Crooked Timber

Via Lindsey, I see that Christianity Today has an interesting interview with Philip Pullman; the extended interview is at Peter Chattaway’s blog here. Well worth reading. My favourite quote is the same as Lindsey’s (no doubt because I can identify with it pretty well, and it helps explain why I liked HDM so much; though my atheism is more of the low-CofE-veering-on-Methodism kind):

My answer to that would be that I was brought up in the Church of England, and whereas I’m an atheist, I’m certainly a Church of England atheist, and for the matter of that a 1662 Book of Common Prayer atheist. The Church of England is so deeply embedded in my personality and my way of thinking that to remove it would take a surgical operation so radical that I would probably not survive it.

This is awesome.

For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon’s unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid “illegal restorers” set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building’s famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves. “When we had finished the repairs, we had a big debate on whether we should let the Panthéon’s officials know or not,” said Lazar Klausmann, a spokesperson for the Untergunther. “We decided to tell them in the end so that they would know to wind the clock up so it would still work.

“The Panthéon’s administrator thought it was a hoax at first, but when we showed him the clock, and then took him up to our workshop, he had to take a deep breath and sit down.”

Myself and the wife have been watching the second series of Heroes, which is finally beginning to pick up after a slow start (although the spunky cheerleader needs to lose the drippy boyfriend immediately ). One of the subplots plays out, strangely enough, among the Cork criminal underclass, or at least the show producer’s idea of same. The accents of these purported Corkonian ne’er-do-wells are nothing short of atrocious. Perhaps it’s understandable that there’s nothing at all resembling an actual Cork accent to be found among them; that might be a bit much to inflict on unsuspecting American television viewers. But there’s not much in the way of Irish accents, full stop. One fella who thinks that Irish people speak like Scotsmen with adenoids, another with standard mid-Atlantic intonations, and a British actress who at least seems to have heard Irish people talking once upon a time, even if her ability to imitate them slips in and out of focus. The nadir was reached when one of the actors pronounced “Slainte” as “slah-in-che” on this week’s show (all they needed to do to get this one right was to do a bloody Google search). This is all quite unnecessary – I can testify from a considerable personal acquaintance that unemployed Real Irish Actors with Real Irish Accents are not a commodity in short supply.

That said, the problem goes both ways. We also recently saw the first episode of Spooks (MI5 on this side of the Atlantic), a BBC production, which has an abortion clinic bomber whose purported Southern US accent had to be heard to be believed. My wife didn’t even realize that it was meant to be an American accent until I told her (a later episode’s subplot concerning the vast amounts of WTO cash subsidizing the Russian economy did little to add to my estimate of the show’s commitment to verisimilitude). So anyway, I thought that there might be some entertainment value in a thread on Bad TV/movie Accents that you have heard (and good ones too, if you like; the best Hollywood Irish accent by far that I’ve heard was Brad Pitt in Snatch – it approached a kind of incomprehensible Platonic ideal of dense Midlands guttural).

A (slightly ponderous) documentary on a set of rare sound recordings of British and Irish POWs from World War I. First recordings are just after 10 minutes in. I liked the way the speed of the shellac recording is calibrated by matching an A note on the last groove to the A from a tuning fork. At 23” or so there’s a recording of a man telling the parable of the Prodigal Son, where the difference between the ‘a’ in father and the ‘a’ in man is quite striking. At about 35” there’s an nice example of the problems associated with interpreting material like this: another recording of the Prodigal Son story (a set text for the German academics who were interested in English accents) is played to a woman who knew the solider speaking, with interesting results.

About a month before their wedding my friends told me they have a region-free DVD player, so I lent them Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? I hope they understood that it was not an attempt to get the wedding cancelled, but rather an expression of confidence that they were doing the right thing. It is hard for me to believe that my parents allowed me to see Whatever Happened when it was first on TV, but they did, and it provided a vision of adult life and, eventually, marriage, that only dissipated when I finally decided to marry myself. The writing and acting are both pitch-perfect in the first series, which narrates the lead up to Bob and Thelma’s wedding. Bob is torn between Thelma, his upwardly gazing (but not necessarily upwardly-mobile) fiancee, and Terry, his laddish, feckless and determinedly working-class (apart from the working bit) childhood friend.

Two things that struck me watching it again, recently, were confirmed by the one member of the couple who watched it religiously (and didn’t, I should add, call off the wedding, which was absolutely lovely!)

Continue reading “Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?”

Douglas Adams really wasn’t a good writer of books. Even the first entry in Hitchhiker’s Guide depends entirely on his ideas, not on his writing. He wrote for TV and radio, and for radio best. Fans will want, then, to listen to the BBC adaptation of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (with Harry Enfield in the lead). First episode should stay online until Tuesday night.

Tim Lambert has some good, clean fun with Mark Steyn’s strange notions about Hollywood hygiene. (via Yglesias.) But then I flip to the NY Times and read that the bidet is finally coming to the US:

Although Americans have long shied away from conventional bidets, which are common in other countries, and the newer bidet seats, at least two major companies, Kohler and Toto, expect the seat to overcome that resistance eventually.

Proving once again that you can’t spell commodity fetishism without the ‘commode’. This calls out for something – not as beat your head against the basin stupid as Steyn; a microtrendy David Brooks column. Something wise and telling about bidet liberals vs. flyover country, do-it-yourself sons of the soil; of left-coasters who like sipping lattes, hands free, while “a remote-controlled retractable wand that spouts oscillating jets of well-aimed aerated water and a dryer that emits warm air” do the necessary. Some sort of ceramic sequel to Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital. Something faintly superior, yet self-deprecatingly alarmist, possibly involving clever yet oddly meaningless puns on ‘day’.

I recently visited the British museum for the first time. The very little I saw really was astonishing. I found it surprisingly moving, in fact – especially the Rosetta Stone, for whatever reason. But despite the sense of amazement, I also had the gnawing and depressing feeling that the last 3500 years of human history really just boils down to one damn war after another. Another (related) feeling was the more inchoate discomfort with how all that stuff managed to arrive in London.

In chapter 8 of Cosmopolitanism, Kwame Anthony Appiah asks “Whose Culture Is It, Anyway?” He points to an ambiguity in the term “culture.” Sometimes it refers to artifacts – “whatever people make and invest with significance through the exercise of their human creativity.” Other times it refers to “the group from whose conventions the object derives its significance.” He struggles with the relationship between these two senses of the term – specifically with the question of the return of ancient cultural artifacts to people who claim them as their “cultural patrimony”.

Appiah has lots of sensible and interesting things to say on the issue. He holds that it is “a perfectly reasonable property rule that where something is dug up and nobody can establish an existing claim on it, the government gets to decide what to do with it.” But the government should think of itself as a trustee “for humanity”. This cosmopolitan perspective breaks any kind of special tie to geographic location. “However self-serving it may seem, the British Museum’s claim to be a repository of the heritage not of Britain but of the world seems to me exactly right.”

But he also quotes Major Baden-Powell (founder of the Boy Scouts), who after looting the palace of the Asante King Kofi Karikari in 1874 1895 [thanks, rea – see comment 14.] wrote: “There could be no more interesting, no more tempting work than this. To poke about in a barbarian king’s palace, whose wealth has been reported very great, was enough to make it so. Perhaps one of the most striking features about it was that the work of collecting the treasures was entrusted to a company of British soldiers, and that it was done most honestly and well, without a single case of looting.” Appiah obviously recognizes this as theft, and wants a negotiated restitution, but this is because “the property rights that were trampled upon in these cases flow from laws that I think are reasonable. I am not for sending every object ‘home.’ … I actually want museums in Europe to be able to show the riches of the society they plundered in the years when my grandfather was a young man … Because perhaps the greatest of the many ironies of the sacking of Kumasi in 1874 is that it deprived my hometown of a collection that was, in fact, splendidly cosmopolitan.”

There certainly is something very attractive about the ideal of a grand cosmopolitan museum, whether in London or Kumasi. But I just couldn’t shake the thought that most of the artifacts were taken with an attitude that Britain – as opposed to the world – was entitled to them.

Via a slightly ticked-off Max Sawicky comes this ranking of economics blogs, in which (like MaxSpeak) Crooked Timber does not feature. The author remarks,

Only genuine economics blogs are included. … [and later, in a comment] By genuine, I meant not spam blogs or useless stock tips blogs, and not blogs that claim to be about economics but are really about politics (there are quite a few of those).

Usually, in the U.S., the key test of whether one is a real economist is a simple credential: you must have a Ph.D in economics. Choice of substantive topic certainly can’t be the discriminating factor, as is made clear by the position of the Freakonomics blog at the very top of the list. But by my count, we have at least as many Economics Ph.Ds writing here at CT as several of the blogs on this Top 10 list, and more than at least one of them.

If I were a cynical person—which of course I am not—I might say that the dividing line between what’s “really” economics and what’s “really” politics is itself something of a political question. (As Abba Lerner remarked, an economic transaction is a solved political problem.) Perhaps we often see instances where I hold policy positions informed by scientific economics whereas you are a mere advocate, pushing a political line. There was a pretty entertaining example on Mankiw’s blog the other week.

Anyway, on the measure used, Crooked Timber would be fourth on the list, if only the likes of John or Daniel or Ingrid (whose Ph.D was supervised by someone or other) could be thought of as having an informed point of view about economics.

Update: Aaron, the list compiler, comments below and is maybe a bit nicer than this somewhat irritable post merits. I think it was the “genuine economics” comment that set me off.

Uncle Zip (aka M. John Harrison).

Reading Benjamin R Barber’s Consumed: How markets corrupt children, infantilize adults, and swallow ctizens whole, & invincibly reminded of some of the weird contortions Thomas de Zengotita (Mediated: How the media shape your life and the way you live in it) put himself through to avoid looking as if he was saying what he was so obviously saying, I determined to write a book of cultural criticism of my own, to be called Nuanced: How the contemporary left has been forced into hypocrisy, temporising & doublespeak by the fear that no one would otherwise publish, buy or read its books of cultural criticism. Damned if he does & damned if he doesn’t in a culture that simply won’t be criticised, Barber explains why this can’t actually be described as a form of soft censorship proceeding from what unstreamlined old lefties would have called f**** c************. Not a bad thing, because it forces him to find a new way of (not) saying it, & books like Consumed–unable to point the finger at their own potential readership for fear of losing it–survive the market only on their ability to confect neologisms & catchwords, presumably in imitation of the business bestsellers & aspirational texts which they don’t actually want to be seen to be contradicting.

When I’ve finished Nuanced I’ll move on to Fucked.

August is the time for our annual household argument about Jesus Christ Superstar. We’re all fans (apart from #3 whose tastes are not yet his own), but disagree about its meaning. Before elaborating on the disagreement I should make a preemptive strike against two charges – the charge of liking Andrew Lloyd Webber (can’t stand anything else he’s done, not even Joseph, which I had always thought I liked until hearing it recently) and the charge of snobbery that response naturally prompts (I’m a snob about some things, no doubt, but when it comes to culture I revel in my lower-middle-browness).

The disagreement is basically this. My wife thinks that JCS is fundamentally anti-Christian, because it presents Judas as the most sympathetic character, and Jesus as vain and rather directionless. I disagree – Judas is, indeed, presented with the maximum sympathy compatible with Christianity, but ultimately his failing is a lack of trust in a power and mystery that is beyond his understanding. Jesus? Well, when I watch the movie (a very good deal at the moment, more on that later), and even when I listen to the soundtrack, I can sort of see her point. But my reading of Jesus Christ Superstar was a response not to the movie or soundtrack, but to the original concept recording.

Continue reading “Ian Gillan Superstar”

From time to time, I think of winnowing down and revising my published work into a collection of essays. And then kicks in the memory of having a player in literary publishing in New York (fully “made,” as they say in the Mafia) tell me, in the tone one would use in explaining things to a child, “You can’t publish a book of essays until you are somebody.”

Well, now I’ll keep in mind the example of John Emerson, whose writings appear at Idiocentrism and who regularly intervenes in the CT comments section. He has launched the Éditions le Real imprint with a book of his poems and a volume of essays.
Continue reading “The Miscellany is a Kind of Book”