The Virtual Stoa

The world of blogs became a far better place this week with the launch of Class Worrier, a splendid new blog by my excellent friend and long-time co-conspirator Raj, blogging all the way from Oakland, CA.

There’s a lot of things Raj can educate us all about, but I’m guessing that it’ll mostly be a blog devoted to food sovereignty, peasant farming, Zimbabwe, South Asia (and South Asians), gender politics, think tanks, trade negotiations, environmentalism, Marxism and the most important failings of the most important international financial institutions. But that’s just me guessing. No doubt we’ll find out what it’s really going to be about over the coming weeks and months.

Class Worrier goes straight onto the blogroll, and - like a couple of other blogs I might mention - it transcends the usual alphabetization…

Backed into a corner, with an image of an elephant behind me, here I am arguing about one of the footnotes in my dissertation, c.2003.

Sitting in a comfy chair, with the images of two elephants behind her, Josephine also argues about one of the footnotes in my dissertation, c.2003.

(I’m not sure history records the outcome of the argument, nor even the identity of the particular footnote.)

Photos by Adam Shapiro.

It’s The Virtual Tophet, new bloghome for Josephine. She’ll be telling us what to think about the ancient world in general, and Phoenician child sacrifice in particular.

(And yes, we’re married. So I should declare an interest.)

So I have to blog for two and a half years before I get honoured with a normblog profile; my brother Michael’s been going for less than two and a half months, and he gets one, too…

… which is — of course — richly deserved: Mischievous Constructions is (in my entirely unbiased opinion) an excellent addition to the World of Blogs, and well worth a visit (if there’s anyone here who doesn’t visit regularly already).

My brother-in-law Matt Delargy has been nominated for a BAFTA award for his short, Sea Monsters… (Does anyone know if it’s any good?)

Over at michaelbrooke.com, my brother Michael has changed the name of his blog to “Mischievous Constructions”. He explains why here, and he’ll get another link when he posts his promised refutation of the piece in the Guardian yesterday which argued that Lost in Translation (which I haven’t seen) is racist twaddle, as I dare say it’ll be interesting and at least reasonably well-informed. I doubt that I’ll change the name of his blog on the blogroll, though, as I’m not sure it’ll fit onto one line on most browsers…

My older brother Michael, occasional visitor to the comments boxes here at the Virtual Stoa, has started his own blog over at michaelbrooke.com. Since a typical email message from the man fills several screens, expect frequent, lengthy posts — some of which might be about films.

My brother Michael now gets paid to write about films all day, which is a Good Thing, and he’s usefully sent me a list of leftist film people currently included in the whopping great screenonline project on the history of British cinema that he’s caught up in.

So just in case anyone else is interested, here goes: Jim Allen, the Amber Collective, Lindsay Anderson, Anthony Asquith, Ralph Bond, Alan Clarke, Sidney Cole, Bill Douglas, Cy Endfield, Karl Francis, Kenneth Griffith, Michael Grigsby, Glenda Jackson, Humphrey Jennings, Roland Joffé, Ken Loach, Joseph Losey, Kay Mander, Ivor Montagu, Harold Pinter, Vanessa Redgrave, Paul Robeson, John Taylor and Peter Watkins.

After his recent contributions to this thread, Marc Mulholland is being interesting on the subject of how the Indymedia sites (and, in particular, Indymedia Ireland) are re-shaping the ways in which far-leftists communicate with the world.

My friend Naunihal Singh is off to teach political science at Notre Dame in the New Year. Here’s an extract from the “Classroom Questions & Answers” document he’s been sent by his new employer [via Ishbadiddle]:

Q. What if the lights are not working and/or burned out?
A. Call Building Services - 1-5615

Q. What if I need chalk or erasers?
A. Each building housekeeper has a supply or you can call Building Services - 1-5615

Q. What if the heat/air conditioning is not working?
A. Call Facilities Operations - 1-7701

Q. What if there is no Crucifix in the classroom?
A. Please call Academic Space Management - 1-5773 and we will replace it.

Q. What if there is no clock in my classroom?
A. The University stopped putting clocks into classrooms in the early 90’s due to theft.

Culture shock starts early.

It seems that my friend Alan is caught up in the Hangingday site. I’d noticed the site, and Dan (see below) had told me he was something to do with the London News Review, but I’d never put the various bits and pieces together. Anyway: even though it’s a commercial outfit, the front page looks enough like a blog to justify a permanent presence over on the blogroll on the righthandside of the page.

Clearly writing a sunday newspaper is much like writing a weblog: sometimes you just feel the need to fill space. And so, armed only with the google search engine, Tom Shields was able to fill up pages and pages of this week’s Scottish Sunday Herald with an article devoted to the observation that some people have the same name as other people who are a little more famous than they are…

But not at the Virtual Stoa, where there’s only one Martin O’Neill…

Make Mine A Double: An internet search reveals lots of faces running around with the same names

… Martin O’Neill’s primary interests are in moral, political and legal philosophy, the philosophy of action, and the philosophy of Wittgenstein. This may well be how the Celtic manager spends his off-duty hours, but the Martin O’Neill we are talking about is the PhD student at Harvard University.

The philosopher O’Neill is author of a treatise called “Pele, The M25 And Artistic Post-Modernism” and is obviously almost as cerebral as the football manager O’Neill. Philosopher O’Neill is described as ‘the Bard of the Hanger Lane gyratory system, West London’s Wittgenstein, and Man with a Liver of Steel’. But can he find a goalkeeper to get Celtic through the remaining European Champions League fixtures?

Martin is, of course, a Celtic fan himself (and Arsenal and Ireland, and, I hope, the Boston Red Sox — not that anyone should think that my attention is drifting towards Fenway Park a little too often these days as the playoffs draw ever closer). But it was in his Leicester City FC days that Martin used to receive email at his balliol.ox.ac.uk account imploring him to stay with the Foxes…

The estimable Marc Mulholland is whiling away the Summer months by writing longish posts to his brand-new blog. Read what he has to say. Then buy his very good, very short book about Northern Ireland.

A warm welcome on the newly-alphabetised blogroll to the silverdollarcircle, a new blog by my former student (and occasional VS-reader) Simon, which will educate us all about the contemporary music scene.

Friend and comrade Jon Wilson sinks in his teeth and doesn’t let go, writing in today’s Guardian.

Anyone in the UK with �11.48 to spare can acquire a copy of Ben Dalby’s debut album, Symphony of Silence, over the internet. Just click here.

From this week’s New Statesman (but not, sadly, available online to non-subscribers) — and complete with photo! — are two entire pages on a Balliol contemporary, Gerard Russell, “Our man in the land of Zam Zam Cola”, by Christina Lamb:

In a large, high-ceilinged room at the Foreign Office, where the television is tuned to al-Jazeera and three clocks show the time in Washington, London and Abu Dhabi, sits the young (he’s 29) diplomat whose task it is to spread the Blair message in Islamic countries….

Russell may be an anonymous, slightly balding man in a pinstripe suit in London, but in the Middle East he is “Brother Gerard”, recognised everywhere from petrol stations in the Sinai Desert to customs offices at Riyadh airport. When Tony Blair visited the unit, Russell was introduced to the Prime Minister as “the man more famous on al-Jazeera than you are”…

My goodness. Who would have thought it?

I’ve never seen a genealogical demonstration of this, but I have heard it alleged (and it is entirely plausible) that I’m a very distant cousin of Sir James Brooke (1803-1868), the first of the “White Rajahs” of Sarawak, on the northern coast of Borneo. And it is both comic, embarrassing and rather ghastly to record that, according to Sylvia Brooke’s later memoir, Queen of the Headhunters, the Sarawak national anthem used to contain the line, “And tens of thousands yet unborn / Will bless the name of Brooke”.

I’ve been aware of this possible genealogical connection for a while now, but never really paid attention to the activities of the Brookes of Sarawak. In the last six months, however, they are cropping up in the most surprising places.

First, my colleague Giovanni told me all about the Italian Sandokan films and TV series, which are based on an extraordinarily popular set of novels by Emilio Salgari (1862-1911), who is sometimes called “the Italian Jules Verne”). In these films, the hero is Sandokan the Pirate (”the Tiger of Malaysia”); his arch-nemesis is Sir James Brooke (”The Exterminator”), who is leading a crusade against the pirates in the area. Like James Bond, the part of Sandokan has been played by several actors; and just as there is general agreement that Sean Connery was/is the best Bond, Kabir Bedi is generally reckoned to be the definitive Sandokan.

But Sir James Brooke isn’t just a important semi-fictionalised character in Italian popular culture, however. He’s also a man who may or may not have his penis shot off in India, a question to which the London Review of Books has, oddly enough, devoted an entire column of the current issue, and which apparently lies at the heart of Nigel Barley’s “lightweight but entertaining” new biography, White Rajah.

Well, perhaps he hadn’t, after all. While family tradition seems to have insisted that he had (hence his refusal ever to marry), Adam Kuper’s review notes that Brooke eventually come to recognise “an illegitimate son who had been born while he was recovering at home”, and, he asks, “Would Mrs Brooke have exhibited on her mantlepiece a bullet that had been removed from such a sensitive part of her son’s anatomy?” But it’s good to know that the LRB is continuing to discuss the questions that matter.

Raj writes [15.12.2002]: I’ve always been a Kabir Bedi fan. A staple of Hindi movies, he was always far more enjoyable to watch than the cleanshaven identikit heroes who would eventually triumph over him with a loud dooshoom-dooshoom (the fictionalised sound of good fist on evil jawbone, known to all who have ever watched Bollywood).

Richard adds [1.1.2003]: This is a bit late for comments but I’ll send it anyway: small world dept. The Adam Kuper who wrote the review of the book about your (vague) ancestor (featured on 8.12.02) is the father of Simon Kuper, author of the wonderful Football Against The Enemy (and Times football columnist — the only thing worth reading in the Monday pull-out-and-throw-away sports section).

I went to London yesterday for my fine Trotskyist friend David Renton’s 30th birthday party, in the function room at The Sol Arms pub just off the Euston Road. And it was a happy occasion: the London Socialist Historians’ Group brought their banner, various literature was passed around, and the assembled company follwed the traditional singing of “Happy Birthday” with the similarly-traditional Internationale — in (at least) two languages.

Britain’s finest man of letters Keith Flett, of the Beard Liberation Front, was there too, wearing a Philosophy Football Eric Hobsbawm T-Shirt — which, I thought, was an odd thing to do for a man who is waging a one-person campaign in the correspondence columns of the nation’s magazines drawing attention to the fact that EJH might have had time to write so many excellent books because he didn’t seem to sell many newspapers during his time in the CPGB. Dave, who by contrast both continues to sell a lot of newspapers and to write a lot of books, was distributing copies of his latest, Classical Marxism, which, he tells us, is the first volume of a projected five. If he continues his present work-rate, the other four will, no doubt, be out by Christmas.

It was also excellent to see a comrade from the Voice of the Turtle, Leo Zeilig, for the first time in months. He will soon be in the dock facing preposterous charges of “incitement to violent disorder”, after being the Person with the Megaphone on a recent antiwar demonstration in London, a charge which carries a possible five-year prison sentence. The defence campaign is already organising itself — and the party was a good occasion to collect signatures and donations on behalf of the Trafalgar Square Three (or whatever they will come to be called). More on this soon.

Happy Guy Fawkes Night — as they say, the only man to enter Parliament with honest intentions… I was once told, and I believed (to use the rather useful Socratic locution) that I was distantly related to a couple of Gunpowder Plotters. My grandmother’s maiden name was Winter — the name of two of the conspirators — and hers was a Catholic family. But this page has persuaded me that, sadly, this fact is probably not a true one.

J. Carter Wood, who has sweated volumes in the fields of the Voice of the Turtle, has an essay on the contemporary round of American anti-Europeanism over at the rather fine Freezerbox online magazine. Read it.

Get your copy of The Border Cantos by Stuart Kelly… Send a cheque for £1.50, payable to the Scottish Borders Council, to Joy Dunsmore, The Arts Service, St Mary’s Mill, Selkirk, Borders, TD7 5EW.

My old friend Sasha Abramsky continues his excellent work to expose the grim conditions in America’s prisons. Here’s his latest article, in the current issue of The American Prospect.