well that’s that out of the way.
These 1269 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:19pm GMT. Comments.
Sunday, 21 December 2003
The Left Hand Of Darkness »
I had a generous Christmas present (note: irony) in the post. I had a very suspicious large and stiff (calm down, calm down) envelope which looked like a Christmas card, apart from the weight. It looks like the news of my no longer being a Labour party member has yet to reach my MP, as it contained a (quite nice) card from him — and a 300 gains booklet, with a foreword by Alun Michael (who happens to be the MP in question, so I’m pondering whether they do special print runs). Said foreword’s third paragraph starts, “I have am sending you” which suggests that employing proof readers is not part of Labour’s agenda. I thought it would just fluff like “Tony has a nice smile", and “We won a war this year you know", but its very crapness testifies to a sort of grass-roots sincerity. For ticks, for some reason, they use square-root symbols, and the grammar is, um, variable.
Some of it is real and good. I’m very happy about the minimum wage (and that it applies to sailors on British registered ships who got something like a pound a day confirms to me that the invisible hand of the market is not going to take care of everyone). Freedom of Information legislation is good too; it’s just a pity that they seem to spend all their time undermining it.
Apart from that, I’m a little stuck with the benefits. I think that devolution has been an expensive disaster. I don’t know anyone who is impressed with the Welsh Assembly; they all seem like very second-rate skivers.
Points 107 to 144 cover the NHS, which has always been one of Labour’s crowning achievements. I can’t say that I’m convinced by a single point. What does point 113: 1,900 Modern Matrons recruited — 3 times the target mean? Are they over-recruiting? Is that good? 136 Created NHS Direct… but does it do any good? And all the comparisons, what are they against? The Telegraph, not normally a campaigning newspaper, has been railing against NHS bureaucracy, and whatever the figures, that sounds right. New Labour are terribly fond of measuring and assessing things, and writing reports. I’m not certain that the Tories would be any better, but I’m less swayed than they intended.
I think I’m a lefty, but I don’t know what that means. I’ve never been happy in the Labour Party; I’ve tended to believe in agitating against the government through organisations like CND, Amnesty, and Greenpeace, though of those, the only one I really support now is Amnesty, and I let my membership slip.
I feel very little common cause with other interwebnet lefties in the UK. Kevin Drum defines himself as a liberal, apart from on union issues, where he is clearly ‘left-wing’ which sounds like a good place to be. I’m less clear about, say, Harry’s place. I have not the first clue what Johann Hari is talking about here.
But there is also, style aside, a substantive political fact that forces me into a strange existential alliance with her. I know that any regime that would kill Melanie [Phillips] would put me up against the wall too. When they turn on the bolshy Jews, they will turn on the bolshy gays. In a funny way, from totally opposing ends of the political spectrum, Melanie and I stand and fall together; we can only exist in the most free of societies.
There are so many unfounded assumptions here — that both of them are ‘bolshy’, neither seem so to me, that regimes have anything like a method, South Africa was undoubtedly fascist, but they only locked Nelson Mandela up, they didn’t put him against any wall; the Soviet Union tolerated Solzenitzen (I know my spelling here is wrong) and Shakarov, both far mightier pains in the arse than mere journos.
She also has, undeniably, the courage of her convictions: did anybody catch her on Any Questions up against the loathesome Tariq Ali a few months ago? The most lazy, ridiculous anti-war babble was being recited by Ali and cheered by the audience. Melanie turned on the audience — an incredibly audacious move — and told them that they were “morally fallen” and that it was a sign of their “decadence” and “decay” that they could applaud a tired old Trot like Ali while Saddam was being deposed. It was impossible not to love her at that moment.
Why is Tariq Ali loathsome? It’s not because…? Nah, you wouldn’t think a thing like that Johann. Why is anti-war speech “babble", “lazy", and “ridiculous"? The accepted default position for any statesman is Churchill’s “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.” Is it less lazy to force oneself to think contrary to facts, in some Nietzschean ubermenschish ‘overcoming’? Ms Phillips ‘s prejudices sound merely anti-democratic. What the old demos needs is to be led, like sheep. I don’t know what “morally fallen” means, other than “I disagree with your position, and as I have no facts to back me up, I’ll spit meaningless insults"… Nietzsche was rather fond of the word ‘decadent’ (in the Hollingdale translation, anyway), but I’ve never known what it means. Oscar Wilde was self-consciously decadent, and he was a good bloke. I’ve seen Steven Berkoff’s play Decadence and apart from it seeming to consist of several hours of fart jokes, which seemed to mortify and bore my companion within the first ten minutes, I could see it again.
I can’t speak for any putative fascist regime waiting to take over the country just so it can shoot a couple of not-very-bolshy-by-any-standards journalists, so I can’t rule out what they would not do, but I don’t see one existing outside Mr Hari’s teenage imagination. Fascists love telling others what to do; it seems both he and Ms Phillips would fit right in.
Now I was going to talk about Johann’s love for Ian Paisley, but I thought I’d need to explain the joke.
"YOUSE ARE ALL MORALLY FALLEN! YOUSE ARE DECADENT! THE POPE IS THE ANTI-CHRIST! etc etc etc etc.”
Despite hundreds of intentional murders, the IRA have never even thought about harming Paisley. Fascists love people like that. They make them look reasonable.
These 1038 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:04pm GMT. Comments.
Monday, 22 December 2003
Out Of Touch »
It seems that my phone has been cut off. It took me a while to work this out as connection to ntl can be variable: sometimes their computer does not answer, sometimes I ‘connect’ but cannot check mail or connect to any sites.
When I say cut off, I mean I cannot ring out — I only get a dead tone after dialing. People can ring in, and dialing works, so I assume some numbers, like 999 or their payment line work.
Damn. I’m broke. Well, until my flat is sold. God, this has been my least favourite year, ever.
These 98 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:35pm GMT. Comments.
A Philosophical Conversation »
Me: “Leptons and quarks, that’s all, that’s all, that’s all, that’s all.”
Him: “What about space?”
Me: “OK, there’s space, too.”
Him: “And time?”
Me: “And time too, though really it’s the same as space.”
Him: “No, it’s not.”
Me: “Yes, it is.”
Him “No, it’s not.”
Me: “I think you’ll find that it is.”
Him: “How?”
Me: “Anyway, leptons, quarks, and space and time are all there are.”
Him: “What about numbers?”
Me: “Well, maybe there are numbers too.”
Him: “And supervenience? emergent properties? Emergent things may be made of quarks, but emergence itself isn’t.”
Me: “Am I the only one in this conversation who is drunk?”
Him “And sex. Sex exists.”
Me: “Yes, OK, sex exists.”
Him: “And elephants?”
These 121 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:17pm GMT. Comments.
Gazing Into The Abyss »
I was a little drunk when I wrote this. I don’t disown my conclusions, but I think I free-associate a little to much in getting there.
Recently, I asked why a nice leftie like me reads the old Torygraph. And the answer was because the Grauniad was so short on facts. (I’ve just watched the excellent Simon Callow in Galileo’s Daughter, and facts are what matter, facts are what bring down the conceited other-worldly bigots of popes, Ian Paisely, Melanie Phillips, Adolf Hilter.) Well, the reasons are manifold. Matthew Turner linked to two very odd articles in the Sunday. (I’m not on the interwebnet, so I can’t do links.)
In today’s Torygraph, there is an excellent article by Hamida Ghafour on “Prison for women who flee cruel husbands.” The short version is that Afghanistan, the country we liberated, the one the US boycotted the Moscow Olympics for, is a hateful prejudiced society run by [see above]. (Admit it, you can hear old Melanie wailing to Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina that they are “morally fallen” or “decadent” or some similar excuse for the leaden-eyed to stone them.)
There is a great editorial, unendowed with wealth or pity, on Rio Ferdinand. It upsets me to see Alex Ferguson, one of the great triumvirate to emerge from the Glasgow shipyards (the other two were Gus, now Lord, MacDonald and Billy Connolly) criticised this way, but they are right. (At some point I have axes to grind on where Labour went wrong when it met ‘Rock Against Racism’ and other causes I supported at the time, and, in the interests of civil liberties, lost contact with the workers. Put simply, I think that looking after the ‘lowest’ makes the just society; the rest is lip service. Unionism, and a sort of market of interests is the only way to freedom. Even if the meetings are deathly boring.)
There is also a marvellous letter on Keiko, the whale. I divide the world into those who are sympathetic and those who are not. Patrick O’Brian has a talking, realistic horse in ‘Post Captain.’ There is a Kurt Vonnegut novel, I forget which one, but it’s the one with Ice 9, which destroys the world (Vonnegut is the most moral writer I can imagine), where the narrator has a cat killed by an artist, and Vonnegut knows this is wrong: and there is ‘Trainspotting’ by Irvine Welsh, where despite terrible things happening to a heroin addict, a kitten is allowed to survive. Now I know which sickens and revolts me, and I know which is art. They are the same, because that is life. What orcas think is clearly controversial: Wittgenstein said, ‘If lions could speak, we could not understand them.’ But from my limited understanding, I can easily imagine that an orca would rather be with an alien species than alone. God help us if SETI works.
However, I’m more concerned with Matthew’s articles. He first mentions Theodore Dalrymple’s piece on Ian Huntley, and how he is modern plebian man writ large, a little brighter, a little stronger even, but one of the mob. Well there are two problems with this, IMO. First Huntley may have enjoyed ‘statutory rape’ (and in “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest", Nicholson’s crime was just that), but the girls he killed were, legally and practically, sexually immature. The urges to rape and dominate and centred on power not procreation. Secondly, as Dr Dalrymple clearly has not, I have escorted a girl with a black eye into a pub. (It weren’t me, it were her ex-boyfriend who punched her.) Even if the pub were in Stamford Hill, not the most proletarian distict in the world, it felt like it that night. I may have a thin skin, but if Huntley can endure the looks I endured on a regular basis, he is a hard man, and good luck to Maxine Carr.
Secondly, Stephen Pollard has an odd take on the death penalty. Good of him, as always, as a whatever it is he is, to speak for the plebs. I oppose the death penalty, but not for Stephen’s squeamish reasons that one innocent person in 100 might get hanged, My opposition is more visceral than that. At risk of sounding like William Burroughs’s riffs on Nietzsche’s “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” (in Zarathustra): “Everything is true, everything is permitted”, etc in Cities of The Red Night, my opposition stems from Marlon Brando’s line in Apocalypse Now “You have no right to judge me, you have a right to kill me…” I think the opposite. Neither the state, nor any individual, has the moral position (and anyone who assumes such a position is disqualified as mentally ill) to judge the right to existence of another. Foucault’s (you knew I was coming to this) Discipline and Punish begins with a prisoner torn apart by four horses, which the French philosopher claims is better than the utilitarian prisons with the panopticons and exercise yards. (Much as I love Foucault, who claimed that he learnt philosophy in S & M gay bars on acid, I confess to being biased against any Francophone who disses an English writer, as Sartre attacked Shakespeare. Still, he may have been right here.) My own views were formed and effectively fossilised by Arthur Koeslter’s Reflections on Hanging. My view, in short, is: killing is wrong; if not killing costs X, while killing costs Y (which is some trivial fraction of X), then it is worth it.
Pollard’s second argument concerns Saddam. Now I’ve thought about this for a few days, and I disagree with Gert’s choice of moral philosophers on the subject. I’ve already said that I don’t think my opinion counts for anything. I also believe in the sovreignity of states. That is, I believe that all national law is, like the IRA, provisional. It is neither right nor wrong. It is experimental, like a teenage romance; it may work out or it may not. I don’t belive in the death penalty. I probably feel strongly enough to protest outside prisons in my own country. I don’t think it is right if the Iraqis kill Saddam or not. I think it is mu, to quote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintence. Should we kill Ian Huntley (something I have a realistic chance of protesting)? No. Should the Iraqis shoot Saddam (something I have no more influence over than I have on Pilate’s verdict on Jesus)? It does not matter.
These 1059 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:21pm GMT. Comments.
Tuesday, 23 December 2003
Grime and Punishment »
I’ve shared houses most of my adult life. It was only for the past five years that I’ve lived on my own, in my own place. I thought that I didn’t like sharing with others: I always seemed to be the anal one who did 90% of the cleaning, and a lot of Saturday after a run went into making the kitchen safe for cooking. I’ve discovered that it’s not that I don’t like mess, it’s that I can’t stand other’s mess. It is like, as I read in an old Mirror today before getting my hair cut, Ian Huntley’s need for control.
I tolerate my own mess. I think living alone does that to you. After I moved to Cardiff, I spent a weekend back in London in a friend’s new flat. We went for a few pints when I arrived and I didn’t see the place in daylight that first night. When I did see it properly, when she went to work, I lost the day cleaning it. And now, I realise that I’ve let my own place go, because no one else wants to use it, or annoy me by using it. I have a three bedroom house, and it’s full of newspapers. I have deshelved something like half my books to look things up and filed them under my bed, under chairs, on desks. I have to remember when I last looked something up and search for it historically if I want to find a book I consulted earlier this year. Quentin Crisp says that the dust doesn’t get any worse after the first five years, but I’ve had enough. I made two trips to the bottle banks/recycling places (made longer because Tesco Extra had removed theirs and the next nearest, on Wedal Road, closed in November — I discovered both of these yesterday). I ended up in a Sainsbury’s on the other side of town. Today I actually used a map and discovered a closer place in Fairwater, which was known to me in the way that Darkest Africa was in Livingstone’s day.
I used to wonder how other people could live like this, and the root answer is simple — laziness.
I don’t care if it frightens Gordon. I’m going to hoover ‘til my Dyson bursts, (Now there is a sentence which will date.) I have a mountain to climb, but I’ll start tomorrow.
These 400 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:24pm GMT. Comments.
A Quick Note On The CMS »
It is coming along. I’ve reached the point where I’m pleased that I decided to do this. Last week was the week of coding until two in the morning, when I was making stupid mistakes, writing infinitely looping lines of code, or condition statements which made no sense. This week is the week of pulling it all together, of sorting out why the archived monthly file looks so odd, why the RSS seems to behave strangely and coding an RDF equivalent.
But I’m happy with it. Writing to it is so much easier than writing to Greymatter was, for me. Now when I want an emdash: — I type two hyphens (--), and when I want quotation marks: “” I type "". I can forget about the HTML. Carriage returns are converted into paragraphs. All I have to do now is code some javascript that will take care of basic tags like <strong>, <em>, and so on.
RSS works two ways. There is a field in the form I use to post, so I can write a summary myself, but if I ignore it, the first n words where n is a variable, but currently set to 20, are used instead. Either way publishes the word count. I’ll have to checks the RSS/RDF specs, because I’d like to update the syndication files with each comment, which doesn’t seem so hard or impractical. And being technically XML, I ought to be able to extend either anyway, though I’m sure this will offend someone.
I’ve got the preview page working. Before I always tried to post, to see what fresh disaster happened, but it’s pretty smooth now. That means that I should start proof-reading again.
Yes I discovered that comments ceased to work, having sent myself 20 messages tweaking the form and the final tweak broke everything. That should be fixed now. I’m pretty pleased with the comments form. It’s more liberal than most, in that it doesn’t require an email address (which is pointless given that it’s so easy to spoof), but it does require a name, although ‘Anonymous’ or ‘Anon’ will work — for now. There is a maximum length to comments, of around a KB, or 1000 characters, which should be enough for most replies. I’ve decided to allow tags inside comments, though that is open to review. Certain URLs will not work and will return an empty url field or, if you post, will look as though you did not give an address. These are built from regular expressions matching words which appear in spam comments. They are ad hoc and may be overly restrictive. From my side, the emails I get tell me which post the comment is on, which is more than Greymatter did — I can’t remember if Movable Type does or not, but I think that it does.
Finally, I can add quotations at the top of posts and wrap them in blockquotes. Greymatter and Movable Type allow you to choose what to replace line breaks with, and I prefer paragraph tags, but if you’re going to close each paragraph, you have to have a para tag open at the start or the <p>\n</p>s won’t make sense.
It’s not there yet. It’s a long way from Movable Type. I can’t do pings or trackbacks yet, although they are in the works.
These 558 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:09pm GMT. Comments.
So »
Norman Geras links to the Emma Nicholson story in the Scotsman. I’m not swayed by Lady Nicholson’s animadversions (though it’s nice to see a Lib Dem being taken seriously in the blogosphere). For me, Graham Norton summed up the case against best at the start of the war, when he said on his show ‘Now would be a good time to use them.’ Indeed. Saddam had no moral problems with the weapons he had during the Iran-Iraq war, and Iran was much less of a threat to his presidency than the US. The options seem to be: he had them, but is totally irrational (not easy to dismiss); he had them, but his generals knew that if they used them, they’d be killed by Allied retaliation, and they all mutineed, and either hid the weapons or sold them on the next country (not impossible; the flaw seems to be them all acting in concert when Saddam trusted almost no one, and would only tolerate commands coming from himself); he didn’t have them.
I prefer the third option.
I’m not sure why the Scotsman has become one of the papers of record for bloggers. It’s a good paper, or it was when I lived in Scotland, being a serious broadsheet with ambitions, and few populist instincts. It used to be stolid and ‘small c’ conservative, though I’ve suspected it of more recently indulging in trendy left-wingery.
In 1984, I worked in a bar behind the Scotsman offices, when printing was done with presses and hot metal, and I still shake my head at how much the printers could put back in their closing time tea break. (I’d been there a few months before I realised that they were staggering back to work, rather than catching a late bus home.) The editorial staff came in at the same time, for ‘wee whiskies’ rather than the Bacardis and Tenant’s Supers that their colleagues favoured. We were usually quiet toward the end of night, the owner having irritated most regulars into going elsewhere. (I know, that makes no sense. I remember being left in charge when an older and wiser barmaid took him off to another pub in the hope that he could scare some custom back to us.) Only the seriously ambitious journalists, or the serious drinking ones looked in in the evening. The main gang of such who all had the gift of mutual admiration (when drunk, anyway) used to clap their ginger-haired junior collegue on the shoulder and tell anyone who would listen, or couldn’t go elsewhere, that he would ‘go far’.
I suppose talking with your hands on every news bulletin as BBC chief political editor counts as having ‘gone far’.
These 451 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:09pm GMT. Comments.
The Happy Hoofer »
Speaking of Norman Geras, I’m still considering my top ten favourite movies of all time. I’m not sure how committed I am by the 24 Greatest Movies (of the last 20 years) which I eventually updated to 28. A long list of 100 is in some ways easier, and there are films which I’ve seen nominated that I’ve never heard of.
But Channel 4 showed Singin’ In The Rain today, and that has to go in, even if some of the musical numbers are too long. It tries hard to be cynical, and the writers must have known about heartbreak for Gene Kelly’s night of despair when he realises that the film is a failure, and for the career on fast-forward of the hoofer who conquers Broadway (and meets Al Capone, who was of course in Chicago, but who needs realism?), but the whole thing is so sunny and optimistic. I’m think that The Player deserves a mention too, but I’m not sure that two films about films can be taken seriously. Singin’ In The Rain even dares to end on the implication that Kelly and Debbie Reynolds characters go on to make the film you just saw. Seinfeld was less post-modern.
These 202 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:11pm GMT. Comments.
Wednesday, 24 December 2003
10 Top Films, Take Two »
Another shot at getting down to 10.
- 2001
- Bicycle Thieves
- Schindler’s List
- Singin’ In The Rain
- Apocalypse Now
- The Seventh Seal
- The Sacrifice
- Casablanca
- Bananas
- Wings of Desire
There are too many omissions: Citizen Kane, David Lynch’s The Straight Story, Blue Velvet, and Eraserhead, anything by Hitchcock, but probably Psycho, Kieslowski, especially No End.
These 52 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:21pm GMT. Comments.
An Irishman, An Englishman, A Welshman, and A Scotsman »
Since I gave ’Farting in lifts,’ as my reply to ‘What personal fault do you most dislike?’ I ought to recite a farting in lifts anecdote.
Dedicated readers (well, I can hope) will recall that I went to a stag weekend back in April, but I didn’t really blog it. (Now, I blog every bit of rubbish that comes into my breakast [breakfast-in-bed: head].) Perhaps the young stag weekenders among you spend the whole time in orgies of drinking or even orgies of orgies (though there is something about these testosterone festivals, and their effect on the participants, that would render Tom Cruise unable to score in a bingo hall). However, the beer in Belgium is stupidly strong; some of it is like wine. Each pint is worth two or three at home, which didn’t result in the nights being any shorter, just that coherence left us earlier. During the day, four of us, DL, DP, and myself, who are collectively known as the ‘culture club’* not because of our ambivalent sexuality, but because we go abroad a lot for marathons — though it’s me who insists on chamber concerts in Prague and art museums in Chicago, and BJ who is perhaps the fastest drinker in the West, and the oldest of us at 51. DP is 37 or 38 and DL and I are both 41. We couldn’t handle drinking all day as well as all of the night, so DP broke out a Time Out guide and found the fifth largest church in the world (and you don’t get any more Belgian than that).
The church was visible from the city centre, but was a tram and bus ride away in the suburbs. Up close it looked like a mosque that had had the Carol Smillie/Handy Andy treatment. It was too 20th century for me. Where the old baroque churches had gargolyes with actual expressions and individuality and life, the carvings were expressions, and smooth as snooker balls, with no noses, eyes, or other facial features. It is very big inside — big in an impersonal Nuremberg Rally way, you couldn’t imagine a C of E vicar whispering Sunday School pieties, nor any of the C of E hymns to the divine in the small or ordinary. There is a roof from where you can see the panorama of the city, and for which, because of, you know, the church roof, they charge access. Perhaps averting eternal suffering is not paying like it used to, or something.
Anyway, between checking the war memorials, I realised that our party comprised one each of Scots, Irish, English, and Welsh decent. DP swears he was born in Copenhagen, but I’m not going to let a fact like that ruin a good title. And finally, we took the lift to the roof, and stood out in the rain and admired the signs which indicated the parks and over which horizon Madrid was and which direction a crow would have to fly to New York, seeing actually very little. Then we came down, realised that we’d missed a level, and BJ, being mature and all, had had enough, so the three of us climbed back in the lift, and DL farted. That was pretty much it. The level we missed turned out to be inaccessible as the lift opened on to a locked door, and we fell out the lift laughing like schoolgirls to a bemused BJ.
We should give up this church-going. We really don’t seem to appreciate the sanctified.
* When we’re not known as the ‘Three Daves’ because that’s our names, though DP prefers ‘David’ and DL answers to ‘Dai’.
These 607 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:15pm GMT. Comments.
Thursday, 25 December 2003
Humbug! »
Bah!
This word was hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:10am GMT. Comments.
Conceit »
I went out with an actress once. I told her I was a scriptwriter and she said, “I’m an actress, I’m not stupid.”
Anyway, we didn’t get on. She did say, and this bit is true, “I don’t like modest men, are you modest?” To which, without thinking, I said, “It’s not for me to say…”
Which brings me to my favourite Christmas present. A mug with the words, “I am an extraordinarily witty, brilliant and clever man. George Bernard Shaw”
Now why would anyone think that is suitable for little old me?
If I really thought about these posts, I’d try to work in ‘conceit’ in the John Donne sense. (Which reminds me, that as I still haven’t started on The Bible, I could at least read some George Herbert before I get drunk.)
These 135 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:00pm GMT. Comments.
Repeat After Me »
The Daily Mail complained that there are too many repeats on at Christmas. (See Matthew Turner for all the latest news on the Mail.) It’s incredible what pushes some people’s buttons. I mean it’s not like there’s a war to report, or the capture of one of the most notorious dictactors since the Second World War, or the NHS apparently collapsing, or the Prime Minister’s possible retirement, or missions to Mars, or any excuse to print more pics of Kylie. No, the voice of the middle classes gets the yips when old stuff is on the telly. OK, they showed the Queen last year, maybe we could do with a change, but apart from that, go out, read a goddam book or do something already. People!
I want more repeats, or more specifically, more old stuff on TV. How can I decide which is the best Marx Brothers film for Norman Geras’s ‘Favourite 10’ list, if I don’t see them all again? These are the lengths your fearless researcher goes to. I could take Casablanca again, and a couple of early, funny Woody Allens in the evening.
I’ve been told I think too much about things, and too deeply about stuff others just let slide. What’s getting me (aside from why the RSS generator is counting paragraphs when everything says that it should be counting words) is why does Debbie Reynolds choose the eponymous song at the end of Singin’ In The Rain, when it’s not even in ‘The Dancing Cavalier’? This really makes no sense.
There are artistic reasons for her choice, but I don’t think that I can express them. Just as somethings have to be demonstrated to be understood, and some things have to been done to be understood, and some things can be said in mathematics but not in natural language, so there are some things which can be said in art which cannot be expressed any other way. Poetry is what gets lost in translation, according to Robert Frost. If only certain words in a certain order say something and any alteration changes what is said, there you have poetry (or something too banal for periphrasis). I think she chooses Singin’ In The Rain to show the strengths of the title song, and to repeat it, so it sticks in your head after the movie ends, and that Gene Kelley sings it happy, while she sings it while crying, without losing anything for the audience, says something, even if I’m not sure what. It’s also a song that takes Donald O’Connor’s voice as well as Reynolds’s.
These 431 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:53pm GMT. Comments.
Friday, 26 December 2003
A Novel Idea »
… if like a crab you could go backward.
Hamlet, Act II, scene ii
The Daily Torygraph Christmas Quiz, section 6, Buzzwords, question 7. What is a ‘blogger’? They publish the anwers too, so there’s no point in writing in.
But what does the Grauniad want with blogs? I said last week that the Guardian’s choices of ‘best written’ were those which look like they could be adapted easily into book form — or newspaper columns, which leads me to suspect that they are after some Bridget Jones’s Diary type serial. Whether Belle de Jour or Call Centre Confidential make it as Guardian regulars remains to be seen. One of the interesting facts about blogs is their free-range nature, unlike newspaper columns, they have no predetermined length, and no deadlines.
However, I am sure that next year’s summer publishing trend will be novels in blog form. Perhaps the Guardian has already been approached by hopefuls with early scripts for “Bridgret Jones with a twist — she’s a blogger”. Expect near-riots in your local paper shop every Wednesday.
The point about most blogs (not this one), is that archived material is in reverse chronological order. A novel in blog form would have to go backwards.
Yada yada Betrayal, yada Time’s Arrow, yadda Tristram Shandy… I can’t be bothered writing this bit.
Maybe I should have a go at writing the first blog-novel.
Gollum died today. Or perhaps yesterday, it’s hard to tell. He fell into the volcano…
Oh, fuck it, I can’t remember any of the silly names.
These 241 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:40am GMT. Comments.
2001 »
I’ve decided that the only way to eliminate films from my list of favourites is to try to write something about them. The more I have to say that’s good, the more I like it.
I first saw 2001 in the Edinburgh Odeon with my dad. It must have just come out, and I would have been six. I think he had seen it already. I was too young to realise that books and films could be new. I’m pretty sure that he described the middle section (with the Blue Danube and Leonard Rossiter playing a Russian) as ‘bloody tedious.’ I know that I didn’t understand it at all, but then I’m not sure 2001 can be understood. I still think it’s a great film.
The beginning certainly makes no sense whatever. What did the monolith do to the apes? And what mnemic process was supposed to pass this on? I don’t like the idea of alien interference in human development anyway. It’s just a way of pushing back the question of why did intelligence evolve? It seems more parsimonious to assume that if it can evolve anywhere, it evolved spontaneously here. It’s like asking “If God made the world, who made God?” which usually receives the theologically profound reply, “Don’t ask silly questions.”
The first great genius of the film is the skeleton smashing sequence, where the ape throws the bone in the air, and it falls and falls before cutting to an orbiting space ship. At the time of the Apollo programme and the Vietnam war, the suggestion that aggression and space travel were linked was provocative. (Normal Mailer also suggested that one was a diversion from the other.) The next moment of genius was using real companies’ names, like Pan-Am, on the spacecraft, which made the whole enterprise seem doable and realistic. I can’t think of any other film which understands that outside a gravity well, all objects are in free fall. Every space ship in other films has its own artificial gravity which works even when the power goes off.
After this it does die a little, the next section is supposed to advance the plot, but it takes its time (and doesn’t really help). I don’t even like the denouement, as the monolith seems to have been discovered already, but it waits until now to do whatever it does. I’ve never really understood why they then go to Jupiter. It’s supposed to be part of the arms race (because it’s a secret from the Russians), so whatever advances the monolith reveals are militarily useful, but they don’t seem to be.
Finally, there is the Dave, Frank, and HAL section, which is really like nothing else, ever. (Clarke and Kubrick denied there was anything in the HAL/IBM connection.)
2001 gets the physics right. Spacecraft at constant velocities will seem to stand still. One of the most frightening scenes ever is Dave going outside the ship, and HAL won’t let him back in. The space outside is totally silent, and they are further from Earth than anyone has ever been.
Ultimately, 2001 is HAL’s movie. There is so much interesting stuff for a psychologist like me. HAL is supposed to be one of two identical computers (which raises issues like twin studies — most famously Cyril Burt). We discover that HAL is malfunctioning when his calculations differ from its twin back on earth. The reason HAL goes wrong is supposed to be that he has different orders from his twin, orders which are secret from everyone, even the crew, which concern the monolith. The idea that contradictory instructions or demands can lead to madness was suggested by R.D. Laing, who blamed parents for schizophrenia (almost certainly wrongly). I can’t think of a more piteous scene than the one where Dave ‘kills’ HAL, as HAL pleads with him, and dies singing ‘Daisy, Daisy’ (a geek joke).
There is the awful ‘stargate’ mess at the end to explain away. It’s all very well being gloriously psychedelic, and neither Kubrick nor Clarke knew what was supposed to be happening — it was supposed to be beyond contemporary physics. All the same, the end where Dave finds his pod in a room with his much older self (and the room is modelled on a Paris hotel) makes no sense whatever. The giant foetus the film closes with means nothing.
Still and all, it’s one of the most intellectual films ever (even if the ideas are mostly from the sciences), and it has one of the best soundtracks.
These 752 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:58pm GMT. Comments.
Apocalypse Now »
This is another film I saw at an impressionable age: this time 17 or 18. Like many of my favourites, such as Casablanca, 2001, Singin’ In The Rain, in some ways it is an awful mess, a very very long film extracted from a very short book. (Completely pointless aside: Heart of Darkness, the novel on which Apocalypse Now is somewhat based, has the same conceit in its construction as The Time Machine, one of my all time favourite novels. Both are narrated by an unnamed person, who is retelling a story told him by the actual actor in the story. Perhaps the most useless book I have ever read is the correspondence between Wells and Henry James.)
I don’t think I’d like to meet Harrison Ford. He must be one of the most competitive men on the planet. Not long after stealing ‘Star Wars’ (though perhaps he was meant to — one of the reasons the prequels are so flat is that they revolve around Luke’s father, and, like Luke, he isn’t all that interesting) he tries to steal his only scene in this, and just about succeeds.
You either know Apocalypse Now or you’re unlikely to care, but it’s a daringly ambiguous movie. It’s usually seen as anti-Vietnam, but Brando’s descriptions of the Khmer Rouge come close to justifying the venture. What other film combines Wagner and The Doors? What other film would dare a scene like the one where the helicopters fly in blasting out ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ and then cut to the beach silent but for the distant buzz of the rotors?
What other film quotes Eisenstein quite so audaciously? (OK, ‘The Untouchables’, but what else?) What other film could use the corpulent Marlon Brando as a malignant Buddha? There is genius in getting a top-class actor to read poetry which quotes the scene where Brando’s character dies in the book.
There is Dennis Hopper, who had to get in this list somehow. I consider him the major actor of the last century: the only one in four ungainsayably great films (Rebel Without A Cause, Easy Rider, this one, and Blue Velvet). In the first of those, he was out-acted by James Dean, and shown up in the second by Jack Nicholson. Neither is a disgrace. He does get rather typecast as the evil crazy in thrillers (Speed, 24), and he doesn’t turn down work often enough. (Christopher Walken has the same problem.) I could have done without The Indian Runner (by another sweet and tender hooligan, the ex-Mr Madonna, Sean Penn), and his performance is River’s Edge where he lives as a sort of vagrant, having killed his girlfriend when younger, and where he has a scene in which he walks into a bar carrying an inflatable woman under his arm, which is supposed to be serious, but ranks very high in unintentional comedy.
Apocalypse Now introduced me to The Doors, Wagner, Eisenstein, Conrad, and Eliot. I’ve never looked back, and I’m extremely grateful. And it’s far better than all the Godfathers put together.
These 511 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:51pm GMT. Comments.
Love And Death »
Does Woody Allen belong among my favourite film-makers? Yes, but which film should make my top 10? My favourite films and my favourite film-makers seem to be almost mutually exclusive lists. Lynch and Kubrick would appear in both.
I did consider including a serious Woody Allen, but that feels too much like a wasted opportunity. (I’m sure Allen himself would disagree.) Candidates include Hannah And Her Sisters and Another Woman. But it’s the early, funny Woody Allen that I’m most fond of.
Bananas has the great subway chase scene with Sylvester Stallone, and the marvellous translator scene where Woody comes back to the States and is greeted by a dignitary and an interpreter. The Interpreter repeats everything the others say, though everyone speaks English. Then two guys with white coats and a butterfly net come and chase him around.
Sleeper has some great clowning — Woody disguised as a robot for instance, and some very clever jokes. Woody owned a health food shop, but in the future they’ve learned that steak is the real health food, and Woody wails “But how can they be dead? They ate macrobiotic rice” (or something like that), though he’s centuries in the future.
I really want The Seventh Seal among my top ten, but if I don’t manage to see it again soon, I’m going to have trouble describing it more articulately than “Wow!” So Love And Death which borrows the closing scene will have to do instead. I’m not sure that it’s a happy film, Allen appears outside Diane Keaton’s window beside the Grim Reaper and tells her he’s dead. She asks what it’s like, and he says “You know the chicken at Minsky’s? It’s worse.” But he and Death go dancing off, so it feels uplifting even though it isn’t. Before that is the joke where Allen is in a cell awaiting death, and a light shines on and a voice tells him that he’ll be saved…
It’s the film with the fantastic play about VD for soldiers about to go on leave, “You have a social disease,” which Allen discusses like a critic “The doctor was very good.” And there is brilliant clowning again with the bayonet charge, but this is the film where Allen transcends the Marx Brothers. He’s not just verbally inventive and witty like Groucho, he’s more ambitious and pretentious.
These 391 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:22pm GMT. Comments.
Saturday, 27 December 2003
The Sacrifice »
I have a thing about endings. 2001 ends terribly, but it has to end somehow, and after Dave kills HAL, he can’t get back to Earth. Apocalypse Now may have the ‘wrong’ ending where the ‘bad guy’ (Willard) kills the ‘good guy’ (Kurtz). Kurtz was after all a talented, straight officer in a crazy war. He didn’t know his last words would be recycled on Seinfeld. Kurtz was doing his best, and Willard was sent to kill him. It wasn’t his fault the world was mad. HAL was turned crazy by its orders. As Rutger Hauer sees it, he was the hero in Blade Runner. All he wants is freedom, and Harrison Ford has to take that from him.
Singin’ In The Rain makes no sense at the end. It’s set in the twenties, before colour film, yet it seems to end with the making of itself. And why are Gene Kelley and Debbie Reynolds looking at a giant poster in what looks like their garden? It is, however, enormously satisfactory if you don’t think about it. As some Greek or other should have said, the examined Hollywood film is not worth seeing.
There are films with straightforward bad endings: William Hurt dies in Kiss Of The Spider Woman; Jonathan Pryce does too in Brazil. The Life Of Brian ends in death, but is uplifting.
The Sacrifice is odd. It ends in disaster (the protagonist’s house burns down) but a lesser disaster than what might have been (nuclear war). I don’t understand Tarkovsky’s theology enough to comment on it. I know that it references Job and Isaac. There is little plot; no one has sees a murder in the apartment opposite or has to disguise himself as a washer woman. On the other hand, it is so well-made that it shows how shoddy and superficial most films are.
Despite nuclear destruction being the real threat to the civilised world between about 1950 and 1990, there are only two films which deal with it properly — this and Dr Strangelove.
These 339 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:23am GMT. Comments.
The Life Of Brian »
The bastard! He doesn’t exist.
Waiting For Godot
Worth including because it was banned in Swansea and stirred up all the censorious sexless old farts who praise their god by snuffing out anything that looks like fun.
Also worth including for the “What did the Romans ever do for us"? argument, “He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy", “Blessed are the cheesemakers"… Never mind that I wanted to start a blog to send up all those asses who hide behind classical names, called ‘Biggus Dickus’ but another.com had snaffled it already.
And I had a girlfriend who would whistle either Spandau Ballet’s “True” or “Always Look On The Bright Side” in the morning. The one possibly signifying that I had hit the secret spot the night before, and the other that I had missed it by a mile. The Python song remains the better of the two.
Life’s a piece of shit
When you look at it.
When you’re chewing on life’s gristle
Musn’t grumble — give a whistle!
That pretty much sums up our national stoicism, and while we had some nonsense under Henry VIII, we largely missed on the silliness of the Inquisition.
Altogether a serious candidate for inclusion.
These 191 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:12pm GMT. Comments.
Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure »
I wouldn’t even have thought of this if it hadn’t been on TV. It’s consistently funny, and consistently decent. People, with the exceptions of Ted Theodore Logan’s disciplinarian dad, and the ‘ugly old dudes’ the princesses are promised to, are decent and kind, even Napoleon who is described as a ‘dick’ by Ted’d brother. The plot is cleverly knowing: it involves time travel so everything can be solved by going into the past and anticipating it.
Bill And Ted contains an affectionate rather than angry satire on Californian society, as the students attempt to give their history presentations, from the football player who gives up and just says, “San Demus football rules” to the black Marxist who claims that American society is as stratified as pre-Revoultionary France, and ends with “let them east fast food.”
Napoleon does just that, stuffing himself with ice cream. Far more educational than Dr Who, from whom the time travelling phone box was pinched, but Socrates really only speaks Greek, and Beethoven only knows German, unlike Freud, who has fluent, if stilted, English (quite right, as he moved to Hamstead).
I don’t know about heavy rock aligning the planets, or Napoleon and Billy the Kid being among the greats of history, though.
These 208 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:43pm GMT. Comments.
The Player »
Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.
T.S. Eliot
In order to cram more than ten movies into my favourites list, I’m going to have to cheat and include films which reference other favourites. Hence Apocalypse Now cites October, Love And Death borrows from The Seveth Seal, and this quotes Bicycle Thieves. The plot of Bicycle Thieves is pretty simple — bloke buys bike to get job, he has bike stolen (he is in Italy after all, where thieving is the main occupation of the Prime Minister), he searches to get it back, and in despair tries to steal someone else’s with tragic results. (Bart Simpson had a similar problem with tempation, a video game, and others stealing with impunity. Bart is caught, but rather than dying he is only has to worry that Marge might not love him. “Do you ever worry that your Mom might stop loving you?” he asks Milhouse. “No way! I worry about piranhas!” said Milhouse. Don’t we all?)
The Player doesn’t properly quote Bicycle Thieves but it does imply that it is more elevated than contempary cinema. The film then does the strangest thing: it shows how Hollywood corrupts absolutely while not being corrupted itself. Like the film within the film, The Player ends with an undeserved happy ending: essentially Tim Robbins gets away with murder, and the anti-death penalty (or anti-racist, or whatever) film that Richard E Grant writes is bowlderised into populist pap. Which you realise the moment you recognise Julia Roberts in the gas chamber.
(The eponymous Thomas Bowdler is remembered for giving happy endings to Shakespeare. Wives and servants expect no less.)
Altman in The Player realises that film is entertainment, not rhetoric. It does the flakiness of La-La land ("This is a wine glass. I want my water in a water glass") more pithily than, say, Get Shorty. Although, OK, maybe I should consider an Elmore Leonard adaptation — Jackie Brown being the best. But I’ll come to that. Maybe.
Peter Falk shows his face, Bruce Willis does a little action, Whoopi Goldberg breaks out of her silly stereotyping, and Lyle Lovett acts. (Why? He hasn’t acted since. My one regret when I first saw him in Kentish Town in 1988 was that we stayed in the pub too long and only caught the last number by his support — kd lang. Neil Young drives a truck in Alan Rudolph’s Made in Heaven. Alan Rudolph. Shit, I’d forgotten all about him.) Greta Scaatchi plays Robbins’s love interest and doesn’t even get her kit off. Mind you, she didn’t get her kit off when I saw her in Uncle Vanya once, though it would have been a very strange production if she had.
I’m trying very hard to be honest in my choices, and not turn in a falsely didactic selection of one film about the director (The Sacrifice), one film about the actors (this one), and so on. But Singin’ In The Rain spoils that being about performance more than story, and Apocalypse Now and 2001: A Space Odyssey are consumate director’s movies.
While The Player is based on a novel, and well-scripted, it’s all about the actors. I can’t give a bullet-proof reason why The Player over Nashville, other than I like the self-referentiality of it — and it’s a long time since I saw Nashville.
These 541 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:25pm GMT. Comments.
Come On With The Rain »
Let stormy clouds chase
I’ve a smile on my face.
The difference between even a heavy California dew and December rain in Cardiff is that one is cold and miserable. The local bakery was closed today, so was the veg shop, and town was heaving. There’s an experiment in the psychological literature which claims that cockroaches run faster when watched by other cockroaches. (It’s supposed to be one of those controls which says something about human experiments, in this case one where skilled basketball players score more hoops with an audience, while unskilled ones miss more often.) People when crowded together seem to endeavour to walk slower than the slowest possible person.
Martin Amis says somewhere that women snag on you less when you hit 40, and by god he is right. Where are all these women supposed to be enamoured of older men? I caught the eye of a very pretty girl on a bus turning into St Mary St, and she smiled corruscatingly back, but I can’t tell if that means I’m not of a clock-stopping age yet, or I was outside in the rain and she wasn’t.
Of course, it stopped as soon as I got home.
These 190 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:49pm GMT. Comments.
Sunday, 28 December 2003
An Office You Can’t Refuse »
As I don’t know when the last two episodes of The Office will be screened in the US and elsewhere, I won’t give away the ending. But I did think that the first of the two Christmas episodes was fairly weak, except for one visual joke at the end, and only watched the second out of loyalty.
The final episode excruciating, but excellent. I haven’t wanted to hide behind the sofa since I first saw the Daleks, and I want to see it again, although it was possibly the most painful television I’ve ever watched. The direction and body language are superlative.
If it’s released on DVD abroad, they should include a Halifax advert, just so people know who Howard Brown is.
There are aspects which strike me as very, very clever. The premise is that the original series were documentaries, and these episodes are ‘where are they now?’ follow-ups. Dawn and Lee are in Florida, Tim is in the same job, Gareth is in Brent’s post, just as ineffective, but with a fascist ethos, and Brent is a travelling rep with a foot on the bottom-rung of the celebrity ladder. The genius comes with Brent’s take on the series. He calls it a ‘stitch-up’ and moans about the hours they shot of him being a good boss, who made everyone laugh, and they’d all miss now, and what gets shown is him headbutting some girl. He believes this, though since he got fired, and no one wants to go for a drink with him, it doesn’t convince anyone.
The series always has succeeded in making us feel sorry for Brent, and we still do, though he is particularly hard to like here. There is a sense at the office party that most people can behave normally, as they stand around in little groups. Even Keith, the fat one in accounts who built up a cameo of tactlessness and self-delusion, has the decency to dance with the girl in a wheelchair. What isn’t left on the cutting-room floor is Brent’s unceasing output of delusional bollocks.
There is a feeling at the very end, when he makes everyone laugh, that perhaps he was not all that bad, after all. It doesn’t last.
These 373 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:07pm GMT. Comments.
Capturing A Trend »
Our intellectual marines,
Landing in little magazines,
Capture a trend.
Under Which Lyre, W. H. Auden
Steven Den Beste links to the discussion on Jane Galt’s site on books our grandchildren will read, where he names George Bernard Shaw as his choice “for the ages.” I can’t dislike a person with such good taste. He even anticipates many of the objections that books won’t be around or that other forms will have replaced them. (Known in the UK, as the “if Shakespeare/Dickens [delete as applicable] were writing today, he would work on EastEnders” proposition.)
The consensus seems to be that the popular authors of the 19th century are the ones read today, and the popular books of recent years (e.g. Stephen King) will be around in the future. (This is called the “critics and academics are all fatheads” proposition.) I’m not convinced that science-fiction will last (and I read little else in my teens). No one mentioned Ray Bradbury who seemed so visionary to me thirty years ago as well as one of the best stylists. I think Isaac Asimov is a very good science-explainer, but a lot of his science fact stuff has dated (somebody equally polymathic should edit a collection of the still good stuff) — but most of his fiction is forgettable.
Also not mentioned are Philip Roth and Margaret Atwood, both excellent storytellers who are perceptive about relationships. I think John Steinbeck will obviously survive. I hope Richard Ford does.
Patrick O’Brian depends on anarchronism for his tales to work. We know, as Stephen Maturin cannot, that he beats Darwin by 20 years to the Galapagos. There are also intentional parallels with the World War II: Napoleon the dictator covering Europe, a resistance struggling against him, a war fought by intelligence. So while I’d name O’Brian as a contemporary great, I’m not sue how he will last. Everyone names Wodehouse, even though the world he describes has vanished (and never really existed).
As for other aspects of culture, TV seems to date, so it’s hard to see even the near-perfect Seinfeld lasting. I don’t think special-effects movies will be in demand in 20 years unless they go somewhere really interesting. 2001 is the only film which suggests that free-fall is the norm above the atmosphere. Alien and Forbidden Planet may get shown when I’m gone, but not, I hope, anything else.
These 379 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:49pm GMT. Comments.
Monday, 29 December 2003
Reflections »
The good thing about Norman Geras is that he is provocative. He should get a newspaper column. I don’t nod my head, “How true, how true,” at every paragraph. I disagree with everything he says, but I recognise that we’re on the same side. Whatever that means, and whatever that is worth.
Take The end of Saddam: two late reflections. I’ll allow him his outrage at the Guardian cartoons. Steve Bell seems less witty than he used to be, and Martin Rowson always seemed like a cartooning version of John Sessions, all this recondite babble, dropping references you felt smart and in to recognise. I’m convinced that the Guardian picture editor sends every illustration back that is recognisably human and/or fails to meet some European standard of hideosity. Anyway, Guardian cartoonists don’t do jubilation. It’s not cool. I’ll eat the cryptic crossword if anyone can show a leader cartoon in the past year which celebrated anything.
As for the third paragraph, while I’m unhappy about George Galloway’s nomenclature, he seems to be right. Saddam’s detention does not seem to have abated the attacks on US troops. I agree with Tony Benn; I think a trial would embarass the US, so I don’t see one happening, even though I think one is essential. Kevin Drum seems to agree. (I’ve said before, and I still think that the trial will be like Soham — expected for ages, and then a confusing anti-climax that seems to satisfy no-one.) What the SWP comment on really does not concern me. The party exists to provide income for its leaders; it’s no more and no less than a secular cult.
It is clear that one thing on many people’s minds was a worry that the arrest of Saddam might help to secure George Bush’s re-election, a worry mattering more to them than did the cause of Iraqi rejoicing.
Well yes. That is because Bush’s re-election impinges on me in ways that Saddam’s survival did not. I’m not an admirer of the administration’s view of economics. It seems to me that Clinton bequeathed a healthy economy, and Bush has done his best to ruin it. The state of the US markets affects my mortgage. It affects my job prospects and my earnings next year. It affects me where it hurts.
My understanding is that the Clinton administration had become very concerned about al-Quaeda, and had developed a strategy to deal with that threat. The new administration were concerned about other matters — avenging Saddam’s assassination attempt on G H W Bush, and cutting taxes for some microscopic portion of the ultra rich. I can’t prove it, and professor Geras can dismiss my claims as mere fancy, but I think there would be fewer US dead under Gore, none of this undemocratic detention-without-trial nonsense, and no Patriot Act.
How to explain it? If one could amass in a single place all the suffering, the sheer volume of human pain and loss and grief which this odious tyrant and his regime have been responsible for, a mountain chain would not encompass it…
As Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” You can’t amass suffering. It doesn’t work like that. I feel like a lousy old cynic for saying this but the celebrations which followed the end of WWII were not merely on account of the defeat of Hitler. They meant an end to the Blitz, rationing, suspicion, and it meant soldiers coming home. This war has had little of that. All the soldiers were professional before it started. The end didn’t bring them home. It has made little difference, if any at all, to life in the US or the UK. And really, Saddam was at his worst before the Gulf War (or the first Gulf War), when he still enjoyed the backing of the US. After that war, UN sanctions, the flyovers protecting the Kurds largely kept him in place. He didn’t become nice; any more than a mafia boss like John Gotti becomes nice languishing in prison: he ceased to be able to do much damage.
If there is a rift between professor Geras’s position and my own, it is because I believe in the UN methodology. So, I think, do many on the left. I have heard the term ‘appeasement’ applied to my position. I can live with that. If Hitler had been appeased by the League of Nations in the way Saddam was, he would not have been able to invade Poland.
I find it funny that Norman can refer to the “usual suspects” in part 1, but not use the term in part 2. Of course Amnesty are against the death penalty. Apart from that being their logical moral position, if they concede that X is so bad that he merits execution how can they oppose torture and judicial killing in Uzbekistan? The state torturers will merely turn round and say but these people are such a danger to our civilians that only this treatment is acceptable. I’d be sorely disappointed in the Guardian if it advocated capital punishment.
Two such considerations are these. First, the danger of miscarriages of justice, in which those innocent of any crime are done to death, I would have thought to be almost non-existent in the case of major criminals against humanity. Second, trials like any that is projected for Saddam Hussein or his principal co-perpetrators do not require the institutionalization of an entire system for the regular killing of human beings, such as might be thought to degrade the society which tolerates it.
Well, I’ve already forgotten his name, but there was one BBC reporter on Broadcasting House yesterday talking about an Iraqi diplomat he knew who was an Anglophile, spoke perfect English etc, and was looking forward to a post in Vienna, when he finds that he has to serve in Saddam’s inner cabinet. And, of course, he could not refuse. So while Saddam may be guilty, the guilt of others in the pack of cards is more debatable.
In current discussion, the anti-death penalty argument often avails itself of George Bush’s record as Governor of Texas, as a way of making some extra rhetorical mileage.
See the last but one quoted paragraph, especially the mention of the “institutionalization of an entire system for the regular killing of human beings, such as might be thought to degrade the society which tolerates it.” And, yes, I have several problems with Bush’s record here. The disproportionate number of blacks on death row. And how come that Texas is so violent it needs this many executions? We don’t have hanging, and we have nothing like their per capita homicide rate.
These 1113 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:31pm GMT. Comments.
Wednesday, 31 December 2003
New Year Resolutions »
The bloody pies are bloody old,
The bloody chips are bloody cold.
John Cooper Clarke, Chickentown
1. I’ll try to get fit again, at least back to running 5 miles in under 30 minutes, even if 10 under an hour is probably history.
2. No more posts on one thing that wander off into prosy sub-Donneish conceits.
3. Start another blog, either to send up all the cod Latins, since Biggus Dickus is taken, possibly called Gluteus Maximus, or called Prejudiced Penguins because the publisher is responsible for lefty underminers of our culture (well, they corrupted me with Tolstoys, Dostoevskys, Checkovs, Nietzsches, Sartres, and Darwins) — instead demanding books like The Henry Kissinger Miscellenany, Collected Sermons by Dr Ian Paisley, and The Wit and Wisdom of Enoch Powell. Proud citizens who stand up for what is right, and since they are bold enough to recognise absolutes, in each case that they are absolutely correct, will happily kill anyone who disagrees, or happens to be of a religion or skin tone not favoured by the almightly, or a denizen of some corrupt banana republic, or gets in the way.
4. No more swearing. No more ‘cunts’, ‘bloodys’, ‘fucks’ or derivatives or conjugations of same, ‘spastics’, ‘buggers’, etc, etc, etc. No more shall I hail a fellow blogger with whom I have an altercation with a cheery ‘how-de-do’ such as “Your wife, under pretense of keeping a bawdy house, is a receiver of stolen goods.” No more villification, vituperation, or invective. In fact, I give the “V’s” to the letter ‘V’. I ne’er liked it anyway.
5. No more quotations.
6. I’ll live on a diet of raw onions until I can give up all unnecessary adjectives. From now on, my bible is The Old Man and the Sea. No more stupid modifiers like ‘hortatory’, ‘irabund’, or ‘crepuscular’. I mean, when did anyone ever find a use for crepuscular? Apart from whichever Julian Barnes novel employs it five times.
I haven’t a bloody hope.
These 318 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:56am GMT. Comments.
Wednesday, 31 December 2003
A Pretentious 10 »
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. I was going to nominate The Killing, but this is better.
Bicycle Thieves (released in the US as ‘The Bicycle Thief’ — but there is more than one, that’s the point).
And no room for Rumble Fish. OK the last two are cheats, but what the hell.
These 77 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:56pm GMT. Comments.
End Of The Year Show »
As the poets have mournfully sung,
Death takes the innocent young,
The screamingly funny,
The rolling-in-money,
And those who are very well hung.
WH Auden, from memory
With 50,00 deaths in Bam, lamenting the great and the good, etc, who dropped off the perch in the last twelve months seems a little provincial, not to say insular. One of my cats died, which was a great sadness to me, but of no import to the universe.
Tim Berners-Lee received a well-deserved knighthood, triumphing over the protests of New Labour MPs who thought that all such awards should go to national institutions like Posh Beckam and Chris Tarrant (who, ye gods, actually got one). Good for Menzies Campbell, Simon Jenkins, Ray Davies, and Nicholas Parsons (but what about Humph?).
As for the Auden limerick, it’s not in my Selected Poems. Another New Year resolution, add Absolutely Everything Written by WH Auden, Ever to Amazon wishlist.
New Year resolutions, con’t. Get Amazon Wishlist.
Be excellent to each other.
Party on, Dude.
Happy New Year.
These 145 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:09pm GMT. Comments.
