Crooked Timber

Scott had a delightful column over at IHE last week, demonstrating to tyroes like Matt Seligman and Ezra Klein how you really show off your bookish erudition to the world (by affecting, of course not to be at all interested in what the world thinks of your erudition; see further Chris on the cultural politics of ironic gnomes) .
Continue reading “Aspirational taste”

A bit of random surfing just took me over to Ken Worpole’s site , where I was very pleased to learn that his wonderful book of essays Dockers and Detectives has been republished by Five Leaves Publications (Verso did the first edition, back in 1983). Dockers and Detectives is one of those rare books that not only entertains and informs you, but also opens up new paths of literary discovery. I think that I’d probably have got round to Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain without Worpole, but not as quickly and without seeing their influence on French existentialism. I’m not so sure I would have discovered Alexander Baron’s From the City, From the Plough or Stuart Hood’s wartime memoir Pebbles From My Skull, though. Worpole discusses both in his chapter on the popular literature of the Second World War, along with other works such as Rex Warner’s dystopian The Aerodrome. Recommended.

I’m just back from Arizona (big thanks to Kieran and Laurie btw), where I had a great time. My purpose in going there was to deliver a paper on “public reason and immigration” and a couple of conversations I had on the trip concerned how some Americans see the European issue. In both of them (one with a grad student, one with the guy next to me on a plane) my interlocutor referred, in almost identical terms, to Europe’s problem with immigration by “fundamentalist Muslims”, and seemed to believe that this was an accurate depiction of the Islamic population of Europe. Meanwhile, back home, my partner had arranged for a Muslim colleague to accompany her to watch Bristol thump Stade Francais in the Heineken cup. Needless to say, the woman in question is about as distant as it is possible to be from the Muslims who feature in the imagination of my two conversation partners. At Heathrow, I bought a copy of the Guardian to read on the bus, and was reminded by Ronan Bennett’s excellent article, that such blanket stereotyping is also practised by many people here in the UK, who don’t have the excuse of lack of familiarity. When the stereotyping is done by a major British cultural and literary figure and is mixed with a strong dose of sadistic revenge fantasty, it is all the more deplorable. But as Bennett points out, Martin Amis has largely got away with it and a lot of the commentary has been more critical of Terry Eagleton for calling him the bigot that he is. (Chris Brooke at the Virtual Stoa also linked the other day to some more on-the-money kicking of Amis, in which the great writer’s grasp of the history of technology is examined.)

Josh Glenn, who I interviewed last week about his book Taking Things Seriously, may have solved the puzzle of what “little nameless object” is produced by the factories that secured the family fortune of a wastrel in Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors.

Normally this would merit a short item in Notes and Queries or The Explicator. But in this case, the proposed solution to “the Woollett Question” appears as an article at Slate.

Next challenge: Figure out what the stolen “little object” was in Norman Mailer’s Barbary Shore.

Well, it’s been months and months since my last contribution to this fine blog, but this time, folks, I have a real excuse: the dog ate my August, and it’s all Janet’s fault. Janet, you may recall from months and months ago, is married to me. We learned in mid-July that Janet would need surgery to keep a couple of bones in her neck from pressin’ on her spinal cord. Those bones have now been put back in their proper places, and Janet’s recovering the way people do when they’re told that their surgery has been a “complete success.” (That’s how the neurosurgeon felt about it; now we gradually find out what the patient thinks.) As for me, the minute I learned the surgery would take place on August 28 and that Jamie would have no summer camp in August, I realized that I would very likely have to spend every spare waking second of my summer trying to finish a draft of the book I’ve been talking about for the past couple of years, The Left At War: The Totalitarian Temptation from Hume to Human League. So I made my apologies to my fellow CTers via “electronic” mail, and let them know that I probably wouldn’t be posting again for quite some time. And though I know this will mortify Janet no end, I thought I’d offer CT readers a closeup of the X-ray that started the whole thing:

Continue reading “Everybody wang chung tonight”

I have very little time for blogging at the moment, so I’m going to abandon a plan I had to write an extended post about Byron Rogers’s The Man who Went into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas . Thomas, referred to by Larkin as “Arsewipe Thomas” was, as most of you probably know, one of the very best poets in the English language in the twentieth century. He was also an Anglican vicar in a Wales where most of the population was chapel and a fierce advocate for the Welsh language despite speaking a variant so academic that his parishioners struggled to understand him. He sometimes refused to speak English at all (except through an interpreter), yet he wouldn’t let his own family learn Welsh and couldn’t write a decent poem in his adopted language. His son tells of being packed off to boarding school in the hated England and of listening to sermons in which Thomas denounced fridges and vacuum cleaners as the paraphenalia of modernity. He barely showed any affection for his talented artist wife but after he death composed supremely tender love poems. With her he lived a life of dour austerity in sub-arctic temperatures, but then he remarried a fox-hunting reactionary and was seen queuing for lottery tickets at Tescos. He was a priest with distinctly unorthodox views about the nature of the deity (of whom he had an almost Newtonian conception). He carried out the duties of a vicar with conventional conscientiousness, but felt awkward talking to parishioners and once vaulted over the churchyard wall after a funeral service to avoid conversation with the bereaved. He had a reputation for grim humourlessness with some, but at least one person compared him to Lenny Bruce and Ken Dodd. And then there’s his feeling for nature and landscape … I could go on and on about this extraordinary man with many many personas and a capacity for repeated personal reinvention. But you should buy the book, you really should.

Kip Manley directs us to a very worthwhile discussion of the ‘intentional fallacy’ and ‘bad readers’, Helen Vendler and Plato’s “Euthyphro”. I’ll just dunk you in the middle: Continue reading “The New Skrullicism”

I have an essay (.pdf) in the latest issue of The Common Review, on Harry Potter and my younger son’s adventures in the world of Hogwarts. But never mind me—the real news is that this is apparently the week for Azar Nafisi Football, Round Two!

On Monday, as I returned from my brief family vacation, I was greeted by the arrival of the latest issue of the American Quarterly; its lead essay, by John Carlos Rowe, is entitled “Reading Reading Lolita in Tehran in Idaho.” If you’ll recall Hamid Dabashi’s critique of Nafisi from way back in ‘06 (elaborated later in the year in this interview in Z), Rowe writes, as he explains at the outset, “to work out the scholarly and historical terms that are often lacking in Dabashi’s more strictly political analysis.”

“Nevertheless,” he adds,

even as I wish to distinguish my approach from Dabashi’s, I want to agree at the outset with his conclusions. Although I do not think that there is a direct relationship between Nafisi’s work and U.S. plans for military action in Iran, I do think Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran represents the larger effort of neoconservatives to build the cultural and political case against diplomatic negotiations with the present governmentof Iran.

I’ll get back to Rowe’s essay in a moment, but first, here’s yesterday’s arrival in the mail: the Common Review, with my little essay– as well as an essay by Firoozeh Papan-Matin, defending Nafisi from Dabashi! Comme c’est curieux, comme c’est bizarre, quelle coincidence!

Continue reading “I’ve got mail”

And to imagine there are people who think the Interweb cannot contribute to the advancement of human knowledge…

How many times have I seen the Bugs Bunny cartoon in which Bugs squares off against a baseball team called the Gashouse Gorillas? And how many times have I taken in the joke advertisements lining the walls of the baseball stadium?

So why did it take me this long to notice that one of the ads is for something called Filboid Studge? I knew the Warner Brothers animators at Termite Terrace were a smart bunch, but extra kudos are in order for the gag writer who managed to work in a nod to Saki, aka Hector Hugh Munro.

I never would have caught this Edwardian allusion, helpfully glossed in suitable detail by Steven Hart.

I teach my last class of the semester tomorrow, and what a semester it’s been. In the four months since I gave up full-time, long-form solo blogging, I have put my extra time to good use: freed from the demands of daily blog posting and comment-section maintenance, I found time to work out every day for 90 minutes, meditate for an hour, cook dinner nightly, and brush up on my French. As a result, I am fit and sane and centered, enjoying a balanced diet and the consolations of the passé simple.

Actually, that’s not true. And Bourdieu didn’t really appear in Slap Shot, either. This semester, neither did I: my Nittany Hockey League teams had 28 games scheduled this semester. I made it to ten of those. I worked out once, maybe twice a week. I last meditated in 1999. I last cooked in 1994. (Janet and I have taken to asking each other, “whom shall we dial tonight?”) And my French is just as abysmal as it ever was.

So what happened to all that time?

Continue reading “Time check”

In honour of International Pixel-stained Technopeasant Day, Charlie Stross is giving away his novella(??? I – never figured out the difference between novellas, novelettes etc myself) Missile Gap for thems that wants to download it. I’ve put it on my iRex Iliad (which I promise to write a proper review of after the end of semester crunch) for consumption on an upcoming plane trip. Other good stuff is available for free on the technopeasant page from Jo Walton (the main instigator), Sarah Monette etc.

Just before Christmas, I picked up a copy of Roseanna, the first volume of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s Martin Beck series. I’ve just finished the final volume The Terrorists. Having read the first, I had to read them all. Since the reprint schedule wasn’t going to get me them all quickly enough, I scoured Hay-on-Wye for volumes and then the internet. In the 1960s and 1970s Sjowall and Wahloo, husband and wife, collaborated on the sequence of ten detective stories set (mainly) in Sweden. Though we at CT sometimes Scandinavia as some kind of benign alternative to North American capitalism, the far-leftish Sjowall and Wahloo had a much more negative take. The Swedish welfare state that appears in the novels is a grotesque fraud perpetrated on the working class and they use the device of detective fiction to show a reality of desperation, poverty, isolation, alienation, exploitation, and criminality. But the novels are hardly exercises in agitprop . If they were, they’d be a pretty poor read. Instead, their brutally cynical vision of Swedish society simply tinges the whole and emerges through the facts and the occasional acid comment.
Continue reading “Death in Sweden”