American Literature (2)

Posted on February 6, 2005 by acb

Poking around the second-hand bookshops of Walden on Saturday, I found an Alison Lurie novel I didn’t know existed. Other people might get that excited about the discovery of lost plays of Sophocles. I just want to say that The Last Resort is the most ruthlessly plotted of all her books; and that I have discovered where I go when I sleep — I model for her clever, pompous, self-pitying characters., There’ really can’t have been anyone who writes so well and so cruelly about self-pity as Alison Lurie does. There is certainly no one who has made me laugh quite so loudly for so long.

Posted in Literature | 2 Comments

American Literature (1)

Posted on February 6, 2005 by acb

The FWB and I have been watching the television mini-series of Lonesome Dove. This has had three consequences.

  1. I have ordered five McMurtry books from Abebooks. I have known, and loved, one of his early lnovels, All My friends are going to be strangers for a long time. But I had never made the effort for the cowboy stuff.
  2. I will try and profile him for the Gradniau
  3. The FWB has drawn up some life lessons.

(1) Men only ever have accidents with the pretty girls.
(2) Spells given to you by little old ladies showing you how to fly are frequently less powerful than gravity
(3) If your wife travels from Arkansas to Nebraska and then to certain death at the hands of the Sioux to get away from you…she may be trying to tell you something.
(4) Horses are waaay more important than names.
(5) Chasing buffalo is not always a brilliant idea.
(6) It’s okay to rustle horses as long as you’re rustling them off of someone who’s stolen them in the first place, but if anyone steals your stolen horses then you’d better go after them.
(7) Bank robbery is never a good idea.
(8) If your saloon doesn’t attract enough visitors, you don’t have enough whores.
(9) Pigs are amazingly hardy animals, and will often survive almost everyone else unless someone decides to eat them.
(10) Most importantly…always be polite and considerate to everyone you meet. Some people just can’t abide rude behaviour in a man.

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I’ll stop calling them bigots

Posted on February 5, 2005 by acb

When they stop saying things like this:

The Right Rev. Josias Sendegeya, Anglican bishop of Kibungo, Rwanda, and his wife, Dorothee, were in neighboring Burundi during the genocide that took place in their country 10 years ago. Dorothee’s mother and father, brother, sister and eight nephews and nieces were all murdered by Hutu extremists.

Sendegeya draws a parallel between the atrocities committed in Rwanda in 1994 and what happened to the Episcopal Church USA in 2003, when American bishops consecrated an openly gay man as bishop of New Hampshire. The move was seen as a repudiation to more conservative elements of the global Anglican church who oppose the consecration of homosexuals, and it especially offended Anglican bishops in Africa.

“The Rwandan people know what it is to suffer,” said Sendegeya, speaking in French through a translator on a recent trip to St. Louis. “We experienced genocide and the horror that no one in the world came to help us. What has happened in the Episcopal church feels like a genocide, too. But it is spiritual rather than physical.”

Maybe it sounds better in French

(the story comes from the St Louis Post-Dispatch, via Simon Sarmiento

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paradigmatically rubbish

Posted on February 4, 2005 by acb

Some pseudoliterate has been reminiscing in the Guardian about the dotcom boom in Hoxton: “The satirical fanzine Shoreditch Twat, which I published, was born out of this confusion, seeking to make sense of the stampede of east London paradigms who talked much but seemed to achieve very little.”

Well I remember how we would scramble for shelter in the doorways of Old Street when a dustcloud rising above City Road gave early warning that a paradigm stampede was headed our way.

At any rate this provides an opportunity to revive one of the greatest puns of the twentieth century, which arose from a vicious wartime academic squabble in the Dublin Institute of Celtic Studies, when two professors resigned when their favoured candidate for a job failed to get it. All together now, the song of Myles na gCopaleen:

They sang in the choir
Of the Institute (Higher)
Binchy and Bergin and Best,
And when they saw fit
The former two quit,
Binchy and Bergin and Best,
But the third will remain
To try to regain
At whatever cost
Our paradigms lost,
Binchy and Bergin and Best.

Posted in Journalism | 3 Comments

More sherry, Vicar?

Posted on February 3, 2005 by acb

“I heard of this kind of thing in mortuary school” said the investigating detective. This is a completely pointless but strangely charming story of a woman who decided to help her alcoholic husband out after he became unable to drink.

So she gave him an enema with two bottles of sherry and later that night noticed that he was dead. She has been charged with murder — “We’re not talking about little bottles here: these were at least 1.5 liter bottles,” said Detective Robert Turner of the Lake Jackson police. (via)

Posted in Travel notes | 3 Comments

Global fame narrowly averted

Posted on February 2, 2005 by acb

I see that 12 people voted for this site in the Satin Pyjamas awards for best European weblog — not that I was nominated for that eminence, but as one of the blogs people should read more. Well, that was fun. I thank you all individually. It’s surprising, though, how many really interesting ones are out there. The overall winner was an English-language blog based in Slovenia; but there were two French ones that are really attractive, as well as petite anglaise, who is English in Paris. (I voted for Scandiwegian polymathy)

Im this context, the quotidian blogs are those which are most impressive. We all know the pleasure of expert blogs, like Juan Cole’s. But one of the distinctive pleaures of the net is coming across people living ordinary lives in cultures set at an angle to our own so that the light of reason shows them up in their true extraordinariness, like a ploughed field photographed when the sun is low.

Posted in Blather | 1 Comment

Somewhere in New York

Posted on February 2, 2005 by acb

There is a collector of dolls who likes to dress them up in Nazi uniforms, and have the cadet sitting on the officer’s knee. “here’s a bunch of guys in a cardboard box before i hide them – i have to hide them when my family comes to visit, or else they’ll think i am retarded.”

This is so horrible that my reactions loop the loop and bang into each other like an executive toy that has been struck with a hammer. I end up thinking quite warm and fuzzy thoughts about human diversity. Some stupidity and nastiness is so grotesque that it expands your sense of possibility.

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Great moments in British journalism

Posted on February 2, 2005 by acb

The front page of today’s Daily Mail. The Express was almost identical. I suppose that to win the next election, Blair will announce that householders have the right to shoot asylum seekers, but only if they’re very very angry.

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Google anthropology

Posted on February 1, 2005 by acb

The FWB was muttering over her my laptop this afternoon when the words “Legolas girl” emerged coherently. This was, she said, the teenage female equivalent of being called Nathan Barley. I said no one could possibly call themselves that. I was wrong.

So when the subject of naked sushi girls came up at supper, and I said there was something about them in the Mail about it today, my wife, reacting to the words Daily Mail so soon after a woman had been mentioned, cried “Melanie Phillips? I can’t believe it!”

[self-refuting prophecy deleted on grounds of taste]

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Oh for the wings of a nut

Posted on February 1, 2005 by acb

Friends in the business have been sending me a fine list of religious reasons for the tsunami. I thought nothing could top Paul Johnson‘s proof, in the Spectator, that the disaster proves the existence of a benevolent God but I was wrong. A truly creative theologian can use it to prove not just God’s general benevolence, but His particular care for His favourite causes. A former chief rabbi of Israel has explained that it’s all the fault of the people pressing Israel to withdraw from any part of the Occupied Territories:

In the latest edition of Mayanei Hayeshua, a weekly Torah pamphlet distributed to thousands of synagogues throughout the country, Eliyahu was asked how we are to understand the tsunami.
Eliyahu answered, “The [Babylonian] Talmud [the tractate of Berachot] says that when God is angry at the nations of the world for not aiding Israel – they want to evacuate, to disengage, to interfere in our affairs, He claps his hands, causing an earthquake.”

(The quote comes from the Jerusalem Post.) The only remaining question is why God, when he zapped Iran last year, didn’t manage to remove their nuclear programme too.

Posted in God | 2 Comments