The Virtual Stoa

Happy Bloomsday, Joyceans everywhere!

Have there been any good books on Joyce published recently, say in the last five years or so, since this one? I haven’t been keeping up.

We’re in the home straight, so it’s time for the annual round-ups. Four books stand out in my 2007: Patrick Cockburn’s The Occupation - published in the Autumn of 2006, but I didn’t get round to it until January, so I’m counting it as a 2007 book - which joins Rory Stewart’s Occupational Hazards as one of the indispensable memoirs of this terrible war. I thought John Rawls’s posthumous Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy were very interesting when they came out, and I’m delighted that enough colleagues and graduate students here in Oxford thought the same that we could hold a very stimulating seminar to discuss them in the term just ended. Raj Patel’s Stuffed and Starved is terrific, as expected (though I’m hardly an impartial critic). And the best history-of-political-thought volume I read this year was Michael Sonenscher’s Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution, which goes to show how the eighteenth-century political economy scholarship of the last generation or so can be put to work to address the really big historiographical questions.

What else was good this year?

Chris Bertram points out that our mutual friend Martin O’Neill has an article about inheritance tax in a recent New Statesman. I hadn’t noticed this, as the postal strike means that my copy hasn’t arrived yet, and while the NS was nice enough to (e)mail out a pdf (no, not that kind of pdf), I thought I’d wait for the paper copy to arrive, which perhaps it will one day. It’s a good piece, and one that incorporates my favourite Ben Franklin quotation, and the intro blurb suggests that Martin’s going to be the NS in-house political philosopher, at least for a bit, and that can only be a good thing.

While I’m on the subejct of recent stuff by my mates: here’s Rory Stewart on Gertrude Bell in the New York Review of Books; here’s Raj Patel being interviewed in Australia’s finest newspaper, the Age (and do buy his book if you haven’t already); and while you’re in the bookshop you might want to pick up a copy of Patricia Owens’ new book, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt, which ought to be hitting the shelves about now.

And I’ve just acquired a copy of The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity by Raymond Knapp, so - as you can imagine - I’m quite happy.

(Favourite snippet from the Preface: “I have often been asked what this project has to do with my other work, which has centered on such figures as Brahms, Haydn, Beethoven, Mahler, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky. While I might hope some day to be asked what these others have to do with my work on the American musical, it seems for now to be a fair question…” [p.xvii])

My old friend Raj Patel, who used to blog at Class Worrier, has an article in tehgraun today about obesity.

His (excellent) book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System will be published in September, and he has a website to explore the issues discussed in the book here.

What are you reading this Summer, Stoa-readers? What, if anything, do you recommend? Tell me about books (though preferably not about Harry Potter books, unless you’ve got something especially interesting to say about them).

This is all terribly, terribly funny. First we have Johann Hari writing about Nick Cohen’s not especially good recent book What’s Left? in Dissent here (with bloggers’ responses here, here, here, here and here). Then we get NC’s reply to JH here and JH’s reply to NC’s reply to JH here, with today’s blog discussion over here [update: subsequently removed].

I want this one to run and run.

TUESDAY UPDATE: Oliver Kamm weighs in, again; AaroWatch has an Ode to Kamm [update: subsequently removed]; and JH has added bits and pieces to his reply to the reply [update: and some of the bits and pieces have been, er, subsequently removed].

WEDNESDAY UPDATE: Indecent Left, Conor Foley, Chris Bertram, Blood & Treasure.

Johann Hari reviews Nick Cohen’s recent book for Dissent. It’s quite a good piece.

See subject line.

Apologies for the silence over the last few days, which means, among other things, that Karl Marx (14 March) got left out of the Dead Socialist Watch on this particular trot through the calendar.

Turned out that what I thought was upper arm cramp last week was in fact a rip in the tendon in one of the rotator cuffs in my left shoulder. I noticed at the week-end that I couldn’t really lift my left arm into even a horizontal position, let alone anything higher; on Sunday night I stopped being able to sleep comfortably; and on Monday and Tuesday it became quite inflamed and produced a lot of pain, so I’ve started doing sensible things like going to the doctor and finding out what’s actually going on in there, and I think everything’s on the mend now, with industrial quantities of ibuprofen working its anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving magic.

As a Boston Red Sox fan, I thought I knew a lot about rotator cuffs — Pedro Martínez’s rotator cuffs were about as familiar to New Englanders as David Beckham’s metatarsals. But whereas Pedro damaged his RCs by striking out lots of New York Yankees (or something similar), I hurt mine through the altogether more sedentary activity of reading Fénelon on the sofa at home. Perhaps it’d be safer if I gave up reading altogether.

Anyway: I still can’t lift my arm above the horizontal, but now it doesn’t hurt anymore, I don’t really mind.

I thought that Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? was likely to be the worst book that I would be reading in 2007, but it’s already been beaten, by Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Roads to Modernity (Knopf, 2004). Well, I spent twenty minutes flipping through it the other day, rather than actually reading it, but even the briefest of flip-throughs makes it clear what a shocker it is. So that’s Cohen off that particular hook.

(I suppose What’s Left? is also the best book that I’ve read that was published in 2007, but that’s for the pretty obvious reason that it’s the only 2007-vintage volume that I’ve read through so far this year.)

I finally got round to reading Fénelon’s Telemachus over the weekend, which I should have done years ago (and it was splendid), but sitting on the sofa for quite so many hours on end seems to have given me a painful case of upper-arm cramp, so if you hear me barking in pained surprise over the next few hours, that’s probably what that’s about.

James Joyce liked birthdays, if I remember rightly, and he’s 125 today.

(I think he’d have liked the cubed nature of that number, too.)

My old friend Raj Patel, who used to blog at Class Worrier, is now running a new blog over at Stuffed and Starved, on the politics of the world food system, which is a sort of multimedia hyperspace experience thingy designed to supplement his book of the same name. Except the book hasn’t been published yet. He’s in Nairobi right now, at the World Social Forum, and it’s not a wholly happy place: see “Forum for Sale“.

“For a generation or more [from the 1960s], the dominant model of human behaviour on Left and Right was highly individualistic. This was true in the liberation of private life and in intellectual debate. The Left was captivated by the elegance and power of Professor John Rawls’s Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1971). His manifesto for an egalitarian society is a brilliant exposition of the argument that an equal society is in the interests of anyone who does not know which position in that society they would occupy. But it is derived from a highly individualistic view of the world.'’

I don’t think Googling will help here, but perhaps some of you have better Googling skills than I.

… Can anyone recommend any good recent books?

I enjoyed Rory’s book (UK title: Occupational Hazards; US title: The Prince of the Marshes), and recently read through George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate, but haven’t really been paying a great deal of attention to what’s been coming out over the last couple of years. Is Patrick Cockburn’s book good?

Look, everyone. The important thing about Magnus Magnusson is not that he presented bloody Mastermind for so many years, or - relatedly - that he said “I’ve started, so I’ll finish” more times than most over the course of a lifetime, but that he translated a whole bunch of the Icelandic Sagas for the Penguin Classics series, including the greatest of them all, Njál’s Saga, and that these were later revised and improved (not least by incorporating the genealogies back into the main text, rather than shunting them off into the footnotes) and reissued as parts of a two-volume Folio Society set. Get your priorities right, please.

The brothers Hrút and Höskuld rode west to Reykjadalur and stayed overnight at Lund; it was the home of Thjóstólf, the son of Björn Gulberi. It had rained heavily that day; everyone was soaked, and the longfires had been lit. Thjóstólf sat between Höskuld and Hrút. Two boys who were in his care were playing on the floor, along with a little girl; they were chattering loudly because they knew no better.

One of the boys said, “I shall be Mör∂ and divorce you from your wife because you have not poked her.”

The other boy replied, “I shall be Hrút and make you give up your claim if you do not dare to fight me.”

They repeated this a few times, and there was much laughter among the household. Höskuld became angry and struck the boy calling himself Mör∂ with a stick. It hit him on the face and drew blood.

“Get out,” said Höskuld, “and stop ridiculing us.”

Hrút said, “Come over here.” The boy did so. Hrút drew a gold ring from his finger and gave it to him, and said, “Off you go, and never provoke anyone again.”

The boy went away and said, “I shall never forget your goodness.”

Hrút was much praised for this. Later they went home to the west, and so ends the episode of Hrút and Mör∂ Gigja.

That’s the end of the eighth chapter of Njál’s Saga.

(The rest of you won’t be interested.)

(more…)

John Barrell on Christopher Hitchens on Thomas Paine in the LRB is quite fun.

I don’t think I’ve got much to say about patriotic festivals of anti-Catholic bigotry invovling fireworks this year, except to report that I recently flipped through Garry Wills’s Witches and Jesuits — his reading of Macbeth as a gunpowder play — and it’s splendid.

The Stroppyblog has prominently displayed on its front page Rebcca West’s famous remark that “I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.” I’ve been reading her short biography of Augustine today, and I rather liked this [from p.101]:

“Involuntary episcopacy is one of the few perils which man has been able to eradicate since the time of Augustine, and it is hard for us to realise that it was then a hovering terror, almost as the press-gang once was in England.”

I think there should probably be more Rebecca West-themed blogging, but that may not be a widely shared opinion.

Which Jane Austen Character Are You?

You are Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. You’re pretty arrogant, but that pride stems from the deep-seated knowledge that you are generally the most superior creature in any given room. The good news is that you are deeply loyal to your family, and you have a generous and charitable streak, even though most people don’t notice because you are too busy practicing a large vocabulary of stern looks.
Take this quiz! Quizilla | Join | Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code

This might seem like a surprising result, but it’s actually quite scientific, in that Josephine did the quiz imagining herself to be me and got the same result, too.

I suppose this means I shall have to finish reading Pride and Prejudice. which happens to be one of those books that I’ve started several times, but never finished, which is curious, given that it’s not exactly a turgid read. [via]

“Potted meats. What is home witohut Plumtree’s potted meat? Incomplete. What a stupid ad! Under the obituary notices they stuck it. All up a plumtree. Dignam’s potted meat… With it an abode of bliss. Lord knows what concoction. Cauls mouldy tripes windpipes faked and minced up. Puzzle find the meat.”

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)

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.