It's hard to precis this story, but let's just say it involves a Harvard law professor who meets a woman in a hardware store (in one of the many impossible-to-invent details, the fact that she is wearing a dress is a key part of her allure), becomes involved with her, in a way, and also caught up with her transgender friend - and then it all goes horribly, horribly wrong. It is a cracking story and so much of the delight resides in the details that I shouldn't tell you more.
There is a further irony. At a point when he was feeling more friendly towards his on-off girlfriend's transgender friend, the professor wrote this weirdly odd piece speaking ill of the late Justice Scalia - but accurately describing himself as a naive fool.
Wednesday, 24 July 2019
Friday, 19 July 2019
The United Kingdom
Some glimpses of this country.
1. Miners, the aristocracy of the working class. (Also on the subject of the north-east, "Marat was, of course, best known for living in Newcastle, where he wrote an essay on gonorrhoea.")
2. The other aristocracy: an article by James Wood on his old school, Eton. This, I thought, was an unpleasant and meretricious article. Unpleasant in the grating lack of filial piety (which to some extent must reflect badly on the school, I suppose) and otherwise entirely meretricious. It reveals that some boys at Eton come from rich and well-connected families: David Cameron was one. Some of them have double or even triple-barreled surnames! Other boys are less well-off but talented in some other respect: these included Boris Johnson and Kwasi Kwarteng. Many of the people involved in the Brexit debate went to Eton (there are King's Scholars on both sides of the debate), as did some other prominent people in the fields of acting and the Church of England. It is possible to maintain friendships across the Brexit debate lines. Boris Johnson has not changed his appearance much since he was a teenager. If any of this surprises you then you have come to the wrong blog. Wood writes that he has tended to avoid the topic of Eton "mainly because I dislike a retrospect that might sound like some nasty combination of complaint, boast and self-pity": well, he has largely avoided the element of boast. Nonetheless, Wood does write very nicely, as he is well aware, and I happily found myself reading the article right to the end, having cheerfully abandoned many others in the LRB.
3. Not long ago, I mentioned that it's surprising how many times discussion of Brexit turns to discussion of the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony. Here is Dawn Foster in the Guardian summing it up: "Centrist thinking is focused on two false premises. The first is that the 2012 London Olympic ceremony represented an idyllic high-point of culture and unity in the UK, rather than occurring amid the brutal onslaught of austerity, with food bank use growing and the bedroom tax ruining lives. The second is that the UK became divided by Brexit and the 2016 vote, rather than it being a symptom of long-term problems ...". It really is worth looking out for the references to this little bit of made-for-television spectacle: truly the Great Exhibition of our time. Wherever I go I spot them.
4. A literary map of the UK.
5. A little glimpse into the wonderful world of politics on the Left: it appears that, for so long as the UK remains in the EU, it would be illegal to impose VAT on private school fees. This view seems to be kosher (Art 132.1(i)), so long as private schools fall within the scope of "bodies governed by public law having [education] as their aim or by other organisations recognised by the Member State concerned as having similar objects" (the words after the "or" are crucial here). This might make the vehemence of pro-EU support among the normally affable London professional classes perhaps a little easier to understand. (Of course VAT on female sanitary products is mandatory within the EU until 2022, according to Wikipedia.)
6. London from the Monument. A little different from the view that prevailed when the Monument was first erected.
1. Miners, the aristocracy of the working class. (Also on the subject of the north-east, "Marat was, of course, best known for living in Newcastle, where he wrote an essay on gonorrhoea.")
2. The other aristocracy: an article by James Wood on his old school, Eton. This, I thought, was an unpleasant and meretricious article. Unpleasant in the grating lack of filial piety (which to some extent must reflect badly on the school, I suppose) and otherwise entirely meretricious. It reveals that some boys at Eton come from rich and well-connected families: David Cameron was one. Some of them have double or even triple-barreled surnames! Other boys are less well-off but talented in some other respect: these included Boris Johnson and Kwasi Kwarteng. Many of the people involved in the Brexit debate went to Eton (there are King's Scholars on both sides of the debate), as did some other prominent people in the fields of acting and the Church of England. It is possible to maintain friendships across the Brexit debate lines. Boris Johnson has not changed his appearance much since he was a teenager. If any of this surprises you then you have come to the wrong blog. Wood writes that he has tended to avoid the topic of Eton "mainly because I dislike a retrospect that might sound like some nasty combination of complaint, boast and self-pity": well, he has largely avoided the element of boast. Nonetheless, Wood does write very nicely, as he is well aware, and I happily found myself reading the article right to the end, having cheerfully abandoned many others in the LRB.
3. Not long ago, I mentioned that it's surprising how many times discussion of Brexit turns to discussion of the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony. Here is Dawn Foster in the Guardian summing it up: "Centrist thinking is focused on two false premises. The first is that the 2012 London Olympic ceremony represented an idyllic high-point of culture and unity in the UK, rather than occurring amid the brutal onslaught of austerity, with food bank use growing and the bedroom tax ruining lives. The second is that the UK became divided by Brexit and the 2016 vote, rather than it being a symptom of long-term problems ...". It really is worth looking out for the references to this little bit of made-for-television spectacle: truly the Great Exhibition of our time. Wherever I go I spot them.
4. A literary map of the UK.
5. A little glimpse into the wonderful world of politics on the Left: it appears that, for so long as the UK remains in the EU, it would be illegal to impose VAT on private school fees. This view seems to be kosher (Art 132.1(i)), so long as private schools fall within the scope of "bodies governed by public law having [education] as their aim or by other organisations recognised by the Member State concerned as having similar objects" (the words after the "or" are crucial here). This might make the vehemence of pro-EU support among the normally affable London professional classes perhaps a little easier to understand. (Of course VAT on female sanitary products is mandatory within the EU until 2022, according to Wikipedia.)
6. London from the Monument. A little different from the view that prevailed when the Monument was first erected.
7. Here is something written by a transwoman who became a Catholic after transitioning: Durham University's Centre for Catholic Studies' "nurturing, dialogical community showed [her] the possibility for reconciliation with the ecclesial tradition that had nourished [her] theological imagination".
Thursday, 11 July 2019
Links for fun
1. In 1587, Urbano Monte made the largest known early map of Earth. You can play around with a digital version made into a globe here.
3. Come, Josephine, in my Flying Machine! "You're surprised that, having scored big with one ethnic novelty song, the wily Kraut didn't follow it with "If The Man In The Sun Were A Hun". Instead, over the next three and a half decades, he prospered in just about every genre: Irish songs ("Peg O' My Heart", one of the most beguiling of Tin Pan Alley's shamrock ballads), Irish mother songs ("Ireland Must Be Heaven For My Mother Came From There"), substitute mother songs ("Daddy, You've Been A Mother To Me"), anti-German luff ballads ("Lorraine, My Beautiful Alsace Lorraine"), pro-American luff songs ("Would You Rather Be A General With An Eagle On Your Arm Or A Private With A Chicken On Your Knee?"), songs about pedal extremities ("Your Feet's Too Big"), songs about railroad excursions through mining country ("Phoebe Snow The Anthracite Mama"), and songs of sound general philosophy ("There's A Little Bit Of Bad In Every Good Little Girl")." Mark Steyn - and with observations on Titanic too.
4. A Norwegian woman who runs and jumps like a horse.
5. When Slavoj Žižek wrote the text for an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue.
6. "As a gaggle of teenage girls waved their Blue-Shield-advertisement-paddles to cheer on the police, I thought to myself “Yes, this exactly captures the spirit of the original Stonewall rioters”." Scott Alexander on civil religion, specifically American civil religion.
7. Christopher Walken dancing.
4. A Norwegian woman who runs and jumps like a horse.
5. When Slavoj Žižek wrote the text for an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue.
6. "As a gaggle of teenage girls waved their Blue-Shield-advertisement-paddles to cheer on the police, I thought to myself “Yes, this exactly captures the spirit of the original Stonewall rioters”." Scott Alexander on civil religion, specifically American civil religion.
7. Christopher Walken dancing.
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