Braintipped, cheek touched with flame, they listened feeling that flow endearing flow over skin limbs human heart soul spine. [...]
— Sorrow from me seemed to depart.
Through the hush of air a voice sang to them, low, not rain, not leaves in murmur, like no voice of strings of reeds or whatdoyoucallthem dulcimers, touching their still ears with words, still hearts of their each his remembered lives. Good, good to hear : sorrow from them each seemed to from both depart when first they heard.
Bloom (presumably) attempts to rationalise what he's hearing [2]:
Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. [...] you think you're listening to the etherial. But suppose you said it like : Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It's on account of the sounds it is.
___________________
[1]Ulysses, James Joyce (1922), p. 262 [OUP Oxford's World's Classics edition] [2] ibid. p. 267
The Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella, has this to say on the word "broken":
One breaks things like guitar strings, bicycle chains, and glasses. That which is broken no longer functions as it was intended to. A broken X is not a suboptimally functioning X but a nonfunctioning X.
That seems fair. Vallicella points to Obama's (mis)use of the word to describe the U.S.' healthcare system.
But the most prominent use of the word here in the UK in recent times has been in the phrase "Broken Britain". It was used by David Cameron in the Conservative's General Election campaign earlier this year. What does it mean? Those without the patience for such questions may say that we shouldn't "quibble", that "we know what it means". But unless there's a clear definition we really actually don't.
An image from prepriministerial days:
Cameron, visiting an estate in Manchester
The point of such a phrase is to conjure up associations and images, to play on the emotions. In fact, the phrase is powerful and successful in the way that photographs can be — without any context, we are left baffled and end up bringing our own values (or, if you like, narratives) to bear on the image.
A phrase like this can become a rallying point, for people who believe they share the same values and that the phrase somehow articulates those values. But the point is that phrases like this don't articulate anything.
Cameron's call for a "Big Society" as a fix for "Broken Britain" may be more helpful but suffers from a similar weakness of definition. It sounds aspirational but it's a euphemism, the very vagueness of which seems to protect the government's aims from accountability and leave us busy, hotly debating its meaning.
Like Obama's "hope" and "change" of 2008, or more recently "squeezed middle" from UK Labour Leader Ed Milband, such phrases aren't supposed to articulate anything. They're designed to be pithy and catchy. The best one can say about them is that they generate debate, but unfortunately I tend to think the worst: that they're distractions which lead to pedantic posts like this one. Meanwhile, somewhere out there, there are issues that are both deserving of more precise language and in need of being debated and discussed.
This past few days I've been ill. Apart from making me a bit miserable, being off work and stuck in bed also got me thinking about all the things I haven't done this year. Like keeping a blog.
Cheerfully, I said to myself: "that site's like a graveyard now". Having spoken, I then proceeded to cough for half an hour.
As you can see, I took a very long break from blogging. I put too much pressure on myself to make posts as good as possible. I've had many drafts lined up for a long time, always almost ready for people to see.
The same could be said for my writing in general. It must be time for a change in approach or attitude or something.
Comparing a blog to a graveyard's not a very apt metaphor though. After all, it's on the active blogs that posts get buried. An abandoned blog is more like an unsown field.
Or perhaps in my case more like a rundown dockyard, from which small boats no longer cast off. Time to make some little rafts to get things going again. I have to remember that even the ricketiest things will float, even if they won't actually sail.
Following my post on modern policing in the UK, I found this post at My Tiny Spot in which Mike fearlessly explains why police in London had no choice but to remove McIntyre from his wheelchair. He also picks up on the BBC's interview it seems:
Identified by his I.D. card - surely forged - as "Jody McIntyre, Violent Anarchist Revolutionary,” Mr. McIntyre plans to sue the Metropolitan Police Service for God knows what. Perhaps for saving his life?
As you'll see, it was all for the man's own good.
And in more good humor, following my post on pre-modern policing in the UK, here's a look at what they were predicting police of the future would look like back in 1886. Well, sort of.
Courtesy of this post from one of my new favourite blogs, The Cat's Meat Shop:
Then I found this in the introduction to the book:
England's treatment of political radicals was another example of this general equality. On the day the Queen opened Parliament, James had witnessed a demonstration in Trafalgar Square 'which might easily have given on the nerves of a sensitive police department'. But the English police were unperturbed; they allowed the demonstrators to 'sun themselves' freely. James was struck by the 'frank good sense and the frank good humour and even the frank good taste of it', as well as by
the fact that the might mob could march along and do its errand while the excellent quiet policemen — eternal, imperturbable, positive, lovable reminders of the national temperament — stood by simply to see that the channel was kept clear and comfortable.
It was political revolutionaries like this 'mighty mob' — as well as those he had witnessed in France — that James was remembering when he wrote The Princess Casamassima. [2]
Almost enough to make one slightly nostalgic, no?
Coming soon: a consideration of The Princess Casamassima. ___________________
My friend just sent me a couple of links to items he said made him feel "angry and upset". So be warned.
One link is to an article from The Guardian about protestor Jody McIntyre being tipped out of his wheelchair and dragged across the street, here.
The other to a (slightly glitchy) YouTube video of a BBC interview with McIntyre, in which he is asked at least twice whether he was "rolling towards" the police in question:
The BBC interviewer (Ben Brown) asks some other frankly absurd questions. For example, would McIntyre label himself as a "revolutionary"? But since when did a person's beliefs become reasonable grounds for inflicting violence when that person poses no threat?
Perhaps one could argue that beliefs, statements, even statements of fact constitute some sort of threat. But the point here is that McIntyre posed no physical threat to the police, even if one were to argue that in his beliefs he posed some sort of threat to society.
Surely in the policing of protest, the police are ideally looking to prevent or stop violence and destruction. That is, they should deal with physical threats or actions and not with why the protesters are actually there. Whether that is what the police have actually been doing in practice is another question, perhaps one the BBC should have asked instead of looking into McIntyre's beliefs.
McIntyre is fortunately very articulate and patient on several points: though it might be reasonable for an interviewer to ask if he has complained to the police, it seems less so to ask the same question three times when the interviewee has already given a perfectly reasonable response. Which McIntyre did — it seems eminently sensible that he first consider his legal options.
And he's right to point out that these are not isolated incidents in recent policing by the Met. Remember Ian Tomlinson, or Delroy Smellie, or very recently Alfie Meadows (here, here, and here).
The footage will stir certain emotions and doubtless cause many to feel anger. And the debate around the cuts and fees means that some will already have taken sides. But whether or not McIntyre and other students are right is besides the point. Just as whether or not McIntyre was, according to The Observer, a "cyber-radical" is surely irrelevant to his treatment at a protest. The arguments for or against the coalition's decision to cut funding for higher education and raise tuition fees seem to me to be very separate from the issues of policing or the media's coverage of protest.
If there's one thing all three main parties in the U.K. agree on, — if there's one thing that hasn't been changed by the Liberal Democrats' sudden emergence as a main contender on the political stage, — it's the importance of economic growth. Of course, there isn't just one thing; bickering aside, the three prospective leaders probably share very similar views on lots of things in principle, but as Gordon Brown learned first-time-round, repeatedly saying "I agree" doesn't make for much of a televised debate. Right now, economics — The Economy — is pretty much as up there as you can get on the political agenda. You'd be hard pressed to find a politician who isn't talking about it. And you know things are bad when Greece's socialist leader is talking about how to make the country 'competitive' and 'viable' again, just like it was any other big, shiny business.
So given the headlines of late and over the last year (whereever you look), there's probably no better short non-fiction book to be reading right now than Partha Dasgupta's Economics: A Very Short Introduction. As with all the books in Oxford University Press' series (except maybe the one on the E.U.), this one can be picked up and put down — or into a coat pocket — with relative ease. It'll also help you understand that little bit more about the world we all seem to be currently inhabiting. Finally, importantly, the author seems to achieve the appropriate mix of enlightening and depressing that makes such books worth reading.
One of the reasons that this book is so accessible is that Dasgupta begins at the ground-level, with sketches of two ten-year-old children — one in the developed world, one in the developing. They are both similar in many respects, and yet they both live in totally different worlds. Dasgupta claims that economics can help us understand why those worlds are so different. Throughout his mostly straightforward explanations of complicated and abstract concepts it's his constant recourse to the human causes and effects that keeps the theory side relevant and applicable to the real world.
This review contains a few excerpts from the book but doesn't spoil any surprises.
Featuring just five short pieces, Him With His Foot In His Mouth might be an ideal introduction for those who have never read anything by Saul Bellow. The collection showcases his unique voice and style, while familiar readers can find some interesting new perspectives on the usual themes.
The longest story in the collection, for example, is called 'What Kind Of Day Did You Have?'. It's underscored by Bellow's trademark examination of what it means to live in a mass society more organised than its individual members, among the rubble of grand ideas and failed dreams. At the centre of the piece is Victor Wulpy, a mouthpiece for Bellow's various anthropolitical musings, trying 'to pole his way upon a walking stick against the human tides of airports'.
I finished reading a collection of Saul Bellow stories last night. Most books by Bellow, there's rarely a page where something doesn't resound or resonate, where something doesn't ring a bell. I was reading 'Cousins' the last in the collection I have and, what with the sun flung well below the horizon some-many hours previous, I was flagging — when Bellow struck this one. It was more like an alarm bell:
Sleep is out of the question, so instead of going to bed I make myself some strong coffee. No use sacking out; I'd only go on thinking.
Insomnia is not a word I'd apply to the sharp thrills of deep-night clarity that come to me. During the day the fusspot habits of a lifetime prevent real discovery. I have learned to be grateful for the night hours that harrow the nerves and tear up the veins—"lying in restless ecstasy." To want this and to bear it, you need a strong soul. [1]
This review contains a few excerpts from the book but doesn't spoil any surprises.
In the interests of full disclosure, I have a confession to make. The Catcher In The Rye was a very important book for me. I read it one summer as a still tender nineteen-year-old, working in a quiet pub, saving for my move to university in the autumn. I'm sure many of its readers will know what I'm talking about when I say the novel's narrator Holden Caulfield seemed to perfectly embody my own naive cynicism while simultaneously showing up everything that was wrong with it.
For Esmé — With Love And Squalor is the UK title for a collection of Salinger's short pieces, which in the US is simply called Nine Stories. All nine will be of interest to anyone who was impressed or moved by Salinger's most popular novel, but they might also provide an interesting taster for readers who've yet to be swayed by The Catcher In The Rye's often earnest admirers.
With all this beautifully disruptive and prohibitive snow about, I've been reminded on several occasions of one of my favourite books.
Philip Larkin's A Girl In Winter is a vivid portrait of England and a warming love story that unfolds slowly and sensuously. I'd like to write a review so that I could explain just why I think this novel is worth reading but, as I don't have time, I'll have to settle for sharing a meteorologically relevant passage. This is in fact the book's opening:
There had been no more snow during the night, but because the frost continued so that the drifts lay where they had fallen, people told each other there was more to come. And when it grew lighter, it seemed that they were right, for there was no sun, only one vast shell of cloud over the fields and woods. In contrast to the snow the sky looked brown. Indeed, without the snow the morning would have resembled a January nightfall, for what light there was seemed to rise from it.
It lay in ditches and in hollows in the fields, where only birds walked. In some lanes the wind had swept it up faultlessly to the very tops of the hedges. Villages were cut off until gangs of men could clear a passage on the roads; the labourers could not go out to work, and on the aerodromes near these villages all flying remained cancelled. People who lay ill in bed could see the shine off the ceilings in their rooms, and a puppy confronted with it for the first time howled and crept under the water-butt. The out-houses were roughly powdered down the windward side, the fences were half-submerged like breakwaters; the whole landscape was so white and still it might have been a formal painting.
I grew up¹ in the UK, and have yet to escape for more than a month at a time. This blog is my attempt to put out some of my reflections on literature, politics, philosophy, and anything else that catches my eye.
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