The Virtual Stoa

I don’t often (read: ever) do this at the Virtual Stoa, but it’s for a friend. So read on…

(more…)

C. L. R. James, author of The Black Jacobins, Beyond a Boundary and others, born in Trinidad, 4 January 1901; died in London, 31 May 1989.

By my reckoning Enkidu caught two mice in the first two years of his life, and three mice in the last two weeks. So either he’s getting much, much better at catching mice, or else the mouse population in Jericho has recently gone through the roof. (I wonder which.)

Rather touchingly, he brought in last night’s mouse shortly before midnight, played with the corpse for bit under the table, and then placed it in his food-bowl before starting to devour it.

Adam H sends me pictures of his MIT Philosophy Department mug. And it’s a fine mug.

Front:

Back:

In other mug-related news, our “Tough on Crime” bright green Labour 1997 campaign pledge mug is not long for the world, and now leaks coffee. Symbolically, it is choosing to bow out at the same time as the man who gave those words their immortality.

Alexander Carlyle (not to be confused with this one), Christian socialist and Oxford don, he taught politics and economics at University College, and was rector of St Martin and All Saints; author of The Influence of Christianity upon Social and Political Ideas and Wages (both 1912) and The History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West in six volumes (1903-1936); born Bombay, 24 July 1861; died in Oxford, 27 May 1943.

The Carlyle Lectures in Oxford on the history of political thought are dedicated to his memory. Recent lecturers have been Noel Malcolm (Islam and early modern European political thought, 2001), Blair Worden (literature and political thought in early modern England, 2002), Mark Lilla (modern political theology, 2003), Magnus Ryan (the legal framework of political thought, 1100-1600, 2004), Peter Garnsey (ideas of property, 2005), Colin Kidd (varieties of unionism in Scottish political thought, 2006) and David Runciman (hypocrisy in English political thought from Hobbes to Orwell, 2007. Next up is Annabel Brett, and after that Istvan Hont.

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

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday, dear Stoa,
Happy birthday to you…

Over here:

30th over: West Indies 115-7 (Bravo 18 Taylor 0) Keith Flett rears his hairy head from the Beard Liberation Front’s overgrown bunker long enough to shout: “HIRSUTE ENGLAND INTIMIDATE WEST INDIANS WITH FIERCE APPEARANCE: The BLFront, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that with a seam and pace attack of Harmison, Plunkett and Sidebottom amongst the most generally hirsute England bowling sides of recent years, it appears that West Indies batsmen are being intimidated to lose their wickets, rather than losing them to good quality bowling. Pioneered in modern times by Australia’s Merv Hughes the intimidation is quite within the rules of cricket and amounts to little more than looking somewhat fierce and as if you and ought to take wickets.”

I missed last nights Dispatches on the bin wars — the one where they collected some of our rubbish for us in a nice yellow wheelie-bin — so if anyone can fill me in on the state of play here in Oxford, that’d be useful.

In possibly related news, I realised last night that there’s at least one mouse on the loose in our house, and that when Andromache has been parked in front of her food bowl for lengthy periods without eating, this isn’t a protest against the muck we feed her so much as her patient vigil in front of the mouse-hole.

Jennie Adamson, Labour politician; a dressmaker and teacher, she joined the Labour Party in 1908, becoming involved in the Black Country strike of 1913. She moved to Belfast in 1915, and then to London in 1923 when her husband, William Adamson, became MP for Cannock Chase. She served in a number of posts — LCC, NEC, etc. — being elected to Parliament in 1938 for Dartford, defeating the Tories on an anti-Munich platform. In the wartime Parliament, she supported a number of feminist initiatives (equal compensation for war injuries,  family allowances to be paid to the mother, etc.), though she insisted that she was not an “extreme feminist”. She was elected for Bexley in 1945, but left Parliament in 1946.  Born at Kilmarnock, 9 May 1882, died in Bromley, 25 May 1962.

Sidney Bunting, political activist in South Africa. Having missed out on a fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he had studied classics, Bunting went to South Africa  in 1900 to serve in the war, remaining there afterwards and practicing law. He joined the whites-only South African Labour Party in 1910, and drifted leftwards from 1913, after witnessing brutal state repression of labour disputes. One of the founders of the CPSA in 1921, he pushed to transform a virtually all-white into an overwhelmingly black organisation, though he fell out with the Comintern when it called for an independent black republic outside the British Empire. He kept quiet for a bit, but was expelled from the Party in 1931, when “Buntingism” became a term of opprobrium. Born St Pancras, 29 June 1873, died Johannesburg, 25 May 1936.

The excellent Allison Drew has recently published a book about him.

My goodness. They’ve been talking about me and boxing in last week’s Observer:

The film [Blue Blood] is effortlessly stolen by a cameo appearance from [Chris] Kavanagh’s philosophy tutor. ‘He asked if I could go and watch him get his face smashed in, but it was short notice and I was busy. Usually am,’ says Chris Brooke, who is also the author of the highly recommended blog Virtual Stoa.

‘Everyone who watches the film thinks he’s absolutely hilarious,’ says Kavanagh, ‘and the sort of person you only really find at Oxford. He’s from this incredibly aristocratic family yet is a socialist. He just wanders around being Chris Brooke. He’s a legend.’

And one who has now been immortalised in, of all things, a boxing movie which, thanks to Riley’s direction and the charm and passion of the contestants, is that rarity - a film set among a privileged elite that does not grate but inspires.

I’m glad I’m keeping people entertained.

There’s a fine moment in the film when I say something incomprehensible, and the camera cuts away to a shot of Chris K rolling his eyes. He can’t have been rolling his eyes at that particular comment, as there was only one camera in the room, but it’s nicely done.

[Thanks to dsquared in comments below for the tip-off.]

From the same source as below:

With all due respect,
Rilke didn’t know his cats.
Their eyes are mirrors.

Sidney Ball, tutor at St John’s College, where he became known as “Oxford’s socialist don”. Involved in the University settlement at Toynbee Hall, co-founder of the Oxford University Fabian Society in 1895, member of the committee that produced Oxford and working-class education in 1908 and - a little bit of Oxford trivia here - the person who first proposed that the doctorate be called a D.Phil in 1916, in order to distinguish it from the Germanic “PhD” on the one hand and from Oxford’s own “D.Litt” on the other. (I had no idea that this particular idiosyncracy owed to anti-Hunnish sentiment.) Born in Pershore, Worcestershire, 20 April 1857, died at Boars Hill, Oxford, 23 May 1918.

Paul Nizan, French communist, novelist and philosopher, born 7 February 1905, killed at Dunkirk, 23 May 1940.

David Lewis, Canadian social democrat; born 23 June 1909, died 23 May 1989.

Last Friday afternoon, as it happens, I tried to walk up to the top of Monte Nuvolone above Bellagio on Lake Como. I didn’t succeed, partly because I didn’t leave myself quite enough time, and partly because at one point I spectacularly missed the path, and it took quite a long time to find it again, much further up the slope. But while wandering through the fairly dark woods looking for the path again - in, significantly, my thirty-fifth year, I realised I was enjoying what can only be called an authentic Dante moment.

People tell me I should go off next in search of an authentic Petrarch moment in an attempt on Mont Ventoux, but those who know me better will know that if I ever do go up that mountain it won’t be by way of tribute to an Italian poet.

My friend Ted Vallance (his new-ish blog is over here) has just posted his report of this year’s Levellers’ Day in Burford over at the New Statesman website. Somewhat to my shame, I’ve never been.

Enkidu recently disappeared for (we think) three nights in a row, which isn’t typical behaviour, and in the end I found him on the corner of Victor St and Canal St where there’s a little alleyway that goes down to the canal, and I brought him home. (This confirms what other neighbours had told me, that he spends his time hanging out down at the canal, and this may be where he finds his mice.)
Anyway, this is by way of background to the fact that my friend Max Pensky, who has been a visiting philosopher at Oxford this year, is living round the corner from us in Jericho, on the street to which Enkidu is a frequent visitor, and has now turned to haiku.

First, there was this:

Enkidu’s return:
Indignant but glad he’s found
Like any good cat.

Then, yesterday, this:

Peripherally
Glimpsed, black-white quicksilver flash.
“Flink,” the Germans say.

And, this morning, the third instalment:

Dialectic of
Enkidu’s extremities:
Quite sharp, or quite soft.

Was this year the first time the French have entered a song with Anglo lyrics in the Eurovision song contest?

(You can tell that I’m brooding over the issues that matter.)

Is it true, as more than one person has suggested to me this evening, that Kant was only four foot eleven?

If it is true, a follow-up question: what was the average height of the German professoriat in the second half of the eighteenth century?

One of the faintly annoying things about last week’s coverage of Mr Blair’s resignation announcement is that not enough attention was being paid to the extent to which he was, at bottom, being deposed by his party.

It’s true that his departure doesn’t look much like Mrs Thatcher’s in 1990, but the underlying politics are pretty much the same: if you’re supported by the Cabinet but by not nearly enough of the back-benchers, you can’t remain Prime Minister for long. (The funny thing in Mrs T’s case is that she forgot this crucial rule: in her first term, she knew half the Cabinet didn’t want her as Prime Minister, but she had a keener sense than they did that this didn’t really matter.)

Shrewd observers (well, Jamie K at B&T) have been saying for a while now that the Blairite response would be along the lines of wanting to dissolve the ungrateful people and elect another one, that he was too good for us, etc., and we got this in great steaming dollops from John Rentoul at the weekend. But Rentoul at least acknowledged that “the real story behind his promise in September 2004 not to fight a fourth election” was “not a mistake, it was a tactic of self-preservation”, and that Blair was leaving office because he was being forced out.

And I’m writing this because I’ve just read Avi Shlaim’s new piece up at tehgraun, which starts with the words, “Tony Blair’s opposition to an immediate ceasefire in the Lebanon war last summer precipitated his downfall.” And I think that’s more or less right. Certainly in my neck of the Labour woods, there was a perceptible shift in attitudes to Mr Blair’s continued tenure in office last Summer over precisely this issue, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the historians do ultimately judge that it was this more than anything else that meant that he left office in 2007 rather than 2008, which is what he must have been thinking at minimum when he said he’d serve for a “full term”.

Idiot.

A bunch of my friends went off to Helsinki last week. They said they were going to attend the Joint Sessions of the European Consortium of Political Research. But were they just too embarrassed to say that that they had tickets to Eurovision 2007? It’d be nice to think there were several analytical political theorists in the audience. Perhaps one of them was holding the much-filmed “Where Is Andorra?” placard?

Just as the separation of Montenegro and Serbia came suspiciously close to last year’s Eurovision Song Contest, Tony Blair’s resignation was clearly timed to try to increase the chances of the Eurovision electorate casting any votes at all for the UK entry, but in the end only Ireland (7) and Malta (douze points!) co-operated. (Perhaps we should hand out the George Cross to foreign countries more liberally than we do.) Still, I was glad Scooch got something. 2003’s Jemini deserved nothing, and Flying the Flag For You was far better than that. Ukraine was robbed, though.

Is all of Eurovision ever on Youtube? There seems to quite a lot of it, anyway, as searching for things like “Eurovision 1957” is generating quite a lot of clips. But I won’t plough through them just yet.

And if we are stuck in the era of Eastern domination and shameless regional bloc-voting, please can all the North African countries in Eurovision get over their hang-ups about Israel, at least to the extent of sending in their official entries, in the interests of living in a more multi-polar Eurovision large geographical area? And the Italians should return to the fray. Just because they’ve got their very own San Remo festival doesn’t mean the rest of us think it’s OK to opt out of Eurovision.

(I was surprised Sweden didn’t do better.)