The other night I went out with a group of people to a private dinner club hidden away at the top of a residential building in Garden City, a middle-class area of Cairo where many foreign embassies are (with, not surprisingly, a very heavy security detail). A Sudanese waiter welcomed us into the vast, sumptuously appointed flat. It used to belong to Hoda Shaarawi, an Egyptian feminist leader, born in 1879, who wrote poetry in Arabic and French, and was the first Egyptian woman to remove her veil in public, in 1923.
An oud player was performing in one room, while corny pop tunes – ‘Feelings’, ‘Blue Moon’ – blared from the stereo in another. We sat down, and were greeted by another Sudanese waiter. Was every waiter at the club Sudanese? ‘They are Darfuris,’ my host said, a homage, he explained, to old world colonial aesthetics (and hierarchy). Our waiter wore a name tag: R. Reagan. And indeed the name of this man, born in Sudan in 1983, was Ronald Reagan.
When the Toronto Star announced it would be outsourcing 100 editorial jobs, someone sent a copy of the publisher’s letter to Torontoist.com, marked up in red ink with dozens of corrections. Point made. (Click on the image to see the whole thing.)
The postal strike is off. You don’t need me to tell you that. What you may not know is how this has affected us posties.
I first heard the rumours in the office on Thursday when I got back from my round. The union rep said: ‘You’d better watch the news.’ I’m sure I wasn’t the only postie glued to his TV that afternoon, waiting for clarification. It seemed a strange way of finding out whether or not you were going into work in the morning, waiting for a BBC newscaster to inform you.
The atmosphere at work on Friday was slightly odd, slightly out of kilter. Someone had turned the volume up. Everyone was a tad more animated than usual, a fraction louder, a notch more bellicose. But after that – well you get on with things, don’t you. There’s a job to do. By Saturday everything was quieting down, and by Monday it was as if the strike had never happened at all. We were all just standing around, sorting the mail, wondering what, exactly, we had gained. More »
In a ghastly vision of future desolation, Lord Byron foresees the contemporary American novelist’s dust-jacket photo:
… and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenchéd hands, and smiled
‘Darkness’, lines 25-26
During his trip to Asia this month, Barack Obama is visiting China, Japan, Singapore and South Korea. All four are critical to US policy in the region – three Northeast Asian economic powerhouses and Singapore, which has the closest relationship toWashington of any country in Southeast Asia. And yet Obama is skipping the largest nation in Southeast Asia, Indonesia.
That’s a mistake. More »
At the Basingstoke Odeon the other night, in an almost empty cinema, I counted six advertisements for different kinds of booze (two brands of vodka, one sweet liqueur, one bourbon and two beers, as the John Lee Hooker song doesn’t quite go), three or four car ads, a couple for violent computer games and one recruiting for the Royal Marines. I resisted the urge to go on a binge, get behind the wheel and fantasise about killing. The army recruitment spot came immediately after one of the computer games; they weren’t easy to tell apart. But the slogan for the second game was a sly corrective: ‘As close to war as you’ll ever want to get.’
The movie that followed, Jennifer’s Body, has been a massive flop. This is largely because the target audience, as the ads at the Odeon would seem to bear out, has been teenage boys and young men. But if the marketing team at Twentieth Century Fox had been able to see through the horror clichés that the film plays around with, they might have realised that a story about the disintegration of a friendship between two teenage girls isn’t, unfortunately, the kind of thing that teenage boys usually go for.
Charles Haddon-Cave’s Nimrod Review: An Independent Review into the Broader Issues Surrounding the Loss of the RAF Nimrod MR2 Aircraft XV230 in Afghanistan in 2006 was laid before Parliament and published by the Stationery Office on 28 October. Two days later it was out of print. The Review was not a Public Inquiry with statutory powers. It sat in Ministry of Defence premises. Some staff were seconded from the ministry. But its conclusions, and its naming of the incompetent, leave no doubts about its independence. More »
From ‘Slate’, 9 February 1999:
Last week I went to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s 90th birthday party at the Collège de France. It seemed an unremarkable occasion at first. Though the courtyard of the Collège de France is fittingly grand for the republic’s premiere scholarly institution, the rooms inside are meanly proportioned and shabby. The three dozen or so academics in attendance looked dreary and moth-eaten the way academics do. There was a sprinkling of journalists, but no cameras or microphones. Fortified by a couple of glasses of indifferent burgundy, I obtained an introduction to Lévi-Strauss, who rose with difficulty from his chair and shook my hand tremulously. The conversation went poorly, owing both to my shaky French and to my lack of conviction that the nonagenarian I was talking to could actually be Claude Lévi-Strauss. More »
Let me say immediately that I don’t doubt that Planet Earth is on its way out. I couldn’t be more gloomy about its future. I’m also not much of a fan of Clive James, in fact I was involved in an angry lunchtime argument with him on the subject of Iraq and what he called ‘the triumph of Democracy’ the last time I saw him, some years ago.
I am, on the other hand, constantly interested in how I can know whether what I read and hear is reliable. I couldn’t for example put my hand on my heart and say that my belief that climate change is irreversible is based on anything very much more substantial than a tendency to trust in the green and the left, and the fact that I know from history and experience that human beings are inclined to do what they want to do until they use up the ability to do it. I’m certainly not equipped to verify the scientific arguments for or against climate change. I can’t do the maths. More »
In a villanelle mood, Colm Tóibín started the following poem. The immediate context was a remark by a colleague that our students (and indeed most of our colleagues) don’t seem to get excited about theory the way they used to. The title and first stanza are Colm’s, and therefore so are the rhymes. You can tell from the word ‘skid’ that I’m running out of options.
A Structuralist Lament
They don’t thrill at the sign as we once did.
They see Saussure as one more dead white male
Trapped between the ego and the id.
The Elementary Structures all are hid,
No Lévi-Strauss is heard to tell the tale:
They don’t thrill at the sign as we once did.
Semiotics had its day but flipped its lid,
Got lost inside the advertising whale,
Or trapped between the ego and the id.
Alas, poor Barthes, who cares for Ess and Zed?
When every morpheme’s up for sale
They don’t thrill at the sign as we once did.
And as for ‘Theory’ writ large, heaven forbid,
There’s nothing left but cakes and ale
Trapped between the ego and the id.
Myth and symbol slide and skid,
It’s lost for good, the fine old trail.
They don’t thrill at the sign as we once did,
Trapped as we were between the ego and the id.
