Spot the Author

Posted on January 13, 2003 by acb
The rose opens her petals
And embraces the violet

The lily too has awakened.

They bare their heads to the zephyrs.
Yes, it’s dreadful; and it’s translated, too. If I gave the original language away, it would be too easy. But I defy anyone to identify the least likely adolescent poet of the twentieth century.
Posted in Literature | 4 Comments

Pilgrim’s protest

Posted on January 13, 2003 by acb

Mark Pilgrim has lost his temper about the W3C abolishing a couple of tags in the XHTML specification. I don’t understand why. That may not be news. I understand, at best, about half of what I read on his site: this is hard core programming and web design, written by an expert for other experts, but how else does one learn except by eavesdropping and experiment? Still, in this instance, he claims they have dropped two tags whose usefulness he daily illustrates: references. But when I follow these up, I discover that the missing tags are there all along: although <Q> is now <QUOTE>. But the example <QUOTE>shown uses <CITE> as well. Very odd.

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Encounter with an old bruiser

Posted on January 13, 2003 by acb

I had to ring Denis Healey today in re Conquest: they were both in the communist party at Oxford inthe late Thirties. He was delighted to hear Bob was still alive. “When you are over eighty,”, he said, “all your contemporaries are your friends”. He liked the serious poetry, which I admired him for. And, when I told him that Bob had excused his CP membership with the words “You couldn’t take seriously any organisation headed by Philip Toynbee”, he added the following anecdote: “I remember reading the first volume of Philip Toynbee’s autobiography in which he said that he had proved his dedication to the cause by reading the Daily Worker from cover to cover between Oxford and Paddington. If I had done that, I would have finished it before the train had left the Oxford suburbs.”

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The Suez Fallacy

Posted on January 13, 2003 by acb

I have noticed a new distortion of thought in the British Left: I will call it the Suez Fallacy becasue it appeared to me most clearly in a report on opposition to the war among Labour constituency chairmen. The term that most of them used to describe the catastrophe they feared was “another Suez”. But there can never be another Suez. That is a moment which happens only once to empires; after the first time, you have no prestige nor power to lose. If anyone suffers a Suez moment as a result of a disastrous Iraqi war, it will be the Americans (with the parallel elegantly adorned by the fact that they, too, will have been egged on into imperial overstretch by the Israelis). Note, also, that Suez was a military victory for our lot. It was not the Egyptian Army, but the exercise of American diplomatic (“soft”) power that defeated the Brits. In that sense the Falklands changed nothing. Suez had established that we could not win wars even against third-rate powers that the Americans did not want us to fight. The Falklands showed that we could beat a third-rate power with American permission and help.

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big self restraint

Posted on January 10, 2003 by acb
“Have begun big self-restraint programme with no drinks or smokes until 7.30pm and then only beer and wine till 10 or so. When I go out to lunch etc. I can have what I like. Works bloody well: I can now take a heavy day and feel all right the next morning.”
(Kingsley Amis toRobert Conquest , 1 March 1976).
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more puerility

Posted on January 10, 2003 by acb
Another Conquest fragment:

When the earl pulled out his bloody great tool at tea

To do the page-boy wrong,

His chaplain cried in incredulity,

‘How long, oh Lord, how long!’.
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Vanity

Posted on January 6, 2003 by acb

A narrow escape for Professor Dawkins, I think: I was just rung up by BBC Four, a digital TV channel, and asked if I would be interested in presenting a programme about him, and interviewing him. The woman talking to me seemed smart and sympathetic; she had actually got hold of a copy of the Darwin Wars, and read several chapters. The money was agreeable. I found I had a few ideas still on the subject. After about half an hour, she asked whether I still resembled the figure on the back jacket of the book. Well, I said, I’m 48 in a month, and I have less hair now than then. Whoops. The gig went up in smoke less savoury than the stuff rising in the background of that author picture.

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get online

Posted on January 6, 2003 by acb

Don’t be a hamster! This note is for all the francophone readers: you know, when you were being taught in school, that none of this stuff seemed as if it would be any use? Well, here’s the proof of that intuition, from the Guardian‘s Paris correspondent.

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So I’m smug

Posted on January 5, 2003 by acb
But this horrendous burst of redesigning, which culminated in the rolling, changing subtitle under the new logo, made me feel, for a moment or two, that I actually knew what the hell was going on with MT.
The only hassle is that I must now replace with sober
<blockquote>s
all the stuff I had exuberantly classed as <span class=”loony”>, or sort it into my new class, sane. Coming soon, world domination: at least I think it ought to be possible to republish all my old articles as another blog, which would make them automatically searchable, and let me use fun plugins like the “more like this from google search” one. It seems logical that I should be able to use the customer as the category, and so have automatic indexes showing everything I have done for the Guardian or whatever.
Posted in Software | 4 Comments

Astonishing blog

Posted on January 4, 2003 by acb

I was rambling and found this — enchanting, shameless, sad. Also, utterly sweet. Odd that it would once have been a much more forced newspaper column.

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