Kieran Healy

I feel bad for _Star Wars_ fans, I really do. Most of them are in a kind of “abusive relationship”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/08/revenge-of-the-sith/ with George Lucas. I see “via John Gruber”:http://daringfireball.net/linked/2006/may#thu-04-original_trilogy (a Vader-codependent himself) that, prior statements notwithstanding, Lucasfilm will “release the first three remastered Star Wars films unaltered”:http://www.starwars.com/episode-iv/release/video/news20060503.html on DVD, together with the original theatrical release of each. This is the fake kiss-and-make-up period: now that everyone has bought the currently-available retroactively-reprocessed collection, and cried about that for a while, they can all go out and buy them again. “See.” they will say, “I _told_ you he was a good man!” Nine months from now he’ll announce an Ewoks/Gungans musical or something — “The Wizard of Endor,” maybe, or “My Fair Leia” — and the whole process will start over again.

Jury decides against execution. Seems like the right decision to me. Opportunist that he is, Moussaoui shouted “America, You Lost!” when being led from the courtroom, which is meaningless but may have its intended effect on those who wanted to see him executed. I’m sure he had an equally snappy alternative ready — perhaps something about martyrdom, or maybe just the same line, come to think of it — in case the decision had gone the other way.

I mentioned in posts or a comment a while ago that I was writing a survey piece on sociology and political philosophy, and several people expressed an interest in seeing it. Well, here’s a draft. I was invited to write it for the second edition of _A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy_, which is being edited by Bob Goodin, Philip Pettit and Thomas Pogge. Like the “first edition”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0631199519/ref=nosim/librarything-20, there will be chapters on the relationship between political philosophy and disciplines like political science, economics, law, and so on, together with essays on problems, ideologies and debates in the field itself. The disciplinary essays are supposed to strike a balance: not too boringly encyclopedic (it’s a Companion, not a Census), but still informative to those unfamiliar with the field. I guess it’s also not supposed to intrude too much on the substantive terrain of other essays, such as those on “Power” or “Trust” or “Feminism” or “Marxism” and what have you. I also wanted to convey what’s distinctive about sociology when compared to disciplines like political science or economics.

Meeting these requirements made for a paper that was quite difficult to write. I’d very much welcome any comments, especially from the prospective audience of political philosophers. Please bear in mind that I’m not a political philosopher myself, so try not to wince too much when you see me wander way out of my depth into exciting areas of interdisciplinary inquiry.

“David Bernstein speculates”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_04_23-2006_04_29.shtml#1146187672 about the casting for a new film of _Atlas Shrugged_. Inevitably, “someone in the comments”:http://volokh.com/posts/1146187672.shtml#85930 points out the obvious, viz, that Ayn Rand is an atrocious novelist fit only for insecure fifteen-year-old boys. Some other Volokh readers are not amused, and stomp off in a huff to listen to their _Rush_ CDs. In the course of his snipe at Rand, the commenter says “At least Marx, for all his faults, didn’t attempt fiction.”

Well, as a matter of fact, he “did”:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1837-pre/verse/verse41.htm. _Scorpion and Felix_ is Marx’s unpublished comic (I do not say “funny”) novel, written around 1837, when he was 19. It is not for the faint-of-heart. In essence it is a pastiche of _Tristram Shandy_, a book Marx thought was fantastic. Here is the entirety of Chapter 37:

David Hume maintained that this chapter was the _locus communis_ of the preceding, and indeed maintained so before I had written it. His proof was as follows: since this chapter exists, the earlier chapter does not exist, but this chapter has ousted the earlier, from which it sprang, though not through the operation of cause and effect, for this he questioned. Yet every giant, and thus also every chapter of twenty lines, presupposes a dwarf, every genius a hidebound philistine, and every storm at sea — mud, and as soon as the first disappear, the latter begin, sit down at the table, sprawling out their long legs arrogantly.

The first are too great for this world, and so they are thrown out. But the latter strike root in it and remain, as one may see from the facts, for champagne leaves a lingering repulsive aftertaste, Caesar the hero leaves behind him the play-acting Octavianus, Emperor Napoleon the bourgeois king Louis Philippe, the philosopher Rant the carpet-knight Krug, the poet Schiller the Hofrat Raupach, Leibniz’s heaven Wolf’s schoolroom, the dog Boniface this chapter.

Thus the bases are precipitated, while the spirit evaporates.

In his “biography of Marx”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393321576/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20, Francis Wheen points out that the convoluted parodic style seen in the novel was a feature of Marx’s writing throughout his life, and in _Capital_ in particular. He also notes that the passage above, with its contrast of Napoleon and Louis Philippe as giant and dwarf, clearly prefigures the famous opening of the _Eighteenth Brumaire_:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidiere after Danton, Louis Blanc after Robespierre, the _montagne_ of 1848 to 1851 after the _montagne_ of 1793 to 1795, and then the London constable [Louis Bonaparte], with a dozen of his best debt-ridden lieutenants, after the little corporal [Napoleon Bonaparte], with his roundtable of military marshalls.

At any rate, it is striking that Marx had such versatility that he could write a novel even less readable than _Atlas Shrugged_.

“Apparently,”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2006_04_23_atrios_archive.html#114610748283196427 Michelle Malkin is ticked off by a song that incorporates bits of the _Star-Spangled Banner_ in Spanish — or “Star-Spangled Mangle” as she prefers to say. It’s an outrage, and so on. Meanwhile, here is a quiz: 1. What do the following words have in common? California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, Montana, Oregon.

Via “Making Light”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007459.html#007459 comes the entertaining saga of “Another Hope”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1933456027/104-9826048-8077521, a Star Wars fan-fiction novel that you can buy on Amazon, though I should imagine not for very much longer. Apparently the author believes that this doesn’t contravene George Lucas’s copyright because “I wrote this book for myself. This is a self-published story and is not a commercial book. Yes, it is for sale on Amazon, but only my family, friends and acquaintances know it’s there” — Amazon being your local, small private website.

Anyway, the “Making Light thread”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007459.html#007459 has lots more, but I thought a short excerpt from the book was worth reproducing here, because I read it and why should I be the only one with blood leaking out of my eyes?

The galaxy known as Celestine … was a spiraling mass of six concentric rings that encircled a small group of densely packed stars, the Deep Core. The Core Worlds formed the first ring around the Deep Core, and the Core Worlds were the oldest known places of human habitation. A second ring, the Colonies, was quickly established around the Core Worlds. Like the Core Worlds, the colonies became heavily populated. Later, humans again fanned out into a third region called the Inner Rim, a great ring of sparsely populated territory where conditions were harsh and resources extremely scarce. This lawless region formed the largely uncharted frontier between Celestine and wild space.

In between the Deep Core and the Colonies was a region known as the Old Suburban Worlds, where people moved after the Core Worlds filled up with immigrants from a nearby Galaxy. But this happened long ago — shortly after the invention of hyperdrive technology — and so most of those people (or rather, their descendants, for all this happens a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away) now inhabit the New Suburban Ring Worlds, a rapidly developing region located between the Inner Rim and Wild Space, where the Malls are nicer and there are fewer of those awful Gungans.

Bumper sticker seen in traffic: “If evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve.”

You sometimes see a rhetorical device were the author compares himself (or another) to some related group of people, real or fictional, and says that while one might have hoped to be _x_, it turns out one is actually _y_. So, for example, here’s one inspired by reading “Untold Stories”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374281033/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20 the other night. “When I was younger I hoped I might be “Peter Cook”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Cook, or even “Jonathan Miller”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Miller, but then I discovered I was really Alan Bennett.” As can be seen from this example, there is usually a strong element of faux-modest self-promotion in the apparent putdown, at least when the author is the subject of the comparison. When there is some other target, this scheme is a vehicle for insult. In these cases, the comparison individuals will be related not by a substantive tie but only by name.

People speaking in some official capacity should always take care what they say, because they aren’t just speaking for themselves. The higher up the ladder you go, the more care you have to take. Most of the time inappropriate comments don’t even raise a laugh. So it’s hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy when someone is — rightly — made to apologize for having said something that’s actually funny. In this case it’s “Police Chief Constable John Vine”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4913866.stm who, when speaking to the Perth Bar Association in Scotland, told a joke about Al Qaeda fathers chatting about their suicide-bomber sons. One says wistfully to the other, “Kids blow up so quickly these days.”

Sorry to inflict kid-related anecdotes on you all. However. Scene: Two-year-old sitting in her cot with Teddy and Elmo. She has put a sippy-cup in front of Teddy. Me: “Oh, is Teddy drinking some water?” Pause. Kid: “No.” Me: “Why not?” Kid: “Teddy has no mouth.” Me: “Ah.” Kid: “Elmo has mouth. Elmo drink it.”

Over at the Guardian Blog, “Daniel looks to see”:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_davies/2006/04/university_colours.html what percentage of the 300 “Comment is Free” contributors mentioned in their profile that they went to university, and of those what percentage went to Oxford or Cambridge. Answer: 20 percent mentioned a university, and 85 percent of the time it was Oxford or Cambridge. This reminds me of a line, which you still sometimes see in obituaries or profiles, that goes something like, “Educated at Eton and Oxford, he then [or “also”] attended Harvard.” There’s also that episode of _Inspector Morse_ where the Chancellor, played by John Gielgud, is asked by some toady how many honorary degrees he has. “Oh, fifteen,” he says blandly, “Sixteen, if you count Yale.”

“Kieran Setiya”:http://ideasofimperfection.blogspot.com/ announces the “results of his competition”:http://ideasofimperfection.blogspot.com/2006/04/economy-of-prestige.html to find the best exquisitely mean review. The criteria were:

1. The review must have a worthy target. Thus, I was forced to ignore, among other things, A. O. Scott’s review of Gigli.

2. The review may be grossly unfair, but…

3. It has to give good arguments, or memorable ones that contain a grain of truth.

4. Finally, preference was given to reviews that made good use of sarcasm.

Kieran’s readership is composed mostly of philosophers, and his list of reviews reflects this. The prize has already been awarded, to “Miles Burnyeat’s”:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/5444 enfilading of Leo Strauss’ _Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy_. But I have a late entry from another field. For sheer mean-spirited, grossly unfair (not to say misguided) but nevertheless well-written and funny attacks on worthy targets, you can’t beat “Philip Larkin’s”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Larkin criticism of modernist Jazz, especially his stuff on John Coltrane and Miles Davis. He thought Coltrane was “possessed continually by an almost Scandinavian unloveliness.” For example, here he is reviewing _A Love Supreme_:

It is of course absurd to suggest he can’t play his instrument: the rapidity of his fingering alone dispels that notion. It would be juster to question whether he knows what to do with it now that he can play it. His solos seem to me to bear the same relation to proper jazz solos as those drawings of running dogs, showing their legs in all positions so that they appear to have about fifty of them, have to real drawings. Once, they are amusing and even instructive. But the whole point of drawing is choosing the right line, not drawing fifty alternatives. Again, Coltrane’s choice and treatment of themes is hypnotic, repetitive, monotonous: he will rock backwards and forwards between two chords for five minutes, or pull a tune to pieces like someone subtracting petals from a flower. Apart from the periodic lashing of himself into a frenzy, it is hard to attach any particular emotional importance to his work.

And on Miles Davis:

bq. He had several manners: the dead muzzled slow stuff, the sour yelping fast stuff, and the sonorous theatrical arranged stuff, and I disliked them all.

Continuing my tradition of being several years behind (I find it easier as time goes by), someone gave me a copy of Dan Brown’s _Angels and Demons_ to read on a flight. I knew about the Da Vinci Code and all that but hadn’t read anything by him. The result was very nearly as painful as “my attempt to read”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/29/cryptonomicon/ _Cryptonomicon_ last year. _Cryptonomicon_ consisted of nerdish Mary Sues afloat in a sea of Cliffs Notes for popular science books. _Angels and Demons_ retains the nerd protagonists but adds a layer of cack-handed James Bond stuff. I mean, can you believe this shit:

Descending from the chopper in her khaki shorts and white sleeveless top, Vittoria Vetra looked nothing like the bookish physicist he had expected. Lithe and graceful, she was tall with chestnut skin and long black hair that swirled in the backwind of the rotors. Her face was unmistakably Italian–not overly beautiful, but possessing full, earthy features that even at twenty yards seemed to exude raw sensuality. As the air currents buffeted her body, her clothes clung, accentuating her slender torso and small breasts.

“Ms Vetra is a woman of tremendous personal strength,” Kohler said … “She spends months working in dangerous ecological systems. She is a strict vegetarian and CERN’s resident guru of Hatha yoga.” …She turned to Langdon, holding out a slender hand. “My name is Vittoria Vetra. You’re from Interpol, I assume?” Langdon took her hand, momentarily spellbound by the depth of her watery gaze.

I imagine it was the air currents from the chopper that were making her eyes water. My own eyes were doing the same by this point. I didn’t get much further, but I suppose it was worth it for the image of Harvard (the protagonist is “professor of religious iconology” there) and CERN (much like Dr Evil’s Island, apparently, except for being in Switzerland).

I picked up Alan Bennett’s new collection, Untold Stories over the weekend. It looks as though it is at least as good as Writing Home. The prose is — well, here’s an example from the diary entries:

bq. I’m sent a complimentary (sic) copy of Waterstone’s Literary Diary which records the birthdays of various contemporary figures in the world of letters. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.

This is just Bennett being the Woody Allen of Leeds, but there’s a lot more to him than this. Well worth your time.