The Virtual Stoa

My brother Michael, over here.

Martin O’Neill, over here.

Raj Patel, over here. And he calls Stephen Pollard a cretin for good measure, too.

In other Raj-related news, people in the UK can now buy his excellent book Stuffed and Starved in paperback, and the US edition has been published over there, too. Buy it and read it, if you haven’t already. (Even the Daily Mail liked it!)

The knitty professor, a dear friend and former flatmate, on autoimmune Schadenfreude.

My friend Sasha Abramsky has been hanging around in Nevada brothels.

Over at some website or other called DVD Outsider by some chap called Slarek:

But my choice for DVD release of the year is…

Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films – region 2, BFI

This was an easy decision. The most comprehensive DVD set of the year has been assembled with passion and care in every department, from the remastered transfers to the extensive and sometimes rare extra features to form a Svankmajer completist’s dream package. If you’re at all interested in animation or surrealism or art then you should own this set. Knowing that it was a real labour of love for Michael Brooke, the driving force behind this excellent package, inevitably adds you your appreciation of the work that has gone into it. Fabulous.

And here’s my friend Rick Muir, on the Winterval, vel sim.

My friend Ted Vallance, on the Levellers, over here.

There’s this piece on the weird Canadian film-maker Guy Maddin on the website of the London Film Festival. And he [Mike, not Guy] tells me that the interview he did with everyone’s favourite Czech animator Jan Švankmajer for Vertigo (whatever that is) earlier in the year is now freely available here.

Marc’s blog’s been silent for a bit, but he’s now posting great big chunks of the article nobody wanted to publish on why Marx thought the proletariat would become socialist here, here, here and here, with more to come.

Norm has posted on Eric Hollies’ dismissal of Don Bradman for 0 in the latter’s final Test Match at the Oval in August 1948 — you know, the duck that ensured that he only averaged 99.94 over the course of his international career (YouTube over here) — and he discusses the phenomenon of inherited cricket memories, of events that took place before you were born, or that you couldn’t possibly have experienced firsthand yourself, but of which you possess the most vivid of memories. And this example and this phenomenon makes me think of my dad.

As it happens, he was in the crowd at the Oval during that match as a twelve-year-old, though he didn’t see Bradman bat (not that he batted much), and I think his only memory is of Bradman fielding on the boundary.

(Australia, as it happens, didn’t need Bradman’s runs, as in the first innings England had been all out for 52, with Lindwall taking 6 for 20; Australia replied with 389, with 196 from Morris; and England only managed 188 in the second innings, with Hutton top-scoring with 64, Australia winning by an innings and 149 runs.)

But I thought of my dad more because I’m going to hazard a guess that his is the generation that is most familiar of all with powerful memories of cricket matches it never saw, owing to the Second World War. Men in their seventies now were boys during the war, when there was no significant domestic cricket and certainly no international cricket to follow. So they read up about games that had been played before the war, and very possibly about games that had been played before they were born, and can now talk about them as vividly as I can remember Test Matches that I saw on TV when I was younger, and above all in the early 1980s, with the England team of Ian Botham, David Gower and Bob Willis.

And I think this also helps to explain just why Dennis Compton’s runs in 1947 were quite so celebrated, or why the visit of Bradman’s Australians in 1948 was quite so exciting. During the war people could only read about past heroics, and here were the heroes finally playing again, and heroically, too.

So I’m not sure I’ve got any severely inherited cricket memories. I think I just belong to the wrong generation. The 1970s moment I’m most familiar with is when Fredericks hit Lillee for six but then trod on his stumps in the 1975 World Cup Final at Lord’s, but that’s just because that was the best game ever to screen highlights from during rain breaks in TV broadcasts in the 1980s. (It’s the third ball in this clip, coming after less than a minute.)

Readers! Any inherited cricket memories of your own? Or just cricket clips from YouTube you want to recommend? Fire away in the comments.

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.

I don’t think I’ve publicised this properly before, so here goes. Some Stoa-readers may remember my brother’s old blog, Mischievous Constructions, which doesn’t exist any more. Then he went off and wrote at Closely Observed DVDs for a bit about Czech cinema. And now he’s writing again at a new-ish blog, Kinoblog (”a survey of Central and East European Cinema”), and it’s turning out very nicely. So add it to your bookmarks. And, if you haven’t already, get yourself a copy of his Jan Švankmajer box set while you’re at it.

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.

Over here [via]

The British Film Institute has just released its triple-DVD set of Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films, and this is what Marina Warner has to say about it in tehgraun:

“26 extraordinary works so far, they unfold his artistry and his preoccupations with rare richness, and have been annotated by an admiring group of critics and film historians.  So this set of short films is a marvellous and invaluable collection.”

Yes, indeed, yes indeed - Svankmajer’s Dimensions of Dialogue may be the best short animated film that there is, and many of the others are not bad at all - and there are special reasons at the Stoa for celebrating the release of the set:  it’s been assembled, put together, produced, hand-tooled (I’m not really sure what the appropriate verb is) by my brother Michael. So well done him.

When my friend Katherine isn’t thinking about ideal theory, she’s training for a 100km in 24 hours journey across the South Downs, or somesuch, on foot, to raise money for Oxfam and the Gurkha Welfare Trust. Sponsor her! Blog over here (a must for foot fetishists! and blister fetishists — there must be some out there), and click on the “Sponsor Us!” link on the left-hand side. Highly recommended (unless you think, of course, that Oxfam is a bunch of neocolonialists).

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.

Chris Lightfoot, in The Times, a few days ago.

Also, over the fold, the text of a recent article from the Morning Star.

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Chris Lightfoot did many valuable things in his life, but one that was particularly treasured here at the Virtual Stoa was the Melanie Phillips Naziometer. It was a bit of code that reported on the number of times the word “Nazi”, “Nazis” or “Nazism” appeared on the front page of Melanie Phillips’ blog, so we wouldn’t have to do a manual count ourselves every day. (It rarely recorded a score of zero, though it did from time to time.)

When Chris died, the Naziometer stopped working, as it was on the server that he had running at home. Unlike my grandfather’s clock, however, I’m glad to report that the Naziometer has started going again, having been revived by Chris’s friends over at Mythic Beasts. It lives over here, and it’s also now been reinstalled on this page on the blog’s sidebar as a permanent tribute, now redesignated the Chris Lightfoot Memorial Naziometer (a label which will help to distinguish it from all the other Naziometers that there might be out there).

It’s currently reporting a somewhat low score of Three, though we might note that a manual check reveals three uses of “genocide” — one of which is particularly tasteful — and two of the verb “islamise” — but only one reference to Britain “ever more eagerly stretching out its neck for the cultural knife”, which I particularly like.

Chris Lightfoot, 1978-2007.

Chris was splendid, and one of the few bloggers whose contributions to the world stretched far beyond blogging. (Some details over here.)

Two trivial details: he’s the only person I’ve ever successfully identified in a pub, having only seen their South Park version of themselves ahead of time; and he will always be remembered at the Virtual Stoa for writing the code that powered the Melanie Phillips Naziometer, which used to adorn the sidebar.

UPDATE [6.3.2007]: More links, over here and here.

The BBC have turned my friend Rory Stewart’s book about walking across Afghanistan into the Thursday Afternoon Play this week (2.15pm, Radio 4).

You can use the link to listen to the show for up to a week after the broadcast, which is helpful, as only a madman (or madwoman) turns on Radio 4 in the afternoon before 10pm.

Can people stop dying, please, at least for a bit? The last six months or so of my life have been punctuated far more than I’d like them to be by the news of deaths. My grandmother Eileen died in August at 95, which is a pretty good innings by any stretch of the imagination; the others have all gone long before their time, whether scholars in my field like Robert Wokler (cancer) or Iris Marion Young (cancer), colleagues and friends here in Oxford like Ewen Green (MS-related) or Peter Derow (heart attack), the poor 15-year old chap who rode his bike into the river a few hundred yards from where I live, or, most recently, one of my undergraduate political philosophy students here at Balliol, Andrew Mason, whom I’d barely got to know, but who was clearly a great guy. It’s too many. And I’d like it to stop.

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“.