Chris Bertram

I’m just back from a trip which included a visit to Manchester for “a conference to honour the academic career of Norman Geras”:http://les1.man.ac.uk/government/whatsnew/manceptconference.html . Chris Brooke of The Virtual Stoa “asks”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_03_01_archive.html#107920404047110697 how it went. Very well indeed, I think. I gave a paper in the morning on the relationship between Marx and Rousseau, Ian Kershaw gave a most interesting paper on the singularity of the Holocaust, Shane O’Neill spoke about Richard Rorty and Simon Caney about the concept of a crime against humanity. The discussion was all very friendly and civilised and I got the impression that “Norm”:http://normblog.typepad.com/ enjoyed the event (though he hasn’t blogged about it yet). Anyway, thanks to Norm and Hillel and the other folks in Manchester for inviting me: it was an honour and a pleasure.

In a disproportionate and heavy-handed response to a specific problem, the University of Birmingham (UK) has banned staff from hosting personal web pages (including blogs) on their systems. “The Guardian has the story”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/administration/story/0,9860,1166989,00.html . And staff at Birmingham have “a campaign”:http://web.bham.ac.uk/web_campaign/ to defend their right to host personal material.

Below the fold is a request for someone to dig out something Marx-related from their university library for me.

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Thanks to “Michael Brooke”:http://michaelbrooke.com/ , I’ve been reading “Adam Yoshida”:http://www.adamyoshida.com/ ‘s surreal rantings on and off for the past few weeks. They really are marvellous, although “today’s speculation about whether John Kerry was a KGB sleeper”:http://www.adamyoshida.com/2004_03_01_archive.html#107872548628430079 may in fact be a coded message that Yoshida himself is a deep-cover satirist for the left. Sample quote:

bq. If one picture emerged of George W. Bush, in 1970, of raising his arm in what vaguely appeared to be a Nazi salute, the media would cover it for weeks. Why, then, has no one in the mainstream media probed John Kerry’s ties to an evil which, at the very least, is the equal of Nazism?

Why indeed? And why doesn’t “TechCentralStation”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/index.html hire this guy?

I’m back from seeing the “ENO production of The Rhinegold”:http://www.eno.org/whatson/full.php?performancekey=18 (sung in English). I should say, before uttering a word of criticism, that I enjoyed myself and wouldn’t disrecommend the experience at all. But, that said, this was a pretty weird staging. The opening scene takes place in a pole-dancing club, with dodgy businessman Alberich being teased by dancers in turquoise pvc mini-dresses. Alberich is sung by an Alexi Sayle lookalike (Andrew Shore) who does an excellent job of portraying the sexually-frustrated dwarf. The scene opens, though, with Alberich being encouraged to enter the club by property-developer Wotan and his PR-man and Mr Fixit, Loge. This addition, needless to say, has no textual warrant and, if taken seriously, would amount to a major distortion of the plot.

Scene two takes place in Wotan’s apartment and opens with Wotan in the bath. The dynamic between Wotan and Fricka may not have been modelled on Tony and Carmela Soprano (or JR and Sue Ellen), but it is hard to think that such comparisons weren’t somewhere in producer Phyllida Lloyd’s mind. The giants are played as construction engineers who brandish their plastic-bound copies of the contract as they demand payment for their work on Valhalla. Donner wears trainers and wields a baseball bat, Loge prefers subtler methods: you get the picture. One of the problems of staging such a modernized production is that it interferes with the suspension of disbelief. If everyone is dressed up in fantasy costumes then it is easier to take seriously the idea of Freia as an object of lust even if she is somewhat hefty. But if everything else looks like Dallas or the Sopranos then a Freia who doesn’t fit with the conventions of those dramas is incongruous.

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Belle Waring has “a brilliant lampoon of utopian libertarian discourse”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/if_wishes_were_.html .

Seumas Milne has “an article in today’s Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1163360,00.html plugging a book of his and remembering the British miners’ strike of 1984–5. Like Milne I was an active supporter of that strike, collecting for striking miners and offering as much propaganda and political support as I could. I worked for Verso, the publisher of Milne’s book, at the time and we produced a special on the strike called _Digging Deeper_ in record time: going from copy to bound volume in about two weeks.

So my memories are still pretty vivid and I think I’m in a position to assess the claims Milne makes. With his general characterization of the strike as being self-defence against a class war fought by a vengeful Tory government, I have no quarrel. Likewise with what he says of the police at the time. Since the strike we’ve had to listen to no end of sermons about “insurrection” and the assertion of the “rule of law”. There was no rule of law. The police and the government and the courts acted violently and cynically against the miners and their communities: men were attacked and beaten, their freedom of movement was restricted, they were not given fair hearings by magistrates and courts. I could go on, but those who know know and those who don’t want to will not be persuaded by further extending the list of arbitrary and violent state actions. The government had decided to break the NUM, was going to apply all necessary resources to doing so and could do so untrammeled by worries about legality.

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“John Holbo and Belle Waring”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/ have now finished their week of guest blogging with us, so I think it appropriate to say how much fun it was to have them around. With reflections on Sesame Street, the English murder-mystery, Chinese-Italian (or should that be Italian-Chinese) cuisine from Belle and on the changing experience of blogging, the FMA and conservatives in academia from John — we at CT have certainly done well from having them on board. (You can check out those posts again by clicking on the little squiggly thing next to “Guest Bloggers” on the LH sidebar.) I hope we’ll be seeing them again some time soon, but in the meantime be sure to visit their blog regularly.

bq. “The launch of his Kulturkampf has been a blitzkrieg.”

“Sidney Blumenthal”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1161399,00.html trips over the “fascist octopus”:http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html in a polemic against G.W. Bush.

I’m off to see “Das Rheingold”:http://www.metopera.org/synopses/rheingold.html on Saturday (or, rather, since the production is by “English National Opera”:http://www.eno.org/home/index.php , “The Rhinegold”:http://www.eno.org/whatson/full.php?performancekey=18 ). The anticipation of this set me off googling for a hilarious passage from a Jerry Fodor review of Steven Pinker. I’d have liked to have found the whole thing, but the money quote is there in this “review”:http://www.yorku.ca/christo/papers/Fodor-review.htm of a Fodor’s “In Critical Condition”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/026256128X/junius-20 :

bq. The literature of psychological Darwinism is full of what appear to be fallacies of rationalization: arguments where the evidence offered that an interest in Y is the motive for a creature’s behavior is primarily that an interest in Y would rationalize the behavior if it were the creature’s motive. Pinker’s book provides so many examples that one hardly knows where to start.… [H]ere’s Pinker on why we like fiction: “Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them. What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother?” Good question. Or what if it turns out that, having just used the ring that I got by kidnapping a dwarf to pay off the giants who built me my new castle, I should discover that it is the very ring that I need in order to continue to be immortal and rule the world? It’s important to think out the options betimes, because a thing like that could happen to anyone and you can never have too much insurance. (p. 212)

UPDATE: Thanks to commenter C.P. Shaw. The whole Fodor article, which I’d failed to find using Google is “available on the LRB website”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n02/fodo01_.html .

Head over to Normblog for “another of Norm’s polls”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/03/tangled_up_in_b.html , this time on Bob Dylan’s best songs. You have up to five, but no more than five votes. My own entry?

bq. Visions of Johanna
Stuck inside of Mobile
Desolation Row
It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
Gates of Eden

All from just three (consecutive) albums. In my view, despite a brief return to form with _Blood on the Tracks_ , Dylan’s subsequent output has been pretty mediocre and doesn’t compare to those wonderful albums just after he discovered the ‘lectricity whose ghost howls in the bones of her face. But I know others disagree (strongly).

I still have a childhood memory of our teacher pointing out that the date was 6/6/66. Tomorrow, at one minute past midnight, in those (sensible) countries which represent dates as day/month/year, the time and date can be represented as the sequence 00:01/02/03/04 .

Today is the second anniversary of my first ever blog post, on my old blog, “Junius”:http://junius.blogspot.com/ . John Holbo “reflected the other day”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001378.html on how things have changed in blogging since: my first few posts engaged with people like Lileks and Reynolds and, indeed, it was the discovery of Instapundit that set me off doing this stuff. It has been an interesting and rewarding couple of years, and I’ve met people, read people, gone places and done things that I would never have done but for blogging. Roll on another 12 months!

Over at The Virtual Stoa, “Chris Brooke reports”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_02_01_archive.html#107798928814598472 that Paul M. Sweezy, author of _The Theory of Capitalist Development_ and editor of the Monthly Review for many decades has died. Chris will be posting links to obituaries as they appear.