Norman Geras

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.

I see that Norman Geras has joined the blogging community. Norm was involved in some of the early discussions around Crooked Timber and even suggested the name. He’s the author of many books on subjects as wide-ranging as Rosa Luxemburg, the holocaust, and cricket and he’s also been a contributor to one of my other collaborative projects, Imprints, which featured an interview with him recently (the current issue has his take on Polanski’s The Pianist). I’m sure that Norman’s blog will be one of my regular visits and I already see plenty to argue with, including his inclusion of Jules et Jim in his list of 20 best films when, as any fule kno, Les 400 Coups is superior. (Norman goes straight into the academic part of our blogroll under political science/political theory).

Not being an American, I’ve followed the whole Cindy Sheehan thing from afar. I’d been noting, with growing disgust, the whole slime-and-defend operation mounted by O’Reilly, FrontPageMag, Michele Malkin and points rightwards. Now I see that Christopher Hitchens “has joined in”:http://www.slate.com/id/2124500/fr/nl/ and that his invective against Sheehan has been “endorsed by Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/08/ventriloquizing.html . I guess there are two views on this kind of thing. There’s the view that citizens, whatever their background, are fair game for personal attack as soon as they open their mouths and should be treated in the same hardball manner as any machine politican or professional pundit. And there’s the view that grieving mothers should should be shown consideration, kindness and respect. Geras and Hitchens clearly take the first of these views.

Just over a year ago “I posted”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/06/26/katharina-blum/ about Schlondorff’s film of “The Lost Honour of Katherina Blum”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073858/ and commented:

bq. What is different today, of course, is the way that the blogosphere serves as an Insta-echo-chamber for tabloid coverage of such stories. One imagines the “Heh”s and “Readthewholethings” that would accompany posts linking to a contemporary Die Zeitung’s online coverage of events.

[There’s good coverage of earlier episodes of the anti-Sheehan slime campaign at the Media Matters site: “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508100009 , “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508110002 and “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508120006 . ]

Crikey, if you guys regularly had to get something through a legal department, you would never again complain about mere copyediting … I’ve made a few illustrative comments which need to be taken into account before we resubmit this piece to Norman for a redraft ….

I do not generally [consider deleting, or move to beginning of sentence] hold people in contempt because of for their profession, their job^, or their calling.

[Can we prove this? Could we provide at least three examples of each (ie, three of not holding people in contempt because of their profession, three of not holding in contempt because of job, and three of not holding in contempt because of calling). Otherwise change this to “I do not always hold people in contempt ….”]

But copy editors editing!

[This sentence may be unclear to non-native English speakers]

That is something [Make consistent with either ‘editors’ or ‘editing’ in previous two sentences] different.

[Different from what? Can we prove this? Could we find someone else saying that it was different and just quote them?]

Not as bad, I will grant, as war criminals or child molesters

[Need specific examples here rather than making a value judgement. Perhaps we could provide a table of the numbers of people tortured and children molested by each of the three categories? At the very least, we need to say why we think copyeditors are not as bad as war criminals or (I really would prefer “and/or”) child molestors]

, they nevertheless belong in one of the very lowest categories of human intelligence^, and indeed morality.

[Specifically which category? How many categories are we using, and where do copyeditors, war criminals and child molestors come respectively? This sentence can’t be printed unless we provide a sidebar giving our scales of categories of human intelligence and morality. Ideally, we should also combine the two into a weighted average intelligence/morality scale. We should also give examples of where saints, charity workers and tenured professors come in order to demonstrate how much differentiation there is in our scale.]

You will [consider ‘may’] object that copy editors perform a most useful and necessary function, turning what is often ill-formed and error-strewn text into something more presentable. This, too, I will grant.

[This doesn’t appear to be consistent withour view above, and could be taken out of context. Need to rephrase the sentence to make sure our view is clear].

However, it there is no excuse for what copy editors they [referent is clear] also do

[Avoid unequivocal statements of this kind – of course there must be some excuses. Suggest “there is no excuse meeting what a reasonable man would consider to be a reasonable standard of exculpatory value”]

– which is to [run-on; consider breaking into two sentences] interfere with people’s painfully-crafted stuff
[lazy choice of word] when there is no reason whatever for doing so

[As above, there are preumably lots of reasons – you give one below – once more, suggest “no reason meeting what a reasonable persion would consider to be a reasonable standard of rationality”. BTW, the piece is too long as it stands and needs to lose 50 words]

, other than some quirk in the ^mind of the particular copy-editor ing mind which is at work….

[“Quirk” is an ambiguous term. Do we mean an idiosyncracy or do we intend to imply incompetence or something worse? If the former, we need to make it clear. If the latter, we will need to support this claim]

I have charged £541.63 to the Normblog profit centre for this advice, as per usual overhead conventions.

Norman Geras writes:

bq. I do not generally [consider deleting, or move to beginning of sentence] hold people in contempt because of for their profession, their job^, or their calling. But copy editors editing! That is something [Make consistent with either ‘editors’ or ‘editing’ in previous two sentences] different. Not as bad, I will grant, as war criminals or child molesters, they nevertheless belong in one of the very lowest categories of human intelligence^, and indeed morality. You will [consider ‘may’] object that copy editors perform a most useful and necessary function, turning what is often ill-formed and error-strewn text into something more presentable. This, too, I will grant. However, it there is no excuse for what copy editors they [referent is clear] also do – which is to [run-on; consider breaking into two sentences] interfere with people’s painfully-crafted stuff [lazy choice of word] when there is no reason whatever for doing so, other than some quirk in the ^mind of the particular copy-editor ing mind which is at work….

“Norman Geras writes”:http://normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_10_26_normangeras_archive.html#106718001212566747 :

bq. I do not generally hold people in contempt because of their profession, their job or their calling. But copy editors! That is something different. Not as bad, I will grant, as war criminals or child molesters, they nevertheless belong in one of the very lowest categories of human intelligence and indeed morality. You will object that copy editors perform a most useful and necessary function, turning what is often ill-formed and error-strewn text into something more presentable. This, too, I will grant. However, it is no excuse for what copy editors also do – which is to interfere with people’s painfully-crafted stuff when there is no reason whatever for doing so, other than some quirk in the particular copy-editing mind which is at work….

Hmm. As an author, I share some of Norm’s frustrations. Indeed I’ve felt them keenly very recently. But I also once worked as a freelance copyeditor to supplement my then pitiful income as a 0.5 temporary lecturer. I remember having to justify myself to desk editors and production managers and hoping, hoping that they’d give me another book to work on. Most of these people are ill-paid casual workers constantly having to prove their worth. I’m sure that’s where the urge to over-correct comes from — to demonstrate that you _did_ something for that miserable payment.

A bit more online content from Imprints: Norman Geras’s reaction to Roman Polanski’s The Pianist. He concludes:

bq. The Holocaust and other calamitous experiences not only can be represented, they must be, whatever the difficulties. There will be those who err or fail in the way they do it. Others, though, will not, as The Pianist itself exemplifies. And if part of what is revealed in these efforts to represent the universe of pain and death is some surviving human value, so be it. Would the world be better without this, or for not being shown it? No, it would be then truly without hope, the hope that Polanski professes to have found in Szpilman’s story in spite of the enormity of the surrounding horror.

Crooked Timber is twenty years old today, which is an awfully long time for a website, never mind a blog, never mind one that is strictly non-commercial and run on volunteer labour. So here’s to us, and here’s to all those who have been on board at various times during our journey. To quote the Grateful Dead: what a long, strange trip it’s been.

We started the blog shortly after the Iraq war started and in a world that was still shaped by the immediate aftermath of 9/11. A bunch of people who had blogs of their own came together to form our collective after a period of email back-and-forth. It might have been quite a different blog: Norman Geras a strong supporter of the war, had been involved in the emailing, but it became clear that we couldn’t have both him and Dan Davies, so we settled for Dan, and what a good choice that was. Matt Yglesias was invited, but never replied, and has gone on to a rather successful online career.

The initial crew was Chris Bertram, Harry Brighouse, Daniel Davies, Henry Farrell, Maria Farrell, Kieran Healy, Jon Mandle and Brian Weatherson. Four out of nine survivors isn’t bad, but I miss the contributions of those who have moved on, who wrote some of the great posts of the early years. Within a few months we had added Ted Barlow, Eszter Hargittai, John Holbo, John Quiggin, Tom Runnacles, Micah Schwartzman and Belle Waring, and then Ingrid Robeyns and Scott McLemee joined us a couple of years later, followed soon after by Michael Bérubé. By 2008, the Guardian was listing us in its top 50 most powerful blogs, but I think we missed the moment to cash in and become tech zillionaires. Niamh Hardiman became a member around 2011, followed later by Tedra Osell, Eric Rauchway and Corey Robin, then Rich Yeselson. In 2018 we were joined by Serene Khader, Miriam Ronzoni, Gina Schouten and Astra Taylor and then this past year by Chris Armstrong, Elizabeth Anderson, Eric Schliesser, Kevin Munger, Macarena Marey, Paul Segal and Speranta Dumitru. Throughout we tried to keep a mix of people of different experiences, backgrounds, genders and locations, though I’m sure we could have done better. One person, who sadly has left us, deserves special thanks: Kieran Healy was not only an intellectual force behind Crooked Timber, but also, long after he ceased posting, kept us on the road with his technical expertise. The site would have long since fallen over without him.

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As everyone knows, today is the 20th anniversary of 9/11, as well as being the 48th of the coup that toppled Allende in Chile. But decades being what they are, as well as locations and long-term consequences, 9/11 is the one that will rightly be getting the most attention. Its most important consequences include millions of dead across Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, as well as other parts of the Middle East, a catastrophic loss of freedom across the world because of ever deepening securitization and hardening of borders, Guantanamo and torture at the hands of “liberal demogracies”, an enraged Islamophobia that has infected the “West” and divided countries between racist right-wing populists and the rest, bringing us Trump and Breivik among others, and, ultimately, a relative loss in power of the American hegemon with the humbling withdrawal from Afghanistan. Israel’s leaders were encouraged to dig in, knowing then that they could get away without any concessions to the Palesitinians. Some of developments no doubt have other causes too, but without 9/11 we’d be a lot less far down the path. Osama bin Laden failed in most of his aims and the slaughter of nearly 3000 people was for nothing: the Caliphate is no closer than it was, though the world is a lot worse, perhaps especially for Muslims.

Everyone who was then alive and still is will know where they were that day. I was on the top floor of the Bristol philosophy department when I started picking up the confusing news and turned the radio on. Nobody really knew what was happening and there were odd reports of things that don’t seem to have happened, such as, if I remember right, a car bomb outside the Pentagon. I went down and told a couple of other people the news and we listened and watched, obsessively refreshing our browsers. In the following days, we had little meetings and seminars in which some of us had to push back against the idea that the death of three thousand American civilians was somehow “deserved”. Having travelled to the US at Easter of the previous year, gone to the top of the World Trade Center with my young sons (our very first visit to the US), I was sentimentally inoculated against that particular brand of anti-imperialist triumphalism, for which I consider myself morally lucky.

And out of it all came blogging and ultimately Crooked Timber as we all argued online about processes and forces beyond our comprehension with people like Instapundit, “Armed Liberal”, and Norman Geras. Michael Walzer asked whether there could be a “decent left” and the answer seems to have been that “decent leftism” was a gateway to right-wing alignment for many (where are the signatories of the Euston Manifesto now?). I too wrote things then of which I am now ashamed.

So let’s remember the three thousand, but also the more numerous dead of Mosul and Fallujah, of Helmand, of Aleppo, of nameless places where drones struck, of Utøya too. All those people who would be living now but for 9/11 and the reaction to it, as well as those who did not die but are maimed in mind or body.

A song about the day itself from one of the greatest songwriters of the past 20 years:

Today, July 8th, is the tenth anniversary of Crooked Timber. I don’t suppose that when we started, any of us expected it to last this long, but it has, retaining its distinctive character through many changes of personnel. By way of marking the occasion, I thought I’d set down how the blog came into being, and a little bit about its prehistory.

Some time early in 2003, I decided that I couldn’t keep going with my solo blog, Junius. My colleague Keith Graham had unexpectedly taken early retirement and the finger was pointing at me to head the philosophy department at Bristol. But I didn’t want to quit blogging: I’d made a bunch of friends online and I was enjoying arguing with people about ideas. Still, I knew I couldn’t keep Junius going if it meant updating a blog several times a week. So the idea struck me that I should invite some of the people I’d most liked interacting with to form a group blog. To them I added a few other friends whom I wanted to read online but who hadn’t yet taken the plunge.
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The latest Financial Times weekend had “a piece”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/1a5ab5ee-e407-11e0-bc4e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1ZGFzB7OG by Simon Kuper about how studying English literature had spoilt the experience of reading for him. Whereas once, as a child or an adolescent, he could immerse himself in a novel, the academic study of them had taught him to read as a critic. That second-order relationship to the text, just made the whole thing much less fun than it had been. I see what he means. Relatedly, one of the problems about writing for a blog like Crooked Timber with so many readers who know more than I do on just about any topic is the the difficulty in sharing books, films, or music that you’ve enjoyed because I’m scanning the horizon (or the potential comments thread) for the dorsal fin of the Great White Critic for whom the immediate pleasure taken is a symptom of hopeless naivety and a failure to adopt the necessary critical distance. But to hell with that. Sometimes some discovery is so fantastic that I just want to share, and that’s how I feel about reading Anne Tyler. Since reading “a post about her”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2008/08/reading-anne-tyler.html on Norman Geras’s blog (Norman is great for that stuff, just ignore the politics) I’ve made my way through The Accidental Tourist, A Patchwork Planet, The Amateur Marriage, Noah’s Compass, Celestial Navigation, Earthly Possessions, Ladder of Years, The Tin Can Tree, Digging to America, Back When We Were Grownups, and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and I feel blessed that I still have (by my count) seven to go.

For those who don’t know, Tyler’s novels, nearly all set in Baltimore, are mostly quiet dramas of family life and relationships. The wider world of politics and economics doesn’t intrude much, so we’re a long way from the grand themes of Jonathan Franzen and the like. Many of the books are somewhat similar, in that a person has their habits and their conception of who they are turned upside down by an encounter with someone utterly unlike themselves. Sometimes they are changed; sometimes they revert. Her male characters are often stiff, calculating and habit bound; women more open and spontaneous, but she manages to achieve a sympathetic engagement with all of them. And all of her families conform to the Tolstoyan cliché. Her writing is also extraordinary. Highly economic and unfussy and yet she has an ear to capture a scene or a moment in a phrase that sticks in the memory – “By now he was looking seriously undermedicated” from A Patchwork Planet, for example.

The novels are about you, and me and our relationships and difficulties with spouses, parents, children, in-laws and colleagues. Since I became enthusiastic about Tyler, I’ve given some of her books as presents and then been asked if I was “making a point” about the recipient’s relationship. Well no I wasn’t, but I take this as good evidence that Tyler sees and captures the universal in all of our peculiar cases. I mentioned Tyler to a bookblogger friend, Kate, recently, and she asked me which are the best. I’m hard pushed to say. The Tin Can Tree was a bit of a struggle and some of the others disclosed themselves slowly but turned out to be among the best. Perhaps Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant would be a good place to start.

Quite a few people have now posted about Jerry Cohen on the web. Notable amongst them are “Colin Farrelly”:http://colinfarrelly.blogspot.com/2009/08/ga-cohen-1941-2009.html , “Thom Brooks”:http://the-brooks-blog.blogspot.com/2009/08/obituary-g-cohen-1941-2009.html , “Ben Saunders”:http://bensaunders.blogspot.com/2009/08/death-g-cohen.html, “Chris”:http://virtualstoa.net/2009/08/05/dead-socialist-g-a-cohen-1941-2009/ “Brooke”:http://virtualstoa.net/2009/08/06/jerry-on-jerry/ , “Matthew Kramer”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2009/08/ga-cohen-a-tribute-by-matthew-kramer.html and “Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2009/08/ga-cohen-19412009.html . I was also sent, by Maris Kopcke Tinture, a “link to a private recording she made of Jerry’s valedictory lecture from May 2008”:http://rapidshare.com/files/264780177/jerry_valedictory.m4a. The recording is imperfect and there is a chunk missing in the middle, but it is the only such recording to have surfaced.

(I also need to post a short note about use of my photos of the valedictory, since people have been taking them from my Flickr stream and using them without permission: they are not public domain. 1. Seek permission, which I will normally grant to any not-for-profit site unless I find the content objectionable. 2. Please attribute (this can be in as miniscule a text as you like). 3. If you are a commercial organization then we will need to come to an arrangement about a fee, which will be donated to an appropriate charity.)

I”m reliably informed that Brian’s funeral is today, and I know a number CT readers will be there. The post here announcing his death (in my typically abrupt way) generated a wonderful set of touching remembrances (including Anni’s moving thanks to the commenters). Since that post is closed to comments, and at least one person has asked to add his, I thought I’d take the opportunity to link to various memories on the web, and open up again for anyone who wants to add their memories. Stuart White; Norman Geras; The British Humanist Association; Chris Brooke; Colin at Oxford Sociology; Jacob Levy. I was disappointed to see that he has not merited an obituary in the grauniad. But then I realised that he probably wouldn’t have wanted to belong to a club that contained Jane Goody, whoever she was.
UPDATE: A reader has (rightly) complained about the nastiness of my references to Jade Goody. I apologise. And recommend the extraordinarily good obit of her I linked to.