History matters
The Observer | Review | The future’s in the past
Here’s a marvellous piece by the ridiculously multi-talented Stephen Fry on the importance of History. Should be compulsory reading for all with any influence on education policy.
Little things for which I have an irrational loathing. Number 1
…of what I expect will be a very long series. First up, then – personalised number plates. I remember explaining the British number plate system to a German friend, and almost causing him to choke on his beer when I revealed how much people will pay for a particularly apt plate. I suppose if you could get AB 1, assuming your initials were AB, then it might be worth a bob or two, but actually, who cares? Well, quite a lot of people it seems, judging by the lengths people go to in order to have something approximating to a name on their plate.
The worst kind are the ones which have no discernible meaning, but which have to be imaginatively reinterpreted to yield some kind of name. You know the ones – a B can kind of be fashioned by putting a 1 and a 3 close together, or a 5 stands duty for an S. Really desperate ones also use a strategically placed screw with a black cap to sort of make a 1 into an L. I saw one recently where J2NNE was supposed to spell Jenny. How do I know? Because of the most tragic aspect of the enterprise, in which the owner has to put what the plate is supposed to spell in very small letters under the actual registration number.
My all time favourite was one such, although this was not on a personalised plate. No, under a perfectly ordinary plate, someone had seen fit to have added “Jeanina Topping BSc (Hons) QTS”. Maybe the car was a graduation present from Mummy and Daddy Topping…
A real pea-souper, and no mistake, guv’nor…
For reasons which are actually mundane, but which I won’t reveal in order to maintain an air of spurious mystery, I have to visit Birmingham twice a year. Once again this time, I stayed at Jonathan’s, and it is a strange experience. Jonathan’s presents itself as a Victorian “experience”- and it is – but far from some country park setting, it is actually located on an unprepossessing roundabout (is there any other kind?) in a rather down at heel suburb.
So it’s odd to be resident in a room which might have served as Sherlock Holmes’s study – dark maroon wallpaper, mahogony furniture, cushions, knick-knacks and ornaments in abundance – not in Baker Street but in darkest Brum. My room didn’t feature correspondence fixed to the mantlepiece with a knife, but did have a bowler-hatted and union jack-waistcoated Teddy Bear. Possibly that belonged to Watson…
Apart from its intense Victoriana, Jonathan’s is quirky because of its system of naming rather than numbering rooms. I was in Whiteheath. The labyrinthine interior is navigated by means of coloured lines on the ceiling which correspond to the tube map design on the “passport” they give you when you check in. It is actually quite good fun, but the drawback is the location. For my purposes, it’s fine – it’s a few minutes’ drive from where I need to be – but it seems odd where it is. You expect a Travel Lodge and you get number 221b.
Blog Power
The growing influence of blogs in public policy is well-documented. Norman Geras and the Euston Manifesto is a blog phenonomenon. More evidence that blogs are changing things is the appearance of Alasdair Gray’s blog. Here’s a leading writer and artist publishing thoughts and new material freely to the web. This, it seems to me, is what the web is for.
Exterminate all the brutes
Those pesky detainees, eh? What to do when they insist on pulling publicity stunts? I have a modest proposal. We all know these are very dangerous men, locked up for years because they are terrorists conducting a secret war against America – so secret in fact, that we can’t possibly allow any of the evidence into the public domain. But if they were terrorists in, say, Fallujah, the US wouldn’t be arresting them – they’d be killing them. So, why not ship them to Iraq, and, er, treat them like other insurgents. Problem solved!
This is Fishy
Potter Author ‘The Best Living Writer’ – Yahoo! News UK
If she beat “Salmon Rushdie” then this is obviously fishy…
Sting 0 Dowland 6
As I write this, I’m listening to Jacob Heringman playing Dowland. It’s sublime. Dowland is, to me, the greatest. His Lachrimae Antiquae Novae will accompany my body when it’s consigned to the earth or the flames. So, I was a little startled when ‘er indoors alerted me to this. With that marvellous gift for oversimplification that he honed by airing ideas such as the one about love saving the rainforest, Mr Sumner suggests that Dowland was the first singer-songwriter. Well, I’m sorry, but equating Dowland with Cat Stevens or James Taylor is like suggesting Dan Brown is a modern Shakespeare. I dread to think what Sting will do to the vocal parts, quite apart from what he’ll do with the complex lute lines – does he know a lute has more strings than a bass? I see that, in a move replicating Elvis Costello’s excellent North, the album will be issued on Deutsche Grammophon. Declan won a little battle with Mr Sting some years ago when Gordon accused him of affecting an American accent in his singing. EC’s reply was contemptuous, and homed in on the fake Jamaican of the Geordie Stingster. I fully expect a reggae beat to “Now O Now I needs must part”…
This is an opportunity to plug the excellent Magnatune.com – this is a growing collection of music available to download for much less than you’d pay in the shops. It gives the artists a very good deal. Worth a look.
NATFHE’s last act
BBC NEWS | Education | Lecturers call for Israel boycott
Following this ridiculous motion, which is NATFHE’s last significant act before the merger with AUT, I have resigned my membership. It is grotesque to require people to, in effect, declare their non-allegiance to their government before being accepted in the academic community. What’s proposed here is nothing less than institutionalised discrimination based on nationality.
The backlash has, predictably, already begun. One reason that many academics, including me, put forward in opposition to this boycott is that it singles out Israeli academics whilst leaving academics in countries with much more repressive regimes alone – China, Zimbabwe, Sudan come immediately to mind. A letter in yesterday’s Guardian by Sabby Sagall, a leading light in the Socialist Workers Party, puts forward a wonderfully barmy reason for picking out Israel: “Israel is not a “normal” democratic society in which the rulers have had to accept that far-reaching political dissent or class conflict be part of the state’s ideological framework. It is a settler-colonial society with a much greater degree of social cohesion. Therefore the question why Israeli academic institutions should be boycotted and not necessarily those of other societies with poor human rights records is wide of the mark. In most such societies, there are usually many dissident intellectuals who tend to suffer the same repression meted out to ethnic or political minorities. Not in Israel. There, academic institutions are part of the structure of the illegal, colonial occupation. It is right that the boycott should go ahead until Israeli universities decide to support the campaign for an end to the occupation.” Brilliant, Sabby – so presumably you’ll also be supporting a ban on US and British universities until their academics declare their anti-war stance? Australia and Canada too, presumably? How twisted is this logic? We should attack Israeli academics because they’re not repressed?
Get a grip.
Poppycock
Dalrymple is always challenging the orthodoxy, but does it from a position of strength – he knows about these people, he’s done his time with them, so for me, his ideas have a greater resonance than those of some well-heeled politician showing how compassionate he is. I think he’s spot on about the Romantics’ use of opium. I always thought that the allegedly opium-influenced poetry was easily the worst. Coleridge clearly was a great poet – but Kubla Khan is just loopy, I’m afraid.
Rock of Ages
I remember as a teenager the excitement caused by the arrival of first the beat groups and then the rock bands of the late sixties and early seventies. These guys (and they were nearly all guys) were a few years older than the fans, and were god-like figures, with great manes of hair and impossibly tight jeans. Thirty – odd years later, incredibly, most of them seem to be still around. Have a look who’s touring at the moment – The Stones (once they’ve located Keef’s brain) Deep Purple, Jethro Tull, a version of ELO, and so on. Of course, the members aren’t the same – they are now fat and bald, or indeed dead. Which leads me to my proposition – the amalgamation of rock bands to compensate for missing members. I notice the Who are headlining festivals this summer, despite being down to 50% of their original strength due to the exits of the drummer and the bass player. There’s another group who are 50% down, too, and the remaining members are – the drummer and the bass player! Step forward The Whotles, or possibly the Boo. That bass player might need the money, soon…