I went out of my way to read the Daily Mail today, what with all the fun of the Two Shags story, and it’s all about trousers, isn’t it? The big Mail piece about Pauline Prescott dwelt lovingly on the leopard-print trousers she used to wear, once upon a time, and ended by saying (something like; I paraphrase from memory) that John Prescott was now throwing all of this away for a pair of red leather trousers.
A comrade writes from South Africa:
Strini Moodley died this morning. Member of the
Socialist Party of Azania and Black consciousness movement (one of Biko’s lieutenants). Died broken and bitter. Could put away a bottle of whiskey in a heartbeat. Good guy.
There’s the transcript of a long interview with Moodley here.
Antonio Gramsci, 22 January 1891 - 27 April 1937.
Virtual Stoa readers attending the Tribeca Film Festival (I’m sure there are thousands) may have seen me last night in a documentary about students at Oxford who spend their time boxing. I’m told that I featured in one shot saying that one of my students “said I could go and watch him get his face smashed in, but it was short notice and I was busy… I usually am…”. Anyway, the film’s over here, and I’m told it’s being shown again some time.
My goodness. Not sure how that nearly two week silence happened. It’s not as if I went away or anything. I think perhaps I just wanted to keep those magnificent pictures of Enkidu (scroll down) at the top of the page for longer. And I was listening to lots of Schubert, which is more enjoyable than reading or writing on weblogs.
Three pictures of Enkidu, for Easter Sunday.
First:
Second:
Third:
You might conclude from the photographic evidence that he hasn’t moved much in the last couple of weeks (scroll down). He has, in fact, been out and about quite a bit recently, as the weather gets better, and I met him in the street for the first time last week, while returning from the pub.
Vladimir Mayakovsky, futurist poet, born 19 July 1893, died 14 April 1930.
I want the pen to be on a par
with the bayonet; And Stalin
to deliver his Politburo
reports
about verse in the making
as he would about pig iron and the smelting of steel.
Simone de Beauvoir, born 9 January 1908, died 14 April 1986. Socialist, feminist and existentialist philosopher.
Ernest Bevin, trade unionist and Foreign Secretary; born 9 March 1881, died 14 April 1951.
Willi Stoph, German Communist and leading politician in the DDR; born in Berlin, 9 July 1914, died in Berlin, 13 April 1999.
Abbie Hoffman (also here, Yippie, born 30 November 1936, died 12 April 1989.
Good news! Also good news here, too.
Jacques Prévert, French poet and screenwriter, Surrealist and Communist, born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, 4 February 1900; died in Omonville-la-Petite,11 April 1977.
Ben Pimlott, Labour historian, biographer of Harold Wilson and the Queen, born 4 July 1945; died 10 April 2004.
Tony Cliff, International Socialist, Socialist Worker, and theorist of Soviet state capitalism; b. 1917, d. 9 April, 2000.
Yesterday… nice new comfy seats… no smoking policy… same food, same waitstaff, same chef, same generous helpings of bacon.
I’m a happy man.
Pablo Picasso, artist and communist. Born 25 October, 1881, died 8 April, 1973.
Alexandre Millerand, French socialist politician and minister, later non-socialist prime minister; born Paris, 10 February 1859; died Versailles, 7 April 1943.
Andromache:
The judgment in the Dan Brown / Holy Blood Holy Grail case is available here [pdf], and is quite fun. It’s better written than The Da Vinci Code, and it’s probably better written than The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, though it’s a while since I’ve seen a copy of that book.
Dan Brown doesn’t come terribly well out of the judgment at all (see ��197-217, 315-327, 343-5 especially), but fortunately for him he was up against Claimants like Michael Baigent, whose performance as a witness is described here:
“Mr Baigent was a poor witness. Those are not my words: they are the words of his own Counsel in his written closing submissions (paragraph 111). Those words do not in my view do justice to the inadequacy of Mr Baigent�s performance…” (�213)
And the judge observed a bit later
“I make allowances for the fact that Mr Baigent performed so badly he plainly missed obvious points when answering questions… Nevertheless the Defendants are right in their submissions even when taking in to account the factors mentioned above to submit that he was a thoroughly unreliable witness. They say that they do not know whether he was deliberately trying to mislead the court or was simply deluded and that he is either extremely dishonest or a complete fool. I do not need to decide that issue…” (�232)
There’s this, too, which I liked, when the judge was commenting on the evidence of Mr Ruben, a senior person at Random House, Dan Brown’s publisher: “His enthusiasm of the book [The Da Vinci Code] knew no bounds. I am not sure that it is as good as he says but then I am no literary person.” (�354)
Just for reference, I’m posting a few links to other posts that appeared in the Enlightenment wars over the last week or so, to add to the ones I mentioned below.
Chris Dillow made the unusual move of taking Madeleine Bunting’s question about models of rationality seriously, and offered a MacIntyre-inflected response. Bunting herself posted a follow-up here, accurately noting that my friend Jon Wilson’s comment was one of the smarter ones posted on the various Guardian threads (go here and ctrl-F on “jonewilson”).
Four posts that suggested that I’d missed the point somewhat are here (from a muscular liberal), here (from a non-muscular liberal), here (from a muscular non-liberal) and here (from a non-muscular non-liberal), all of which tend to converge on the idea that this isn’t really an argument about the eighteenth-century Enlightenment at all.
And if I’ve missed any more good links, please pop them in the comments.
Julius Martov, Menshevik, born in Constantinople, 24 November 1873, died in Sch�mberg, Germany, 4 April 1923.
As a footnote to last week’s posts on the Enlightenment, here’s a footnote from Istvan Hont’s Jealousy of Trade, which I bought yesterday (see below) and have been reading this morning:
198. [Adam] Smith expressed a violent dislike for the vicious combination of political and intellectual authority which today is often described as a characteristic of “the Enlightenment project.” “Project” is a genuine eighteenth-century key-word, but Smith deployed it for negative purposes. Jeremy Bentham, who regretted Smith’s aversion to “dangerous and expensive experiments” in business and technology, noted Smith’s hostility to projectors and his derogatory use of the term “project.” (Jeremy Bentham, “Letter XIII, ‘To Dr. Smith, on Projects in Arts, & C’” in Defence of Usury [1787], reprinted in Smith, Correspondence, “Appendix C,” pp.388-404) Samuel Johnson, like Bentham noted, defended projectors in science but made it clear that in politics “project” was a pejorative term. Projectors were persons of “rapidity of imagination and vastness of design,” such as Catiline and Caesar at the end of the Roman Republic whose projects were “to raise themselves to power by subverting the commonwealth.” Xerxes and Alexander the Great were projectors, and more recently there were the “royal projectors” such as Charles XII of Sweden and Peter I of Russia, all of whom Johnson, like Smith, detested (The Adventurer, [No. 99, October 16, 1753], subsequently retitled as “Projectors, Successful and Unsuccessful,” reprinted in Samuel Johnson: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Donald Greene [Oxford: OUP, 1984], pp.273-277). The Encyclopédie defined “Projet” as a kind of large-scale reform that had considerable beauty or imaginative order, like Lycurgus’ laws for Sparts, or Rome’s empire over Europe. While such large-scale meliorative efforts were of considerable beauty and imaginative order, the Encyclopédie asserted, the experience of centuries had shown such projects to be chimerical (Encylopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par unes société de gens de lettres, ed. d’Alembert and Diderot, vol. 13 POM-REGG, [Neuchatel: S. Faulche, 1765], p.44b). The greatest enemy of projects in France was Montesquieu, with whom Smith was completely in tune on this issue; see Montesquieu’s “Preface” to the Spirit of the Laws: “In a time of ignorance, one has no doubts even while doing the greatest evils; in an enlightened age, one trembles even while doing the greatest goods. One feels the old abuses and sees their correction, but one also sees the abuses of the correction itself. One lets an ill remain if one fears something worse; one lets a good remain if one is in doubt about a better. One looks at the parts only in order to judge the whole; one examines all the causes in order to see the results” (p.xliv). By “projects” Montesquieu meant policies of “increase,” either as designs of conquest and territorial expansion, or grand economic schemes, mainly in revenue raising and taxation.
- Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective, Harvard University Press, 2005, pp.108-9.
The other day I asked the security guard in the Bodleian what he was looking for when he dutifully inspected my laptop case for the seventeenth time. “Things you aren’t supposed to take into the Library”, he replied. “Sticky buns?”, I asked. “No”, he said, “explosives”.
