I felt a sudden disturbance in the Force, as if a rather irritating voice had screamed, and then gone silent forever

Let’s see. Has he ever denounced his mother’s complicity with Hergé?

i always thought the point of owning a newspaper like the times was for murdoch to be able to use its influence for his own ends. that’s basically how he’s always run, say, the australian which sure is a vastly more reactionary/inferior newspaper but which relevantly is also supposedly going behind a paywall soon.

so yeah, don’t anyone tell him the mistake he’s making, basically.

Kamm’s mother had nothing to do with Tintin. She was only involved in Asterix and Obelix. I do wonder though whether Ollivix fell in some magic potion when he was a baby, leading to the strange obsessions and the linguistic pettyfogging.

Oliver Kamm on twitter? Unpossible!

Perhaps Twitter is a better fit – has he ever said anything which should have takent more than 140 characters?

I have a hypothesis. In the far, far future, a time war is being waged. (I suspect this because, if it were capitalized, like Time War, then it would be fictional).The problem is, it is not our universe’s future. We are a scratch pad universe. Certain things are tried out, in a Or(wells)ian manner, and results are flagged with the key word “nugatory” which for obvious reasons doesn’t attract much attention.

Dateline London: Oliver Kamm is now officially behind the times.

@Irrelephant, great name paranomastics there. Even if all the online news zines charged for content, I would still have wikipedia, which is far more illuminating and entertaining.

I wonder if there will be any hacktivism regarding this decision. o_O

Bruce Baugh,

What? Who is Reagan?

One thing I’ve never understood about the free access/paywall debate is why the paywall faction want to protect content for all time. News is, by definition, recent. I can understand why the Times wishes to charge for readers, but it could also make everything older than, say, two weeks free. No one is going to buy a two week old newspaper anyway. And very few people keep newspapers. But it is useful to know what some politicians said, for example, during the election campaign, and to be able to compare it to what is being said now. Also, it’s useful to know what columnists said about recent events. It’s useful information to know how often certain columnists repeat themselves (see Simon Jenkins, yet again, calling science a religion), and whether they made any ridiculously confident predictions. (There was some guy, used to write for the Guardian, surname put him at the top of every alphabetical list… if only I could remember his name.)

Newspapers are, after all, supposed to be reliable. There was that recent case about two teenagers who were supposed to have died after taking the drug popularly known as ‘Miaow Miaow’. Many papers, including I think the Times (though I do not intend to register to check) ran this story. Strangely, the drug in question turned out to be so lethal that the boys had died without ever having taken it, and you can’t get any more lethal than that.

This is a rather long-winded way of saying that I think that Michael Ezra has a valid point, in a sense. It is a shame that the Times paywall will hide from casual searches Oliver Kamm’s Chomsky obsession, because it will also hide contemporaneous reviews, which may reveal strengths and weaknesses in a reviewer.

Kamm is indeed on Twitter. I even follow him. He has yet to call me a stalker – unlike Nick Cohen who has – for the moment? – deleted his account. I meant to tell you elsewhere Dan, but Twitter is great fun, if extraordinarily time-wasting. The Times staff appear to have been prodded to take up Twitter (so many of their writers have joined recently that some co-ordination should be suspected, at least). It’s particularly nice to see Harry’s Place represented by an old Etonian while they, ahem, condemn the coalition.

The mock-obituary might be too easy (and too limited) a target. Can I propose something I’d meant to save for Aaro Watch, to wit a competition for Kamm obituaries of great historical figures in politics and the arts? I’d have loved to have read his Beethoven obit, for instance (…admirer of dictators…his only opera an artistic and commercial failure…unhappy personal circumstances…a wasted life).

What the hell is wrong with people like Phil?

Sense of humour failure? (Possibly mine, although that’s not where I’d start.)

When the geriatric Stalinist Pete Seeger was wheeled out to perform for the great and the smug at Obama’s inauguration, it was no surprise to find him croaking out the words of “This Land Is Your Land”, Woody Guthrie’s loutish apologia for trespass and vagrancy. Admittedly, the bums whose grubby lifestyle Guthrie celebrated would have been out of place on the White House lawn, just as they would have found no place in the regimented utopias of which Seeger dreamed. But Guthrie did have something in common with both the well-to-do Communist folksinger and the urbane lawyer in the White House: when it came to radical politics, they were and are all no more than tourists.

Certainly Guthrie’s work was not always marked by the radical posturing which so endeared his work to the Obama crowd. Guthrie it was who took his sympathy with the white working man to the point of closing his weekly radio shows with a catchy number called “Nigger Blues”. (I apologise for the use of the term; it is a pity that Guthrie’s legion of admirers seem not to feel the need to do likewise).

Of course, not all of Guthrie’s huge output was as repellent as this; much was simply insubstantial fluff, and has been rightly forgotten. One typical effusion, quarried from Guthrie’s papers for dubious reasons after his death, is titled “Ingrid Bergman” and is in essence a masturbatory fantasy; Guthrie invites the actress to climb his penis, which he likens to a volcano.

But self-deprecation was never Guthrie’s strong suit. Those few who saw Alice’s Restaurant, his son Arlo’s forgettable venture into film, will remember how ruthlessly Woody upstaged his son, even from his hospital bed…

…enough already. The trouble with this stuff is that it’s not hard – you can actually do it about anyone.

Myles SG, we need to deconstruct the joke. Oliver Kamm’s mother translated Asterix, something he mentions from time to time. (She did so very well, adding jokes.) Kamm is also notable for denouncing people for associations they have not publicly apologised for. I can’t recollect Kamm ever condemning someone for their parents’ political affiliations, but Steven Poole said it all better than I can.

First off, I am very sorry. That flew right over my head. And secondly, my head now hurts from all this stuff. In fact, it still hurts from having to read Asterix in French class.

By the way, OT, but does anyone wonder, as I do, why we in the Anglophone world have not produced anything as good as Tintin? The closest in terms of quality juvenile reading I can think of are the Wind in the Willows, Beatrix Potter, and the like. All of which are pre-1914.

(I remember reading the Wind in the Willows in primary school, and thinking, this author is awesome! And went to the book jacket to look and see if what other novels he wrote so I can go and read them. And then finding that it was published in 1908.)

By the way, OT, but does anyone wonder, as I do, why we in the Anglophone world have not produced anything as good as Tintin? The closest in terms of quality juvenile reading I can think of are the Wind in the Willows, Beatrix Potter, and the like. All of which are pre-1914.

Richmal Crompton, Just William. (And, like Tintin, the series was put together over several decades in the middle of the twentieth century, both pre- and post-war.)

“Why does everyone know who ‘Oliver Kamm’ is?”

Daniel’s posts are often among my favourites, but the Oliver Kamm/David Aaronovitch threads do make me feel like I’m sitting next to a table full of Oxford grads continuing their arguments from the JCR. And it’s not a feeling I enjoy.

While I did not know of Oliver Kamm (is he a relative of Willie Kamm?) I propose the following short Obits for his blog

I was somebody.
Who, is no business
Of yours.

I had a blog like none other,
but now nobody will read that mother

Asterix and Chomsky
were the bombski
A tomb now suffices the blog for which the world was not enoughski

does anyone wonder, as I do, why we in the Anglophone world have not produced anything as good as Tintin? The closest in terms of quality juvenile reading I can think of are the Wind in the Willows, Beatrix Potter, and the like. All of which are pre-1914.

Carl Barks’ Disney comics.

Roald Dahl was on my list too. Peter Dickinson, Alan Garner, Rosemary Sutcliff, Joan Aiken. I loved Tintin, but not above all others. Leon Garfield. And to be honest, my discovery of Tintin overlapped with my still reading Dr Seuss.

Holes, by Louis Sachar (1998), is a children’s novel that is politically aware, daringly experimental, funny, suspenseful, and deeply satisfying. If you haven’t read it you are missing something unique.

Sir Pterry?

Dave Weeden, 06.26.10 at 9:14 pm (or does the comment system change timestamps as well as numbers?): “How doth the little busy bee” is early eighteenth century.

There are some great 19th century children’s books (Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edith Nesbit), but yes, in general children’s books have got better since 1914 (read “The Wide, Wide World”, which was the big seller of late Victorian times, to get an idea): Ursula Le Guin, Philippa Pearce (“Tom’s Midnight Garden”, “The Minnow on the Say”), Catherine Storr (“Marianne Dreams” and the Clever Polly series), Jan Mark (“Thunder and Lightings” etc), Diana Wynne Jones.

As my old friend Fred Rift would say “Gor blimey!”. From Kamm to his mother, to cartoon books she translated, to other cartoon books that she didn’t translate, to children’s literature in general.

The first time I encountered Oliver Kamm’s name, it was in the dedication to Henry Treece’s “The Dream-Time”; published 1967, posthumously, with a sorrowful post-script by Rosemary Sutcliffe, and typically powerful and terrifying illustrations by Charles Keeping.

I was seven and had no idea who he was, obviously. The way things turned out, I wish it had stayed this way.

Treece, Sutcliffe and Keeping should all be added to these lists.

#46- I feel a fight coming on.
Look, the statement that no one writing in English has written for children as well as Herge is not up for serious contention. It’s just a ridiculous statement. Sticking to post-WWI, off the top of my head I can think of Laura Ingalls Wilder, E.B. White, Louis Sachar, Lynne Reid Banks, Beverly Cleary, Norton Juster, David Almond, Susan Cooper, Jean Craighead George. And these are just authors I happen to know.

Not to mention that Tintin is not, actually, all that good.

By the way, OT, but does anyone wonder, as I do, why we in the Anglophone world have not produced anything as good as Tintin? The closest in terms of quality juvenile reading I can think of are the Wind in the Willows, Beatrix Potter, and the like.

It’s because we are too supportive of Israel.

(yes, I’ll match that troll and raise you ten)

“Wind in the Willows, Beatrix Potter, and the like” <– what does "the like" even mean in this phrase?

Animal Farm?

“Humans will eat anything by Beatrix Potter, but they will not eat anything by Kenneth Grahame”. – Alan Coren

ajay, you are killing, you are just killing. I thought #51 would be the end of this thread, but no, you come back with #55! and 57!! one smashing overhand after another!

Hence A.Coren (as usual) proved less funny than he thinks he is BY SCIENCE.