I had written an entirely different wormseye, about choosing Muslim leaders. this this bubbled up, and I’m not sure whether to use it instead. Do any of you have opinions?
(serendipitously, I find on Brad deLong an illustration of my point about citizenship more shocking than anything I’d dare make up.)
more below the fold.
There is a photo up on Snopes.com which has been submitted as an urban legend. It shows a petrol station in Georgia charging $6.00 for a gallon of gas — the person who sent it in thought it must have been photoshopped. Such prices were surely illegal. Indeed, in Georgia, they are. The governor has come over all socialist and found a law which forbids profiteering at the pumps; and prices will only “soar” toward $3.00 a gallon.
Assuming Google uses American gallons, I am paying about £3.60 for an American gallon of gas, or $6.55. Let’s say it takes ten years before the US catches up with this level. We have there a service-based economy in which the servant clases drive to work to serve customers who have driven to shop. What happens when they can’t afford to drive? What happens here, in the outlying provinces?
Here are the profiles that a quick prod round the archives found, not really in chronological order.
Eva Hoffman
Mary Midgley
Stewart Brand
Tam Dalyell
Brian Aldiss
Steve Rose
Evelyn Fox Keller
Bob Conquest
Elizabeth Jane Howard
Redmond O’Hanlon
John Sulston
Robert Silvers
Dan Dennett
Mary Warnock
Roy Foster
Oliver Sacks
John Brockman
Robert Trivers
They really were interesting people to talk to, and to read. There were three or four people who never talked to me, and whom I really wanted to do — Sybille Bedford booked a restaurant then changed her mind; Richard Lewontin and Bernard Lewis considered letters for months and then declined my offer. Larry McMurtry waited until I had booked (and the Guardian had paid for) a flight to Texas before deciding he had better things to do.
Benny Morris, whom I liked and admired, was never published. Too much politics. A couple of other ones fell by the wayside for other reasons.
What’s sad is that these were proper interviews, for which I would prepare by reading, and thinking about, everything I could get my hands on of the authors, and not just whatever their publishers wanted plugged that month. I would talk to friends from their childhoods. I tried to avoid quote mines and even clippings, and to get the quotes freshly. I’m really delighted to have been able to do all that work. The photographs that Eamonn McCabe did were fantastic, too.
One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth. Perhaps the most frightening thing about this statistic is that the NYT felt obliged to end the sentence “… an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century” as if this, too, were something its readers might not have known.
It seems to me that one of the positions that progressives simply cannot abandon is that teachers know better than parents what should be taught to children. And when that position goes, usually in the name of democracy, there is no limit to the folly that ensues. Creationism is only the beginning.
Of course, it’s not just science which is the victim of this sort of thing, but history, geograhy, languages, and so on. We take for granted American ignorance of anything that happened more than three years ago, or off-camera anywhere; very probably Europe is approaching similar levels of ignorance. Sing all together now, with uncle Hamish: “We are here to compete in a global, knowledge-based economy”
If he is remembered now, it is as the author of Tarka the Otter, a fine book that is still in print. But he was more than a nature writer. He’s one of the three really good writers I know of who became Nazis — the others being Céline and Knut Hamsun.
He wrote and rewrote his own life obsessively, in gigantic novel sequences; but he also wrote a couple of short books on his experiences in the first world war. Last night I finally read The Patriots’s Progress, which is the one you would recommend to Victoria Beckham, because it’s quite short and has lots of pictures, even if they are not in colour. It’s a work of astonishing force. It’s crude and self-consciously literary at once — the hero is called John Bullock and the early paragraphs go on for whole chapters. DEATH appears in capital letters, in a most unironic way. No writer could be further from Robert Graves, not in the force of his egoism, but in the artless unashamed desire to bully us into seeing and suffering as he did and to do so on his terms.
But he passes the only test that matters: the nightmare comes through to us with greater force than in anything I have read for a long time on that war, even Frederic Manning’s Her Privates We. Do read it, but not last thing at night, unless you want to wake, as I did, in the middle of the night seeing parts of dead men sticking out of the mud.
I don’t mean that Graves didn’t have a fierce artisitc egosim, in the sense that he, too, wanted everyone to know and care about the reality of war. But he set about it with savage understatement, and employed his every art to seduce the reader, not to bully them. Williamson must be artful in the organisation of his material. Otherwise the climax of the book would not have the effect it has. But you can constantly feel a hectoring and didactic purpose; and the very end, or anti-climax, strikes a clanging false note of fascist mysticism.
Hamish McRae has yet another article in the Independent today arguing that globalisaiton is wonderful, or at least inevitable; and that we will be fine in this country providing we compete for the jobs that require intelligence rather than cheap labour; I must have glanced at this, on a breakfast table spread with newspapers, at exactly the right angle to illuminate just how preposterous this hope is.
There’s nothing wrong with the logic, of course — or nothing much wrong with the logic: let’s assume for the moment that there is in fact free global competition for interesting jobs among intelligent and well-educated people of any nationality. Now ask yourself where on that scale you would rank the British. If you answered “We have one of the best-educated, most cosmopolitan and best-disciplined workforces in the world”, award yourself a suitable prize — something like an A at GCSE.
Well, I have just learned something interesting. If you are going to make backups onto CD, it’s not enough to make them regularly, keep backups of the backups, and so on: it’s also important not to use cheap bulk CDs. I just had occasion to go through a whole stack of backups from the years 1999 and 2000. Of the twenty or so disks I had made, three were still readable in their entirety: the ones made by Hewlett-Packard. All the ones labelled “Targa”, that I had picked up cheap, feeling clever, are riddled with errors.
So, if you need the data, pay good money for good disks. If you don’t need the data, why are you saving it?
The other lesson, as pointed outmany years ago by Rupert, is to use zip as your only backup format. I have about 120gb of backups made, carefully, devoutly, under Windows 98, in a format which can’t be read by any later operating system. Aren’t computers wonderful?
I have only just discovered the detective novels of Sarah Caudwell, Claud Cockburn’s daughter by Jean Ross (who was the original of Sally Bowles). They got great reviews when she died a few years ago, but I loathe the puzzle element of detective stories. All the qualities of my mind which are in some circumstances advantageous — chilefly an ability to make leaps of sympathy, and to see how things would be if something else were true — make me easy for the malevolent writer to hoodwink. So I made no effort until I found one in a book sale yesterday and devoured it in an evening. The voice of the heroine is distinctive and might appeal to more people than me:
“Venice, as one sees from the map in Ragwort’s guide, consists essentially of three large islands, though subdivided by canals into a great many smaller ones. Two of the three lie curled together, divided only by the Grand Canal, in an embrace of such Gallic sophistication as to prevent my pursuing further the anatomical analogy. To their left, excluded from their intimacy, the long thin island of Giudecca stretches out alone, a parable in geography of the hazards of a partie a trois. For consolation, like a divine hot-water bottle, it has at its foot the little island of San Giorgio Maggiore.”
There is something about Venice which brings this out in English writers. Spike Milligan, in the last volume of his war memoirs, is sent there with a concert party: “Wasn’t the city resting on piles? Yes; it was agony for the people underneath.”
Trivers is out. It will be the last profile I do for the Guardian since that slot is a casualty of the redesign; and I’m glad it was so much fun. It was one of the best jobs, perhaps the very best, that I have ever had as a journalist and I can’t think of any other European paper which would have run those.
List to follow when I feel more organised
This week’s Wormseye (below the fold) an angry reaction from at least one reader, Allan Hodgson. I’ve moved it out of comments in a Voltairean spirit.
I could not disagree more with Andrew Brown’s comments in a Worm’s Eye View on the unfortunate death of Mr. deMenezes. We are extremely fortunate to have a police commissioner of the stature of Sir Ian Blair. Under the circumstances it was imperative to keep the lid on things and to prevent mass hysteria.Mistakes do happen under such circumstances and the unfortunate shooting of one man is not a high price to pay. I fervently pray Sir Ian is not forced to resign, and I wish the media would find something more meritous to concern themselves with.
