It wasn’t my intention to post twice on Wagner in 24 hours, but “the Observer’s report on the ENO’s Twilight of the Gods”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1451219,00.html has me worried:

bq. In what will come to be regarded by opera fans as a moment of bizarre heresy – or of creative triumph – Brunnhilde, the leading character in the ENO’s new production of Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods, was portrayed as a suicide bomber. Clad in a modern jacket packed with explosives, the betrayed lover of Siegfried, played by Kathleen Broderick, obliterated the rest of the cast by detonating herself in the dramatic ‘immolation scene’ that ends the opera.

I have tickets to see this production at the end of the month and, since, I have already attended the previous three in ENO’s cycle, I’m going to go. I hope my worst fears won’t be realized.

Pope John Paul II came to Ireland in 1979. It was the first time a reigning pontiff had visited the country and the nation went crazy. I was six. My father, my younger brother and my uncle Donal drove to Limerick to see him, along with about 300,000 other people. He faced a similar-sized crowd in Galway, and filled the Phoenix Park in Dublin with nearly a million people, by some estimates. This in a country of about three and a half million people. I went to bed at six o’clock the night before and my father woke me up at midnight. I was put in charge of the torch. We drove up to the Northside to pick up my uncle. Then we hit the road at about half one in the morning, along with most of the rest of Munster. There were helicopters overhead, monitoring the traffic. It was the first time Radio 2 broadcast all the way through the night. It’s sixty five miles from Cork to Limerick. We parked the car a mile or so from the Mass site at about seven o’clock in the morning. Then we got out the deck chairs, settled down and waited for the Pope to arrive.

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I want two things from you.

First, directions to a solid (preferably undergraduate-friendly) account of Nietzsche’s impact on the social sciences. What major figures (schools, theories) were influenced by him and how? From Max Weber and Georg Simmel down to Foucault and beyond. I realize this is a potentially vast topic – indeed, little better than an invitation to pick a number of fights.

Second, I am collecting instances of Wittgenstein-inspired art, produced since (oh, say) 1999. (Before then I was pretty up on the field.) I am also (even especially) interested in finding essays and critical appreciations of Wittgenstein produced by poets, novelists and other artist-types, rather than (say) philosophers or academic lit crit-types. I blegged this over J&B way some time back, so if you contributed then you don’t need to again.

First off, thanks to Crooked Timber for letting me guest-blog this week on work-and-family issues. In this last blog, I’d like to offer some reflections about what Americans might learn about the way other countries are addressing child care, parental leave, and working time. In the much-talked about book by Judith Warner, Perfect Madness, she argues we should look at the French model of child care and family support. I do not suggest we try to wholly transport the Swedish or Dutch or French model of public policy to the United States, as each model has distinct historical and cultural roots that would defy replication elsewhere. Moreover, it seems that the quickest way to doom an idea in American politics is to point out that this is how it is done in some other country.

No, instead I suggest we might learn from the way some European countries go about dealing with what is often a controversial issue – whether or not mothers should work when their children are young, and what the role of the state should be in subsidizing these decisions — and then figure out our own homegrown solutions. While conservative observers hold that official European policy increasingly favors the imposition of “radical feminism” – meaning the elimination of the full-time homemaker – the reality is considerably more complex. In countries such as Germany or Austria, the attachment to parental care is so strong that state policy has long sought to subsidize mothers (or the very few fathers) who stay home with young children. In France, because people have different views on this question – much as in the United States – government policy subsidizes both child care and parents at home, rather than impose one model on everyone. France’s free, universal preschool system appeals as much to stay-at-home-moms as it does to working mothers. Even in Sweden, one conservative commentator has to admit, the very long parental leave time is indicative of a strong commitment to parental care. As a result, many more babies are breast-fed for six months in Sweden than in the United States.

In addition, publicly-subsidized child care is not the Leviathan envisioned by many conservatives, by which the state uses its power to manipulate the hearts and minds of young children. In Germany and the Netherlands, the state subsidizes voluntary organizations – many of which are religiously-based – who then provide kindergartens, day care, and other family-related services. While services for families are subsidized, parental choice is maintained. This is very much in line with the church-run day care favored by social conservatives as a last resort.

In short, a commitment to the material well-being of families does not imply a one-size-fits-all solution, whereby one set of values gets imposed on everyone else. What is needed is first some agreement that subsidizing families with children is a worthy goal – something we have long done through both the tax code and publicly-supported education. Then, a pluralistic vision of family needs could bring together liberals and social conservatives, if the latter are willing to shed their alliance with economic libertarians, and the former relent in their focus on abortion and the strict separation of church and state (which complicates state subsidies to church-run day care). But first, we need to start having that sensible national conversation about work and family.

Adios.

From the “New York Times article on the Pope’s Death”:http://nytimes.com/2005/04/02/international/europe/02cnd-rome.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5094&en=a14559977d56d35d&hp&ex=1112504400&partner=homepage as of 3.25pm East Coast time.

Even as his own voice faded away, his views on the sanctity of all human life echoed unambiguously among Catholics and Christian evangelicals in the United States on issues from abortion to the end of life.

need some quote from supporter

John Paul II’s admirers were as passionate as his detractors, for whom his long illness served as a symbol for what they said was a decrepit, tradition-bound papacy in need of rejuvenation and a bolder connection with modern life.

p. Somehow I don’t think the middle paragraph was meant to be there. And I would like to see those masses of Christian Evangelicals among whom the Pope’s views on the death penalty were echoing. I thought some of them were arguing we were “too restrictive in our killing practices”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_03_27_atrios_archive.html#111228949630598709.

Reading up on hometown blogs I came across the unfortunate news that rat poopie was found in a warehouse holding airplane snacks at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport (and you don’t have to live in Chicagoland to use that airport during your U.S. airtravel given how many transfers occur there). The article states that “inspectors discovered more than 1,000 rat droppings where pretzels, beer and other airline snacks and beverages are stored”. To this a Chicagoist reader responded with the following astute question: “who got stuck with that counting job?”.

From “a piece by Andrew Clark”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/8cf0b7c8-a0e0-11d9-95e5-00000e2511c8.html in today’s Financial Times:

bq. Until the final scene, the Hamburg State Opera’s November 2002 production of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg had proceeded without comment. Everyone was primed to applaud the hymn to “holy German art” that brings Richard Wagner’s four-hour pageant to a climax. Then came the bombshell. Midway through Hans Sachs’s monologue about honouring German masters over “foreign vanities”, the music came to an abrupt halt. Suddenly one of the mastersingers started speaking: “Have you actually thought about what you are singing?” he asked. No one had experienced anything like it in an opera house. There followed a lively stage discussion – some of it shouted down by outraged members of the audience – about Wagner’s anti-Semitism in the context of 19th and 20th century German nationalism.

There’s much to disagree with in Clark’s piece, both in terms of particular judgements about the relationship between ideology and music and over the claims he makes for the extent of Wagner’s influence. Still, worth a look.

Amazon has a new feature:

_Amazon.com Statistically Improbable Phrases_: Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, show you the interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases that occur in the text of books in Search Inside the Book. Our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to how many times it occurs across all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

Experimenting with this, I find that SIPs effectively convey the essence of an author’s ideas, provided that the author is a phrase-maker. Very useful for cocktail parties. Here, by way of example, is the condensed essence of a number of sociological theorists.

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Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the St Pauls in Bristol riots that initiated a period of urban unrest in Britain which ultimately led to the “Scarman”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Scarman report. The riots followed a police raid on the Black and White cafe on 2nd April 1980. The Bristol Evening Post has “some”:http://www.thisisbristol.com/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=144936&command=displayContent&sourceNode=144919&contentPK=12141802&moduleName=InternalSearch&keyword=riots&formname=sidebarsearch “coverage”:http://www.thisisbristol.com/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=144936&command=displayContent&sourceNode=144919&contentPK=12145074&moduleName=InternalSearch&keyword=riots&formname=sidebarsearch , but I’ve not managed to find much on the web (the BBC’s “On This Day”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/default.stm page ignores the events entirely). The following day’s Daily Telegraph headlined with:

bq. 19 Police Hurt in Black Riot

and editorialized thus:

bq. Lacking parental care many (black youths) ran wild. Incited by race-relations witchfinders and left-wing teachers and social workers to blame British society for their own shortcomings, lacking the work-ethic and perseverance, lost in a society itself demoralized by socialism, they all too easily sink into a criminal sub-culture. (Quotes from “an academic paper”:http://www.psa.ac.uk/cps/1995%5Crowe.pdf .)

I doubt that even the Telegraph would dare to cover such events in these terms today. Contrary to the Telegraph’s fantasy version, neither these riots nor the ones of the following year in Brixton, Handsworth, Toxteth and elsewhere were race riots — black and white youths were involved together, though systematic racial harrassment by the police (throught the “Sus” law) and pervasive racial discrimination undoubtedly underlay the events. This was an important moment in postwar British history, now all but forgotten.

In the April edition of Prospect (subscription required), Roderick Swanston has an interesting review of The Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin. Swanston attributes to Taruskin an agenda that

is conservative, even Hegelian, and implies an evolution of music from the 6th century AD to the present. Key works and composers are included that have in some way contributed to music’s progression.

I haven’t read the book, and at 280stg, I’m not likely to, but the raw numbers are pretty convincing. Of five volumes covering the last 1500 years, Taruskin devotes two to the 20th century, and, according to Swanston, his focus is almost exclusively confined to art music derived from the classical tradition.

This allocation of attention states a doctrine of historical progress in music in a way that is so extreme as to be self-refuting. The 20th century was saturated in music, as is the early 21st, but 20th century[1] art music plays a tiny role on any objective criterion, from popularity to durability to impact on our culture as a whole. If you covered the entire field, from ABBA to zydeco, on any of these criteria, contemporary art music would merit an entry comparable in length and reverence to that on progressive rock (another sub-genre inspired by historicism). Speaking personally, I couldn’t name more than a handful of living writers of art music, and even if I stretched it to include people who’d been active during my lifetime, I doubt that I could name ten. No doubt there are readers here who could do better, but we’re still talking about a marginal phenomenon, unless you assume that cultural significance is heritable property, passed on by classical music to its institutional successors.

Nor could it be said that art music has handed on the baton of progress to other forms of music. The 20th century saw a profusion of musical forms and styles, and these have developed over time, faded away, crossed over and intermingled, but there’s been no obvious movement for the better (or, for that matter, for the worse).

If you want a grand-historical theory for music, Giovanni Battista Vico is your only man. The wheel turns.

fn1. As always, the term “20th century” can’t be used in a strictly chronological sense. For most purposes, as Hobsbawm says, the 20th century began in 1914, and composers with an essentially 19th century approach were still writing well after that. On the other hand, the view that progress manifested itself through formal innovation was around much earlier. A reasonable starting point for the 20th century proper would be Schoenberg’s atonalism.

I wasn’t watching it tick over, and I missed the party but Technorati just passed 1 billion links, of which this blog accounts for 311. Here’s the Technorati Top 100, including Crooked Timber at #59.

I don’t know exactly what to make of this number. A link can be anything from part of an extended debate to a cut-and-pasted item on a blogroll. Still, its obvious that the blogosphere is still growing rapidly and in all dimensions. There’s some more data, here , herehere

Democracy Arsenal, the blog of the Security and Peace Institute, looks to become a valuable source of center-left commentary on international affairs. What’s even more interesting is that the blog precedeth the Institute. That is, there isn’t any SPI presence on the WWW yet, and the links from the Democracy Arsenal blog that should lead to the Institute don’t have a URL. The blog page does tell us that the Institute “supports fellows, sponsors research and convenes foreign policy conferences and meetings.” Now, obviously, it’s a lot easier and faster to set up a blog than it is to create a new institution – this could just be an issue of timing. But I can’t help wondering if this is a new, and rather interesting hybrid organization- a blog with associated institutional trappings (speaker series etc), rather than a traditional think tank which perhaps has a blog as an afterthought (if it has a blog at all). Certainly, the fact that they went to press with the blog before the Institute itself was ready for primetime suggests that the blog is going to play a central role in the final arrangement.

I’ve been reading Michael Lind’s Up From Conservatism, which started me thinking about a justification for affirmative action for conservatives that even the most red-bloodedly partisan liberals ought to be able to get behind. Lind, a former conservative himself, is pretty grumpy about the lack of debate within the conservative movement. By his account, conservatives are allowed a little leeway for free thinking before the Republican magisterium has pronounced on an issue, but after that they’re expected to parrot the accepted line or find themselves excommunicated. Probably a bit of an exaggeration, but I’d imagine that there’s some truth to it too. The interesting bit is Lind’s argument about the source of this discipline. Because most prominent conservative intellectuals are in think tanks, they’re vulnerable to the threat that if they stray too far from the flock, their cushy think tank position will be axed, their funding from conservative foundations will dry up, and they’ll be cast into the outer darkness. Thus, they have a strong incentive to keep their disagreements with the prevailing Republican wisdom to themselves.

Lind’s thesis has some interesting implications when you compare the sad plight of Heritage and AEI Senior Fellows with the cosy situation of tenured lefty academics. The former are required to toe the party line or lose their livelihoods; the latter can say whatever the hell they want and still keep their jobs. So here’s the kicker: the obvious way to encourage more dissent in the ranks of conservatism is to liberate as many conservative wonks as possible from the golden handcuffs of the Scaife Foundation by offering them comfortable tenured positions at prestigious universities. We can then expect conservative thinkers to become as quarrelsome, disputatious and inclined to carp in public about their political leaders as their left-wing equivalents, if not more so, as they give free rein to their natural tendencies towards spleen, orneriness and gouty irritation with politics. How about it?

Wired Magazine has a fascinating story about buprenorphine, a heroin detox drug that offers significant promise for recovering addicts. Unlike methadone, buprenorphine (or “bupe”) doesn’t produce a high or low, and it’s almost impossible to abuse it. As a result, it can be dispersed in large quantities. (Methadone clinics generally only deliver one dose per day, which must be consumed on the spot.) Recovering addicts using bupe don’t have to deal with the sedative quality of methadone, and don’t have to schedule a visit to a clinic every day. Unlike methadone, it doesn’t show up on a urine drug test. All of these factors should significantly ease the reintegration of ex-addicts into the work world.

Despite the improved technology, bupe hasn’t been much of a success. Regulation has been bungled, and the relevant parties simply don’t have the incentives to promote a new, improved treatment. Methadone clinics are afraid that they’d lose money if methadone users got on bupe. GPs are afraid of bringing a new population of ex-addicts into their offices. A set of idiotic regulations prevents clinics from dispersing more than a pill a day, and bans even giant health care providers from taking more than 30 cases. The patent holder isn’t a pharma company, and doesn’t have the interest or expertise to promote the new drug. In fact, the protagonists of the article are a pair of treatment specialists who are promoting the drug freelance.

Well worth reading.