by Chris Bertram on May 25, 2015
One thing about the interwebs is that you sometimes get to find out about someone you’ve been disconnected from for years. It happened to me yesterday, when I discovered that the guy who had been my “handler” in Lutte Ouvière [had died in 2011 aged 62, following a stroke](http://www.lutte-ouvriere-journal.org/2011/10/12/notre-camarade-denis-robin_25765.html). I’d noticed that some prominent French administrator had the same name and googled to see if it was the same guy. It wasn’t, but up came the obituary of Denis Robin, comrade Cerdon, and with it a whole bunch of memories of the nineteen-year-old me from 1978.
Back then I had finished school, having taken the Oxbridge entrance exams before Christmas. I therefore had about nine months on my hands and wanted to spend it in Paris, where I had friends (and still do) through a language exchange with a family there. I landed a job as a courier with an agency called the Banque Centrale de Compensation which recorded transactions on the Paris commodity exchange, the Bourse de Commerce. This meant that I spent my days running from our office to the Bourse and to the HQs of the various coffee, cocoa, soya and sugar companies.
I’d long been interested in the French left and had even done a school project on May 1968, sucking up lots of information on the various groupuscules. This was, I think it fair to say, alternately irritating and amusing to my French friends who were stalwarts of the Socialists, then in electoral alliance with the barely post-Stalinist Parti Communiste. After one dinner-table debate they expressed scepticism about whether my money would ever follow my mouth, and I took this as something of a challenge. The following day, when I was making a delivery to the main offices of the Crédit Lyonnais, I encountered a bunch of militants selling Lutte Ouvrière, a Trotskyist weekly newpaper and engaged them in conversation. One of the people there was comrade Cerdon, and I agreed to meet him on the evening of Mayday for a conversation, ideally having joined up with their contingent on the big demonstration. I never found LO demonstrators that day and ended up marching with UNEF, the Communist student union. But we did meet in a café in the Place de la République that evening and began one of a series of long conversations about politics and related matters, the purpose of which was to recruit me to the organization.
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by John Q on January 14, 2005
Australia is having a national day of mourning and reflection for tsunami victims tomorrow. Copying an idea from Michele Agnew a little while back, I’ve set up a post and will give a dollar (Australian) for each comment[1] on this post to our Red Cross appeal until midnight Sunday Australian time. I’ve called for cosponsorships from readers, and the response has been great. The total promise is now more then $3/comment. Come on over and help us put our money where our mouth is. If you’re so inclined, make a pledge of your own.
fn1. I’ve set an upper bound of 1000 which is unlikely to be reached given my normal readership, but guarantees that I and the cosponsors won’t be ruined by a blogstorm should one occor.
by Chris Bertram on January 9, 2005
I’m just back from the Oxford Political Thought Conference, which was great fun. On my trip I managed to run into Chris Brooke of “The Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html , Marc Mulholland of “Daily Moiders”:http://marcmulholland.tripod.com/histor/ and Sarah of “Just Another False Alarm”:http://rubberring.blogspot.com/ . I’ve met Chris before, but it was good to see the others as well and to compare blogospheric notes with Marc. Chris told me about “the fuss about the BBC’s broadcast”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/4154071.stm of “Jerry Springer: The Opera”:http://www.jerryspringertheopera.com/jerry_opera.html . So of course I tuned in to this spendid TM production last night and greatly enjoyed such numbers as “Chick with a Dick” and “Mama Gimmee Smack on the A**hole”, before wowing to the Jerry in Hell special program complete with Jesus, God and the Virgin Mary. The microslice of the blogosphere that both hates the BBC _and_ was in a great lather of indignation over the British government’s incitement to religious hatred legislation (Melanie Phillips and co) is going to have a problem over this one. Here’s how I expect them to handle it: (a) they’ll argue that it exemplfies the double standards of a decadent culture (everyone is careful not to offend Muslims and Sikhs but Christians can be trashed with impunity) and (b) they’ll say that whilst _of course_ there should be no legal interference with speech, the BBC _is an exception_ , since, funded by licence-payers, it had an obligation not to transmit JSTO. Just my prediction, now let’s wait and see…
by Chris Bertram on January 1, 2005
A happy new year to everyone! Time for those new year resolutions, then. Last year I resolved to learn German and, I’m astonished to say, made considerable progress. So my first resolution has to be to continue and get myself in a position where I can sustain a reasonably interesting conversation or read a short novel. Other than that, my main thoughts are of reading and writing. Thanks to reading Sebald I’ve got into my head the thought of working through Chateaubriand’s memoirs (we’ll see how that goes). And, of course, there’s the thought that every academic has, of writing more and better papers and getting them published in decent places. Before then, though, there’s that tax return to complete….
by Chris Bertram on December 24, 2004
With it being Christmas, the Guardian has again published “the world’s more difficult quiz”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1379479,00.html as given to the pupils of King William’s College. A first scan leaves me with a single-figure score, but I bet Kieran would do much better….
UPDATE: Mark D. Lew has posted “an annotated list of answers”:http://home.earthlink.net/~markdlew/quiz/ (179/180).
by Chris Bertram on November 21, 2004
Regular readers will know that I’ve been trying to learn German since January of this year. And it is going ok. I just want to put in a plug for my favourite German resource: the online German-English dictionary “Leo”:http://dict.leo.org/?lang=en&lp=ende&search= from the Technical University of Munich. Not only is Leo invaluable as you’re trying to decipher that article in Der Spiegel or FAZ, it also enables registered users to enter the words they don’t know into a little personal list and then to test themselves repeatedly on their chosen vocabulary. Leo is also very easy to integrate with Mozilla Firefox both by adding to the search engines box and — this is really great — by installing the ConQuery plugin so you can highlight the German text and then have the dictionary open with a translation in a new tab.
by John Q on August 6, 2004
Australia is such a small country that, whenever any Australian gets noticed for anything[1] we all tend to feel a glow of vicarious achievement. So I was pleased to see that Germaine Greer was ranked second in a Prospect magazine list of 100 top British intellectuals, just ahead of Amartya Sen and Eric Hobsbawm.
Having enjoyed my burst of patriotic pride, I have to ask what they are smoking in the Old Country these days. The Australian view of Germaine Greer[2] is probably best summed up by Geoff Honnor
Greer has metamorphosed into a Barry Humphries creation: the eccentric old bluestocking aunt who loves to blather on in a colourfully opinionated, slightly shocking way about the great issues of the day. These, oddly enough, seem to always come back to the single greatest issue of all – herself.
In fact, Humphries himself would rank ahead of Greer in my rankings of expat Aussie intellectuals. And if you want an expat with bitterly negative views of home, you can’t go past Robert Hughes (admittedly, since he’s based in the US, he wasn’t eligible for the Prospect poll).
fn1. It doesn’t even have to be something creditable. Just being noticed is enough. And we’re not too fussy as to who we count as an Australian. In particular, any Kiwi who’s done so much as pass through the transit lounge at Sydney airport automatically has their achievements added to the Australian total. OTOH, we’re happy to disown Rupert Murdoch.
fn2. I leave aside the shrinking pool of those who are silly enough to be outraged by her provocations
by Chris Bertram on July 2, 2004
“The Guardian has reacted”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/gender/story/0,11812,1252410,00.html to the sex imbalance of Prospect’s list of 100 “British” public intellectuals (“previously discussed here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002069.html) , with a list of women whom they might have included.
by Chris Bertram on June 24, 2004
Prospect Magazine are running a poll to find the top 5 “British” public intellectuals. You can see “the whole list here”:http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/HtmlPages/intellectuals.asp and can vote by email to intellectuals@prospect-magazine.co.uk . I say “British” rather than British because the blurb reads: “Candidates do not need to live here or be British citizens, but they should make their most significant impact here.” So Seamus Heaney, Amartya Sen and Michael Ignatieff end up being “British”. There are some pretty dodgy characters on the list, various low rent talking heads, a Daily Mail columnist, and several people whose public ravings are at the outer limits of sanity (these aren’t meant to be exclusive categories). I’ll avoid mentioning names for fear of a libel suit. I thought about voting for Quentin Skinner as the only person on the list ever to have left a comment on Crooked Timber, and Richard Dawkins irritates me too often. In the end, my choice from their top 100, in no particular order is:
bq. Onora O’Neill (I had to pick a philosopher and the other philosophical options are _terrible_ and she’s done some good stuff over the years. Her Reith lectures are one of the most forthright recent attempts to drive back the “audit culture” that is wrecking Britain’s public services.)
bq. Amartya Sen (his work on democracy and famines alone should get him near the top of any such list.)
bq. Seamus Heaney (the only poet on the list.)
bq. V.S. Naipaul (the only _great_ novelist in their selection.)
bq. W.G. Runciman (manages to be a shipping magnate and a social theorist at the same time.)
Sen and Runciman were also, aeons ago, co-authors of a paper on Rousseau, the general will and the prisoner’s dilemma, all topics close to my heart.
by Chris Bertram on May 16, 2004
A couple of bloggable bits from the programme booklet for last nights opera. There’s an advertisment for the “National Theatre’s production of Iphigenia at Aulis”:http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/?lid=7783 , where the copy reads
bq. Just how far will a leader go in order to save face and secure a military victory in the East?
How far indeed?
And the notes for Valerie Reid (mezzo soprano, Grimgerde in Valkyrie) tell us that her plans include
bq. Natasha [in] ” _The Electrification of the Soviet Union_ for Music Theatre Wales”:http://www.musictheatrewales.org.uk/electrification.html .
Comments from anyone who has seen that piece?
by Chris Bertram on May 8, 2004
A few interesting things to link to in today’s papers. In the Guardian “David Lodge writes about Nabokov”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1211200,00.html and there’s an interesting account of how “Roman Abramovich and the other Russian oligarchs enriched themselves”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,2763,1212245,00.html at the expense of the Russian people. In the Times “Matthew Parris explains”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-1102058,00.html 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”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1083180354491&p=1045677866454 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.
by John Q on April 4, 2004
Following up on Henry’s post, I wanted to look slightly differently at the appeal of evolutionary psychology. As I said in Henry’s comments thread the ev psych analysis is essentially “realist”. This is the kind of style of social and political analysis that purports to strip away the illusions of idealistic rhetoric and reveal the underlying self-interest. The only question is to nominate the “self” that is interested. In Ev Psych the unit of analysis is the gene, in Chicago-school economics the individual, in Marxism the class, in public choice theory the interest group, and in the realist school of international relations the nation.
All of these realist models are opposed to any form of idealism in which people or groups act out of motives other than self-interest. But, logically speaking, different schools of realists are more opposed to each other than to any form of idealism. If we are machines for replicating our genes, we can’t also be rational maximizers of a utility function or loyal citizens of a nation. Clever and consistent realists recognise this – for example, ideologically consistent neoclassical economists are generally hostile to nationalism. But much of the time followers of these views are attracted by style rather than substance. Since all realist explanations have the same hardnosed character, they all appeal to the same kind of person. It’s not hard to find people who simultaneously believe in Ev Psych, Chicago economics and international realism. One example of this kind of confusion is found in Stephen Pinker whose Blank Slate I reviewed here, back in 2002.
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by John Q on April 2, 2004
This piece in the Melbourne Age by Michael Scammell manages to hit nearly all my hot buttons at once. It includes generation-game garbage, postmodernist apologias for the advertising industry, support for exploitation of workers, and heaps of all-round stupidity. The background to the story, it appears, is that a clothing store called Westco required its female staff to wear T-shirts carrying a lame double entendre. One worker refused, and the Victorian Minister for Women’s Affairs, Mary Delahunty protested, with the result that the company abandoned the promotion. Scammell attempts to set Ms Delahunty straight on the subjects of postmodernist irony and the recent discovery of sex.
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by Chris Bertram on March 4, 2004
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.
by Eszter Hargittai on March 1, 2004
In the comments section of Chris’ recent post about a date, people have started debating whether it makes more sense to list the year, month or day first in a date. This discussion made me think about how different languages/cultures present names. In Hungary, “last” name comes first. To me this always made logical sense. After all, even in cultures where given name comes first (a practice that seems to be prevalent in most places I know) the order of the names gets reversed on certain lists to put the family name up front. This makes more sense, for example, when alphabetizing people in a group (e.g. in a classroom). So why does given name come before family name otherwise? Other than Hungary, I have heard in Japan family name is listed first, can anyone confirm that? Are there any other examples of such ordering of names?