I went to see “Les Parapluies de Cherbourg”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058450/ at my local cinema yesterday afternoon. An extraordinary banal story, real soap-opera stuff, but so strange and wonderful when every line is sung to French semi-jazz music. And the final scene when Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo meet again is so moving. Wonderful multicoloured wallpaper in every room too! The poignancy was accentuated by the mentions of war in Algeria: ambushes, comrades killed and so on. If I’d seen this a year ago these would have been little more than words but now it is easy to imagine the scenes.
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Chris Bertram
I see from comments to “another thread”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001197.html that Daniel is preparing to argue against the British government’s case for top-up fees for universities. A good thing that we don’t have a CT party-line! Actually, I’m not sure I would be in favour of them either if the choice were between the current proposals and any alternative that I’d care to formulate for an ideal world. But that isn’t the case. British universities have been starved of resources for over two decades, academic pay is extremely poor (especially at the start) and we’ll face a real difficulty in recruiting people to teach some subjects if things don’t change (Daniel — fancy a job an a junior econ lecturer in a British university?). So since the extra money we need isn’t going to come from increasing taxation and isn’t going to come from a graduate tax (both of which I’d be perfectly happy with), and since the likely outcome of a government defeat is further drift and starvation — I hope Blair wins this one.
The most popular theory of egalitarian justice at the moment is probably one that says that an individual’s fate should be a sensitive to their choices but insensitive to the brute luck they suffer (including their unchosen circumstances). I bring this up in the light of the often-unenlightening comments threads that ensue once someone here has posted on the situation of the poor (and especially of the _American_ poor), as Henry did on the Caroline Payne case, and I did some time ago on the health outcomes of black Americans.
For the standard response of our rightist friends is to tell us that the individuals who suffer these bad outcomes do so largely as a consequence of their own choices. So it is worth pointing out that, were that actually so, the most influential strand of egalitarian thinking on distributive justice would not find that a matter of concern.
The “Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy” is organizing a conference with the nonsense title of “NOISETHEORYNOISE#1”:http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/CRMEP/events/noise.htm although NONSENSETHEORYNONSENSE might be more appropriate. The “theme” of the conference is described thus:
bq. Noise is an unprecedented harbinger of aesthetic radicality: no-one yet knows what it is or what it means. This non-significance is its strength rather than its weakness. Noise is ‘non-music’ not because it negates music but because it affirms a previously unimaginable continuum of sonic intensities in which music becomes incorporated as a mere material.
And further elaborations include:
bq. Where a ‘new aestheticism’ might present itself as a resistance to pragmatic instrumentality, postmodern academicism continues to adopt theory as ballast: works are mere pretexts for ostentatious displays of theoretical chic. But in what way could noise change the conditions of theoretical possibility, not to say intelligibility or even sensibility?
In what way indeed? Explanations on a postcard please …. (or in comments).
“This is getting ridiculous”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3416091.stm :
bq. A proposed ban on religious symbols in French state schools could include a ban on beards, according to the French education minister. Luc Ferry said the law, which will be debated in parliament next month, could ban headscarves, bandannas and beards if they are considered a sign of faith.
UPDATE: “According to Le Monde”:http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3224,36-349896,0.html , Ferry invoked Saussure’s principle of the “arbitrary nature of the sign” in defence of the policy. We’re not going to hear any think like _that_ from a minister in London or Washington any time soon!
Brian has “a post on his other blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002462.html which I think ought to get wider circulation: it is a discussion of and reproduction of a Times interview/profile of cuddly, charming, self-effacing philosopher Colin McGinn.
The story of the true origins of Monopoly, which I covered “here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001119.html the other day, gets “recounted in today’s Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1127421,00.html in the course of an article on the highly dubious game “Ghettopoly” of which the object is “to become the richest playa through stealing, cheating and fencing stolen properties.” Hasbro, the current owners (or should that be “owners”?) of the rights to Monopoly are threatening legal action.
No sooner have I “mentioned”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001180.html 1960s expectations of what the future would be like — “future cities in which we’d all be whizzing about in our personal aeroplanes” — than I read “John Kay in the Financial Times”:http://www.johnkay.com/trends/318 doubting whether our age is, as commonly supposed, one of unprecedented technological advance:
bq. I began to doubt the conventional wisdom when I discovered a Hudson Institute report from the mid-1960s that predicted technological changes from then till 2000. Its prognostications about information technology were impressively accurate – it foresaw mobile phones, fax machines and large-scale data processing.
bq. But in other areas the Hudson Institute was wide of the mark. Where are the personal flying platforms, the space colonies, the artificial moons to light our cities, the drugs that make weight reduction a painless process? Progress in IT has fully matched the expectations of three or four decades ago. But advance in other areas has, by historic standards, been disappointing.
Worth a glance.
I watched “North By Northwest”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053125/ again last night and was struck more than I had been before by the boldly modernist style the film projects. The texture of the film is wonderful: the future we were promised and never had. The opening title-sequence in which the titles are aligned with the straight lines of an international-style skyscraper with New York taxis reflected in the windows is really striking (the Seagram building?). And Roger O. Thornhill and Eve Kendall (Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint) throughout project a thoroughly enviable lifestyle that is sharply at variance with other images of the 1950s. In fact the whole film (1959) has a taste of the optimistic side of the 1960s about it: the NASA–Expo 67–white-heat-of-technology–007 side. That optimistic image of the future is something I grew up with: children’s comics like Look-and-Learn painted a picture of future cities in which we’d all be whizzing about in our personal aeroplanes (those who weren’t travelling by monorail of course). That isn’t exactly what is happening in North by Northwest, but rather a projection of of what the future might be like if the world of North by Northwest were the present (a TV in every hotel room in 1959!). Architecture and design do the work: from that opening sequence, through the United Nations (clean, sharp lines) through the exquisite train ride from New York to Chicago, through the scene in the cafe at Mt Rushmore (such a clean Scandinavian feel) to the Frank Lloyd Wright-style house at the end. Fantastic.
“The Colloquium in Legal and Social Philosophy”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/spp/seminars/seminars_2004.php at University College London’s School of Public Policy looks very interesting this spring, with papers from Frances Kamm, G. A. Cohen, Jo Wolff, Cass Sunstein and others. (And the papers are downloadable too). First up is Frances Kamm (NYU) on ‘Failures of Just War Theory and Terrorism’.
The “African Cup of Nations”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/africa/default.stm kicks off on Saturday with the host nation Tunisia taking on Rwanda. Most of the groups look fairly predictable, with Tunisia set to top A, Senegal B, Cameroon C and Nigeria D. Having said that, if there is a “group of death” then D is it, with Nigeria, Morocco and South Africa all battling it out. I’ll be rooting for Senegal in the hope that El-Hadji Diouf and Salif Diao recapture their form and bring it back to Merseyside (well you never know). What a great sport, where some of the world’s poorest nations are better than some of the wealthier ones.
Since CT has a decent-sized readership, I’m appealing for help to try to get hold of a copy of a biopic about Jean-Jacques Rousseau by the Swiss director Claude Goretta. The title is “Les Chemins de l’Exil”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077322/ and it appeared in 1978 and was, I believe, broadcast on the BBC. All my googling has drawn a blank, and contacts have come up with nothing. But if someone out there has a copy or knows how to get hold of one, drop me a line at chris-at-crookedtimber.org.
An email from a reader alerts me to “The Cheating Culture”:http://cheatingculture.com/ by David Callaghan, a new book which blames a whole raft of scandals in the US — from Enron to athlete doping — on the erosion of a sense of fair play in the winner-takes-all society. The book’s website has “an interview with the author”:http://cheatingculture.com/davidcallahaninterview.htm and also incorporates “the author’s own blog”:http://www.cheatingculture.com/cheatingblog.html on the issues covered by the book. Worth a look.
Readers of Crooked Timber will know that I have an old and unhappy relationship with the New Left Review. I mention this just to trigger an appropriate level of discounting for bitterness and resentment in the reader. The “latest NLR has an attack on the record of New Labour”:http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR25901.shtml by the person now listed alone as “editor” on the masthead: Susan Watkins. Watkins, married to Tariq Ali and co-author with him of _1968: Marching in the Streets_ but perhaps best known for the cartoon book _Feminism for Beginners_ , has written an extraordinarily poor rant in sub-Andersonic tones. It begins thus (afficionados will recognise the style):
bq. The Centre Left governments that dominated the North Atlantic zone up to the turn of the millennium have now all but disappeared.
Since when was “North Atlantic zone” a category worth bothering with?
“The BBC reports”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3403775.stm that the French government’s proposed ban on the Islamic headscarf and other symbols of religious adherence in schools has upset the 15,000 Sikhs who live in and around Paris. If they insist on wearing the turban they risk being denied access to education. Even with the law merely a proposal, Sikhs are already being refused admission to institutions of higher education.