The Virtual Stoa

It’s not just the Labour councillors in this town who scribble on blogs. Local Green councillor Matt Sellwood’s got a blog, too, and he writes, with reference to what’s going on just around the corner from where I live:

On that note, I am also getting up at the crack of dawn tomorrow [Monday] to go down to the old Lucy’s Factory site, where British Waterways have been stopped from evicting the boatyard by squatters. Contrary to the typical (and false) image of squatters as people who move in and trash a place, the squatting community in Oxford attempts to defend absolutely crucial community facilities like the boatyard (without which, most of the boating community in oxford would lose their affordable homes) and deserve wholehearted support…

Read more about this kind of thing, and other kind of things, over here.

Is the Oxford Labour Party now the most seriously blogged-up local political party in the country? The district party includes our recent parliamentary candidate Antonia Bance, NUS sab Jo Salmon, Oxford City Councillors Dan Paskins in Lye Valley and Rick Muir and Bob Price in Hinskey Park, together with other local members including me, blogger Mike Rowley and one of the more sensible occasional Harry’s Place commenters, Stephen Marks.

That seems like a lot to me, though no doubt the person or people behind Bloggers4Labour can tell me that we’re only the twelfth most blogged-up local party, or something similar. Are there similar blog-legions in other parties’ local parties, or are they still doing sensible old-fashioned things like knocking on doors and persuading people to vote for them?

I probably should have known this, but I didn’t.

Credit Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the wave of anti-Communist hysteria that he rode to political prominence. McCarthy tainted the word “folk” by associating it with “Communist”. He did this by attacking the Weavers “folk” group as Communist sympathizers and summoning its most prominent member, Pete Seeger, to testify before his Committee on Un-American Activities. Overnight the word “folk” was dropped from contention. In 1953 it was no longer used in the trade press, the fan magazines, or in advertisements for country music.”Folk” was out and the word “country” was simply dropped in its place. Along with many other terms, it had been used in the trade press for some years, but by December 5 1953, the date of a forty-eight-page, advertisement-adorned special Billboard section devoted to the music, the term “country” is used virtually to the exclusion of all others…

Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity, University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp.198-9.

I’m not the only one brooding unhealthily over split infinitives (see below, on the IRA statement). (As a friend used to say to me, many years ago, it’s a slippery slope from split infinitives to split-crotch panties.) Yesterday’s Guardian not only carried a picture of a fetching baby pygmy hippopotamus, it also had a column by Ian Mayes’ on the paper’s current thinking on the matter. It’s all terribly reasonable.

What with looking after new kittens, etc., I’ve been visiting pet shops for the first time in quite a lot of years, and was intrigued to find one shop in North Oxford selling ferret muzzles. (There’s a variety of ferret-related products, for example, here.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pet ferret in Oxford, muzzled or not, but if any of my local readers have sightings to report, or other information about the local ferret scene, please deposit them / it in the Comments.

Here’s Denis MacShane, writing in this week’s New Statesman about his brush with the Polish authorities:

“It happened in 1982 when I was picked up by the Polish police after smuggling $10,000 of European trade union funds to the underground Solidarity union. I vaguely remember tearing up and swallowing the address of the contact in Warsaw to whom I had given the cash, but my main memory is of being taken from a prison cell after a few days to meet the diplomat from the British embassy paying me a consular visit. He assured me my case was being reported on the BBC, that a good lawyer had been hired, and that if I looked polite and sorrowful, the court would not impose a jail sentence. To cheer me up he gave me the standard Foreign Office survival kit for politically incorrect Brits banged up in communist prisons. It was a small Harrods carrier bag containing three apples, a tiny jar of Marmite, a packet of Ryvita and two copies of Country Life.

I wonder what you get these days.

Jean Jaurès, French socialist. Born 3 September 1859, shot dead 31 July 1914.

Tim Collins (or the person who does his e-campaigning) has finally taken down his website at timcollins.co.uk, which just displays a blank page if you try to load it. With regret, therefore, I’m removing the link from the “in the bin” section of the sidebar, now that this particular page is, well, in the bin.

Please use the comments to point me towards any other Tory websites which might entertain or instruct. The WiddyWeb claims that it’s displaying a pic of AW MP in a Popemobile, though it’s not clear to me that she really has a Popemobile there, or what variety of Popemobile she’s in. (I think Ratzinger introduced a new kind for his enthronement ceremonies earlier in the year.)

Yesterday in one of the comments threads, Michael suggested naming a cat after the Manichees, and Jamie followed it up by observing (rightly) that Tertullian was a good name for a cat.

By complete coincidence, I was in the Bodleian later that afternoon reading about the early responses to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, and came across this passage from Alexander Rosse’s Leviathan Drawn Out With A Hook, which also mentions the Manichees and Tertullian side by side:

“Such and much more like stuff and smoke, doth this Leviathan send out of his nostrils. This is the spermacaetae or spawn which the whale casteth out… a whale that hath vomited up the condemned opinion of the hereticks, and chiefly the Anthropomorphits, Sabellians, Nestorians, Saduceans, Arabeans, Tacians or Eucratits, Manichies, Mahumetans, and others; for in holding life eternal to be only on earth, he is a Cerinthian and a Mahumetan; in giving God corporeity he is an Anthropomorphit, a Manichean, a Tertullianist and an Andean: in holding the Three Persons to be distinct names and essences… he is a Sabellian, a Montanist, an Aetian, and a Priscillianist. In saying that Christ personated God the Son, he is a Nestorian, giving him two personalities, and in denying spirits he is a Saducean: in making the soul to rest with the body till the resurrection he is an Arabian; in making the soul of man corporal he is a Luciferan, by putting a period to Hell he is an Origenist: in teaching dissimulation in religion he is a Tacian or Eucratit, in making God the cause of injustice or sin he is a Manichee; in slighting Christ’s miracles he is a Jew; and in making our natural reason the word of God he is a Socinian.”

I don’t think I know what a Priscillianist is, but I’m sure it’s not a good thing to be.UPDATE [noon]: I’m reading Culverwell this morning, and he’s being rude about Priscillianists, too, grouping them with the Gnosticks and the Manichees. But this is helpful.

Herbert Marcuse [also], Frankfurt scholar, born 19 July 1898, died 29 July 1979. More writing here.

Can linguistic pedants support peace in Ireland?

There was a split infinitive in the Good Friday Agreement (”… the right to freely choose one’s place of residence…”), and there are three more in today’s historic IRA statement (”… to verifiably put… to fully engage… to fully comply…”)

But as an Irish friend pointed out to me back in 1998, we should applaud all concerned for trying to boldly go where no peace process has gone before…

At long last. Key dates:

23 January 1973: born
5 February 1994: pair-bond
19 March 2001: marry
15 October 2004: start of open-ended cohabitation experiment
27 July 2005: acquisition of kittens

Here they are.

This is the boy-kitten exploring the waste-paper basket for the first time.

This is the girl-kitten figuring out how the Venetian blind works.

I was woken up just before six this morning by the noise of small furry animals hurtling around the house very fast. They seem to have made themselves quite comfortable already, and are now hiding under a large sheet, curled up next to one another on the landing.

Names to follow. And, no doubt, more photos.

Jules Guesde, French socialist, born 12 November 1845, died 28 July 1922.

Nice to see that the Virtual Stoa is identified as a “British Conservatives” blog over at the What is Liberalism? blog [right hand side and scroll down].

It’s a pleasingly idiosyncratic run-through of the UK World of Blogs, in fact. The same list tells me that Backword Dave (from Scotland, lives in Wales) is “some wit from England”, that Oliver Kamm is a “democratic marxist”, and that Stephen Pollard belongs to the “radical center”, to pick out only a few of the more counterintuitive labels.

The more I hear about the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, the more disturbing it all gets.

But here’s a question I haven’t seen asked or answered anywhere: is there any reason to think that would-be suicide bombers in this country have access to the kind of explosives that you can strap around your body? The “he was wearing a heavy coat on a summer’s day” defence of the shooting rather turns on the thought that there’s intelligence to suggest that they do. But if they do, then why have the bombers so far been carting around rucksacks packed with explosives and nails?

(This may have been discussed already. If so, apologies. I’ve been out of the country.)

Recent reading has included Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Reformation (splendid), Richard A. Peterson’s Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (not bad at all), Charles Tripp’s history of Iraq (fairly solid, I thought, though he uses the word “narrative” almost as much as a bad journalist writing about David Davis), and two best-sellers that were kicking around in the flat we were staying in, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (great fun) and The Da Vinci Code (rubbish nonsense, and, oddly enough, far more childish that HP&tPoA, as well as much less well written), together with various other bits and pieces, and lots of copies of L’Equipe, of course. (Favourite headline: “Il est implacable”, with a picture of you-know-who.)

Since the launch of the new Harry Potter book was widely covered in the French media, I can report that French journalists say “‘Arry Pott-eur” when they are trying to say his name in English, and “‘Arry Pott-air” when they are trying to say his name in French.

And my goodness the Paris academic bookshops are wonderful. I could spend a lot of time and a lot of money in the Vrin shop, or in the basement at Compagnie. Well, I did. But I would have spent even more of both if I hadn’t succeeded in restricting my attention to the Stoics / Augustine / Hobbes / Rousseau sections of the shelves.

It’s a good thing, for example, that I managed to resist the temptation to buy (for 320 euros) the Dictionnaire de Port-Royal (here, and scroll down), as I almost certainly wouldn’t have been physically able to cart it home. (Maybe next time.)

I should know the answer, but I don’t, and people I’ve asked don’t know the answer, either. What does the French Senate do, how is it (s)elected, and would it matter one way or the other if it didn’t exist?

(Fortunately, I’ve never had to teach introductory French politics, so I don’t feel too guilty at not knowing the answer to this one. I’ll probably google for it after posting this and the surrounding bits and pieces. But if anyone wants to leap in, please do.)

Concentrating on being in Paris also meant catching up with some dead socialists, with visits to the cemeteries at Père-Lachaise and Montparnasse. (This site is great, by the way.)

Père-Lachaise has (among others) Louis Blanc, Louis-Auguste Blanqui, Pierre Bourdieu, Édouard Daladier, Jules Guesde, Jean-François Lyotard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the Imre Nagy memorial, Marceau Pivert, Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, Maurice Thorez (died 11th July, and therefore a casualty of the Hiatus of the Stoa), Oscar Wilde, Richard Wright, and, no doubt, many more, as well as being home to the Mur des Fédérés and the site of many moving monuments memorialising the dead of the Nazi camps and various résistants.

(Question: there’s almost no Jewish iconography on the memorials to the Jewish dead. I assume that’s got something to do with French republicanism, but if anyone’s got any specific details on just why those monuments look the way they do, I’d be very interested to hear them.)

Montparnasse, which I hadn’t visited before, and which is also delightful, is home to what remains of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as (moving beyond the bounds of socialists proper) Tristan Tzara, Emile Durkheim, Alfred Dreyfus and - much more recently - Susan Sontag, whose grave is marked by flowers, but has no headstone set in place just yet. Perhaps one is on the way.

Concentrating on being in France meant, among other things, paying even more attention than usual to the Tour de France.

Blognor Regis did a terrific job of covering the Tour, and so did the T de F blog. I’m confident all my readers were assiduous in keeping up to date with those sites, so there’s little for me to add here.

French cycling appears to be in an even worse way than usual: no Frenchman finished in the top ten in either the CG or the points competition; the only French riders to make big headlines were Christophe Moreau (above all for his pursuit of Rasmussen with Jens Voigt on the second day in the Vosges) and David Moncouti� (above all for his stage win — the only French stage win — in Dignes-les-Bains, suitably enough on Bastille Day). The Tour needs its local heroes, and it’d be good to have a few more of them, especially now Richard Virenque’s no longer around.

Tragedy is never too far away from cycling, and the saddest cycling news in July came not from the Tour itself, but from Germany, where the Australian women’s cycling team was hit by a car while training, and Amy Gillett was killed. Aussie Cadel Evans made a heroic effort to win the following stage to Pau by way of an inadequate memorial gesture, but was beaten in the final sprint by Oscar Pereiro (who rode a terrific tour, and deserved the prize for “combativit�”). This was around the time, too, that the Tour was marking the tenth anniversary of the death of poor Fabio Casartelli, who crashed on the descent from the Col de Portet d’Aspet in 1995.

I’m already looking forward to next year’s race. There’s been a bit of this kind of thing, but it doesn’t bother me. It’ll be good for the Tour to kick off without one overwhelming favourite. Potential winners include Jan Ullrich (who won the Tour in 1997), Alexandre Vinokourov (especially if he learns how to ride more consistently over three weeks), Ivan Basso (especially if he learns how to go on the attack), Alejandro Valverde (especially if he can find a way of getting to the end of the race) and Mickael Rasmussen (especially if he learns how to time-trial, if that’s a verb). Next year’s teams are beginning to take shape: Vino, for example, has just signed up with Liberty Seguros, and we’re all waiting to find out what the new line-up at Discovery is going to look like in the post-Armstrong era.

As the man said, Vive le Tour!

Thanks to those who enquired after my health:, and especially to one correspondent who wondered whether I’d stopped blogging, and observed that “It would be a shame if your last post was about Horkheimer of all people”. I’m pleased to report that I haven’t, so it wasn’t.

There was only rather slow dial-up internet access where I was staying in Paris. And when the bombs went off on 7 July, I was more interested in using the short periods I was online each day for catching up on news reports than for saying anything in particular in this space. I’m not sure there was a great deal to say, anyway, and everyone else seems to have said it.

And for the rest of the month, it was more fun to concentrate on being in France.

Max Horkheimer, Frankfurt Schoolman and co-author of Dialectic of Enlightenment; born 14 February 1895, died 7 July 1973.

To the splendid Pitt Rivers Museum.

Aneurin Bevan, Welsh socialist and founding father of the National Health Service; born 15 November 1897, died 6 July 1960.