Daily Herald, September 17, 1946.
"Twenty-five years ago Samuel Hawkins went to a sale at Lewis' Stores in Liverpool and bought a pair of trousers for 8s.
In his opinion, the trousers were not a bargain.
Yesterday Samuel Hawkins, now aged 63, was sentenced to two years imprisonment in Birmingham Sessions for smashing a window at Lewis' Birmingham store.
He was stated to have served a number of sentences for malicious damage - one of four years penal servitude. In fact, said a police witness, 'smashing Lewis' windows seems to be a passion with him.'
Hawkins, who said he would consider an appeal, read a statement in which he claimed that the trousers were supposed to be a bargain - 'a very bad bargain for me, since through wearing them I contracted bronchitis and now I suffer from chronic bronchitis.'"
Studious calendar-watchers will notice that Horizon has almost reached its first birthday. I will probably be out of e-contact on the day itself, so I'm pre-empting the party slightly to make a couple of state-of-the-blog comments as one of the parents of this, erm, blooming cherub.
I've enjoyed writing for Horizon this year, and much more I've enjoyed reading it. Alan H and I started out alone, and I think he would agree that the project didn't really pick up any life until we assembled the other four members of our little Band of Brothers (yes, and Sister). I would like to congratulate my colleagues on what has been twelve months of provocative, occasionally infuriating, but persistently interesting discussion.
When we created Horizon it was very much in the context of lessons learned about earlier Internet discussion forums, The Scottish Newsgroup above all: what I hoped we could do would be to recapture the best of that particular experience without the corrupting rot of its flamewars and trolling. On the whole I think we haven't done too badly. The invaluable editing (and sometimes self-editing) tools have only been needed occasionally, and I think one of the advantages of the post-and-comment format is that flamewars tend to be contained: the formal demarcation of one thread from another creates 'firebreaks' which prevent their spread and allow them to harmlessly burn out in isolation. Spam has been a more niggling problem, though the MT blacklist that Alan H added has helped micromanagement of that problem.
Anyway, part of the reason for this little bit of throat-clearing is to point out that our rent is due and we need to decide where we go from here. Are the regulars keen to continue our modest experiment? Do they have any suggestions about changes? New posters? New directions? The floor is open, gents (and lady).
Helicopter Pilot Radio Transmission (Operation Frequent Wind), Saigon, April 29, 1975, 1612:
Reports are that there are 200 Americans left to evac. Gunner Six to GSF Commander bring ur personnel up thu th building do not let them ( the South Viets) follow too closely. Use mace if necessary but do not fire on them.
And you thought cameras in cell phones were just a bourgeois affectation ... (hat tip to Barb).
I think Tim Noah has a point.
"Support for the filibuster, remember, is premised on the idea that the government shouldn't be susceptible to the tyranny of the majority. But I find very little evidence to support the idea that majority opinion in the United States is particularly tyrannical. The real problem in American politics, if you ask me, is the tyranny of the minority—or rather, of a variety of different minorities, known collectively as interest groups, which use a variety of means (including the filibuster) to exert power beyond their number ..."
UPDATE: Noah and his editor Jacob Weisberg hold a five-minute debate on NPR which goes over the basic pro- and con positions.
I'm trying to find a picture of the "nose pegs" Polly Toynbee is offering to the great British public, but no luck yet, so I can't tell if these are the same as the plain American clothespin recently lauded so eloquently in this space.
Someone please help a poor bewildered American here. Wot's a "nose peg" and why might a British voter be needing one at present?
This article in general seems thoughtful if a bit over-dire, but it contains one sublimely dreadful sentence:
Instead, academia was merely lipstick to put on the pig that was already being greased down the shaft.Arrrggghh....
Early in March a post on favorite fictional characters gave us something of an Alan H. homage to The Master and Margarita. I’m through the first five chapters now, and it seems Mr. H. may be da man. Interestingly, as I read it, I am reminded that I want to go back and reread Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. Remembering that that novel was sort of panned when it came out, I searched for some reviews and found this interpretation, which I thought might interest and/or infuriate Alan (of the school of irreducible allegory).
Warren's 100th birthday today. Born in Kentucky, died in Vermont. Don't know what he was doing in Vermont.
By accident, I found out they're remaking All the King's Men. Which is the sort of thing I always wonder about. When there are so many bad movies that could easily be improved with a second try, why do filmmakers insist on remaking the good ones? Casablanca, Psycho, and The Manchurian Candidate come to mind. I suppose it's all about the money, but is there really any money in it?
Last time at my father’s house, I grabbed Karen Armstrong’s A History of God off the shelf, thinking I might shoot through it some day. This morning I was plodding through the development of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, a sample of which goes like this…
Gregory of Nyssa outlined his doctrine of the inseparability or coinherence of the three divine persons…One should not think of God splitting himself up into three parts…God expressed himself wholly and totally in each one of these three manifestations when he wished to reveal himself to the world. Thus the Trinity gives us an indication of the pattern of “every operation which extends from God to creation”: as Scripture shows, it has its origin in the Father, proceeds through the agency of the Son and is made effective in the world by means of the immanent Spirit. But the Divine Nature is equally present in each phase of the operation. In our own experience we can see the interdependence of the three ‘hypostases’: we should never have known about the Father were it not for the revelation of the Son, nor could we recognize the Son without the indwelling Spirit who makes him known to us. The Spirit accompanies the divine Word of the Father, just as the breath accompanies the word spoken by a man.
I put the book down and thought, maybe I should read this as if it were a novel.
Once again, thanks to Ben for the Bruce Bawer assessment of Edward Said. After finishing Covering Islam last night I went back to the Bawer piece, which he closes with:
After September 11, Westerners can no longer luxuriate in the illusion that that hatred is not real or that it can somehow be dissolved by means of a sufficient application of “sympathy.” If we are to show sympathy, rather, it should be for the brave souls in that region who are struggling under perilous circumstances, and against formidable odds, to nudge fundamentalist Islam out of the Dark Ages and to turn rogue states into respectable members of the community of nations. This is, to say the least, a tall order; and in such a monumental struggle, the glib deceptions and slippery distortions of an Edward W. Said can play no positive role.
Really? I think it might have paid us well pre-9/11 to have heeded some of Said’s words in the closing paragraph’s of Covering Islam:
It is certainly true that the Islamic world as a whole is neither completely anti-American and anti-West nor unified and predictable in its actions. Without trying to give an exhaustive account of these changes, I have been saying that this has meant the emergence of new and irregular realities in the Islamic world…There is simply no way in which societies thousands of miles away from the Atlantic world in both space and identity can be made to conform to what we want of them. One can consider this a neutral fact without also regarding it (as I happen to) as a good thing. In any event, the danger in talking about the loss and therefore threat of Iran and the decline of the West in the same breath is that we immediately foreclose the possibility of most courses of action – except the ascendancy of the West and the regaining of places like Iran and the Gulf…
…If the history of knowledge about Islam in the West has been too closely tied to conquest and domination, the time has come for these ties to be severed completely. About this one cannot be too emphatic. For otherwise we will not only face protracted tension and perhaps even war, but we will offer the Muslim world, its various societies and states, the prospect of many wars, unimaginable suffering, and disastrous upheavals, not the least of which would be the victory of an “Islam” fully ready to play the role prepared for it by reaction, orthodoxy, and desperation. By even the most sanguine of standards, this is not a pleasant possibility.
Howzabout this campaign to nominate Leonard Cohen for a Nobel Prize?
A few remarks about atomic bombs and Kent County Cricket Club over at Cliopatria ...
National Poetry Month is only thirty days long, so if you’re thinking you’ve got until the 31st to polish that monument to bad poetry floating in your head, you’re on the road to heartbreak.
Anyone can write bad poetry and, in truth, it’s unhealthy to suppress your inner bad poet. As we say around the office: be the bad poem.
Of course, the path to truly awful verse is a long and arduous one, menaced by good taste and cold eyes, littered with the bones of highbrow aspirations. But armed with the courage of your mixed metaphors and the knowledge that Mom always liked you best, you can drag the glory of the English language to depths that heretofore only people in love have dared to sink.
Can’t choose between free verse and meter? Try this article.
If you just want to write badly well, check out this anthology.
Thanks to Michael Schaub over at Bookslut for the news that some Harvard students have been recognized for their book collections. I think Michael has the best comment on it:
I don't know what's more horrifying: that Harvard has a prize for book collecting, or that the students actually name their book collections.
Edward Said on Islam’s love for martyrdom (flashback, folks, to the Iranian Revolution):
If you assume that the Iranian Revolution was a bad thing because it employed a dramatically unfamiliar (to Western eyes) idiom of religious as well as political resistance to oppose tyranny, then what you will look for, and invariably find, is irrational frenzy. Consider Ray Moseley in an article entitled “Conformity, Intolerance Grip Revolutionary Iran”:
“People who consider dying to be an honor are, by definition, fanatics. Vengeful blood lust and yearning for martyrdom seem especially pronounced among the Shia Moslems of Iran. This is what impelled thousands of citizens to stand unarmed and defiant against troops with automatic weapons during the revolution.”
Each of these sentences contains highly debatable suppositions posing as truth, but they seem allowable generally because an Islamic revolution is in question. They have persisted in reports on Iran in the 1990s, as well as most accounts of the Lebanese Hizbollah movement (always referred to as “Iran-backed”). Most Americans do not consider Patrick Henry a fanatic because he said, “give me liberty or give me death.” A desire to kill French citizens who collaborated with Nazis (many thousands were killed in a matter of days) does not mean that the French could be characterized in so general a way. And what about the very common admiration for people whose moral courage faces down armed troops?
Is the above legitimate, or is this just the talk of an apologist?
Those of you who can't get enough popes or Nazis before breakfast will want to take a look at my post over at Cliopatria on Benedict XVI's Hitler Youth days. (I'm closing comments over here not in a spat of authoritarianism but as an appeal to rationality: could anyone who wants to add feedback do so over at Clio, so that I don't have to check in two places? This will be SOP for any crossposting I do, by the way).
In this appreciation of E.E. Cummings in Slate, Billy Collins leads off with:
In 1957, on television's Nitebeat, Mike Wallace asked William Carlos Williams if he thought that E.E. Cummings' poem "(im)c-a-t(mo) / b,i;l: e" was really a poem. (Television was different back then.)
I guess so.
Like most people this last beautiful weekend, I spent some time marveling at what I consider the truest symbol of peacetime: the clothespin. I went to Kinney Drugs Sunday morning to pick up a prescription, and while there I bought a New York Times for $4.00, an ugly watch for $10.00, and a bag of 36 clothespins for $1.99. Clearly, the clothespins were the best purchase, of the greatest lasting value and certain to reduce my monthly power bill significantly through the spring and summer months. Outside of its timeless beauty – two slips of wood locked together by a simple spring – and the myriad other applications (quaint arts and crafts, dolls and toy soldiers for poor folk, annoying the cat), the clothespin’s finest feature is its ability to transport us to a place where war, taxes, failing fuel pumps, and past-due membership fees count for nothing. Pinning the sheets and garments to a newly raised line on a sunny, breezy weekend morning to watch them ride the wind and occasionally snap like flags over the town green is such a native, innocent pleasure. I hope it never rains.
Despite the feeling of being bludgeoned, there is much in Edward Said’s Covering Islam I find compelling. I’m interested in knowing from those of you who know the drill whether the following is accurate…
The experts whose field was modern Islam – or to be more precise, whose field was made up of societies, people, and institutions within the Islamic world since the eighteenth century - worked within an agreed-upon framework for research formed according to notions decidedly not set in the Islamic world. This fact, in all its complexity and variety, cannot be overestimated. There is no denying that a scholar sitting in Oxford or Boston writes and researches principally, though not exclusively, according to standards, conventions, and expectations shaped by his or her peers, not by the Muslims being studied. This is a truism, perhaps, but it needs emphasis just the same. Modern Islamic studies in the academy belong to “area programs” generally – Western Europe, the Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, and so on. They are therefore affiliated to the mechanism by which national policy is set. This is not a matter of choice for the individual scholar. If someone at Princeton happened to be studying contemporary Afghan religious schools, it would be obvious (especially during times like these) that such a study could have “policy implications,” and whether or not the scholar wanted it he or she would be drawn into the network of government, corporate, and foreign policy associations; funding would be affected, and in general, certain rewards and types of interaction would be offered.
I thought that Horizon was simply going through a quiet phase — a vacation, a missing laptop, and then the poetry. How could I have been so blind? All that time, Alan Allport was setting up house with his "new family".
Never mind that today is the birthdate of Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Beckett, Eudora Welty, Butch Cassidy, and Seamus Heaney. The man we should be celebrating (b. 1899) is Alfred Butts, the father of Scrabble. Here was a man with a dream, laboring from 1931 to '48 to get his idea to market.
No fancypants Latin from me - just two contributions c/o Martin Page's Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major: The Songs and Ballads of World War II. These are the kinds of barrack room ballads that have been doing the rounds since Pontius was a Pilot; the examples below are from Egypt and Libya c. 1940-1942, and the first has a rather touching simplicity to it as well as a geographical resonance today which needs no introduction.
Desert Blues.
I'm just tired of seeing Eastern moons,
Bright red sunsets and shining sand dunes.
Must get away,
I've got the desert blues.
Miles of sand whichever way I look,
Swell but only in a fairytale book,
All I can say,
I've got the desert blues.
Camels galore, goats by the score,
Must go before it gets me down,
I never knew I could be so blue,
Just take me to a respectable town.
I'm just tired of domes and minarets,
Eastern sunsets and the sillhouettes,
Tired of it all,
I've got the desert blues.
An earthier interpretation of the same mood is available below.
Tobruk Song.
Because I'm fucked off, fucked off,
Fucked off as can be,
Fucked off, fucked off, fucked off lads are we.
And when this war is over,
And once again I'm free,
There'll be no more fucking soldiering for me.
Since everyone is obviously too chicken to rise to Bobby's austere challenge of bad rhyme, and since, as he says, it's poetry month (I more than willingly take his word on that, in fact, if Bobby wanted to just declare this poetry month on his own initiative that would be dandy with me), I thought I'd post something most of you, maybe except for Ben (who seems to have read just about everything) -- not to be too excessively hypotactic about it, or unnecessarily delay the point with dubious grammar -- probably haven't read before.
I have broken the lines up into what I kind of figure were probably the original line breaks. Sorry, I'm too lazy to go over the Latin right now.
Okay, here goes:
To pleasant songs my work was erstwhile given,
and bright were all my labours then;
but now in tears to sad refrains am I compelled to turn.
Thus my maimed Muses guide my pen,
and gloomy songs make no feigned tears bedew my face.
Then could no fear so overcome
to leave me companionless upon my way.
They were the pride of my earlier bright-lived days:
in my later gloomy days they are the comfort of my fate;
for hastened by unhappiness has age come upon me without warning,
and grief hath set within me the old age of her gloom.
White hairs are scattered untimely on my head,
and the skin hangs loosely from my worn-out limbs.
Happy is that death which thrusts not itself
upon men in their pleasant years,
yet comes to them at the oft-repeated cry of their sorrow.
Sad is it how death turns away from the unhappy
with so deaf an ear, and will not close, cruel,
the eyes that weep. Ill is it to trust to
Fortune's fickle bounty, and while yet she smiled upon me,
the hour of gloom had well-nigh overwhelmed my head.
Now has the cloud put off its alluring face, wherefore
without scruple my life drags out its wearying delays.
Why, O my friends, did ye so often puff me up,
telling me that I was fortunate?
For he that is fallen low did never firmly stand.
First one to guess who that is gets, um, my congratulations. And no googling.
If April be a nation’s poetry
month, then let us not forget the love, nay,
the lust each of us carries, like a flash
card in the pocket, for the spoken word
written poorly, for that pint of bad verse;
and may everyman discover his
croaking voice, his unsteady hand, his eye
awander - seeking some insouciant
muse - and put to pen one wretched poem
ere maidens dance upon their village greens.
I've always wanted to write a comic book. Actually, if you count a high school project I already have. Little did I know, back then, how many smashing comic book ideas I would develop while working within a massive, barely-functioning state bureaucracy. Best thing that ever happened as far as my future as a comic auteur is concerned.
Recent idea for a super hero:
Strategic Initiative Man
Institutional torpor gumming up the works in your office? Does your boss expect some kind of results from your unit? Strategic Initiative Man may be right for you. Strategic Initiative Man will come swooping all in a flurry of activity, making everything seem dynamic. He can give you that fresh, clean, Taking-the-Organization-in-a-New-Direction feeling in no time, without side effects such as...change. Your boss will love his strategic argot and his air of initiative. Strategic Initiative Man comes with badly translated editions of Sun Tzu and Musashi. Please note that Strategic Initiative Man is not for everyone. Ask your HR Department if Strategic Initiative Man is right for you.
(I got bored of the conceit and turned it into a pharaceutical commercial.)
An interesting passage from Andrew Greeley's The Making of the Popes 1978:
But one thing can be said with confidence — the winner will be a compromise candidate. The fact is built into one critically important mechanism of the election: the two-thirds-plus-one majority required to elect.
Those of us with either memory or history of American politics can recall that until 1940 the Democratic party needed a two-thirds majority to nominate a president, and hence had long and dramatic conventions, including the famous 103 ballots in 1924. The reason for that rule was simple — the Democrats were a disparate coalition which had to keep all its major components happy to win an election. Indeed, the Democrats only began to lose the South in presidential elections when they dropped the two-thirds rule.
Jonathan Dresner's bonus readings include a link to a press release on the newly-translated Gospel of Judas. Hypotyposeis has an excellent collection of links about the manuscript, including a pointer to an article that links the "Maecenas Foundation" to Shumeikei, a Japanese religious sect.
There's a lot to dislike about the press release: The author apparently knows so little patrology that he renders Irenaeus of Lyons in the French form "Irenee." He also repeats the newly popular canard about the NT canon being set at Nicea. And there's just a touch of self-promotion: "We do not want to reveal the exceptional side of what we have," Roberty said.
The most distressing part, however, is the concluding sentence:
The full launch is due in Easter 2006.
Since when is scholarship "launched"?
Update: Looks like this Roberty's day job is as lawyer for a couple of extremely shady antiquities dealers. (Search for "Roberty")
Everyone keeping up with the academic scandal du jour? My own feelings about this were enormously simplified when it transpired that the college's official reason for sacking Pluss was that he had several unexplained absences in the semester (and that his Nazi affiliations only became known after his sacking). As with the Ward Churchill case, this in my mind converts the issue from free speech to simple professional competence: as Jonathan Dresner puts it: "Whether or not "five or six" unexplained absences in a semester gets most faculty fired, it is grounds for disciplinary action or dismissal. Whether or not most professors have their citations double-checked by outside and inside reviewers, plagiarism and abuse of sources is grounds for disciplinary action or dismissal." And there it would be nice for the matter to rest. Except that I have a nagging sense that this is, in a way, an intellectual cop-out on my part. For what if Pluss' seedy extracurricular activities had emerged despite the fact that he was a punctilious attendee in the classroom? What would have been the correct thing to do then?
My general feeling is that a teacher can hold whatever private beliefs he likes, and should be free to state them publicly too, so long as they don't interfere with his work as a teacher. There used to be (perhaps still is) an electrical engineering professor at Northwestern who was a Holocaust Denier as a sideline. From my understanding of the case the university was well aware of his unsavory interests but (correctly, I think) defended his academic status on the grounds that he never introduced the subject into his lectures, nor showed any indication that it influenced his teaching. And of course electrical engineering is sufficiently detached from the study of Nazi Europe that this division of ideas is possible to imagine. Pluss was a historian, hence the issue is more complicated. Is it really possible for views as extreme as his to be checked in at the history classroom door? And yet by all accounts his inner mind remained undetected by his students. The post-hoc comments seem unconvincing: "One student, however, was quoted as saying that in hindsight she could see things about his teaching that were unusual, such as an assignment that students write a journal from the perspective of a German soldier during World War II." Hmmm. I can easily imagine proposing a similar assignment myself, which in principle could be read and graded as neutrally as any other. Should that be held against me? Or him?
Pluss was an adjunct, and hence at the bottom of the campus totem-pole, which again makes things a little simpler. Much less justification is needed whether or not to rehire part-time teachers. But the uncomfortable thought remains. As a departmental chairman I would be extremely reluctant to give a position to such a person, even if his skills were excellent and there was no evidence that he allowed his private beliefs to intefere with his professional judgment. And that reluctance is at least partly due to cowardice, because I can just imagine the firestorm of criticism that would envelop him - and me.
UPDATE: A few more thoughts on this from Hugo Schwyzer.
Reading a Neil Postman essay this weekend, The Educationist as Painkiller, first presented as an address in 1987, I found an interesting passage. Postman was making the case that the job of those in education should be combatting stupidity, or balderdash, as he put it. Of the varieties of balderdash, he mentions Pomposity, Earthiness, Euphemism, Word Magic, Sloganeering, Superstition, and - hey - Eichmannism.
Eichmannism is that form of balderdash which accepts as its starting and ending point official definitions, rules, and regulations without regard for the realities of particular situations. The language of Eichmannism is the voice of the organization, which is why it is usually polite, subdued, and even gracious - in a plastic sort of way...Eichmannism is the cool, orderly, cynical language of the bureaucratic mentality aliented from human interests. It is especially dangerous because it is so utterly detached. That means, among other things, that some of the nicest people turn out to be mini-Eichmanns, and that includes most of us.
Sometimes I lie in bed and wonder how unbearable life might become if index cards were not available. When considering which books I’d want on the tired desert isle, I must confess that without index cards I might just give up reading. The index card makes the best sort of bookmark, being slim and sturdy, and possessing the exact amount of white space necessary for brief notes. Afterwards, they are easily stored and categorized. Much better than big pieces of paper floating around the house.
I cannot discover who invented the index card. I suspect it was the wife of a paper-maker. I imagine lots of waste paper lying around the shop and the wife pointing out to her husband that much of it could be salvaged for practical use and sale if it were cut into three by five segments. He got the credit and the profits, of course, but I like thinking he never forgot his wife’s genius and so provided her with an impressive tombstone upon her death, one that immortalized her devotion to him, but conveniently left out specifically mentioning the index card.