My new year treat has been to ignore all comments about atheism on the Guardian site. 320 at last count. Instead, I went for a long walk and caught up with the LRB and TLS. The personals in the LRB are wonderfully back on form. “I found yours”, my wife said, passing over the one that said “Everyone. My life is a mind-numbing cesspit of despair and self-loathing. Just fuck off. Or else write back and we’ll make love. Gentleman, 37.”

Doesn’t everyone lie about their age?

But there were many other winners this week,and the most encouraging thing was that so many were short, including “I make my own sexual lubricant. The secret ingredient is Bovril. Man, 56. Congleton.” Is this down to the influence of twitter, of the credit crunch, or is it the beginning of a new literary movement?

Over at the TLS there is an interesting and moving piece about Mary Woolstonecraft’s suicide attempt and a really interesting-looking book of ghost stories but the moment that snapped my neck around came at the end of a long piece on Milton when I was assured that one essay was worth the price of a whole anthology. Uh, OK: 288 pages, binding unspecified but probably hardback – £50. By some measure that qualifies as the most enthusiastic review I have ever read.

Happy New Year to all of you.  And I know I owe Mrs T a piece about Franco.

that glance of insufferable, hopelessly dense sufficiency which nothing but the frequentation of science can give to the dullness of common mortals.

I have been frustrated for months by the inability of my nice new Nokia phone to synch usefully with any of the three places where I keep contacts. None of them, you understand, are perfect, but I dont need a fourth.  Ecco would be the most useful, since it links to each contact all the relevant information. Buit it’s very old, no longer properly supported, and has no email links and limited contact fields. So everything was exported from there into CSV a long time ago, and reimported into Thunderbird (if there were email addresses); contacts with phone numbers went into my old Sony Ericsson phone. One of these lists got imported into Google Contacts. Read the rest of this entry »

Three parties last night: a steady descent from candle-lit carols in a Nash interior at the Swedish residence, to a white-painted subterranean nightclub with great slab-sided pillars and artificial snow on the floor of the entrance tunnel—the cocaine slaughterhouse aesthetic. Some social moments and snatches of conversation:

“The thing you have to remember, Andrew, is that the Guardian is the only truly fascist paper in Britain. Understand that and you understand … everything.”

“Oh, yes: Andrew Brown. You reviewed one of my books. You called it a car crash.”

At a magazine party in the Travellers’ Club where the staff wore name tags, but the guests didn’t, being approached by a nametagged person to whom I had last spoken some years ago when she phoned me up in a fury because I had written about her husband’s jail sentence for child pornography. She joined the group I was in. I don’t know you, she said. “No”, I said; “and you’ll wish you didn’t. I’m Andrew Brown”. She left abruptly, very soon after. I can’t say I felt in the very least embarrassed. There are many awful things that one says and does at parties that leave a squirming tentacle of remorse in the brain but sticky conversations about child porn convictions quite transcend embarrassment.

And so to the last train back from Liverpool St, caught with a minute to spare: young man in a suit in that stage of drunkenness where all the small muscles of the face have gone, and a kind of long-jawed chimpanzee mask lolls on the neck; a carton of takeway curry with lots of rice splashed all over the floor by the doors to the carriage; the middle-aged man, also in a suit, who pushed past me out of the lavatory had just been copiously sick inside it. In the middle of the carriage, two jolly fat blondes in miniskirts and sombreros who looked up every time I passed them as if expecting conversation … outside, at Audley End, a hard frost and the noise of scraping windscreens carrying across the car park.

Chris Hedges’ book I don’t believe in atheists. My copy has been pre-owned, as they say (I ordered from Powells, since it isn’t published in this country) by a believer in scientism, whose pencil annotations are most illuminating. The book grew out of a public debate with Hitchens (whom the author, in an an interview with Salon, dismissed as an Ann Coulter of the left) and Sam Harris; and it’s interesting to see the annotations of a true unbeliever who can’t see anything wrong with a faith in progress. I will have to write more, lots more, but this is the first book I have come across which sees the New Atheists as morally outrageous – which of course they are.

Two lovely quotes from the book, one Hedges; the second, apparently, from Ibsen

To turn away from God is harmless. Saints have been thing to do it for centuries. To turn away from sin is catastrophic.

and

To live is to war against the trolls.

Thinking about the ignorant, angry atheists who infest the Guardian’s comment pages I realised one thing they have in common with scriptural fundamentalists: they have no idea of history. They live in an eternally dazzling present and they can’t imagine that there is anything outside it. Oh, sure, they have legends — the inquisition, the crusades, the middle ages — but within these legends the actors move, as they do in renaissance paintings, entirely in contemporary dress. There is no sense of the strangeness and difficulty of the past; no sense that many things have been tried and failed; no sense that words once meant things entirely different and possibly inexpressible now.

This is how the British intelligentsia used smugly to describe Americans as distinct from Europeans. But it is now a general vaseline across the lens of British thought.

So when our readers claim that atheists never persecute believers, this is in part an absolute ignorance of some of the basic facts of twentieth century history — what did they think was happening in Poland up until 1989? — an in part a simple reluctance to believe that history is about other people. I haven’t shot any priests, and nor has anyone I know. Ergo, atheists never persecute.

It reminds me horribly of the fundies I talked to at the Lambeth Conference in 1998, for whom the miracles of the Bible could have happened just down the road. They, too, had no sense of the intervening history, nor of any growth of knowledge in the last 2000 years. The modern atheists know, of course that there has been such a growth. But they couldn’t — outside science — give any examples at all. And even when I write “science” I may be overstating the case. How many know any chemistry or geology?

And to complete the breakdown of western civilisation, the autofocus on my camera has bust, while the manual focus has not recovered from my replacement of the focussing screen. I suppose I had better do some work instead.

is, I think what the FT has done to its site this week. What used to be a compact, elegant and clear display of a great deal of information for grownups is now like a mobile phone designed for the learning disabled. The number of stories and even of words visible at any time has dropped by about 80% but at the same time the screen has actually grown more cluttered because the new fonts are so large and the design so sprawling that there is nowhere to rest the eye.

It is even bigger and uglier than the Janet and John style of the Telegraph and the Telegraph can make two excuses: it was ugly before, which the FT’s old look was not; and it is is aimed at Telegraph readers who these days are split between the cataract disabled and the learning disabled.

The Financial Times, however, is aimed at the same audience as the Economist and the Wall Street Journal: literate grown-ups capable of processing a lot of information quickly. Hell, the average FT reader probably now owns a phone which could display as many stories and words from the old design as now can be fitted on my 19” monitor at home. To cap it all, the new site seems to load mores slowly than the old one.

There is only one consolation. Up till now the FT, almost alone among newspapers, has been able successfully to charge for access to its website, so that there is now one more practical way of expressing disgust than compulsively filling in the reader surveys they offer with their new pages. For the first time in my life I am gong to be able to write to a web site and cancel my subscription.

I noticed over the weekend a gloomy post I had made back in August saying that Obama would certainly lose because of racism. I hoped no one else would notice. But then, this morning, I spotted the voting figures referenced on A Tiny Revolution which suggest that white racism was a huge factor: it was just outweighed by non-white racism. 43% of American whites voted for Obama; one per cent up on Gore’s figures eight years ago. But the non-white vote as grown, and was emphatically non-Republican, too.

I think we can take it as conclusive proof that God really does have a purpose for Sarah Palin. Without her, Obama might still have lost.

I suppose I would have been less shocked and disappointed if Obama had lost than when Kerry did because I could not, still cannot, imagine how anyone could have regarded Bush as even minimally competent by November 2004. But still it was extraordinary to wake at ten past four this morning, and switch on the kitchen radio in the middle of McCain’s concession speech. It was the best news since 1989. I don’t really suppose that Obama can rescue America but what gives me hope is the fantastic volunteer effort that got him elected. It’s impossible to imagine that kind of popular movement in this country, even for donkey welfare.

One other point: Tim Bray, in his comments, was lamenting the absence of a credible conservative voice in American politics. But as far as I can hear, this is exactly the voice they have elected. Just as Kerry was an Eisenhower Republican, Obama seems to me to be exactly the kind of conservative who understands when change is inevitable. The great question is he will prove enough of a statesman to manage things so that everything changes in order for everything to stay the same. Whatever else he is, he’s not a destructive revolutionary, far less so than Bush was in his blundering way.

I have been starting a site at the Guardian, and just too busy to post here, or even to think. I have never in my life had anything like the quantity and virulence of hatemail that I’m getting there. I think the most egregious example was this, sent to me personally at my graun address.:

your book on Sweden and (allegedly) fly fishing.

What a depressing piece of badly written rubbish! Were you not a journo, you would never have had it published. I’m pleased to say I read it AFTER a delightful few weeks in that happy, cheerful country – it went in the bin of course, and I almost feel sorry for you in your clearly depressive state.
Iain Wilson.

This is not much compared to the hatred poured out on that site at Christians, or women. It’s not just upsetting, but really odd. Where does all this bile and self-righteousness come from? (in the quoted case, it comes from a vanity domain, icwilson.com) After a long day reading that kind of crap I feel as some people did after the 7/7 bombings, as if complete strangers might explode beside me in the tube; except instead of semtex, they would just burst from the force of their own corrosive intestinal festerings. It’s probably related to the Ross/ Brand kind of bullying, too.

Ah well, tomorrow I am in Oxford for most of the day, and working on trains when I am not lecturing. But I will try to keep this site going. I like the comments here, for one thing.