paperpools

The irony is that, had Benn stuck to the centre ground that he occupied for his first 20 years in parliament, he may* well have become Labour leader and possibly even prime minister. In the end, however, the die was cast in the early 70s when he opted to throw his weight behind the grassroots uprising and against the party establishment. He once explained his disaffection thus: "I was brought up to believe that when you were elected to parliament, you were elected to control the statute book, the purse and the sword. But I have sat in a commons that has abandoned control of the statute book to Brussels, control of the sword to the White House and the purse to the IMF."

Chris Mullin on Tony Benn here

*Brits. Do not argue with a Brit about moods and tenses. DO. NOT. DO. THIS.

Things have been bad for reasons I won't go into. I am now at the MacDowell Colony (every cloud has a silver lining). Very sporadic internet access, good. But today I am doing laundry.

I go online and search for "Michael Lewis" to see what he's up to - and what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a review of John Lanchester's Capital by Michael Lewis!  At the NYRB!

I have not yet got to the meat of the review; I have only just come to Lewis's account of Britain in the early 80s:

And the most extraordinary anticommercial attitudes could be found, in places that existed for no purpose other than commerce. There was a small grocery store around the corner from my flat, which carried a rare enjoyable British foodstuff, McVities’ biscuits. One morning the biscuits were gone. “Oh, we used to sell those,” said the very sweet woman who ran the place, “but we kept running out, so we don’t bother anymore.”

This is lovely.  Yes, this is recognizably Britain (O Britain, Britain, Britain).  But if there is one thing lovelier than sheer unadulterated British wrongheaded woollymindedness, it is seeing this through the eye of the young Michael Lewis.  The genius of Lewis is to enable the reader to appreciate the ingenuity of persons capable of spotting a market inefficiency and exploiting it - Bill Walsh developing the passing game in football, Billy Beane using statistics to get the most out of the cashstrapped Oakland A's. And with this genius comes incredulous outrage: incredulity, outrage, at those who have institutionalized sheer lumpen stupidity. (O Michael Lewis, Michael Lewis.)  Here we find the young Lewis, long before he has made a career out of incredulous outrage, confronted with the dear dim cluelenessness of the typical British corner shop.  And showing a keen eye for one of the pleasures of foggy island life: McVitie's Digestives! Heaven.

(The review can only go downhill after this, but those unable to resist diminishing returns can find the rest here.)

I was going through my papers and came across notes from Peafowl, their conservation, breeding and management by T P Gardiner of the World Pheasant Association.

The antics and activities of peafowl provoke more enquiries to the offices of the World Pheasant Association than all other species of pheasant put together. It was this simple fact that highlighted the gap in current literature on the galliformes and prompted me to feel that WPA publications should seek to fill it. Who better to do the job than than the person who has answered most of the questions on peafowl for the WPA during the past 10 years.

Those who keep peafowl, ad I do, will now that they can cause embarrassment -- ours  have. At our home in southern England they decided that the roof of a new 200 bedroom hotel next door made a more interesting perch than our numerous trees. In Scotland where we have them roaming in the highland glens and breeding prolifically, an adult male decided that the windowsill of an elderly lady neighbour's bathroom was an excellent roosting place -- the lady in question insisted that it embarrassed her and demanded its removal.

I'm not sure if Tom Gardiner, for all his knowledge of peafowl, would have had any solution for my problems with peafowl, but I am sure that readers will find within these pages the answers to many queries concerning peafowl both in the wild and in captivity.

Keith Howman [I think - handwriting deteriorating at this point]

....
[Mr Gardiner than takes up the baton . . .]

At the time of writing this preface, books about peafowl are still surprisingly few . . .

Another perennial problem with peafowl is that of birds leaving their owner's property and wandering onto adjoining or even distant properties. It is probably true to say that the World Pheasant Association headquarter receives more calls about this problem than any other peafowl related subject.

There was naturally more, but you get the picture.  If I remember correctly, Gardiner points to a major problem with the ownership of peafowl: since the male of the species is the beauty, owners tend to like a large number of peacocks.  Once one has established itself as the dominant male over such peahens as are on offer, however, the other peacocks leave in hopes of finding unclaimed females in the neighbouring countryside.  (Hence, presumably, the fondness for roaming Highland glens.)

almost everything we have done over the last two decades in the area of ICT education in British schools has been misguided and largely futile. Instead of educating children about the most revolutionary technology of their young lifetimes, we have focused on training them to use obsolescent software products. And we did this because we fell into what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle would have called a "category mistake" – an error in which things of one kind are presented as if they belonged to another. We made the mistake of thinking that learning about computing is like learning to drive a car, and since a knowledge of internal combustion technology is not essential for becoming a proficient driver, it followed that an understanding of how computers work was not important for our children. 

John Naughton in the Guardian

Naughton goes on to take issue with the claim that code is the new Latin, because Latin is a dead language.  This is somewhat misguided: the Latin (and, for that matter, Greek) literature I learned to read 40 years ago is no more obsolete than Beethoven's Ninth.  If I had started programming the year I started Latin (1971) I would not now be able to use the programming language I learned then with the same benefits it offered when I first studied it. (I am not saying it is not a good thing to learn to code, or that I don't wish I had done so earlier, only that it's rare to learn something in school that retains its value close to half a century later.)

Naughton also argues that the reason to teach programming in schools is not economic, but moral. What he means by this is that we owe it to children not to leave them in the power of computer-savvy elites. I would have thought the moral obligation was in fact much stronger than this: programming forces one to think logically.  (Some may remember the complaint of the Professor in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: What do they TEACH them in school?  Don't they teach them logic?)  It also forces one to face up many, many times to one's fallibility. (Douglas Crockford's JSLint carries the warning: Your feelings will be hurt.)  Many of the problems I have faced with the publishing industry over the last 16 years could easily have been avoided if people who were "passionate about books" had the kind of logical training, the attention to detail, the awareness of possible errors, that programming provides. 

Anyway, very glad to see this new initiative.  (As a number of journalists have commented, IT in British schools has dwindled to getting schoolchildren up to speed on Word. Jesus wept.)

A few years ago, a colleague in another university published a huge book, based on a vast amount of archival research, meticulously documented, beautifully written and offering a new and formidably argued reinterpretation of a major historical event. I remarked to a friend in that university that this great work would certainly help their prospects in the RAE. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘We can’t enter him. He needs four items and that book is all he’s got.’ ...

I contrast this with my own experience in the old, supposedly unregenerate days. The college where I became a tutor in 1957 had only 19 academic fellows. Of these, two did no research at all and their teaching was languid in the extreme. That was the price the rest of us paid for our freedom and in my view it was a price worth paying. For the other fellows were exceptionally active, impelled, not by external bribes and threats, but by their own intellectual ambition and love of their subject. In due course three became fellows of the Royal Society and seven of the British Academy. They worked at their own pace and some of them would have fared badly in the RAE, for they conformed to no deadlines and released their work only when it was ready. I became a tutor at the age of 24, but I did not publish a book until I was 38. These days, I would have been compelled to drop my larger project and concentrate on an unambitious monograph, or else face ostracism and even expulsion.

Sir Keith Thomas in the LRB, the rest here.

Beyond the warped ingenuity of these Heath Robinson schemes to force ‘free’ competition to happen in closely controlled circumstances, such interest as the White Paper possesses may lie chiefly in its providing a handy compendium of current officialese, a sottisier of econobabble. One of the most revealing features of its prose is the way the tense that might be called the mission-statement present is used to disguise implausible non sequiturs as universally acknowledged general truths. Here is one mantra, repeated in similar terms at several points: ‘Putting financial power into the hands of learners makes student choice meaningful.’ Part of the brilliance of the semantic reversals at the heart of such Newspeak lies in the simple transposition of negative to positive. After all, ‘putting financial power into the hands of learners’ means ‘making them pay for something they used to get as of right’. So forcing you to pay for something enhances your power. And then the empty, relationship-counselling cadence of the assertion that this ‘makes student choice meaningful’. Translation: ‘If you choose something because you care about it and hope it will extend your human capacities it will have no significance for you, but if you are paying for it then you will scratch people’s eyes out to get what you’re entitled to.’ No paying, no meaning. After all, why else would anyone do anything?

...

Not that practical things are unimportant or students’ views irrelevant or future employment an unworthy consideration: suggesting that critics of the proposals despise such things, as David Willetts did when discussing my LRB piece on the Browne Report (4 November 2010) in a speech at the British Academy, is just a way of setting up easily knocked-down straw opponents. It is, rather, that the model of the student as consumer is inimical to the purposes of education. The paradox of real learning is that you don’t get what you ‘want’ – and you certainly can’t buy it. The really vital aspects of the experience of studying something (a condition very different from ‘the student experience’) are bafflement and effort. Hacking your way through the jungle of unintelligibility to a few small clearings of partial intelligibility is a demanding and not always enjoyable process. It isn’t much like wallowing in fluffy towels. And it helps if you trust your guides rather than assuming they will skimp on the job unless they’re kept up to the mark by constant monitoring of their performance indicators.

Stefan Collini in the LRB, the rest here.

(I was reminded of the fact that there are people who honestly believe that if a speaker of British English had a moment of extreme emotion such as fear or anger, the affected British manner of speech would drop away and they would cry out in American English.) 

...

But back to the evolution of language. Caesar makes only one other intelligible spoken utterance in the film. It is a full clause, well enunciated, right at the end. Naturally students of the evolution of syntax will want to know the structure. It is what The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL) calls a complex-intransitive canonical clause, with copular be as its main verb.

Geoffrey Pullum of Language Log on Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the whole thing here.

1986 was not the year I discovered Roland Barthes. That had been at least a year earlier, and (allowing for the tricks of memory) possibly two. I’d come to Barthes in the pages of the British music and style press. There was a brief period in the 1980s – anybody now in their forties who was paying attention will treasure or regret the phase – when the New Musical Express, The Face and Blitz were filled with references, gauchely but passionately deployed, to modish French critics and philosophers whose works, at least in that milieu, had not yet acquired the academic label of Theory. In fact, there appeared to be a seamless continuum between the smart journalistic references from the 1970s – Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and the jittery eloquence then possessed by Clive James – and the new (though they were not really new) continental thinkers: Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard.

 ...

But it was not so much the thought that seduced me, or the profusion of new names (Artaud, Lévi-Strauss, Kristeva), as Barthes’s style, which seemed to reside mainly in his punctuation. Barthes, I’d later learn, has been well served by his English translators (notably, the poet Richard Howard), and they have tended to retain the hedging of parentheses, the sidelong views calmly opened and closed by em-dashes, the colons like stiles that invite one to clamber on over the thought, sometimes two or three in the same sentence. Rapt in this style, I was still not sure I knew what he was doing: I know now that I really didn’t know: but I had found (as Barthes liked to put it) my critic, my thinker, my writer.

Ruins of the 20th Century

A commenter has pointed out that it is no longer possible to ride around and around and around on the Circle Line. Since 2009 (always the last to know), the line has been reconfigured: trains now go in a clockwise direction to Hammersmith, then loop back counterclockwise.

 

Paul Waugh tells the full story here.

When the Protection from Harassment Act was being debated, campaigners warned that a bill whose ostensible purpose was to protect women from stalkers was so loosely drafted that it could be used by the police however they wished. The warnings were ignored, and the first three people arrested under the act were not stalkers but peaceful protesters. The police used the law, among many such instances, against protesters outside the US intelligence base at Menwith Hill, who were deemed to have harassed American servicemen by holding up a placard reading "George W Bush? Oh dear!"; and against a protester in Hull, on the grounds that he had been "staring at a building". Notoriously, the act was used to obtain an injunction against villagers in Oxfordshire, protesting against a plan by RWE npower to turn their beautiful lake into a fly ash dump. If they went anywhere near the lake, they would be prosecuted for harassing the burly men guarding the site.

George Monbiot at the Guardian

A town has emptied its library in a bid to fight plans to close it down.

People in Stony Stratford, near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, have spent the week withdrawing their maximum allowance of books in protest against council plans to close it as part of budget cuts.

And today they said the plan had been a success, with all 16,000 books withdrawn from the library.

Today, as they celebrated the empty shelves, Emily Malleson from Friends of Stony Stratford Library (FOSSL) said they were amazed at how everyone in the town had pulled together.

She said it was calculated that books were being checked out at a rate of around 378 per hour - smashing the usual rates. (the rest here)

[ achieved partly through an enterprising Facebook campaign]

Via MR, video of British town that turned its traffic lights off:

The judge, who said Jacques had no mitigation, told him: "You are a Cambridge graduate and should know better, I suppose.

Book thief brought to book, Guardian

“There are two schools of thought as to why the Germans love board games,” says Martin Wallace of Warfrog. “The Germans are of the opinion that it’s down to their superior education system. We English are of the opinion that it’s because German TV is shite.”

Tim Harford on German board games, FT

They say that if you love something you should set it free. And if it returns it’ll be yours forever.

I’m starting to find that this may actually be true.

If by ‘love’ they mean ‘are quite used to having around’. And if by ‘quite used to having around’ they mean ‘is a District Council-mandated necessity’.

And if by ‘set it free’ they actually mean ‘wonder where the fuck it’s gone.’

The wheelie-bin for my recycling went missing didn’t it.

Tired Dad (who would never have been whipped through the BC revolving door because he would never have got a foot in the door in the first place, O Britain Britain Britain)

New Labour’s policy on celebrity sheen - populism without popularity - was part-and-parcel of a well-documented world of spin, shady unelected advisers, myriad consultants and a pernicious hyper-real feeling that politics was all about being seen to do something, but not actually doing it. Whether we think that New Labour was a continuation of the Thatcher project, or, alternatively, that the Cameron-Clegg axis is a continuation of the New Labour project is perhaps less important than the fact that this unpopular populism is still guiding policy. Alongside the interminable restructuring of public services, particularly education and health, we have flashy, gimmicky one-liner celebrity interventions whose supposedly popular appeal is, at the end of the day, profoundly mysterious, if all pervasive.

...

The recent announcement that Niall Ferguson has been invited to ‘revitalise the curriculum’ for history is very depressing but entirely in keeping with this tendency. Ferguson proposes to introduce a ‘world war two-based video game designed for use as a classroom aid’, but promises he’ll avoid Eurocentrism by claiming that he is also interested in ‘the stagnation of China, the underachievement of Mughal India, and why the Ottoman empire – despite its good mathematics and good-ish astronomy – ultimately failed. It just failed to be part of the scientific revolution.’ May I not-very-controversially suggest that avoiding Eurocentrism isn’t best served by misrepresenting the supposed ‘underachievements’ of other parts of the world. ...

Infinite Thought

British rendition of British citizens, Ian Cobain and Owen Boycott at the Guardian

Andrew Gelman has a post in which he links to an old post of mine on Seth Godin. Andrew took me to endorse the position of Seth Godin. (Divided by a common language, Bill, divided by a common language.)

I went back to look at my old post. What I said was that Seth Godin had a fresh perspective.

Um.

Andrew.

Um.

Oh Lord.

When I say that Seth Godin has a fresh perspective on an issue, what I mean is something like, Seth Godin is a monster raving loony who has boldly gone where no man has gone before; you and I, not being paid-up members of the Monster Raving Loony Party, had never in our wildest dreams imagined that anyone could put this forward as a serious position, we can now feel that we are not alone in the world because standing shoulder to shoulder in gobsmacked amazement.

Yes. All this conveyed in the simple phrase 'fresh perspective'.

Britain. Britain. Britain. You have destroyed my career, Britain, but I am unable not to love you.

When things went wrong with BC I told SMcD I thought I'd spent too long in Britain.

Tired Dad is the kind of thing I LIKED about Britain.

Spend enough time in the country, you can consign 10 emails a day to the drafts folder before hitting send and still feel like Edward Scissorhands.

Here's Tired Dad on a man of the cloth who sets up a brothel.

• Patients are less likely to die in the bigger, busier hospital units where surgical teams are more skilled because they do more of the operations. The results strongly suggest that smaller units should close. This presents a major challenge to the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, who has stopped all hospital reorganisation.

...

Some leading surgeons believe that for best results, a hospital needs to carry out at least 50 AAA operations a year. Yet very many hospitals across the UK see less than 20 cases a year. Dartford and Gravesham had just five in three years, Mid-Staffordshire had nine and Scarborough had 14. Of the 116 hospitals that gave the Guardian data, 35 did fewer than 20 operations a year and 76 did fewer than 50.

Guardian on disparity in NHS death rates