RosieBell

Quiet Please

On rushing to judgement or why can’t they shut up, or just give us the hard facts and forget all this pointless speculation, or if your ideology can explain something 3 seconds after it happened there’s something wrong with you and it.  Inspired by articles on the web passim.

“Atrocities engulf Bombay”.
And out they come to have their say,
The media and blogside tarts,
Open up their Google charts,
And push out words in obscene haste,
So cyber pages go to waste,
On root cause of a killing spree,
Being this or that bad policy.

Something occurs, and then, again,
At first we only know the when,
The death toll climbs, we fill the slot,
Of ignorance with half guessed what,
Next make out tracings of the how,
But that crowd have to pipe up now,
While fog still hangs round the who,
They base whole theses on one clue,
So quick to know wherefore and why,
Of more mass murders in Mumbai.

Watching History

An excellent series, A History of Scotland, has been playing on BBC Scotland.  The most recent episode, “Bishop Makes King”, dealt with Robert the Bruce, who seemed to enact aspects of the Shakespearean kings in real life.  Like Henry V, he was a fine warrior and a savvy tactician.  Like Macbeth, he slaughtered many in the process of consolidating power. His final years were full of illness and with a conscience sickened by his sins of sacrilege.  A tired old compromised king, like Henry IV.  Those huge heroic statues of him shed their stoniness and became scarred flesh. The king was put into the context of his time, when to unite Scotland he had to get the Church on side.  There is no modern equivalent – the Church was as partisan and ruthless as the Murdoch press but also had the monopoly on propaganda, and bishops could raise their own armed forces. 

A History of Scotland is a first person documentary, with the talking head, Neil Oliver, taking you over battlefields and poring over parchment documents like the Declaration of Arbroath.  There is a little reconstruction, when a couple of bearded fellows pull out swords, but mostly you focus on the presenter's words.  Neil Oliver shows the right amount of serious passion for his subject.  He is not bouncing in and out of helicopters or running around busily, or otherwise distracting you from the material.  The scenery is grand, among the hills or in sun dappled woods or in ruined castles.  It has great atmosphere.

Another history documentary on at present is World War II: Behind Closed Doors.  It is in the third person, that is there’s a narrator on the sound track rather than a talking head.  Actors play characters, e.g. Stalin on the phone, shouting in Russian, sub-titled in English.  There are also interviews with those who actually experienced the events (record them while you still can).  Again, it is a detailed look at what happened, without any thesis to expound.  It’s pretty good, giving you a sense of the cunning and shiftiness of politicians, and with the fear as well for those politicians under dictatorships.  One scene that sticks in my mind is Stalin asking his Cabinet if they should abandon Moscow, speaking to them as if to a group of school children, and when no-one puts up his hand, singling them out in turn.  You can imagine the dread of giving the wrong answer.

These documentaries seem to me to be superior to recent Starkey and Schama series, which each had a thesis.  Schama’s A History of Britain was about the development of liberty and democracy in the UK, Starkey’s Monarchy about the necessity of monarchy, and they seemed  to be obviously marshalling evidence for the defence of their big idea. Also, both Starkey and Schama have become insufferable as personalities.

In another kind of historical documentary you have experts being interviewed for about ten seconds each, as if they were celebrities on Channel 4’s Hundred Greatest Gross Outs.  That style insults the historian and his life’s work, and insults the viewer as well.

Here’s a lazy list of my favourite history documentaries.  As happens in these lazy lists, giants, however ancient, remain in your memory, while small workmanlike programmes are forgotten, unless they are recent.

1. The World at War   I can hear Carl Davis’s score and see those burning photographs in my mind now.  It’s harrowing to watch.
2. The Civil War  Photos, diaries and letters flow together in a haunting and beautiful account of the American Civil War. 
3. A History of Scotland Excellent so far.
4. Battlefield Britain  I found myself rooting for Harold and the English at the Battle of Hastings then for Owain Glyndwr and the Welsh at the Battle for Wales.  Exciting stuff.
5. Christina, A Medieval Woman One I saw recently, which explained ownership of property and the power of church courts in medieval times.   I’ll forget it soon, but it was a neat low-key programme, giving some idea on how history is researched, through church records and the like.

Written on Wood

Talking of James Wood, there is a very good article on his strengths and limitations at The Nation.

I only started reading James Wood this year and he took me into his custody.  He grabs you with his sentences and frog marches you to his insights and conclusions.  His criticism is like the beautiful Ordnance Survey maps which show every tiny feature, ever heap of stones, every stream and right of way.  They seem as beautiful in their way as the landscape they portray. 

However, I can be bowled over by William Deresiewicz for pointing this out:-

Wood has read all the novels and all the volumes that bear upon the novels, and he seems to think that is all one needs to do. But there is a world outside his study, and the books in his study, and one can't understand fiction without understanding that. The novel, more than other literary forms, embodies a massive engagement with the world--has massive designs upon the world--and demands a comparable engagement from its critics. Wood thinks that McCarthy got Chigurh from Conrad because he can't imagine that he got him from anywhere other than another novel. How Fiction Works offers us "a brief history of consciousness" from Homer to Modernism but without any suggestion that the representation of consciousness in literature might have something to do with what has happened outside literature. Wood treats the novelistic canon like one giant Keatsian urn, a self-sufficient aesthetic artifact removed from commerce with the dirty, human world.

Here we begin to glimpse the enormous gulf that lies between James Wood, the best we have to offer, and the New York critics, Wilson, Trilling, Kazin and Howe--and, let us add, lest we fetishize that quartet, which in any case begins to sound like a white-shoe law firm that's being taken over by Jews, another critic with strong claims to inclusion in that company, Elizabeth Hardwick. What made these thinkers so distinguished, what made their criticism so significant not only for American literature but also for this country's intellectual culture as a whole, was not great learning, or great thinking, or great expressive ability, or great sensitivity to literary feeling and literary form, though they exhibited all of these, but a passionate involvement with what lies beyond the literary and creates its context.  . . The New York critics were interested in literature because they were interested in politics, culture, the moral life and the life of society, and all as they bore on one another. They placed literature at the center of their inquiry because they recognized its ability not only to represent life but, as Matthew Arnold said, to criticize it--to ask questions about where we are and how where we are stands in relation to where we should be. They were not aesthetes; they were, in the broadest sense, intellectuals.  . .

Gone is any sense that politics and culture are connected, or that their criticism should be connected--the real reason we no longer have any public intellectuals, whose activity is predicated on precisely that belief. It was a belief indebted, to a large extent, to Marxism. The struggle to come to terms with Marxism was central to the New York critics' intellectual formation. It is no accident that the few older writers who still practice a broad-gauge criticism, most notably Terry Eagleton, Clive James and Christopher Hitchens, have all had extensive business with that ideology, or that its disappearance has coincided with a diminishment of critical possibility. Wood's distaste for the postmodern and admirable refusal of its easy cynicisms notwithstanding, his narrow aestheticism marks him unmistakably as a product of his time.

I don’t think that is true of Clive James, who is not, and has never been, a Marxist.  James’s great influence was the anti-totalitarian Orwell.  But I wonder if it is why the London Review of Books seems so uneasy. The old believers, Perry Anderson, say, or Terry Eagleton, come on stage but they who so resounded in the seventies and eighties now sound thin.  They are all self-tribute bands.  Eagleton's eternal sprightliness is Madonna working out, and Anderson saying of Turkish shifts in government "they had completed their historic task" is the Rolling Stones putting out another album that no-one will listen to.

On Oratory

Shuggy has some reservations on the hopes that have been placed in Obama.

Obama's victory, first over Clinton, then McCain was cool. Obama's cool. Everyone agrees. I don't know anyone who doesn't. I read that some people dissent but I don't really believe they exist. I certainly haven't met one. Goddamit all, even George Bush thinks Obama is cool. But when even that old curmudgeon Howard Jacobson starts getting dewy-eyed and imagines coolness necessarily translates into political substance, I start to get worried.

Obama has a way with words, which means he can have his way with writers.

James Wood, the best literary critic writing today, has totally gone overboard for Obama’s rhetoric:-

A movement in American politics hostile to the possession and the possibility of words—it had repeatedly disparaged Barack Obama as “just a person of words” —was not only defeated but embarrassed by a victory speech eloquent in echo, allusion, and counterpoint.

Bush treated the English language as if he had just been introduced to it, and was having trouble making small talk.  Obama’s elegance and ease has brought the same relief to the writers as a musician would feel who had been listening to their nephew fumbling on guitar, then went and heard Richard Thompson.

Of course a musician wouldn’t immediately assume that someone who could play his instrument at perfect pitch would be good at getting bills through Congress. 

All right, oratory is commonly a necessary part of politics, and music is not.  Rhetoric used to be part of the training for e.g. a Roman politician. But good oratory is no guarantee of political competence.  Military prowess can often be a necessary preface and accompaniment to political power – the latest episode in A History of Scotland series, on Robert the Bruce, has just demonstrated that in letters of blood.  Some successful warriors have made excellent rulers, others have not.  And the same goes for orators.

Unsex me here

According to Gender Analyzer this website is written by a man (70%).  So artificial intelligence has decided – which says something about artificial intelligence v. simple common sense.

I often have the same experience with call centres.  I have a deep voice and I’m used to call centre workers addressing me as “Sir” while they discuss my bank account, energy bills or why my internet isn’t working properly.  After a while they’ll ask my name, I’ll say “Rosie”, and they’ll still call me “Sir”.  Not in the script, I suppose, or the training didn’t cover it.  I can accept it from people in India, but from people in Dublin or Dundee?

I think, though, women are less upset at being mistaken for blokes in certain circumstances (eg arguing on blogs), than men are at being mistaken as women. 

Hat tip – the Fat Man (who really is a woman, according to artificial intelligence, his nom de blog and the photo on his site being pathetic disguises).  He demonstrates the abject science and statistics worship of our times by internalising his own gender doubts rather than questioning the methodology and data of the Gender Analyzer.

Cavalier Treatment

I really admired Andrea Riseborough as Margaret Thatcher in The Long Walk to Finchley.  She caught the driving ambition, and made Thatcher glow with energy. She is now Angelica Fanshawe in The Devil’s Whore, and represents a wild sexy thing with liberal views whose story is wound up with the English Civil War. In historical drama there is a necessary scaffolding of ideological differences and sequence of events which has to be erected, and Angelica Fanshawe does this by appearing on battlefields and narrating about who fought this and why.  She looks great, the scenes look great, but does she really need to be there?

Once the fighting and quarrelling men would have been central and a young woman would have been a mild love interest but historical drama has to be feminised these days.

She’s a bit of a distraction, really.  The suspense is not on who is going to win the war but who is going to shag Angelica Fanshawe?

Will she be levelled by Lilburn?

Will Cromwell have his hands on her Rump?

Will she be treated in cavalier fashion by Prince Rupert?

Will the radical Rainsborough root her?

However, the scenes where she isn’t there – eg when the Puritan Rainsborugh attacks a church on Christmas Day with contempt for the papist practices that keep such days holy– are pretty good.  I’m fascinated with those guys dressed like seventies rock stars and for the television Sealed Knot re-enactment of those political passions which come round again and again – the establishment and those that challenge it.

Fascists Freaked Out

The BNP membership list has been published on-line and the members are dripping panic and dismay.  All details here.

There’s nothing so sweet as a bunch of fascists in a sweat.  As someone said, “they couldn’t organise a putsch in a beer hall.”

This inspired me to verse:-

As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I've got a little list--I've got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed--who never would be missed!
There are the ethnic cleansers and the sort ‘em out by race,
There’s the scalped and shaven dickhead with a foreskin for a face,
There are the so-called councillors who’ve started to wear suits,
Though they’d rather be out kicking some dark person with their boots,
And ev’ry myth believing brain dead white supremacist
They'd none of 'em be missed--they'd none of 'em be missed.

(after W S Gilbert)

The South African Invasion

Last night I was cycling home from a friend’s place.  Saturday night is not the pleasantest time for cycling through the city, but I got through without any weaving in my path or drunken abuse.  I went down through the Haymarket and stopped at the light outside Ryrie’s, a tough pub where I’ve seen people come out fighting.

A couple of fellows were leaving the pub.  They were dressed in green, had beards and looked healthy.

“You don’t have to stop at the lights.  There’s nothing coming,” said one to me, speaking as if from a half-wired jaw.

“I’m a law-abiding Brit, you’re a wild South African,” I said.  (I recalled the Springboks were playing that day.)

They found that funny, but they were in a state to find anything funny.

“We really admire you cyclists,” said one.  “All these road works and you still keep cycling.”  (The Haymarket is down to one lane and the lanes divided by barricades.)

“Oh, it’s nothing,” I said.

By then one had his arm about me.  Usually that would scare me to death, or make me very angry, a strange bloke from a pub embracing me in the street, but they were so happy, and handsome, that I found it agreeable.  They paid me some compliments.

The lights changed to green.  I said goodbye and went on my way.

Today’s Conspiracy Theory

From The Times

The death of Michael Crichton deprives us of a hugely entertaining and elegant writer, who infuriated people who should have loved him by becoming a prominent nay-sayer of global warming. Crichton's 2004 best-selling novel, State of Fear, portrayed climate change as a hoax. His eco-terrorist villains blew up Antarctica to convince the public that the glaciers were melting; then claimed that global warming could be averted only by writing fat cheques - to them. It is a testament to the power of his plot - and his copious footnotes - that many people read this as science, not science fiction.

(Or a testimony to the idle stupidity of the green-haters, showing the same kind of mentality that used to  believe that CND was financed by Moscow and that now believes that all terrorist attacks are carried out by Mossad.)

Michael Crichton supported the magazine Spiked “spiritually and financially”.   Spiked takes the offbeat view that global warming is a con and regards it as a plot by the self-righteous to deprive everyone in the world of access to 4x4s and long haul flights.

Some exercises for conspiracy theory beginners:-

Exercise 1 Follow the money

Why would a writer of AIRPORT novels make up absurd conspiracy theories about environmentalists who want to reduce the number of long haul flights?

Exercise 2 Cui bono

Why would a writer of AIRPORT novels support a group of media hacks who want to increase the number of long haul flights?

Two reasons for being sorry that Sarah Palin was not voted in

1. She has been a great unifier.  Commenters and bloggers from right to left, who normally spit and snarl at each other, have been as one in saying how awful she is, how scarey that a bible literalist and ignoramus with the geographical knowledge of a dormouse should have a chance of becoming President.  Only the contrarians like Spiked, the zany Camille Paglia and raving right wingers like Mark Steyn and Ann Coulter have been leaping to her defence, or rather, kicking those who dissed her as a load of snobs.  It seems that it takes a snotty elitist to be outraged that a high up politico in the USA does not know what the First Amendment refers to.  (Even we unAmericans know what it’s about, and it’s one thing we regard as much to the credit of the Yanks, that First Amendment).

There's a story by Saki where the women at a house party, who normally quarrel with each other, unite in hating a rude woman guest.  At the end it's revealed that the woman guest was hired to be a focus of the other women's hatred and consequent fellow feeling. Sarah Palin filled the role of the rude woman guest.

 2. Everyone admires Tina Fey for her imitations of Sarah Palin. I’m sorry to have missed out on what that clever impressionist Ronni Ancona would have made of her.

After the fall of Margaret Thatcher woman impressionists were crying in the dole queue.