The Virtual Stoa

The sixteenth series of Oxford Amnesty Lectures in support of the work of Amnesty International will kick off fairly soon. This year’s topic is “religion and rights”, the lecturers will take place between 25 January and 21 February, and the lecturers are Charles Curran, Simon Schama, Asma Jahangir, Tariq Ramadan, Ronald Dworkin, Chantal Mouffe and Stanley Hauerwas, ending with a debate involving A C Grayling, John Pritchard and others. Website here, schedule here, ticket info here.

Andrew Glyn, Marxist economist, born 30 June 1943, died 22 December 2007 [via].

We’re in today’s Observer.

The Jericho Boatyard planning application went to Oxford City Council’s Area Committee today. I couldn’t stay for the whole meeting, but I’m glad to read that (unsurprisingly) the local councillors threw out the proposals in the final vote. So no doubt it’ll go to appeal - again, and we’ll have to take it from there. Channel Four News covered the story earlier tonight, while the meeting was in progress, and you can watch the clip over here [and click on "watch the report"].

(We’re over here at the BBC, too.)

The Philip Pullman discussion below reminded me of this bit of propaganda that’s going round the neighbourhood, as local gyptian-consciousness is on the rise.

(The film’s playing at the Phoenix with an exhibition of photos of the boatyard in the bar upstairs, and Pullman recently turned up to a ceremony to rename one of the campaigners’ boat Lyra’s Defiance. All the fictional characters are on our side — Sergeant Lewis, too. How can we lose?!?)

More here, here and here.

Mike: “These privileged and stupid people have shown their contempt for the whole of the rest of society, with the sole exception of those few fascists who want to destroy it. They may be assured that the whole of the rest of society has nothing but contempt for them.”

Antonia: “It’s not even as if Irving and Griffin get to expound their vile views and be challenged: they have been invited to speak instead on freedom of speech. And even if they were to, is it not breathtakingly arrogant that Oxford undergraduates believe that in a five minute debating speech they could somehow defeat either, when it took a Cambridge Professor of Modern History weeks on the stand to rebut Irving’s assertions?”

loneraven: “Maybe I’ve as little chance of getting attacked on the street tomorrow as I do any day. But here I am, thinking about it. Here I am, going to sleep at night thinking, there are far-right groups in Oxford tomorrow, oh dear. And why should I have to think that? Why? See above where I’m a human being, where I deserve to feel safe every second of the time in my home city, where white people don’t have to worry about visual indicators and I do. How dare the Union blithely invite RACISTS into my city, so safe in their straight white male privilege that they don’t have to think about the consequences of what they’re doing? I am not straight, white or male, and I have no uncomplicated identity, no simplicity or belonging - but I am an Oxford student. No one is allowed to contest the basis upon which I’m here, at this place and at this time. How dare they take the one thing that I have all of my own, my home, and compromise that?”

I wish people would stop referring to the Oxford Union as providing, for example, “a prestigious public platform.” It’s neither public (being a private members’ club) nor prestigious (being run for as long as I can remember by a bunch of contemptuous contemptible attention-seeking clowns).

Over here.

Apparently we Oxford residents are also shoving a lot of cocaine up our noses in the men’s toilets of the city’s pubs and bars, even when the students aren’t really around, though I’ve never noticed. But then I suppose you’d need quite strong drugs to cope with some of the places they visited.

A few photos from yesterday afternoon…

Flooded allotments along the Botley Road.

Although the Osney Industrial Estate has flooded, the waters haven’t yet reached the Alden Press, who print the New Left Review. (What a blow that would be to working class struggle.)

Where do kebab vans go during the day? Mehdi’s — also known as the Brasenose kebab van — parks itself down Ferry Hinksey Road; and if the water levels rise higher there might be severe disruption to Oxford’s food supplies.

The Oatlands Recreation area has become a nice new lake. When I passed by some chap was very sensibly trying out his remote-controlled boat.

This last pic’s from this morning, as the people of Osney Island continue to watch the water levels in the river channel. The Environment Agency says water levels will continue to rise until some time tomorrow morning.

River Thames from Eynsham Lock, Eynsham to Sandford Lock, Sandford-on-Thames

Status: Severe Flood Warning
Received at: 21:21 on 21-Jul-2007

The River Thames from Eynsham Lock, Eynsham to Sandford Lock, including Wytham, Lower Wolvercote, New Botley, Osney, Grandpont, New Hinksey, South Hinksey and Kennington

Recently the Google Earth images of Oxford got much, much better. This, for example, is the part of town where you might run into Enkidu on your travels. That’s the canal going down the left-hand-side, where he’s been spotted on a number of occasions now; and there’s St Barnabas Church along the bottom edge, with Jericho’s Albert Street cutting through the top right-hand-corner.

Whenever I go past Pepper’s Burgers on Walton Street these days, it seems to be closed. And the people at this page seem to think it has closed down. This would, obviously, be utterly disastrous for humanity in general and the residents of Jericho in particular, so I hope it isn’t true. Does anyone know what’s going on? (I might have to produce another Defunct Oxford Institutions page.)

Below the fold is a statement from the Oxford branch of UCU, which will appear in the next issue of the Oxford Magazine.

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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.

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.

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.]

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.

The rubbish wars are escalating here in Jericho. About ten days ago The News of the World van was spotted driving around with a chap dressed up as Robin from Batman (pretty similar, anyway), and now Channel Four’s Dispatches tell me they’d like to have two weeks’ worth of my rubbish, and have given us an enormous yellow wheelie bin to put it in. I dread to think what’s coming next.

Not good at all. Over here.

UPDATE [Wednesday, am]: More here.

My street, apparently. (I hadn’t really noticed.)

The post below reminds me to resurrect this very occasional series.

(If you remember, #1 was the Lucy’s factory, #2 was the Globe pub, still the subject of various planning disagreements, and #3 was the St Giles Café, except it re-opened a bit later.)

The Radcliffe Infirmary [also], the eighteenth-century hospital on Woodstock Road, which you’ve all seen Inspector Morse going into loads of times as it’s a bit more photogenic than the front of the JR, closed on 27 January 2007, and the University has taken over the site. (All the modern hospital wards will be knocked down, and eventually some kind of humanities campus is going to spring up on the site. The building in the photo can’t be touched, obviously.)

People who work there have told me this isn’t really a bad thing: it should have closed 30 years ago, except that the money to build the replacement services got diverted to Milton Keynes (or something like that, anyway), and it’s better to have all the main hospital services over in Headington. Still, I quite liked having a big hospital just round the corner, and it was terribly convenient to be able to visit friends by popping in through the back entrance, which opened up onto Walton Street.

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.

Not so long ago I posted pictures of the river Thames just a few hundred yards from where I live, swollen by the rain and flooding Port Meadow. This afternoon it seems that some poor kid rode his bike into the river and may have drowned there.

(I can hear the helicopter overhead.)

On a dark and muddy walk last night, I found out that Port Meadow was flooded. That’s not so unusual, but I thought I’d come back and take some pictures this morning anyway. They’re over the fold. Local interest only.

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