Just want to throw in a quick plug for Vera Drake, easily amongst the best films of the year and a movie that has solidified my on-again, off-again critical relationship with Mike Leigh (I still find it hard to forgive him for the two hours of my life I spent watching Naked, but whatever ...) An exquisitely detailed period movie, Vera Drake is in part about the relationship between the working class and the law. The police and court officials who prosecute her case are not bogeymen; some are rather sympathetic, in fact. But it's clear that to Vera, as to many poorly educated and inarticulate people, the law is at once terrifying and bewildering; and certainly no forum for dealing with the moral complexities of abortion in a civilized society.
A corrective essay on the image of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Difficult to judge this without reference to the many important but untranslated works: it's a reminder of how limiting a monoglottal understanding of the world can be.
Readers of my weekly column will know that I had recently expressed optimism that the 45 year ordeal of Steven Truscott might be over. Truscott, at age 14 was the youngest person to be sentenced to death in Canada for the rape and murder of a 12 year-old schoolmate, Lynne Harper. Eventually commuted to prison and then paroled, Truscott has always maintained his innocence, and over the past five years, several investigations have brought to light some serious flaws in the original 1959 investigation. (The CBC have a pretty good backgrounder on this).
The case has become over the years a symbol for a loss of innocence in Canadian culture--it was one of the factors that led to the abolition of the death penalty, and it has always been a sore spot with many citizens in a country noted for its law-abiding nature.
There was hope that an application to the Federal Minister of Justice might bring about a new trial, which might effectively quash the conviction. But today brings the bad news that the Minister instead referred the case to the Ontario Provincial Court of Appeals. While it's a step forward, I do despair for the sluggishness of any remedy to present itself.
Paleoanthropologists have found the remains of a new species of early human on a remote Indonesian island.
They were all about three feet tall with very small heads.
They hunted giant lizards and pygmy elephants the size of buffalo.
(Apparently elephants are good swimmers. No, really. And no, they became pygmy elephants after they arrived on the island.)
This morning's Boston Globe puts it best:
Pigs can fly, hell is frozen, the slipper finally fits, and Impossible Dreams really can come true. The Red Sox have won the World Series.
A new and completely revised 60-volume edition of the Dictionary of National Biography has recently been published by Oxford University Press. If you don't happen to have $11,000 burning a hole in your pocket (or, like me, have a munificent university library) then you can subscribe to the daily life, which is sent to you by email. They tend to pick fairly well-known examples: today's is Dylan Thomas:
"In wider terms Thomas's popular reputation has continued to grow, even if critics have not always been kind. Some had already found his work too florid by the time of his death, and the British Movement poets (Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, and others) began a dismissive tendency that has persisted among those who prefer their poetry served cold. Paradoxically, it is Thomas's rhetoric and romanticism that appeal so widely to the non-specialist reader, and his more accessible poems are widely anthologized. His position in the English tradition seems secure; Donne, Blake, and Yeats are among the precursors cited, with reservations. His own wry assessment—using a metaphor from cricket, the only game that interested him—that he was ‘top of the second eleven’ (Fitzgibbon, 49) may be near the truth."
Thanks to Harper's Weekly, we did not miss this important news: "The British Armed Forces has officially recognised its first registered Satanist."
This means he will be allowed to perform Satanic rituals on board, according to the BBC.
It's about time, but I can't help laughing when I think about how many Satanists out there are going to be totally put off Satan forever now that he's become an officially sanctioned religion.
The Hitch is voting Democratic. UPDATE: No he isn't.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has denied whales and porpoises the right to sue Bush and Rumsfeld.
Whaddayaknow, turns out Proust picked the wrong kind of tea but Anthony Powell got it right.
Portsmouth University unveiled its new site A Vision of Britain Through Time today, an ambitious project which uses census and other data to provide a very detailed statistical analysis of Britain's economic and social development. Except that the site immediately crashed due to "high level of demand" and has been temporarily (I hope) suspended. Fair enough ... the thing that irks me a little, however, is that I already knew this was going to happen. It happens every time a new Internet project like this is unveiled (or seems to, anyway). Is the level of user load on the server really that difficult to predict in advance? (This is a genuine question: I don't know. I just find it surprising how they always seem to underestimate it).
The Radio 1 DJ John Peel has died of a heart attack aged 65.
For those on the other side of the Atlantic who may not be familiar with him, Peel was an important figure in the British independent music industry who was instrumental in giving many bands their first national audience.
Per Mags, we've missed Oscar Wilde's 150th birthday. Sorry, her page won't let me at the permalink -- it actually jumps out of the way when I move the cursor there -- so I have to ask you to scroll down to the Oscar entry. Maybe she can give us the proper link? [UPDATE: Yep, here it is, thanks.]
There's a good Oscar quote collection here. A nice one well down on the list: "Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about."
The times they are a-changin' electorally, it seems. Hawaii, a virtual one-party state since 1962, is now lookingly shockingly iffy for the Kerry college vote column after two polls show Bush slightly ahead. Those who have been paying attention (which certainly doesn't include me) could perhaps have foretold this, however - in 2002 the Aloha State voted in a Republican governor for the first time since the Kennedy administration. Meanwhile, at the other end of the map, Delaware is losing its reputation as a bellwether state as the northern counties become increasingly Democratized by Philadelphia and New Jersey suburban commuters: "If you want to figure out where the First State's headed now, ask the guy from Trenton who just moved in next door."
In the spirit of Barbara Wallraff's Word Fugitives column for the Atlantic Monthly: Is there a word to describe the private despair one feels when an otherwise preferred candidate for office heaps scorn (probably to great effect) on the rare sensible things that his opponent says? (If anyone's interested, the abhorred moment of lucidity is here.)
Joel took some good photos on the Orwell part of our trip through northeastern Spain, including these:
-- Placa George Orwell in Barcelona, CCTV monitoring notice. The medieval city neighborhood east of the Ramblas is now mainly "cleaned up" but the Placa Orwell crowd is distinctly scruffy. Hence, probably, the cameras.
-- A better view of Placa G.O.
-- Sierra de Alcubierre, trenchlike thingy (??), taken from the western (Zaragoza) side, hence possibly not dug or occupied by Orwell's side in the war, but definitely close to Orwell's first posting in 1937. There is still wild rosemary on the hills although they seem as dry as places in California where rosemary won't grow by itself. And you do notice a chill up there. Easy to see how firewood must have been important.
-- And, speaking of noncombatants who have no business discussing war, this is me having a cup of coffee for George in Huesca. With many warm thoughts for fellow Orwell fans here.
If I look especially solemn in the photo it's because we were just emerged from two days sick (UK sense) in a hotel room. J. drove more than 300km that day though he couldn't eat much beyond yogurt and Weetabix. Please, I never want to be in a war; spoiled sandwiches in peacetime are entirely bad enough.
More Sierra de Alcubierre photos available if wanted tho I may not be able to display all at once.
"The situation of a poet and a war-mongering ideologue sharing the stage is odious in itself ..."; clearly, if Aleksandar Hemon believes the two professions cannot be combined, he has never heard of Ezra Pound. But this false dichotomy is just the beginning of a strikingly silly diatribe against the NEA's Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. Hemon's objections to Operation Homecoming are: the project seeks to help "tell the story of our nation", an idea evidently reeking of ideological nationalism; that voices will be censored; that "the story would be much better told by those who died in Iraq"; and that "any account of Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom that does not include testimonies of the freedom-shocked Iraqis cannot avoid being a lie."
To take these in reverse order: no, an account of these Operations that does not include the testimony of Iraqis is not a lie. It is incomplete (like all historical testimonies). The appropriate response, surely, is to try to extend the narrative, if possible; not to abandon it because it fails some absurd test of all-inclusiveness. Whether or not the stories of dead soldiers would be more interesting than those of live ones is an open question, but unless the NEA intends to use ouija boards as part of its research resources, also something of a moot one. Hermon hasn't a shred of evidence that any soldiers' stories will be politically edited; the NEA says that it "has no preconceived ideas about the content of the anthology", and in the absence of any other information I'm willing to take them at their word. I suspect that contributions using language like "lying, manipulative motherfucker" will not make the published cut (though presumably they will be included in the archives along with everything else), but whether this constitutes censorial interference is up to the reader: I don't quite see it that way myself. As for the idea that one group of voices necessarily excludes those of others ... do we really have to defend the idea that historical testimony is a non-zero-sum game?
"The Catcher in the Rye" is now, you'll be told just about anywhere you ask, an "American classic," right up there with the book that was published the following year, Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea." They are two of the most durable and beloved books in American literature and, by any reasonable critical standard, two of the worst. Rereading "The Catcher in the Rye" after all those years was almost literally a painful experience: The combination of Salinger's execrable prose and Caulfield's jejune narcissism produced effects comparable to mainlining castor oil. ... quoth Jonathan Yardley.
Haven't read either. Anyone want to take a stab at defending the duo and convincing me that it would be a worthwhile use of my time?
On most days, this occasional Wikipedian is inclined to agree with Eugene Volokh's assessment and dispair of a world-editable encyclopedia ever emerging from edit wars, vandalism and point-of-view disputes. Today, however, I stumbled across the entry on heavy-metal umlauts and proclaim that my faith is restored.
For those biting their nails as the presidential election comes up, or for those who have a hard time understanding what in the world that 5-10% of "likely voters" in every state are still undecided about, this article may help. It's old, but presumably still relevant.
Thanks to my friend Sean Farber for pointing it out.
Can I nominate this week's Mary Cheney moment as the sine qua non of Campaign 2004, the perfect embodiment of the distance between what everyone says and what they mean?
Dems: "We wished to honor the deep bonds of love between the Cheneys and their daughter, and only incidentally to remind homophobic right-wing voters that their VP candidate spawned one of the evil ones."
Reps: "It's irrelevant and grossly intrusive to bring a candidate's private life into the campaign without soft focus camerawork and smooth jazz playing in the background. Children are our future, and in our particular case the future depends on one particular child's embarrassing proclivities remaining under wraps."
Bourgeois history from the Daily Telegraph. (Hat-tip to Harry's Place).
So Ezra Nicholas stuffs a world-record three and one-fifth McDonald's hamburgers in his mouth and shouts "I am the Burger King"? One for the trademark lawyers that, surely.
Probably one of the most famous scriveners of all time has been identified.
I, for one, am happy I lived to see the day that Chaucer's portrait appears in a newspaper with the caption: "Geoffrey Chaucer: threatened his scribe".
Heavy-handed Old-Europe Big-Government-style it might be, but I sort of wish the Danish baby-name restrictions applied elsewhere too. Is it really that much of a burden to be restricted to a choice of 3,000 names (4,000 if you're a girl), with an 80-85% chance that your alternative selection will be approved in any case? Greg Nagan and Trine Kammer were presumably chosen as the anecdotal victims for this piece, but the fact that they wanted to saddle their poor child with the name Molli Malou because it sounded 'cute' is precisely the reason why they shouldn't be allowed to ... (they got away with it in the end anyway). UPDATE (10/12/04): Greg and Trine strike back ...
A heartbreaking situation and a hard decision, but the right one, I think.
A necessary deterrent or the abdication of personal responsibility?
It's an important question with fair arguments to be made on both sides, but it seems to me that Frank Furedi is missing the point in his attack on dumbed-down, 'inclusive' culture. Much as he might deny that he's being backward-looking, he's forgetting that the high culture of yesteryear was a closed elite culture (the tiny number of working-class autodidacts notwithstanding) that could only exist because of an equally closed social heirarchy - and however attractive some of it may seem in retrospect, it's simply impossible to replicate in a democratized society today. Besides, let's not sentimentalize the past too much. As Kenneth Clark (every bit the intellectual patrician) once put it, the elite of fifty years ago may have looked and sounded beautiful, but they were often as ignorant as swans.
I never knew the old Vienna before the war, with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm - Constantinople suited me better. I really got to know it in the classic period of the Black Market. We'd run anything, if people wanted it enough and had the money to pay. Of course, a situation like that does tempt amateurs, but you know they can't stay the course like a professional. Now the city - it's divided into four zones, you know, each occupied by a power - the American, the British, the Russian, and the French. But the center of the city - that's international, policed by an International Patrol, one member of each of the four powers. Wonderful. What a hope they had, all strangers to the place and none of them could speak the same language, except for a sort of smattering of German. Good fellows on the whole, did their best, you know. Vienna doesn't really look any worse than a lot of other European cities, bombed about a bit. Oh, I was going to tell you, wait, I was going to tell you about Holly Martins, an American. Came all the way here to visit a friend of his. The name is Lime, Harry Lime. Now Martins was broke and Lime had offered him some sort - I don't know - some sort of a job. Anyway, there he was, poor chap, happy as a lark and without a cent ...
More Pennsylvanian battleground news ... my girlfriend was just driving home from work when she quite accidentally happened upon John Kerry about ten minutes' walk from our house. Blimey John, I know we're a swing state, but this is getting ridiculous. What's next: Dubya and big John loitering around our doorstep offering to run errands?
Speaking of Henry V, it occurs to me that (in an outlandish parallel universe anyway) John Kerry could have answered his "dying for a mistake" question in Thursday night's debate rather better with a quote from Act 4, Scene 1:
"... If the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection."
There's a somewhat snarky piece about DVD extras over at Boston.com (link c/o Arts & Letters Daily) which ridicules the inclusion of blow-by-blow commentary tracks for such ephemeral fluff as Agent Cody Banks 2. Fair game, I suppose. But I think the problem with DVD commentaries is not that they're being wasted on junk movies, but that they're being wasted on almost every movie; or, rather, they're an amazing technical resource which just isn't being exploited properly at the moment. Most commentaries are currently made by people who don't have that much to say about the movie - in other words, the actors - or else people such as the director or producer, who might be able to throw in a few behind-the-scenes nuggests, but who have far too much emotionally invested in the project to really discuss it with any objectivity. But what about movie critics? A start's been made here with some classic films on, e.g., the Criterion Collection label. I recently got their copy of Olivier's 1944 Henry V, which includes a wonderful commentary track by film historian Bruce Eder that not only discusses the background to the production itself but also critiques individual scenes as they unravel on screen. Now, wouldn't something like this on the Star Wars DVDs - say, a deconstruction of the trilogy's many borrowings from cine-history - have been far more interesting than George Lucas' reheated waffle about Joseph Campbell and evil Fox execs?
Just saw the dark teen comedy Heathers again for the first time in, like, a decade.
For those who haven't seen it, Heathers is about a high school couple who kill off students who bother them. To cover their tracks they invent elaborate backstories for their prey which lead, inevitably, to said prey's unfortunate suicide.
In hindsight the most interesting element of the film is how, by taking their lives, the two teenagers are somehow magically given the opportunity to write a new (secret) life for their victims that transforms them retroactively in death and in the eyes of the other students. In one case they stage the double-suicide of two football jocks and contrive for the police to find them naked with a bottle of mineral water (realizing that, ironically, everyone will think they were gay on account of the mineral water--this is the 80's, remember). Later, at the funeral, the two "gay lovers" in matching caskets with football helmets on, one of the fathers screams pathetically, "I love my dead gay son!"
But Heathers is not as funny as it used to be and I was surprised when I realized why.
When the movie was made the big hot-button Issue of the Day was, of course, Teen Suicide. It was all over the news, every fresh suicide reported with a grim and proper but also unintentionally morbid air. Teenagers at the time were submitted to a pervasive propaganda blitz designed to "raise consciousness" of the issue. Several pop songs pretended to address the problem, including the outrageously idiotic "Teen Suicide: Don't Do It" which I feel confident in asserting never helped anyone.
It was mass hysteria. Teens were offing themselves left and right, they said. One almost had the feeling that we were on the verge of a new society bereft of teenagers altogether. Statistics were cooked up, support groups formed, teachers trained, and a new social disease was born. Like all social diseases it was So Serious that no one could be suffered to question it; so serious that it merited only the most quiet, most respectful, most concerned tones. It was a good time for platitudes and sham solemnity. It gave everyone's life that little extra gravity which we all appreciate now and again, gave us something to be serious about. Any questioning of the idea or use of less than a reverent tone would immediately spark indignation, or course, this being interpreted as showing insufficient concern for the dead and suffering.
Everyone knew it, no one had to say it, that this epidemic was merely a symptom of our sick society. No one was quite sure what this sickness was, but no one could doubt it was there, and of course it would be the teenagers, those most vulnerable of people, who would be our canaries. The cult of the martyr-teen was born.
Yes, these were heady times to be a teenager. Now that I'm reminded of it, it all seems so strange, like the memory of a dream, triggered by some random smell or shade of blue. I readily forgot that I'd ever experienced it until I saw this movie again.
But, really, this happens all the time, doesn't it? At what point, in the past two or three decades (or five, or six), has American culture not been gripped by some overblown fear, some obsessive fixation, some grand theme, some fear of itself, of some inner corruption that will bring us all to ruin? We certainly are not free of it now.
Hello to the Pain Ray.
Because there are no after-effects, the United States Department of Defence believes that the weapons will be particularly useful in urban conflict. The beam could be used to scatter large crowds in which insurgents operate at close quarters to both troops and civilians.
California has just banned necrophilia.
That is all.
