According to the website, the Latvian pirate song “is a story about the historical endeavours of our ancestors, and tells of their backbreaking lives, rebellious spirit, freedom, masculinity and tenderness while showing their patriotism and love for the planet earth, and an unquenchable thirst for adventure.”
We have the first ever Eurovision entries from San Marino and Azerbaijan this time round.
Here’s San Marino, with “Complice” by Miodio:
Here’s Azerbaijan, with “Day after day” by Elnur Hüseynov:
Be aware that it’s possible that neither of these songs will get beyond this week’s semi-final stage.
I asked my friend Dan, who is an expert on (i) political philosophy concerning the rectification of historic injustice and (ii) pop music, and he reckons that Cliff Richard is the victim of historic injustice, having been cheated by Spanish fascists out of the 1968 Eurovision title that was rightfully his. I’m still not altogether clear who owes what, if anything, to whom. I was rather hoping we might blame Ruth Kelly, owing to her Opus Dei connections, but some people around me seem to think that’s a bit too tangential, all things considered.
The Gaping Silence on the Italian Left.
My brother Michael, over here.
A very strange clip here combining the Stoa’s interest in Monday Marseillaise Blogging, and Lego…
Here’s the French football team and the better part of a hundred thousand fans singing the Marseillaise before the start of the 1998 World Cup Final. (Starts at 5 minutes in; jump forwards to 5.48 or so for Jacques Chirac in full-throated song.)
Haven’t had any of this for a while. Here’s a bit of film from 1907:
David Bordwell writes, of a recent screening:
“There were many early attempts to record synchronous sound, though all too often the accompanying discs have been lost even if the image track survives. The 1907 films contained a few such, but one, La Marseillaise, had its singer’s original voice, remarkably clear and perfectly synchronized. The result was an unusually poignant and vivid sense of a link to a hundred-year-old performance, an immediacy that went beyond what most silent films can convey, wonderful though they might be.
Alan Connor, over here.
Charlotte Higgins on the return of Latin to the inner city.
(I still say we should make Latin the sole official language of the European Union, but I think I’m the only one who says that.)
Perry Anderson on the European Union in the LRB; Ingrid Robeyns on Belgium at Crooked Timber.
Over here…
… Years ago a man who worked for the council sweeping the streets where I grew up used to wear a large Viking helmet (with horns, yes, yes, I know). Somebody wrote to the local newspaper to say that it might frighten elderly residents, whereupon somebody else replied to say that they’d really have to be very old if they had childhood memories of being scared by Vikings.
UPDATE [5pm]: Or not, as the case may be (and as Dan spotted in the comments).
Coming out of the monkey-house at the ménagerie in the Jardin des Plantes here in Paris yesterday, we read a notice about the orang-utans, which said, among other things, that
“Sa mère Wattana rejoindra prochainement un groupe de femelles élevant leurs petits à Appeldoorn, en Hollande, afin de compléter l’entraînement qu’elle a suivi à la Ménagerie pour recouvrer un comportement maternel.”
And what was the matter with her comportement maternel, we wondered?
The internet, as ever, comes to the rescue. This page starts with a disussion of La grande erreur de Rousseau, but eventually gets to the ape in question:
“Des observations récentes, en milieu artificiel, suggèrent même que les grands primates sont susceptibles d’apprendre la culture et les comportements d’une espèce voisine, y compris en ce qui concerne des éléments aussi sensibles à la sélection que les comportements sexuels. L’exemple de Watana, célèbre jeune femelle orang-outan de la ménagerie du Jardin des plantes à Paris, qui reçut des éléments de culture sexuelle bonobo au zoo de Stuttgart et se retrouva plus tard rejetée brutalement en milieu orang-outan, est à cet égard particulièrement édifiant!”
Regular readers of Popbitch can probably guess what’s going on here — the giveaway phrase, culture sexuelle bonobo, will be setting off the alarm bells. But there’s also this page which gives a few more details:
“Le second exemple concerne une amie orang- outan, Wattana. Elle appartenait, de naissance, à cette espèce solitaire dont les comportements sexuels, dans la nature, sont rares, pendant le court oestrus des femelles et plutôt calmes. Les hasards de la gestion des parcs zoologiques l’ont fait élever parmi des bonobos, chimpanzés bien connus pour leurs performances sexuelles permanentes et variées, nombreuses et brèves, entre partenaires de toutes combinaisons de sexes. Eduquée par ce groupe, Wattana fût ensuite “mariée” à un orang mâle qui, d’abord, prit si mal ses grimaces provocatrices et propositions sexuelles explicites qu’il fallut les séparer ! Dans un deuxième temps, introduite dans un groupe familial, Wattana fût acceptée par son fiancé, dont elle modifia culture et comportements, ainsi que ceux des autres membres du groupe!”
Grimaces provocatrices! Anyway, this seems to be the deep background to help explain why she’s now off in Holland to recover her comportement maternel. The scientists seem to be interested in the case, as it’s a good example of the extent to which sexual behaviour is learned, rather than innate. (There’s also an academic article out there about Wattana’s talents with knots.)
And for more on the culture sexuelle bonobo, you might start here.
(What follows is pretty trivial, so I really don’t recommend you read it.)
One of the things I come across from time to time is people - especially young people - using the word “refute” to mean “disagree with”, “oppose” or “deny” rather than, as the OED neatly puts it, “to disprove, overthrow by argument, prove to be false.” (Indeed, the OED notes the incorrect usage, and labels it incorrect, with a series of examples that I’ve placed over the fold.) (I’m sure there’s someone out there who thinks that postmodernism is something to do with this, but that’s a conversation for another occasion.)
Anyway, this Summer, Le Monde has a daily feature revisiting past controversies that have beset what it calls the “intelligentsia hexagonale“. So this week we’ve had discussions of the bicentenaire, Heidegger, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and today (i.e., the issue dated vendredi) we’ve had the affaire du foulard in its original 1989 incarnation. And it’s in this last piece that we find this:
Dès le 24 octobre, Guy Coq, membre du comité de rédaction de la revue Esprit, pousse un premier cri d’alarme dans les colonnes du Monde. Il réfute l’argument de la différence culturelle à respecter. C’est le maintien même de la tolérance qui “périrait si les diverses communautés religieuses entraient en compétition pour s’emparer de l’espace laïque de l’école, pour en briser l’unité, pour y manifester non pas l’esprit d’accueil pour chaque individu en lui-même, comme simple humain, mais le signe de la clôture de chaque communauté contre les autres”.
Now unless my French is even worse than I think it is (which is wholly possible), that looks suspiciously like using “réfuter” to mean “deny”, i.e., following the incorrect English usage of “refute”. So is this because the French verb has a broader meaning than its English equivalent, ranging all the way from “deny” to “disprove”, or is the same bad habit that the Anglophones have developed shared by Francophones? And, if so, has it spread from England to France or vice versa, or is it properly autochthonous in both linguistic communities (if that’s not too pretentious an expression to use)?
I may just be barking up the wrong tree, or just barking. But any thoughts are more than welcome.
There’s not enough cheese-blogging in these parts, so here goes.
I’m eating a lot of cheese while I’m in France, and one thing I’m noticing is that if I eat a lot of cheese in the evening, I have weird dreams. Not bad dreams — which I get if I drink red wine too soon before bedtime — just distinctively weird dreams. I can’t report on the content of any of these (you’ll be relieved to hear), because I have almost invariably forgotten the content of my dreams by the time I’m washed / showered / shaved / breakfasted / caffeinated in the morning. But they are weird.
Here’s information from the British Cheese Board blog on the subject, though in their less than cosmopolitan way they are only concerned with the effect that British Cheese has on dreaming.
UPDATE [8/8]: The nonbloggishblog has more.
From the end of what may be the greatest scene in the greatest film ever made: Rouget de Lisle teaches the Marseillaise to the people of Paris, in Abel Gance’s Napoleon:
As Europe drifted towards war in the Summer of 1939, the Chicago Sunday Tribune was asking the questions that matter: just how tall were the men guiding their nations’ destinies?
Here are the shorties, the rest are over the fold:
[With many many thanks to PM for sending this my way!]
I’m delighted to say that someone is letting off fireworks in North Oxford, which I am assuming is in honour of Bastille Day. Vive la République!
See subject line.
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.
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.)
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?
