The Virtual Stoa

Not so long ago they were issuing gay and lesbian marriage licenses just up the road from where I used to live in San Francisco, California (and in the exact spot where Jo and I were married all those years ago); and at midnight last night they started issuing marriages just round the corner from where I used to live — for a much longer period of time — in Cambridge, Mass.

With luck, the other towns in the US that I’ve never set foot in might begin to follow suit…

A real shame that Malta didn’t win the Eurovision Song Contest this year — with its “On Again, Off Again” the only entry, I thought, which really entered into the spirit of the competition.

Nick Barlow’s already delivered the definitive verdict on the geopolitics of the contemporary competition. I’ll just add that while a significant Eastwards shift in the centre of Euro-culture is a generally welcome thing, it was the absurd decision to let the defeated semifinalists cast votes which intensified to a ridiculous degree the regional biases on display on Saturday night — most of these countries being Baltic, Balkan and/or ex-Soviet countries. (Actually, I could check this by recalculating the results after stripping out these 12 countries’ votes. But, strangely enough, I’ve got better things to do with my time.) It’s also unsatisfactory from an ethical point of view, being a kind of prerogative-of-the-harlot situation: these countries have power over the outcome without the awesome responsibility of having to showcase the awfulness of their own musical offering in the final show. (Yes, yes, they were eliminated in the semi-final. But nobody watches that.)

I’m also confused about eligibility rules. I thought the deal was that it was the songwriter’s nationality that mattered, not the performer’s. But I’m pretty certain there were cases on Saturday where it was the other way round. So perhaps it is the other way round. Hence my confusion.

For what it’s worth, after Malta, I would have placed Sweden, Greece and Bosnia/Herzogovina in 2d, 3rd and 4th places respectively. Make of that what you will.

Next year in Kiev!

The comrades bow out gracefully.

Georgi Plekhanov, Russian Marxist; born 26 November 1857, died 17 May 1918.

A friend tells me that he was in Riga a couple of weeks ago, and went to the big public concert the Latvians held to celebrate entry into the European Union. And that it was great fun.

And that one of the songs the Latvians sang was “Yesterday”…

Today in Oxford we get the chance to elect our next Professor of Poetry, and voting’s going on between 11am and 4pm in the Divinity School (part of the Old Bodleian building). I’ve voted for Canadian poet Anne Carson (having nominated her and raised a bit of Anne Carson-related consciousness on this blog a while back), and we’ll find out later this afternoon whether she’s pipped Christopher Ricks, who isn’t really a poet at all, to the post. Ricks seems to have most of the English Department behind him, and a lot of other bigwigs, and one should never underestimate the power of the Balliol machine in this kind of election. But this is the kind of election that’s pretty hard to call, and who knows what’s going to happen. I certainly don’t.

UPDATE [7pm]: It’s Ricks.

One down.

Two to go.

(OK, so they’re calling it a sacking. That’s a second-best solution.)

The world of blogs became a far better place this week with the launch of Class Worrier, a splendid new blog by my excellent friend and long-time co-conspirator Raj, blogging all the way from Oakland, CA.

There’s a lot of things Raj can educate us all about, but I’m guessing that it’ll mostly be a blog devoted to food sovereignty, peasant farming, Zimbabwe, South Asia (and South Asians), gender politics, think tanks, trade negotiations, environmentalism, Marxism and the most important failings of the most important international financial institutions. But that’s just me guessing. No doubt we’ll find out what it’s really going to be about over the coming weeks and months.

Class Worrier goes straight onto the blogroll, and - like a couple of other blogs I might mention - it transcends the usual alphabetization…

A friend writes to the Virtual Stoa:

Chris, Not your usual reading I’m sure but this month’s SFX features the very unlovely Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale.SFX features a column called ‘My Sci-Fi’ where vaguely famous people give their top SF film, TV show, book and character. Normally it’s comedians, tv presenters, and the like but because of this, it’s Tim Collins this month.

His answers to the last two questions are worth sharing:

Favourite sci-fi or fantasy book: “Apart from The Lord of the Rings, I’d nominate the hard SF sagas of Iain M Banks, including the superb Consider Phlebas. Ironic, really - he loathes Tories, apparently!”

[Apparently, indeed. Banks’s dislike of the Tories is well documented.]

Favourite sci-fi or fantasy hero: “The Doctor, of course. Mind you, not the pale pink pacifist some believe him to be. Rather the guy who fights evil and who mocks those who think you can strike a deal with it. The Donald Rumsfeld of the cosmos, not the Robin Cook!”

And thanks for sharing that with us, Tim.

“Red” Emma Goldman, born 1869, died 14 May 1940.

Smart or happy? detects a gay Republican not-so-subtext in Bob Woodward’s new volume on whatever it is that Bob Woodward writes about these days.

Nick Barlow addresses the issues that matter.

(An mp3 download of Father Ted Crilly’s Eurovision entry for Ireland, “My Lovely Horse, incidentally, is available here.)

(And Kieran Healy’s post on the subject from last year is also well worth another look.)

UPDATE [14.5.2004]: Kieran has more, vital social scientific preparatory reading for this year’s contest. And there’s also a Eurovision Drinking Game.

In comments to this post below, there’s disagreement about whether anything can simultaneously be both rubbish and nonsense. I maintain that it can’t: that something can only be rubbish if it is coherent, and anything incoherent is nonsense. That’s how I learned this vocab from my friend Martin, and I’m sticking to my guns.

On the other hand, I see this morning that Lenin agreed with my critics, and that in Chapter Six of Trotsky’s classic work, The Stalin School of Falsification, he is quoted as saying that something was “nonsense and pathetic rubbish” and that “it is a shame and disgrace to waste time on it”. So if there are any readers of the Stoa who are happy to let some of the Great Bearded Leftists of history decide technical points like this one, they at least can be satisfied that the dispute has been settled.

While on the subject of GBLs, another letter from Fred to Karl which deploys this valuable terminology in abundance is this one, written on 23 May 1862.

Graham and Nick have both now realised the utility of dividing things up into what’s splendid, what’s rubbish and what’s nonsense.

(This is, naturally, a splendid development.)

I was very pleased to receive a message with this subject line this morning - memories of debates in nineteenth-century political economy came trickling back - but it turned out, alas, to be a piece of dull spam.

Melanie Phillips (who else?), in a post understatedly titled “Western Civilisation RIP“:

Destroying the Christian roots of European culture will not usher in a secular utopia where everyone will worship at the shrine of Blairism. It will create a philosophical and intellectual vacuum, an undefended cultural space, ripe for colonisation in particular by Islam, which has its eye firmly on this very opportunity…

Yes, it’s true. Those who don’t think it’s such a good idea to have explicit reference to Christianity in the European constitutional treaty are trying to bring about the aforementioned “secular utopia where everyone will worship at the shrine of Blairism”, but it is clear that they are in fact “intent on destroying the particular cultural basis of British and European society” so that — if they get their wicked way — that culture “will be swept away”.Wheee!

Good use of the word “neo-Jacobinism” in the bit at the end, though.

Apparently Karl and Fred were no strangers to the splendid / rubbish / nonsense triad:

Paris, 18 September 1846
11, rue de l’arbre secDear Marx,

A whole lot of things I wanted to write about privately have found their way into the business letter because that was the one I wrote first. No matter if the others read the rubbish for once.

Hitherto I have rather dreaded setting to work on the extracts from Feuerbach. Here in Paris the stuff strikes one as utterly insipid. But now that I’ve got the book [Feuerbach, Das Wesen der Religion] at home, I shall apply myself to it at the earliest opportunity. Weydemeyer�s sweet nonsense is touching. The fellow first declares that he wants to draft a manifesto in which he pronounces us blackguards and then expresses the hope that this won�t give rise to personal differences. Even in Germany such a thing would only be possible on the Hanoverian-Prussian border…

But L�ning�s rubbish is the most ludicrous of all. One can almost visualise the fellow as he daringly looses a hypocritical turd into his trousers…

Yesterday evening, when I was with the workers here, I read the �London Address� already in print. Trash. They address themselves to the �people�, i.e. the presumed proletarians in Schleswig-Holstein which is haunted exclusively by loutish, Low-German peasants and guildish Straubingers. They have learnt from the English this nonsense, this total disregard for actual circumstances, this inability to comprehend an historical development. Instead of answering the question, they want the �people� � who, in their sense of the word, don�t exist at all there � to disregard it and behave peacefully and passively; it doesn�t occur to them that the bourgeoisie continues to do as it likes…

I did Proudhon a really crying injustice in my business letter. Since there was no room in this last letter, I must make amends here. For I believed he had perpetrated a trifling nonsense, a nonsense within the bounds of sense. Yesterday the matter came up again and was discussed at great length, and it was then I learned that this new nonsense is in truth wholly unbounded nonsense. [Marx explains why this is nonsense in a few lines, and then summarises:] By dint of proletarian savings, and by waiving the profit and interest on their capital, these people intend, for the present, to buy up the whole of France, no more nor less, and later, perhaps, the rest of the world as well. Was ever more splendid plan devised, and if you want to perform a tour de force, what quicker way than to coin five franc pieces out of silver moonshine? And the workers here, fools that they are � the Germans, I mean � believe this rubbish, they who can�t keep six sous in their pockets to visit a marchand de vin on the evenings of their meetings, propose to buy up toute la belle France with their savings. Rothschild and company are mere dabblers compared with these accapareurs. Gr�n has so confused the fellows that the most nonsensical platitude makes more sense to them than the simplest fact adduced for the purpose of economic argument. It is disgraceful that one should still have to pit oneself against such barbaric nonsense… But one must be patient, and I shall not let the fellows go until I have driven Gr�n from the field and have swept the cobwebs from their brains. The only fellow clear-headed enough to see through the whole nonsense is our Junge who was in Brussels. …

What is everyone doing there?

Your
E.

Yes, that’s Fred to Karl, 18 September 1846, full text available here. And for those of you without internet access, it’s also in Vol.38 of the Marx-Engels Collected Works, pp.67-73.

Chris Lightfoot (scroll down a bit) divides the world’s contents into what’s splendid, what’s rubbish and what’s nonsense. Good man.

As a reward, I’ll follow the request near the top of his main page and mention the Mistaken Identity event at the LSE on 19 May, which is Privacy International / No2ID’s public debate on the Government’s ID card plans. Why not go along, if you’re in the area?

UPDATE [10/5/2004]: And still it spreads…

John Stuart Mill, English liberal, philosopher, political economist, feminist and, as it happens, socialist (see also here, for Mill’s further thoughts on the matter); born 20 May 1806, died 8 May 1873.

Silverdollarcircle Simon has been finding poetry in unlikely places: the index of one of Joseph Raz’s recent books, Engaging Reason:

amoralist’s apple tree
beautiful sunsets
Billy Budd
Chess
Chess club
Counting blades of grass
Gay marriages
Inuit face in beverly hills
Jane’s baby
Javanese jokes
Job application to Somali hospital
Just rate of tax
Keep smoking, stay witty
Learning to play the piano in retirement
New York jewish jokes
Promises and John’s cacti
Sacrificing your child for $1000 a year
Sylvia’s repeated door locking
Toddler on edge of road
Uncontrary Mary
Unfaithful husband’s photograph

Careful, Simon: this is the kind of thing that gets you a reputation among Guardian pop writers…

Yes, it’s the new game, to post choice lines from twenty randomly-selected songs on your preferred random-selection-of-songs generator. Me, I used the “party shuffle” feature on my regular playlist on iTunes (617 songs) to pick out a bunch, which the same “party shuffle” feature alleged were “up and coming”. Then I edited the list to remove (i) instrumental pieces and (ii) more than one track by the same artist. And this is what we were left with.

1. I’m your poppet. I love it.
2. Tomorrow was to be our wedding.
3. La�t mich nicht ruh’n in der Schlummerstunde!
4. My horses ain�t hungry / They won�t eat your hay.
5. Sinatra was swinging, all the drunks they were singing.
6. To make ‘em laugh was never your intention.
7. I read between the lines of words you can’t disguise.
8. How far are you going, he said, depends on what you mean.
9. Down in Alabama / They call me “The man of joy,” / Still do!
10. Where the scenery’s attractive / And the air is radioactive
11. It’s just talk, talk, talk, talk, till you lose your patience.
12 .Everything up to that point had been left unresolved.
13. Well my own dear father did me deny.
14. What can I say? Because I wanna be your boyfriend.
15. But I�ll stay quiet and then I�ll go / And you won�t have no cause to think about me.
16. A lot of people won’t get no justice tonight.
17. We’ve got to fulfill the book.
18. They take me home to a land / That my soul understands.
19. Mister, here’s a bag with all my money.
20. Two years and the silicosis takes hold.

I’m not sure this would be a very good party playlist. But a pint of beer in any case (or pale fizzy lager, Dan, if you’re reading this) for the first person who can identify them all. Some are easy. But not all.

Apologies for a bit of silence. The computer system here crashed horribly on Tuesday, what with the rubbish Sasser worm or whatever it’s called, and things have been busy for other reasons, too…

… And we missed a bunch of good Dead Socialists while I was quiescent: the implausible trio of E. Nesbit, Tito and Irving Howe… (There’s always next year. And last year.)

The Red Sox were swept by the Texas Rangers over the last few days, boo hiss. Stupid National League rules, no doubt. Or something.

In other Red Sox news, however, I’m pleased to report that while there are far too many eejits wearing NYY caps around Oxford, which is something that me growl at strangers in the street, Red Sox caps are clearly in second place in this town, with the rest nowhere, and this is probably a Good Thing.

Today’s the May Day Bank Holiday in the UK. But far from celebrating it in suitably socialist fashion, I’m going to draw attention to the proclamation of the Brussels congress of the Second International in 1891, which insisted that the celebrations always take place on 1 May itself, rather than on, say, a nearby weekend (or on the following Monday), in order to emphasise the holiday’s “true character as an economic demand for the eight hour day and an assertion of class struggle”.

Americans! This year’s Loyalty Day proclamation is here!