Chris Bertram

I saw the second installment (and therefore, confusingly “The first day … “) of Phyllida Lloyd’s _Ring_ for ENO: The Valkyrie , last night. Some of it was rubbish, but other parts were truly splendid, and, as it became more and more splendid as the evening progressed, I was able to leave feeling quite satisfied.

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From the Guardian review of a new book by Regis Debray:

bq. Jeffrey Mehlman has managed to translate from French into an entirely new language, one born dead. It is constructed using English words but the effect is of something almost entirely unlike English. This raises profound questions. What is one to make of a chapter heading like “The Milieu/Medium Deflagration”? How is one to translate the last sentence of that chapter: “That nomadic psycho-object, the unknown masterpiece of a nation’s furniture, would mark the improbable encounter, to the benefit of a God more snobbish than His predecessors, of the custom-made and the ready-to-bear”? The last word is clearly wrong. But should it be “wear” or “bore”?

The philosopher Alan Gewirth has died, according to Jacob Levy over at the Volokh conspiracy . Like Jacob, I’m astonished to learn that Gewirth was 90 years old. I’ll add obituaries to this post as they appear. Washington Post , University of Chigago Press Release .

Amid all the bad news, we should celebrate the fact that in the world’s largest democracy the forces of secularism have triumphed and those of communalism have been defeated. Congress is far from perfect, but it is a great deal better than the alternative. Sonia Gandhi may well become the world’s best Italian prime minister as a result (not that the competition in that field is all that stiff).

Some months ago I bought tickets to this Saturday’s performance of The Valkyrie at English National Opera , having failed to notice that it clashed with the last day of the football season . Not only did it clash, but the first act would begin at half-time. So I faced the prospect of sitting through the incestuous romance of Siegmund and Sieglinde whilst in a state of anxiety about the score at Anfield . Happily, thanks to Southampton third-choice goalkeeper Alan Blayney , I can relax and enjoy myself as nothing now hangs on the Liverpool–Newcastle match. Thanks Alan! Now I only have the club selling-out to the Thai Prime Minister to worry about.

In a famous letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson set out the problem of intergenerational sovereignty :it is as unjust for the dead to impose their laws on the living as it is for one country to impose its laws on another. In both cases, those subject to the laws are being obliged to obey legislation that they had no hand in formulating and have limited opportunity to repeal. As Jefferson points out, later generations may be burdened in all kinds of similar ways by earlier ones. So, for example, they may be held liable for the borrowing of their ancestors. But why should they be any more responsible for the repayment of such debts that the inhabitants of one country are for the repayment of the debts of another?

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Following recommendations from a number of CT readers, I watched Wim Wenders’s beautiful Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) on DVD last night. Ausgezeichnet! (or, maybe, splendid! ). No doubt everyone but me has seen it already, but I don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t, so, by way of recommendation, I’ll just say that some lines from Dennis Potter’s final interview came into my head whilst watching it, and have stayed there. Potter, facing death from cancer, spoke thusly:

bq. I can celebrate life. Below my window there’s an apple tree in blossom. It’s white. And looking at it — instead of saying, ‘Oh, that’s a nice blossom’ — now, looking at it through the window, I see the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be. The nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous. If you see the present tense — boy, do you see it. And boy, do you celebrate it.

I’ve just been over to Electrolite, where Patrick Nielsen Hayden has posted this stunning excerpt from the New York Times :

bq. … the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.

bq. The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country’s criminal justice system.

The article is full of other examples of routine abuse in US prisons, for example:

bq. In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are made to wear women’s pink underwear as a form of humiliation. At Virginia’s Wallens Ridge maximum security prison, new inmates have reported being forced to wear black hoods, in theory to keep them from spitting on guards, and said they were often beaten and cursed at by guards and made to crawl. … [S]ome of the worst abuses have occurred in Texas, [where] guards were allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates as slaves for sex.

A few interesting things to link to in today’s papers. In the Guardian David Lodge writes about Nabokov and there’s an interesting account of how Roman Abramovich and the other Russian oligarchs enriched themselves at the expense of the Russian people. In the Times Matthew Parris explains that he wants Bush re-elected so that neoconservatives won’t be able to claim that their ideas never got a fair trial. And Simon Kuper in the FT tells us why last week’s football occupies his brain more than other, more serious, matters. So far as I can see there is no common thread that unites these various pieces, except for their readability.

There’s a fascinating piece in the Economist about the 17-year cicadas that are about to emerge — in “a plague of biblical proportions” — all over the eastern United States, why they (and their 13-year cousins) have prime-numbered life-cycles, how parasites evolve strategies to match, and other cool stuff. Enjoy!

The UK’s new Sexual Offences Act (2003) came into force this week. This is the law which criminalizes whole swathes of normal behaviour (such as teenagers kissing ). But we’re not supposed to worry about that because the Home Office will issue guidance to the Crown Prosecution Service not to proceed in such cases (and to block any private prosecutions). There’s something disturbing about legislators legislating with the prior intention of issuing guidance not to apply the law, and there’s a lot disturbing about the content. But that isn’t the only remarkable fact. I read the following in a rather good piece in the Independent by John Spencer, Professor of Law at Cambridge:

bq. despite conducting “extensive consultations” and a formal review that consumed £17,500 of public money on research and £31,025 on conferences, the Home Office devised the new law without troubling to obtain or consider any solid information about what is normal in the sex lives of children and young persons.

bq. The review document also contains the following disarming statement: “We also tried to test the opinion of some young people and, at a fairly late stage in the review, had discussions with some Year 10 and Year 11 pupils (aged between 14 and 16) at one school (sadly lack of time meant we could not undertake a wider consultation).”

Despite Spencer’s “despite”, the figure of £48,525 means the Home Office spent _nothing_ on research into this important area. And they only had time to interview a few kids in one school! Unbelievable.

There’s a nice little piece in today's Telegraph about the psychology of visual perception and how we fail to notice all kinds of things because our attention is directed in particular ways (of course conjurors have always exploited this). The article refers to the striking gorilla-suit experiment:

bq. Working with Christopher Chabris at Harvard University, Simons came up with another demonstration that has now become a classic, based on a videotape of a handful of people playing basketball. They played the tape to subjects and asked them to count the passes made by one of the teams.

bq. Around half failed to spot a woman dressed in a gorilla suit who walked slowly across the scene for nine seconds, even though this hairy interloper had passed between the players and stopped to face the camera and thump her chest.

bq. However, if people were simply asked to view the tape, they noticed the gorilla easily. The effect is so striking that some of them refused to accept they were looking at the same tape and thought that it was a different version of the video, one edited to include the ape.

There’s also a link to a page where you can watch the gorilla video . (For that video on its own go here .)

John Sutherland in the Guardian looks back over 40 years in British higher education and tells us what has changed for better and for worse. The goods include the breakthrough of women and the provision of decent coffee; the bads are salary erosion, the PhD as a sine qua non for appointment, overspecialization and worsening staff-student ratios. And in between? Surprisingly, the RAE is on that list.

Just back from a very pleasant evening drinking and chatting with Kieran in the Seven Stars , a Bristol pub where Thomas Clarkson stayed whilst investigating the slave trade in 1787. Meeting Kieran brings my person-to-person encounters with other CTers up to three. No doubt I’ll collect the full set eventually! In testimony to the power of the blogosphere I can reveal that when he picked me up this evening Kieran’s car CD player seemed to me to be defective, but he soon put me right: reading Michael Brooke had inspired him to buy a disc of music by Ligeti.