TLS

The Murdoch headquarters in London

This by way of follow up of the advertisement of purchase of a TLS at reference 1.

Overall, very disappointing. Apart from the irritating change of format, very little to interest me. 

The change of format looks to me to be an effort to be more popular in appearance. To be more like the Times and the rest of the gang in the Murdoch portfolio. That is to say, as far as I can make out, the TLS has always been and remains part of the the Times group, unlike, for example, the TES which Wikipedia says was sold off at some point. The TLS itself is rather coy about ownership, but one of the contact addresses given on their website is the News UK (reference 4) headquarters in London Bridge Street snapped above. So perhaps the only road goes downhill.

One small item of interest was in a letter, from which I learn that Beethoven's Kreuzter Sonata was originally dedicated to one George Bridgetower, probably of mixed Bajan (that is to say, a person from Barbados) and German parentage. A child prodigy who as an adult could actually play the difficult violin part of this sonata, but who fell out with Beethoven and lost the dedication. As usual, Wikipedia in on the case at reference 5.

A larger item of interest was a piece by Mary Beard, of whom I usually disapprove on the grounds that she is far too fond of being on television for an academic, about the book by Fergus Millar noticed at reference 6. Her complaint seems to be that the focus of the book on the bureaucratic side of a Roman's emperors's life is far too narrow. Furthermore, Millar was mistaken in deliberately refusing to look at other work on modern dictatorships or that on any of the many other examples of one man rule from around the world.

She may be right, but as it happens I was recently prompted by something, I forget what, to buy the DVD of the 1960 Taylor-Burton film 'Cleopatra', on which the IMDB take is to be found at reference 7. Very long at five or six hours - no idea how this was managed in a cinema - but we managed in three or four sittings. And not as bad as some of the snooty reviews we came across would have one believe. And it was all the better for being made in the relatively coy early 1960's, so no need for lashings of unnecessary sex and violence. The four stars - Harrison, Taylor, Burton and McDowall all knew their stuff, at least most of the time.

The present relevance being that Julius Caesar is often portrayed as the good guy while Augustus is often portrayed as the bad guy, very unattractive by comparison. But this was not how it seemed to the people of the time: Caesar was an arrogant showman who wanted to be king, while Augustus knew how to get along with people. How to pretend to be a servant of Senate and people, of the res publica, while actually being a hereditary, absolute monarch. And he reigned for a long time, even managing to die in his bed, a trick not always managed, be one ever so absolute.

There is an interesting piece at the end of the Millar book, 'From Pompey to Constantine', about this very matter. About how the Latins of Rome were oddly out of step with most of the rest of the Roman world, mostly Greek flavoured, where kings were normal and respected.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/07/an-italian-flavoured-sunday.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/search?q=tls.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/05/lost.html. Hitherto, the blog search button top left has been very reliable, producing, for example, posts which meet the search criteria more or less immediately after they have been posted. But this morning, I fail to work out why this item appears in the search at reference 2 above. No TLS that I can find.

Reference 4: https://www.news.co.uk/.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bridgetower.

Reference 6: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/08/reprieved.html.

Reference 7: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056937/.

TLS

Happening to be in Waitrose this morning to buy some kippers, I fell for a TLS, for once in a while.

Where I read of an article in the New York Times Style Magazine - perhaps their version of one of our trashy colour supplements - about James Baldwin. It starts off  reasonably enough: ''Giovanni’s Room' Revisited. James Baldwin’s 1956 novel is a layered exploration of queer desire - and of the writer’s own sense of self'. Then the picture included left, then the caption: 'Left: The Row T-shirt, $250, (212) 755-2017. A.P.C. jeans, $220, apc-us.com. Right: Hermès shirt, $960, hermes.com. Dior Men pants, price on request, (800) 929-3467. Photo by John Edmonds. Styled by Carlos Nazario'. What?

Compounded by the fact the snap, one of a series of arty compositions accompanying the article, is of a black man with a white man - while the novel in question was about two white men. Guessing, colour was not what the book was about.

While on the back page I learn from the people at reference 2 that I could probably buy a copy of 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone', from the first printing of the first edition, for something of the order of £25,000. Does such a first printing only come in 100 copies, a speculation on eventual fame and fortune? In any event, if Forum Auctions have got it right, some people have a lot more money than sense.

Trivia apart, this number of the TLS does look to contain a fair bit to interest me. Worth its £3.95 on this occasion.

Reference 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/t-magazine/james-baldwin-giovannis-room.html.

Reference 2: https://www.forumauctions.co.uk/.

NYRB

Having decided at reference 1 that the TLS and the 'Sun' are owned by the same people, I thought it only fair to take a look at the NYRB which averages more articles of interest to me and which has, as a result, more or less displaced the TLS. Now just bought from time to time in the margins of buying kippers (or whatever) at Waitrose.

Asking Bing about the ownership of the NYRB only turns up something called NYREV Incorporated, about which I can find nothing.

Eventually, I think to try Wikipedia which tells me that the NYRB is not much more than fifty years old and is proud to be an independent. Well almost, as in 1984 the title was bought by one Rea Hederman, who does indeed appear at reference 3. He kept the founding editors on so perhaps it was a friendly, rather than an unfriendly takeover. And I have learned that 'masthead' is what you call where you list the staff of a newspaper in the US. Hederman also appears at reference 2, from which I learn that in the early 1980's, he was sacked from his family's Mississippi chain of newspapers for having dragged their leading title, the Clarion-Ledger out of a dark and racist past - which we are told included covering 'Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington with a front-page headline that read: Washington is Clean Again With Negro Trash Removed'. He bought the NYRB, along with some other members of his family, in 1984, as noted above. We might deduce that breeding bad, motives good. And anyway, maybe he is more or less a sleeping partner in the business.

I can't find out much more about the Clarion-Ledger, beyond that it is now owned by the people at reference 5. And when you try to go to its website you get redirected to reference 4, which doesn't look much like a newspaper web site at all. Puzzled of Epsom.

But the good news is that the NYRB is probably about as independent as you are going to get.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/07/tls.html.

Reference 2: https://globaljournalist.org/2016/01/fired-by-family-hederman-makes-new-york-review-second-act/. '

Reference 3: https://www.nybooks.com/about/masthead/.

Reference 4: https://eu.clarionledger.com/.

Reference 5: https://www.gannett.com/.

Reference 6: https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/hederman-family/. Another take on the story at reference 2.

Herodotus

I read somewhere recently, possibly in the TLS, about a splendid spoof of Herodotus taking the form of the ancient savant reporting on a visit to London Zoo. So off to Amazon to buy same, to find that it was available for a modest price from India. The spoof has now turned up, but it turns out also to take the form of the winning entry for the 1907 Gaisford Prize for Greek Prose, written by one John Beazley, sometime scholar of Balliol College, Oxford. The same Beazley whose main claim to fame is his description and classification of Greek pots. He also gave his name to the Beazley Archive at the Classical Art Research Centre, also Oxford. See references 1 and 2. But, sadly, a curiosity from which I will be able to extract little further value. Some snaps of the reprint follow.

Front cover

Back cover

Title page

First page

Another page

Notice that the spoof extends to side notes in German. Perhaps part of the fun was poking fun at scholars across the water; scholars whom I believe fancied themselves as Grecians. And a few years after this spoof came out, built the Pergamon Museum in Berlin to prove it.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Beazley.

Reference 2: https://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/archive/history.htm.

New Testament studies

In my innocence, I had thought that while the Old Testament was all a bit murky and of uncertain provenance, with the New Testament we were on much firmer ground, despite the outlandish things that we are invited to sign up to.

But in the course of a review of reference 1 in this week's number of the TLS, I learn that Paul himself only wrote about half the epistles ascribed to him: in approximate order of writing: 1 Thessalonians, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Romans, Philippians and Philemon. Readers who know which of these are places and where they are (or were) get a bonus point.

The good news is that St. Paul seems to be real enough. Indeed, I recall reading a book by one Hyam Maccoby in which it was alleged that he was responsible for most of what is wrong with Christianity. See reference 2.

With thanks to Wikipedia for the snap.

Reference 1: A history of the Bible: the book and its faiths - John Barton - 2019.

Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=hyam+maccaby. Spelling of Maccoby a bit shaky.

Volume LXVII, Number 13

That is to say the latest number of the NYRB, the people at reference 1, which despite the inevitable tilt towards matters north American, still represents better value for me than either of our offerings - the LRB or the TLS, both of which I have subscribed to at various times over the years.

So I was reminded that climate change ought to be higher up our agendas than it is. The outlook is not good.

I glanced at a piece about a Raphael exhibition in Rome, coming to an end at the end of this month, in which I was interested to read that the picture 'La Fornarina', normally to be found at reference 2 and from whom I have lifted the reproduction above, was not by the man himself, rather something knocked out in his workshop to feed the demand for such stuff from the nominally celibate churchmen who dominated the Rome of his day.

Almost as bad as climate change was an article about the US obsession with having ten times as many nukes as anyone else. So at the time of the Cuban crisis, the US had 5,000 warheads to the Soviets 300, but they still worked themselves into a lather about a few missiles arriving in Cuba. And while their stockpile was, some decades later, massively reduced as a result of a deal with the Russians, things are on the up again, with a massive and massively expensive upgrade underway, in part because Trump loves a good nuke. Maybe he really loves having that special suitcase with the codes following him about, night and day. Gets off on it, as it were. And not only does the US like to have lots of warheads, it also believes in having no less than three delivery systems: land based missiles in silos, air launched bombs and submarine launched missiles. With the first of these being very vulnerable to attack, so they are apt to be used sooner in a crisis rather than later. 

While I believe the Russians are also keen on mobile launchers, forever trundling around the Asiatic wastes. Also that the Chinese, although lagging well behind the Russians in numbers just presently, can much better afford an arms race than the Russians, only a tier II economic power these days. They might even end up winning it. And given the present unpredictability of US personnel, pronouncements, policy and action, would it be any surprise if they thought that joining in was a good plan? Could one really blame them?

More dismal reading about the world of hackers, disinformation and lies.

Some better news about the new Supreme Court Justices appointed (for life) by Trump signalling that they are jurists first and poodles second.

Winding up with some entertainment around one Eva Meijer, a hard-core animal rightist who seems to harbour hopes of founding a commune involving lobsters, pikas and humans. Equal rights for all. For the link to Everest see reference 4. While the good Eva is to be found at reference 4 and her big book at reference 5.

Reference 1: https://www.nybooks.com/.

Reference 2: https://www.barberinicorsini.org/.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/01/more-burton.html.

Reference 4: https://www.evameijer.nl/.

Reference 5: When animals speak: towards an interspecies democracy - Eva Meijer - 2019.

A better number

I moan sometimes about the lack of content of interest to me in magazines like the TLS and the NYRB. So today I am pleased to be able to report that about half the latest number of the NYRB - Vol.LXV, No.19 - was of interest, although, not to the point of prompting me to buy any more books. From the top.

A book about how Trump is clearing the swamp by simply not appointing the senior officials who run all kinds of important government services. The old Tory trick of starving public services of staff and money, then announcing that those services are rubbish - which they might well have become, despite the best efforts of the surviving staff - and abolishing them in favour of private contractors. Not to say gangmasters.

A clutch of books about the plight of refugees, of which the world presently has a very large number. But a review which, beyond attempting to jerk our tears, offers nothing by way of a way forward. No suggestions about how to persuade President Putin to deploy some of his vast resources of space to provide homes for these people. No recognition of the limited capacity to absorb broken people of the rich but crowded countries of western Europe. No recognition that some of these problems are self inflicted, the results of civil wars and turmoil. But there is some recognition of the front line roles of Turkey and Greece and there is a reminder that we need to learn, with much bigger waves of refugees being set to follow in the wake of global warming. With this last problem, in large part, inflicted by developed countries on developing countries.

A book about how Brazil got to where it is now, in the charge of an ex-army captain with strong views on all kinds of things. One is reminded the presidents of both the Philippines and the USA. While I was reminded that a lot more slaves went from West Africa to Brazil than went to the USA, perhaps four or five times as many, and that Brazil is now very mixed race indeed. With Wikipedia suggesting that it is a lot more mixed and a lot more complicated that this article would suggest. See reference 1.

I was also prompted to find out that Brazil has perhaps three times the population of the UK, but thirty times the space.

A beacon of hope! The Supreme Court of the US might have fallen into the clutches of the hard Republican right, but other people still have access to the constitutions and the Supreme Courts of the 51 constituent states - where it might still be possible to make progress.

For a lefty, a particularly depressing article about the prison camps of Siberia in the time of Stalin. Atrocities which went on for a long time and which killed millions of people. A book, with a lot of pages to the dollar, which appears to be a long hand version of the short hand 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich', a justly famous book which appeared during my childhood.

A clutch of books about opium in the US, where use has increased massively in recent years. I share two snippets. One, there was a company called Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, which made a fortune out of misselling an opioid called OxyContin. Second, unlike tobacco and alcohol, more or less freely for sale, we really need opium. Without opium, the deaths of millions of people, most of them with cancer, would be hugely more unpleasant than they are already. No easy answers here - beyond what ought to be obvious, that criminalisation has not worked. For previous notice, see the post for New Year's Eve, 2016, at reference 2. There is also reference 4.

And lastly an article about India which was not disguised as a book review, although a couple of books do get footnotes. An article about the way that people whom we would regard as extreme Hindus have taken over the government of India and who, inter alia, are busily rewriting school history books to put a thick Hindu gloss on what should be a complicated, mixed race and mixed religion story. There might be a lot of main stream Hindus in India, but there are also 200 million people who are not, mostly Moslems, but plenty of Christians too. 200 million who are not sleeping so easy in their beds. The decent, secular traditions of Nehru and his kind seem to have been dumped. By no means the first article of this sort which I have read. See, for example, reference 3.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardo_Brazilians.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/12/somewhat-depressing.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/04/burning-books.html.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Sackler. Following in the tradition of the very rich Americans who went before, the Sacklers launder a good chunk of their gains through genuinely charitable foundations.

An Italian flavoured Sunday

Lasagne was planned, so on Saturday down to town to see what Waitrose had to offer.

First stop, Grape Tree, to find that the figs from Demos (of reference 1) have gone missing and I settled for some wet figs, at about the same price on a three for two offer. Tasted OK in small quantities, but an odd aftertaste after a while. Maybe it was the preservative which had been added during the rehydration process - the very small print explaining that wet figs are made by wetting dry figs. Need to find another source for dry figs.

Second stop, Waitrose, to find that cherries only came in very small boxes at £2 a box, with the shelves for cherries not being the only ones which were a bit bare, this being late afternoon. Had three of them. Large, very dark and a little overripe to my taste - I was even moved to put them in the refrigerator overnight, not something I usually both with with fruit and vegetables. But OK, and all done by close Sunday.

To find also that the TLS has changed its format. Possibly some months ago. as I don't buy it very often these days. First impressions not good, but further report will follow in due course.

On the table

In the shed

A bottle of  2015 Barolo to go with the lasagne. From Terre del Barolo of reference 2, of Castiglione Falleto, a small place maybe 30 miles south of Turin, as much to the east of the fag end of the alps. Possibly part of some kind of cooperative, in any event a thriving operation if Street View is anything to go by, with a large new shed under construction to the right of the one shown here. I was amused to see bottom left that they do musical evenings, just like a stately home or a vineyard over here. Think Denbies of reference 3.

The lasagne went down very well, possibly finishing it in one sitting. The first sip of Barolo was a little bitter, but after that it went down very well. This may have been my restaurant wine tasting problem - which means this is a task which I delegate - or it may have been due to my having had a spot of sauvignon blanc by way of apéritif. But all's well that ends well.

I even won at Scrabble.

PS 1: the last bottle of Barolo, from Waitrose but a different brand, was taken some months ago, at the end of last September. It went down well too, on that occasional with a traditional English dish. But it did still involve mince plus carbohydrate. Noticed at reference 4.

PS 2: both the vineyards referenced below have chosen to have swathes of mist featured on their home page. Perhaps the wine marketing people know something I don't.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/07/warf-day.html.

Reference 2: https://terredelbarolo.com/.

Reference 3: https://www.denbies.co.uk/.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/09/shin.html.

Will I ever learn?

Once again, just about two months after the last occasion, on more or less the same errand, I fell yesterday for 40 pages of TLS for £3.50.

Instead of a monster edition of everything that Evelyn Waugh ever wrote, we have three books totalling around 1,750 pages about the life and times of Oscar Wilde. Not greatly encouraged by the performance noticed at reference 2. Fast forward.

Ten pages of books of the year by literary and other celebrities. About three column inches each. Fast forward.

Fast forward to page 26 to an article written around a couple more books about depression and the efforts of big pharma to cure it, or as some cynics would say, to make a lot of  money from it. A not very flattering mention of the Cipriani noticed at reference 3 - but without serious dissent from his cautious conclusion: the drugs do seem to be better than doing nothing. So not doing the drugs - is not a good plan. But remember to take care to get one that suits; this is not a one-size fits all world. Read the article but pass on the books.

Fast forward over the article about happiness, to land on a depressing article about Gaza. A place with about the same area as the Isle of Wight but with 15 times the population, that is to say around two million. The heirs to all those who fled or were ejected from what is now southern Israel at the time of the 1948 war. A mess which is now 70 years old, looking to be getting worse rather than better, with no end in sight. Depressing both for the misery it represents and our collective failure to sort it out.

Fast forward to find an unusual, Turkish flavoured take on the Arab Revolt and Palestine, reprinted from 1938, just before the end of the 40 pages. Ostensibly a review of a book called 'The Arab Awakening' by George Antonius. Available from Abebooks for around £15 including postage, if you don't mind waiting for it to come from the US.

And that was about it. Now taking bets on how many months it will be before I next give it a go.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/literary-stuff.html. The last fall.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/01/wilde-two.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/04/belgravia.html. No follow up post in the event, having failed to get sufficiently to grips with the two papers concerned.

A parable

Prompted by something or other I read, probably in the TLS or somewhere like that, I have been reading ‘Awakenings’ (reference 1), a big book in its time which was made into a big film. A book about Sacks’ use of a drug called L-dopa in the late 1960’s on a group of patients in a long-stay institution, mostly suffering from the long term effects of a bout of a now obscure disease called encephalitis lethargica (introduced at reference 2) – not that it was obscure at the time, that is to say following right on from the flu pandemic which started at the end of the first world war.

Towards the end, in the chapter called ‘Tribulations’, writing about the rather chaotic, bipolar consequences of taking this otherwise splendid drug, he made the striking observation that you cannot expect to control a complicated illness with one dimensional variation of a single drug. Cranking the dosage of a single wonder drug up and down, however carefully, cannot be expected to do everything. Which observation gave rise to the parable that follows.

The snap is taken from the Ordnance Survey map of a mountain – Beinn luthan Mhòr – to the north east of Blair Atholl, in the middle of the Scottish Highlands, a little to the east of where the River Tilt makes its turn to the west, and it is intended to represent a projection onto two dimensions of the state space of one of these patients.

The idea is that the more or less healthy bit of the patient’s world is represented by the more or less level space at the top of the mountain, here outlined in blue. What is left of the brain can more or less cope with the patient wobbling about inside this space, with some such wobbling suggested by the dotted black line. The normal ups and downs of daily life. But the wobbling can sometimes get too much for this brain and the patient tips off down one of the flanking slopes, down into the depths, perhaps of florid sexuality, despair or terror. From which extrication, that is to say rescue, can be difficult.

We suppose that we have four drugs working in this space: green, red, blue and brown, each pushing the patient in some direction or other. By controlling the dose one can control the speed of travel, but what one cannot do is change the direction of travel. So depending on the shape of the region of health, the patient’s state is more or less fragile. If, for example, one is in a thin bit of the region of health running north and south, and the drug of choice works east and west, things are going to be a bit tricky. I think that meta stable might be a bit of jargon which crops up in this context.

Another of Sacks’ points is that long term disease can do real damage to the brain, not easily repaired, damage which in my parable would be represented by the region of health shrinking, becoming smaller, perhaps more stretched out and fiddly, like one of those gerrymandered congressional districts in the USA. A region of health from which it is all too easy to fall – or to be pushed. With it not taking much of a push: perhaps a cross word from a fellow patient or a carer. Or not having the right sort of cake for tea. Or running out of cigarettes.

While the region of health of a healthy person is an extensive, sun-lit, upland plateau, with all the dangerous slopes a good way away. A person who has a sunny, relaxed life in consequence.

To deal with the rest of us, one needs a battery of wonder drugs, with each one covering one of the cardinal directions, and blood tests every hour, on the hour. Brain scans on Sunday mornings. Something which will perhaps be accomplished by an intelligent arm band by the time that I enter the field. I certainly hope so!

References

Reference 1: Awakenings - Oliver Sacks – 1973. Picador edition of 2012.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalitis_lethargica. With reference 1 above being reference 6 herein.

Hearthlands of Belfast

The young Marianne Elliott with her uncle Charlie Lambert.

Just finished reading this memoir of a post-war reconstruction housing estate in north Belfast (reference 1). I had forgotten what prompted this reading, but having visited both NYRB and TLS, I ran the prompt down to an article by the same author in the Financial Times (reference 6). Belfast being a place I have visited quite often over the years since the early 1980’s, far more frequently than Dublin in the south.

Near 200 pages of text, a couple of batches of photographs, of both places and people, and 50 pages of notes, index etc. No proper maps, which was a pity as Ordnance Survey took some getting to grips with.

Oddly moving, despite being a rather odd book. A tale of largely decent people engulfed in sectarian hangovers from the past. It would be interesting to read of similar people in, say, Manchester and Glasgow, where the religious divide between the big football clubs used to be prominent, even to someone like me with no religion and no interest in football.

It seems that the slums of Belfast were pretty bad before the second war, even by the not very high standards of the mainland at that time. Also that they were badly knocked about by bombing during the war, leaving Belfast with a very serious housing problem at the end of that war, not long before the present author was born in 1948.

Some of this seems to have because of awkward governance, with Belfast City being a large part of Northern Ireland as a whole. But more seems to be the dilatory performance of the City Corporation, predominantly Unionist with very few Catholics – although this last does not seem to have been the main problem and housing was as bad for working class Protestants as it was for Catholics. The population of Greater Belfast was around 400,000 in 1950 and is around 600,000 now, perhaps a third of the total for Northern Ireland. A large city by the standards of the mainland, in there with the large cities of the north, once famous for their manufacturing. While the population of Dublin has doubled over the same period, now something more than double that of Belfast.

 

Noting in passing that the Corporation did manage a very handsome City Hall – of which the population of old was no doubt justly proud.

Noting in passing that religion was a problem for schools in Northern Ireland, with the need to have two lots of schools making provision more complicated and expensive than it might otherwise have been. And there was some of this with hospitals. Problems which the Canadians, for somewhat parallel reasons, know all about. 

White City – as it became known – white for all the limestone and quarries in the area – was an estate built in the late 1940’s, underneath Cave Hill, which dominates more or less sea level north Belfast from the imposing height of more than 350 metres, a green space which is home to the Zoo and to the once famous Floral Hall, in the triangle formed by the Serpentine, Whitewall and Antrim roads. Now somewhat blighted by the M2 running along the eastern boundary, with Northern Ireland’s answer to the spaghetti junction at the south eastern corner. To be seen in the first of the snaps above.

An estate which was built on spacious lines, with a lot more space than would be allowed now, out of flat roofed, prefabricated Orlit houses. These last in the interests of speed. At the time of building, these houses were expensive, with rents somewhat above the average. But they were hugely better than what the tenants had been living in before – probably without proper access to either baths or toilets.

An estate which was built by well-meaning people and which was successful for some years. And mixed, although such mixing has largely been swept away by the troubles and not come back, at least not to estates of this sort. This particular one was demolished and replaced in the 1990’s.

Lots of information about Orlit houses is to be found on the Internet, for example that at reference 4. Cheap prefabrication, invented by an expatriate Czech, which met a need in the aftermath of the second world war, during which so much housing had been destroyed, particularly in Scotland. But subsequently condemned for various structural defects, for condensation, cold and damp. With Elliot reminding me of the amount of water pumped out by the two Aladdin paraffin heaters which we used when first married. With the necessary paraffin still sold just up the road at Pound Lane, at the time we arrived in Epsom, thirty years ago now.

A good read, which I am glad to have stumbled upon. Maybe there will be follow-up.

Then.

 

PS: having written about domes recently (at reference 9), it turns out this morning that Floral Hall in Belfast, had a dome not unlike that of our own Bourne Hall. Once famous as a dance hall, derelict for fifty years and now, I think, being restored; for posh flats or posh weddings, I know not which. Maybe both. The snap immediately above might be how it is today.

References

Reference 1: Hearthlands: A memoir of the White City housing estate in Belfast – Marianne Elliott – 2017.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/06/i-thought-this-afternoon-that-it-was.html. The map scene.

Reference 3: A Tale of Two Nations – Conor Cruise O'Brien/NYRB – 1990. Not where I started, although Elliot gets a mention for her biography of Wolfe Tone. Looks interesting but too expensive for me, with both Abebooks and eBay wanting the same sort of money.

Reference 4: https://nonstandardhouse.com/orlit-prc-house-construction-details/. 

Reference 5: Arcadia undone The rise and fall of a Belfast estate – Patricia Craig/TLS – 2018. The source of the first of the snaps above.

Reference 6: Northern Ireland’s uneasy centenary: Drawing on decades of writing about the province, one of its leading historians warns it is still far from overcoming sectarianism – Marianne Elliott/FT – 2021.

Reference 7: Greater Belfast street map – Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland – 1983. The map scene revisited. A large double sided affair, as similarly large and awkward as our own Ordnance Survey’s leisure maps of places like Dartmoor. But no physical details, for which I have to turn to the regular maps from the same people, noticed at reference 2.

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Belfast. 

Reference 9: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/dish-domes.html. 

Another amusement

I came across this book a few weeks ago now, and it is annoying me that I cannot remember where. It does not seem to have been the NYRB, the TLS or even the Guardian. Perhaps Amazon thought it was something I should take a look at? It would not be the first time that they have made a very good guess at what I want to read next. Although I actually bought it, second hand for next to nothing, from their Canadian subsidiary Abebooks.

A children's classic from Australia, maybe a decade earlier than the superficially similar effort from A. A. Milne about a bear. Nicely reproduced by Dover, quite good at this sort of thing, at least in my experience.

As is proper with good children's books, and as with Asterix, a lot of the humour is directed at the parents. And a lot more robust than the stuff about perambulators, acorns and strolls in the woods offered by Milne. More Gilbert and Sullivan really.

Very pleased to have made its acquaintance.

PS 1: I now know that Milne was a wannabee mathematician who went to Cambridge on a scholarship, who appears to have left Cambridge as a writer, and who joined up in 1915. Unlike Lindsay who looks to have been old enough and married enough to avoid the first war.

PS 2: I also know that Lindsay was better known as an artist than a writer. A creator of soft porn, impounded from time to time by the US Customs authorities. Sample above.

Reference 1: The Magic Pudding - Norman Lindsay & Norman Lindsay - 1918. Dover reprint thereof of 2006.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Lindsay.

Ayn Rand

About an apparently important lady of whom I had never previously heard, one Ayn Rand. The patron saint of many important figures of the right in the US, including people like Ronald Reagan, Alan Greenspan, Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump. Plus a whole raft of big cheese IT entrepreneurs - including, I am sorry to say, the man behind Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. I had thought better of him.

I started with the review at reference 1, continued with the short, easy read book at reference 2 and am now waiting on Amazon for the TV film of the lady's love life at reference 3.

I learn that Rand was born of comfortably middle class Russian Jewish stock, exempted from the harsh Tsarist laws for same on account of their making uniforms for the Imperial Guards. Her life was turned upside down by the Revolution of 1917, which seem to have resulted in a lifelong hatred of commies and the empowered mob. Left what was then the Soviet Union in 1926 and headed for Hollywood, alternating between California and New York for the rest of her life. Started out writing film scripts, gets involved in politics, writes a lot, including the two best sellers at references 5 and 6. Both including, by the standards of the time, lashings of sex. Also never heard of by me, but apparently the guiding light for millions of white, professional males. Founds a strange faith called Objectivism, complete with inner circle of acolytes, but which collapsed in the wake of the collapse of her bizarre love life in 1968 or so. But devotees of her books continue to swarm in the corridors of US power.

The hero of her first try at a novel - unpublished - is based on a particularly nasty murderer called William Edward Hickman.

The general drift of her subsequent writing seems to be that larger than life, attractive and powerful heroes should grab what they can from the world and to hell with the rest of us. And as for mental defectives, the disabled and so on and so forth. These heroes are in themselves and in what they create what is important and government has no business trying to reign them in. Never mind tax them. A nostalgic wave at the sturdy homesteaders and frontiersmen of old. Plenty of people in the US who rise to that sort of bait.

I don't think she was an alcoholic but she smoked a great deal and she liked Benzedrine, which as a rich person she could no doubt get prescribed by her doctor, rather than have to resort to some pusher in the street. And anyway, as a hero anything was allowed: rules were for little people, losers and other deviants.

Serious reviewers - by which I mean the sort of people who might appear in the NYRB, LRB or TLS - have pretty much all been very rude about both her and her writing. But that was not enough to stop her and we should worry about what able and determined - but unprincipled and greedy - people can get away with.

All in all a rather unpleasant business and depressing that she should have been so successful.

Lisa Duggan is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and a past president of the American Studies Association. According to Bing, she has taught or is teaching an introductory undergraduate course in LGBT history and politics, apparently encountering anew the alternating confusion, resistance and delight of students as they start to take in the full implications of the simple claim that gender and sexuality are historically constructed. The present book carries some of that sort of baggage, but I am glad to have read it nonetheless. A bit of US history - and life today - that had passed me by.

PS: there is a particularly unpleasant bit at the opening of chapter four about hedge fund billionaires reflecting (at a more or less private meeting) on how they would keep the mob out of their compounds and islands when ordinary life broke down for some reason or other. Reflections which apparently included disciplinary collars for their armed guards - presumably after the fashion of 'Battle Royale'. Perhaps some of these billionaires had done the US equivalent of PPE at Oxford and had learned all about 'Quis custodiet ipsos custodes'.

Reference 1: The Siren of Selfishness - Cass R. Sunstein - 2020. NYRB, April 9, 2020.

Reference 2: Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the culture of greed - Lisa Duggan - 2019.

Reference 3: The Passion of Ayn Rand - Helen Mirren and others - 1999. A made for TV film.

Reference 4: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand.

Reference 5: The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand - 1943. A best-selling story about an architect. Plus sex and scandal. Later: was this book an echo or a cause of the odd fascination of film makers in the US with architects?

Reference 6: Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand - 1957. A best-selling fantasy about a dystopian US. Very long, padded out with long stretches of philosophical-political codswallop.

Reference 7: https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/what-is-objectivism/. A sample of Objectivism turned up by Bing which is visible today.

Reference 8: https://lisaduggan.org/. Lisa Duggan land.

Reference 9: https://theasa.net/. The American Studies Association.

Jam

The blackberry jelly, which surfaced at reference 1, is now scheduled for some time next week. In the meantime, BH thought she would get her hand in with a handful of damsons which fell off a neighbour's tree onto our back garden path. Perhaps to be taken with a spot of good cheddar, that is to say Lincolnshire Poacher?

A long time since I felled the damson tree at the bottom of our garden, on the mutually contradictory grounds that it had got too big to get at the damsons to pick and that there was a fairly low limit to the amount of damsons which one could consume. Still sending up suckers.

More recently, I have picked damsons round and about in Epsom, for example along Mill Road, off Upper High Street. See reference 2.

PS: following the rare blip in Google's blog search noticed earlier this morning at reference 3, gmail has been playing up today, with maybe a couple of dozen emails having gone missing from the social and promotions tabs when I logged on this morning. Some of them came back quite quickly, the rest of them a few hours later. This despite my having taken recovery action with some of the important ones, action which might have disturbed their (that is to say, Google's) recovery action. I was forcefully reminded of how one comes to rely on email boxes behaving themselves: I, for example, use my primary tab as a place to keep reminders about things that I have bought or things that I need to attend to at some point. Reminders which I really do want to stay put. While having to change my email address is quite unthinkable. It is just plugged into so much stuff. Not least the people from whom I buy my Lincolnshire Poacher.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/07/blackberry-jam.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/search?q=damson.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/07/tls.html.