The Virtual Stoa

C. L. R. James, author of The Black Jacobins and Beyond a Boundary (which happens to be the best book on cricket ever written); born in Trinidad, 4 January 1901; died in London, 31 May 1989.

Not that the Virtual Stoa’s got a one-track mind, or anything, but Martin raised a good point in the comments to the post below: why hadn’t I linked to the now-legendary page on Antebellum Parasexuality? Well, there it is, and VS-readers who are keen to learn about farmyard sex in the pre-Civil War South can now follow the link to the 1998 discussion and enlighten themselves in the company of some of the leading students of American Studies.

The last six years have been kind to the perpetrators of Antebellum Parasexuality and both continue to go from strength to strength: Martin has recently been elected a Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St John’s College, Cambridge and knows a great deal about the deep metaphysical structure of contemporary theories of egalitarian justice; Dominic has recently had his first book, Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism, published by Random House, and has some alarmingly good literary representation.

But they’re still both Very Naughty Boys.

The Virtual Stoa is unusual among websites in not being chiefly a repository for images of animal porn. But things are now going to change, bringing this page into line with the rest of the worldwide internetweb.

This discussion below got onto the subject of Gerald of Wales’s History and Topography of Ireland (composed around 1185), and this provides me with ample excuse to reproduce two of the classic mediaeval illustrations that accompany �56, on “A goat that had intercourse with a woman”, and �57, on “A lion that loved a woman”.

Here’s Gerald on the Irish goat:

“How unworthy and unspeakable! How reason succumbs so outrageously to sensuality! That the lord of the brutes, losing the privileges of his high estate should descend to the level of the brutes, when the rational submits itself to such shameful commerce with a brute animal!”

Gerald then sagely observes that

“Although the matter was detestable on both sides and abominable, yet it was less so by far on the side of the brute who is subject to rational beings in all things, and because he was a brute and prepared to obey by very nature. He was, nevertheless, created not for abuse but for proper use…”

And here’s Gerald on the French lion:

“Sometimes when he escaped from his cage and was in such fierce anger that no one would dare to go near him, they would send for Johanna who would calm his anger and great rage immediately. Soothing him with a woman’s tricks, she led him wherever she wanted and changed all his fury immediately into love.”O Beasts! Both! Worthy of a shameful death! But such crimes have been attempted not only in modern times but also in antiquity, which is praised for its greater innocence and simplicity. The ancients also were stained with such unspeakable deeds. And so it is written in Leviticus: “If a woman approaches any beast to have intercourse with him, ye shall kill the woman, and let the beast die the death”. The beast is ordered to be killed, not for the guilt, from which he is excused as being a beast, but to make the remembrance of the act a deterrent, calling to mind the terrible deed.”

Is this sound reasoning from our Gerald? Six hundred years later, this argument was apparently still being made, calling forth Jeremy Bentham’s dissent in his classic essay (and longstanding Virtual Stoa favourite) “Of Offences Against One’s Self“. There he considered the problem of human-animal sex (”Accidents of this sort will sometimes happen; for distress will force a man upon strange expedients”), but expressed the thought that laws against this kind of things were probably a bad idea. He then wrote this:

“Some persons have been for burning the poor animal with great ceremony under the notion of burning the remembrance of the affair. (See Puffendorf, Bks. 2, Ch. 3, 5. 3. Bacon’s Abridg. Title Sodomy. J.B.) A more simple and as it should seem a more effectual course to take would be not to meddle or make smoke about the matter.”

Bentham then turned his attention to the “most incontestably pernicious” of “all irregularities of the venereal appetite”, which was masturbation, though while he judged that this was Very Bad Indeed, he didn’t really think it should be banned, either, for “no punishment could ever have any effect” as “it can always be committed without any danger or at least without any apparent danger of a discovery”. So there we are. (Which reminds me that I haven’t yet read Thomas Lacqueur’s Solitary Sex, though I’m looking forward to very much indeed. No time, no time.)[Gerald of Wales snippets from the Penguin ed., translated by John O’Meara, pp.75-6.]

Erich Honecker, German Communist, builder of the Berlin Wall, and first secretary of the East German Party, 1971-1989. Born 25 August 1912 in the Saar; died in Santiago 29 May 1994, ten years ago today.

Not much missed, though.

Many thanks to all those who marked the third birthday of the Virtual Stoa (see below), and thanks in particular to Norm and Matthew Turner, who offered presents in the form of a joke and a Melanism respectively. Marc offers an historian’s perspective on the early years of the Stoa, and thanks are also due to Sarah, Jason, Michael, Simon and Chris for helping to mark the occasion in style…

UPDATE [29.5.2004]: And Backword Dave, too!

A reader writes…

Talking of Arlette [ = Arlette Laguiller, aka “Arlette the starlet”, as we had been — Ed.] , you may (judging from your postings to the Virtual Stoa) be interested to hear that Arlette has now indicated that she is in favour of gay marriage (though is apparently not so keen on adoption by gay couples).Debate has recently resurfaced on this issue in France, after Dominique Strauss-Kahn (one of your, ahem, favourite French politician Laurent Fabius’ main rivals for the PS nomination for presidential candidate in 2007), last week attempted to make a bold policy move to jostle for position among his rival ‘elephants’ by pronouncing in favour of gay marriage. No�l Mam�re, who you may recall was the Green candidate for president in 2002, has also declared that he is going to carry out such a ceremony in the town of Begles (near Bordeaux), of which he is mayor, on - I think - June 6.

There is, therefore, a cartoon on the front of the current issue of Le Canard Enchain� (which I bought yesterday in the departure lounge of one of the terminals of Charles de Gaulle airport which has not yet collapsed) which has Arlette saying (instead of her standard opening line ‘Travailleuses, Travailleurs’), ‘Travailleurs, Travailleurs, Travailleuses, Travailleuses, mariez-vous’.

The reference to Fabius is a reference to the fact that many years ago, and for odd reasons, I once found myself sat next to him at some function or other. And “elephant” is still one of my favourite political jargon words.

It’s a good week for blogprose: yesterday we had Norm on the Lawnmowers of the Future [see below], and today we have what may very well be the finest tribute ever penned (or typed) to the Shepherd’s Pie over at the increasingly indispensible Fafblog.

A reader writes:

I thought you and your readers might be interested in a free event we’re hosting on June 10th at 7pm at Borders Oxford - I’m emailing you from Oneworld, a publisher based in Summertown. June 10th is of course the day after the G8 summit in Georgia closes - where the anticapitalists will be out in force just like they were in Seattle - and an author of a book we’ve just published called Anticapitalism: A Beginner’s Guide will be speaking about the anti-capitalist movement, how it works and what it can achieve. The author is called Simon Tormey, he’s from Nottingham University, and his book has been praised by such figures as George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth.

I’m trying to work out whether I’m still boycotting Borders or not. I stopped shopping there last year when the strike in Michigan got underway, and now I haven’t heard anything about what happened to that strike, or to the unionization effort that Borders were trying to sabotage, and I’d kind of like to know whether it’s safe to go back in and buy occasional copies of Jewish Socialist, Searchlight and the other periodicals I used to get there, not knowing anyone else in Oxford who had them on sale.Simon Tormey’s a very smart man: I own (but haven’t read) his book on Agnes Heller, but saw him give a very good talk a couple of years ago on another of his forays into Oxford, and I enjoyed his criticism [pdf] of the Government’s White Paper on the future of higher education.

François-Noel “Gracchus” Babeuf, conspirator for equality, born 1760, guillotined 27 May 1797. His famous defence speech is here.

It’s 27 May 2004, which makes it, among other things and improbably enough, the third anniversary of my first postings at the Virtual Stoa. This blog’s a pretty trivial blog in the grand scheme of things (we can be more precise: actually it’s an Adorable Little Rodent), and I rather like it that way. But Three Years Not Out makes this one of the oldest blogs on the block: only a small fraction of the blogs out there can claim a pre-11.9.2001 existence, for example (though admittedly, I can barely do that, with only 15 posts posted before that date, and most of them trivial).

So it’s a trivial anniversary for a trivial blog. But I did want to take the opportunity on this day (no, I’m not going to use that nasty word) to say two things about this blog, about blogging and bloggers.

First, that what I’ve always liked about blogging is the way it fills up both the interstices of my day and the intersections of my life.

On the interstices: I don’t write many long posts, so most of the posts I post don’t take long to prepare and are just scribbled down on the spur of the moment, and that suits a life and a job where I’m often at the computer keyboard for short to medium periods of time at different times of the day, in between the important work of teaching and meetings and eating and drinking. And the subjects of my blogposts dwell on the interstices of my regular life, too: I don’t say much here about my teaching life, let alone my research, or about what might laughably be called my personal life, but instead about the bits that fall in between the major pieces of my life: things from books, things found in newspapers, things on other blogs and in other parts of the web, dead socialists, that kind of thing. It’s all pretty interstitial, and I like it that way.

On the intersections: it’s always been a source of satisfaction to me that the readers of this blog come from many of the different parts of my life, and they include friends from my incarnations both in this country and in the US, relatives, students (current and former), academic colleagues in and outside Oxford, other bloggers, complete strangers, and so on. And I sometimes feel that writing on this blog, for those people, as well as for myself, is one way of drawing together the threads of recent years that might otherwise fall into too many different, wholly separate compartments (to mix metaphors, horribly).

Second, that it’s time to say a series of thanks to all the other people out there — including the ones alluded to above — who’ve taken an interest in this blog and who collectively continue to make this activity worthwhile.

I’ve been sustained along the way by the unintended moral support provided by many other bloggers. First of all, there are those I know in the real world — Moiderin’ Marc and Ishbadiddlin’ Ennis and Silverdollarcirclin’ Simon — who have been joined in recent months by a further cohort of people I know — sometimes quite well — including Josephine, Raj, Mike B., Sarah, Mike S, Jason, all dipping their toes in the blogwaters and starting to write excellent blogthings on their excellent blogsites. And then there are those whom I only know through their blogs, which I keenly follow (except when the posts are about motor racing), and these include Nick and Matthew and Harry and Backword Dave and some of the others who fill out my blogroll.

Two who deserve a special mention, however — a shout-out, even, if that’s the right word — are my two fellow blogging UK academic political theory lefty types, from whom I’ve learned a very great deal over the last chunk of time, and not just about how to write a good blog. Chris Bertram wrote Junius once upon a time, which was the first seriously good British blog, and I’ve been delighted to meet him in person, now on two different continents. And while I haven’t yet met Norm Geras — though he’s threatening a visit — the Normblog has been a source of very great pleasure and interest over the last nine months — and while Norm hasn’t yet persuaded me about Iraq, he might take some consolation from the fact that he has persuaded me that Emmylou Harris is almost as good as he says she is, and that I’m now the happy owner of almost a dozen of her records. CDs. Whatever.

[And an occasion like this should always include a toast to absent friends: Paul “The Thinker” Richards gave me a — yet another, I should say — reason for living, and I’m sorry he’s quit the World of Blogs. (This, I think, is where he’s gone, and if so, this may make sense of his final, enigmatic blogpost.)]

So those are the two things I wanted to say.

Finally to some quick Virtual Stoa Stats: this is the 918th post, which makes for an average of a little under one post per day over the long haul, only 10% of which related to dead socialists. There have also been 674 comments posted with the automated system since I introduced it a little over a year ago. And I don’t think I’ve ever deleted a comment yet, apart from to remove duplicate posts and the like, which is how I’d like things to stay. Since Sitemeter was installed a while ago, there have been 49.137 visitors and 71, 222 page views. And Technorati reports that there are now 65 inbound sources and 78 inbound links to this blog. OK. That’s enough statistics.

Final, final thought: it’s a curious fact that I haven’t changed the visual layout of this blog to any considerable extent since the very first post, and nor have I ever felt tempted to. Given that I’m generally crap at visual stuff, I wonder how it turned out that way?

BBC Radio Four isn’t very good, all things considered, and I only listen to it in the absence of any halfway decent alternative, or the presence of a Test Match (and yes — Test Match Special leaves a lot to be desired, too). But one reason why it’s been particularly annoying over the last day or so is that all three of the news programmes I’ve listened to chunks of have had segments on obesity. This is not good radio. None of the producers and presenters have found a way of making it interesting radio. It’s boring. It’s probably important, true, but you guys talking about it makes me want to switch the radio off altogether (and usually it’s only the words, “And now, Thought For The Day” or the theme tune to John Peel’s Home Truths that can make me do that). Drop it. Leave obesity to the sex columnists, who know how to handle it (if not the GLHs themselves).

UPDATE [27.5.2004]: It’s bloody everywhere. Obesity. I mean, not everywhere, but just on the radio, where it annoys me. Still. It was a leading item on last night’s midnight news, and, as Uninformed Jason points out, the bloody Today programme was still banging away on the subject this morning. Grrr.

Norm’s got a way with words, responding to A Philosopher Abroad (who has recently linked to the Stoa, and been linked to in return):

I mean no disrepect here, but I would like to express the following point with some force and vividness. Consequently, try to imagine this day: the great George Jones seated beside the comparably great Merle Haggard, and on the other side of each of them the ghosts of that even greater pair, Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill, these four driving a large lawnmower through the centre of Denver, Colorado, in search of a drink. Until it happens is how long anyone who’s interested will be waiting for me to apologize for declining to lend my voice and my energies to a political effort that, had it succeeded, would have resulted in prolonging the life of a regime of torture, wanton murder and daily barbarism. And they’d still be waiting after that.

When it comes to keeping up with the George Joneses, I think he’s referring to the country music legend rather than the political editor of the Daily Telegraph. But either would make for a splendid spectacle, along with Merle and the shades of Karl and John Stuart on this dramatic quest for booze.

It’s very sad that much of Charles Saatchi’s art collection has gone up in smoke, irreplaceable blow to our national heritage, etc., etc., but it did bring to mind one of my favourite Letters to the Editor of recent years, this one directed to the Editor of Private Eye, and published in Eye 1013 in October 2000:

Sir,It may not have escaped your notice that the current exhibition being held at the Saatchi Gallery in north London bears the ludicrous title “Ant Noises”. This, it seems, is an anagram of the previous Brit Art extravaganza “Sensation”.

Having visited the show may I humbly suggest that a more fitting anagam of the word “sensation” might have been “Inane Toss”?

Cordial regards,

Vic Darkwood,
Findon, West Sussex

High Art Lite still my favourite book about this kind of thing. Well worth a read, if you haven’t already.

Oxford’s Psychiatry Department is circulating this leaflet, left, around the university. Turns out that when you turn over the page you learn that beer isn’t really the cure for depression after all, and that it’s better to take antidepressants (and, perhaps, to follow some other therapies) than to booze heavily in response to feeling gloomy. Got that?

It seemed, however, a nice image to accompany a blogpost to report that Guy Maddin’s new film, The Saddest Music in the World is a fine, fine film — since this really is a film about how a particular kind of Canadian beer, brewed in Winnipeg, will help to lift North America out of the Depression (and a reminder of just how Depressing the United States must have been in the Prohibition era).

Oh yes, and it said in the glossy cinema programme in reasonably big letters that “While rejecting accusations that he’s a mere pasticheur, Maddin resurrects long-abandoned film forms, stirring into the mix with admirably straight-faced conviction German expressionist lighting, Soviet montage, “golden age” Hollywood melodramatics and Busby Berkeley’s more fetishistic choreography”. That’s an opinion from one Michael Brooke, writing in Sight and Sound, and a reminder that my brother is one of the world experts on the films of Guy Maddin, which must be quite a strange thing to be.

Only seen three of them myself, but very much want to see Careful if I ever get the chance.

On a Crooked Timber comments board not so long ago I saw a link to Alice Dryden’s Nigel Molesworth meets Harry Potter parody, ho for hoggwarts!. It’s very good indeed.

Bradford sociologist Alan Carling is standing for the local council in Bradford as an Independent. Unlike Norm and Chris I can’t count him among my friends, but I do have a reason for admiring him as the author of this splendid description of the difference between American and British academic conferences (and yes, I’ve quoted it before, but it’s worth it):

… but you have to hand it to US academics: they sure know how to organize a conference that feels like a serious business convention. There were actually men and women there in suits, especially those silver-sheeny ones in a mottled semi-reflective material that looks as if they descend from a job-lot of curtain lengths delivered by UFO somewhere over Colorado circa 1955… By dressing below this level, it was possible to regard oneself as a marginally dangerous intellectual presence, or at any rate a marginal one. (In the UK, by contrast, it is physically impossible to dress so low as to be the worst-dressed person present at the Annual Conference of the British Sociological Association).

That’s from his essay, “Rational Choice Marxism and Postmodern Feminism: Towards a More Meaningful Incomprehension” in Rational Choice Marxism, ed. Terrell Carver and Paul Thomas, Pennsylvania University Press, 1995, p.301.

A useful resource, from the New York Observer.

Will has a new Marxist blog called A General Theory of Rubbish, and — fittingly — has linked to the Virtual Stoa. He explains why (the name, not the link) here.

Ralph Miliband, Belgian socialist, lecturer at the LSE and then professor at Leeds and elsewhere, author of several excellent books, founder and editor over thirty years of the Socialist Register — but these days mostly known to the British public as a father of two. Ho hum. Born 7 January 1924, died 21 May 1994, ten years ago today.

Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary biologist, baseball obsessive and socialist, born 10 September 1941, died 20 May 2002.

Henri de Saint-Simon, one of the (so-called) utopian (so-called) socialists, born 17 October 1860 1760, died 19 May 1825.

And, thinking about things that collapse simultaneously appear to us under a triple aspect (see below), I was reminded yesterday of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints, and, in particular, its Medical Committee, which nicely brings together all three of Max Weber’s distinctive kinds of legitimate authority, being a crazy blend of traditional, charismatic and rational-legal forms.

PRESS RELEASE: Despite disinformation / misinformation (variously rubbish or nonsense) appearing on the Virtual so-called Stoa, reliable reports were today circulating on the internet that the splendid journal Imprints has just made its millionth sale. Seasoned observers and investment analysts were predicting a bid for the niche publication from the Murdoch empire, although Thailand’s Prime Minister Thaksin Shiniwatra is believed to be preparing a $65m bid, and Redrow Homes millionaire Steve Morgan is waiting in the wings….

Perhaps this manages to defy exclusive-and-exhaustive categories, qualifying as simultaneously splendid, rubbish and nonsense (much as baking a halfway decent cake with a friend can in certain circumstances count as being triply labour, work and action according to the classical Arendtian schema from The Human Condition). Martin? Any thoughts?

One thing I share with Norm is a deep loathing of the film Life is Beautiful. So go read his thoughts on the subject here and here, where he’s reprinting the relevant section of his critical piece on the film from Imprints, the small-circulation socialist journal.

I nod at almost every sentence, either agreeing, or seeing exactly where he’s coming from and strongly sympathizing, or not knowing exactly what he’s talking about because I don’t know the other artworks he mentions, but strongly suspecting that he’s onto something. And I also agree with his central argument about what it is that’s really wrong with the film, which is more or less why I hated the film so much when I saw it in 1999 — which also happens to be the reason why I think the film failed in its own - or at least in its own director’s - terms.

I read an interview somewhere where Benigni said something about how he wanted to make a film in which he put his stock clown character in the most extreme situation imaginable. And that’s not obviously an unworthy goal. But the point is that he just didn’t manage to do that in La vita � bella, because again and again in the film the camp was presented as being a less oppressive place than we have reason to believe that Nazi camps in fact were (even in the absence of the kinds of gruesome scenes that Norm lists as being absent from the mind’s eye when viewing the film). Benigni’s character is tolerably able to move around the camp unmolested at night, get work in the officer’s lodgings, exchange certain kinds of messages with his wife, etc., as he continues the work of persuading his child that this is all a game. And so whatever else this is, this isn’t a film in which the stock character is placed in the most extreme situation imaginable, but a film in which the representation of a Nazi extermination camp is organised around the requirements of the plot of a light comedy. And that (or so it seems to me) is a pretty ethically dubious way of manufacturing Holocaust-related art.

Perhaps I saw the film too soon after a visit to Auschwitz/Birkenau, so I couldn’t help but relate what I saw on the screen to what I’d seen in Poland and read about beforehand, but in general as I watched the film, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that — some powerful images aside — Benigni had given us a much kinder, gentler Nazi camp than the historical record warranted. Artistically, that fact was fatal both for my enjoyment of the film (not that I want to watch films of Nazi atrocities, please note) and, so it seemed to me subsequently, for what I learned about the director’s own artistic ambitions. And politically it seemed repulsive, because for better or for worse we live in an era where lots of people get their education about subjects as serious as the Holocaust from films like La vita � bella, and I’d certainly hate it if this film really were the source of a lot of people’s Holocaust awareness.

A small number of people whose judgment I generally respect tell me that they think it’s not a bad film, all things considered. But it really, really stank for me. I mean, I hated Ridicule for lots of reasons. But when all’s said and done, that was just unfunny and generally worthless. La vita � bella is something else altogether.