Oh God, no. Not Mandy again! What is it with this man? He gets the sack time after time, and still they bring him back. I can understand why outstanding political figures may clash with their leaders. I can also understand why men and women of overwhelming talent and ability have to be brought back from the wilderness because they are just so remarkable. But Peter “Mandy” Mandelson? Who the hell do they think he is? Seneca? Palmerstone? Voltaire? If “Mandy” has any of the powers of these heavyweights, it has remained stubbornly invisible to me, and to most of the British public.
Actually, the Seneca analogy is not entirely bogus. A thorn in the side of many early emperors, notably Claudius, Seneca was brought into the Nero administration because he was a political genius and Nero rather needed one of them, given his somewhat significant public opinion deficit after setting Rome on fire. Although Seneca tried bravely he did not have a lot to work with, as the Emperor Nero was - quite literally - a flaming maniac. I cannot put “Mandy” in the same frame as Seneca, who was one of the most brilliant literary and political minds of his age, but I can picture Gordon Brown as Nero - fiddling while the economy burns.
Saturday, 4 October 2008
Friday, 26 September 2008
Vous savais ces hommes-rats?
Many years ago, when I was learning French at school, a teacher brought in a copy of a French daily newspaper. I can’t remember which one it was, but the thing that stuck in my mind was the one thing she urged us to ignore. On the funny pages there was a translation of an old American comic strip. In it, Mandrake the Magician was pondering the dilemma posed by the Rat-men. Of course they wanted to take over the world, as all outer-space bad hats did in those days. Doubtless in the original version there would have been exclamations of shock and horror such as ‘Holy Mackinole!’or ‘By Thor’s mighty hammer’ or whatever Mandrake magicians were likely to say. Rendered into French, however, it all became a lot more laid back, casual even. It slouched into an ‘I-suppose-we’d-better-surrender-now’ Gallic fatalism.
‘Vous savais que ces hommes-rats, ils demandent la terre comme rançon?’
‘Oui, je le sais.’
Oh, have you heard? Those rat-men, they want the world as a ransom.
Oh, yes, so they do. How tiresome.
There is something a lot more visceral about ‘homme-rat’ too, much like referring to ‘Man-Bat’ instead of ‘Batman’. You get a much stronger sense of these rat-men being really, seriously ratty. Not having seen any of the earlier episodes, I think another thing that puzzled me was what the hommes-rats had stolen. If they were demanding a ‘ransom’ then, presumably, it would be for the return of something or someone valuable. But if the whole world was the ransom, what could it possibly be? And wouldn’t it have to have been taken away from the world in the first place? So then it would surely be included in the inventory of Planet Earth’s fixtures and fittings when the rat-men take possession anyway? They’d return something only to get it back straight away... along with the whole of the world. A smart trick on their part, I thought, but a pretty dumb piece of bargaining by the Earthlings. It would have been like the Lindbergh kidnapper demanding the entire Lindbergh family, including the baby, as a ransom for the baby.
All the same, when I read in the Financial Times today about the deal that George W. Bush is trying to push through the US Congress I was reminded of Mandrake and les hommes-rats. The bankers are rat-men indeed, and their ransom is nothing less than the Earth.
This isn’t a negotiation. This is an unconditional surrender... of everything. All that seems to be at issue is just how fast Bush can give it all away.
‘Vous savais que ces hommes-rats, ils demandent la terre comme rançon?’
‘Oui, je le sais.’
Oh, have you heard? Those rat-men, they want the world as a ransom.
Oh, yes, so they do. How tiresome.
There is something a lot more visceral about ‘homme-rat’ too, much like referring to ‘Man-Bat’ instead of ‘Batman’. You get a much stronger sense of these rat-men being really, seriously ratty. Not having seen any of the earlier episodes, I think another thing that puzzled me was what the hommes-rats had stolen. If they were demanding a ‘ransom’ then, presumably, it would be for the return of something or someone valuable. But if the whole world was the ransom, what could it possibly be? And wouldn’t it have to have been taken away from the world in the first place? So then it would surely be included in the inventory of Planet Earth’s fixtures and fittings when the rat-men take possession anyway? They’d return something only to get it back straight away... along with the whole of the world. A smart trick on their part, I thought, but a pretty dumb piece of bargaining by the Earthlings. It would have been like the Lindbergh kidnapper demanding the entire Lindbergh family, including the baby, as a ransom for the baby.
All the same, when I read in the Financial Times today about the deal that George W. Bush is trying to push through the US Congress I was reminded of Mandrake and les hommes-rats. The bankers are rat-men indeed, and their ransom is nothing less than the Earth.
This isn’t a negotiation. This is an unconditional surrender... of everything. All that seems to be at issue is just how fast Bush can give it all away.
Monday, 11 August 2008
The Mechanisms of Joy
I was talking to a much-loved friend the other night, we were both hampered by a lack of words for different kinds of love-relations. I was reminded that the Greeks had a number of extra words for love and this took me into a flight of fancy. I promised to identify them all. I knew the first three most often named, because they appear in the New Testament, namely eros, philia and agapé.
The Wikipedia, I notice, stretched the list as far as five by adding storge and thelema although I’m less convinced by them. I would add three significant others, though: epithymia, oikeios and erastés.
I talked of Paul Tillich and his Theology of the Erotic, of Freud, Rollo May and Plato to explain agapé and eros, and of Aleister Crowley to define theléma. I quoted from Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony to explain the mysteries of erastés. I was reminded that this last one “stressed the quality of areté and played down something self-evident: pleasure. Areté means an “excellence” that is also “virtue.” The word always had a moral meaning attached...”
In the end, though, I realised that there is a problem with any discussion of love and the ancient world... they thought in a different way to us. We’ve had our minds twisted up with ideas of romance (as its name suggests, a Roman invention) and witless celebrity. These words just don’t map onto ours at all. In a society which has lost the ideal of the areté, that has no passion for ‘excellence’ and ‘virtue’ it is impossible for us to understand what the Greeks meant. We have replaced virtue with commerce and consumerism, with Jordan and Paris Hilton, with people who are famous only for being famous, with artists and writers who say nothing about anything except themselves, with those who are empty of values. In a culture where no-one can be shamed any more, perhaps we cannot really attain the more advanced forms of love in the way they could. If we want them, we will have to create virtues of our own and uphold them, admire them, desire them, and share them.
I think the ancient Greeks saw their many concepts of love as components that all overlapped and fitted together, each turning the next, none able to stand without the others. I think it’s relevant that we now know they had developed a mechanical computer long before the birth of Christ, a miraculous assembly of cog-wheels and dials that calculated eclipses of the sun and moon, the movements of the planets, the dates of the Olympiads and much more besides. The Antikythera Mechanism was a means of representing the heavens to the people of the Earth - as above, so below. I think it is possible the Greeks thought of love and their culture in the same way, each wheel turning another, none separate from its neighbour, no movement possible without affecting all. In our new age of the computer, can we not engineer something similar again?
The Wikipedia, I notice, stretched the list as far as five by adding storge and thelema although I’m less convinced by them. I would add three significant others, though: epithymia, oikeios and erastés.
I talked of Paul Tillich and his Theology of the Erotic, of Freud, Rollo May and Plato to explain agapé and eros, and of Aleister Crowley to define theléma. I quoted from Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony to explain the mysteries of erastés. I was reminded that this last one “stressed the quality of areté and played down something self-evident: pleasure. Areté means an “excellence” that is also “virtue.” The word always had a moral meaning attached...”
In the end, though, I realised that there is a problem with any discussion of love and the ancient world... they thought in a different way to us. We’ve had our minds twisted up with ideas of romance (as its name suggests, a Roman invention) and witless celebrity. These words just don’t map onto ours at all. In a society which has lost the ideal of the areté, that has no passion for ‘excellence’ and ‘virtue’ it is impossible for us to understand what the Greeks meant. We have replaced virtue with commerce and consumerism, with Jordan and Paris Hilton, with people who are famous only for being famous, with artists and writers who say nothing about anything except themselves, with those who are empty of values. In a culture where no-one can be shamed any more, perhaps we cannot really attain the more advanced forms of love in the way they could. If we want them, we will have to create virtues of our own and uphold them, admire them, desire them, and share them.
I think the ancient Greeks saw their many concepts of love as components that all overlapped and fitted together, each turning the next, none able to stand without the others. I think it’s relevant that we now know they had developed a mechanical computer long before the birth of Christ, a miraculous assembly of cog-wheels and dials that calculated eclipses of the sun and moon, the movements of the planets, the dates of the Olympiads and much more besides. The Antikythera Mechanism was a means of representing the heavens to the people of the Earth - as above, so below. I think it is possible the Greeks thought of love and their culture in the same way, each wheel turning another, none separate from its neighbour, no movement possible without affecting all. In our new age of the computer, can we not engineer something similar again?
Wednesday, 6 August 2008
Another Point of View
This has been going through my mind for a while now... It’s inspired by the approaching start to the Olympic Games in China, and a warped kind of alternative history took form in my imagination. It is quite preposterous, of course... pure sci-fi, because nothing of the kind could ever happen in real life, but I cannot help wondering how we would have reacted if it had?
Who do you think will be coming?
September 4, 2001: Four CAAC aircraft on internal flights from Beijing are hijacked. They are crashed into strategic targets in Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen, killing 2,993 people. Osama bin Laden is blamed, apparently angered at Chinese anti-separatist action in the largely Muslim province of Xinjiang. The date of the attack is seen as significant as 4 is an unlucky number for the Chinese and '9/4/01' sounds quite like a phrase in Mandarin meaning 'a close shave'.
October 7, 2001: China, together with a small group of ASEAN nations invade Afghanistan. The People's Liberation Army quickly defeat the Taliban.
January 11, 2002: China transfers captured militants from Afghanistan to a small island base near Taiwan which they seized from the Philippines at the end of World War Two. International groups are not granted access.
September 12, 2002: Chinese premier, Jiang Zemin, says China has identified a link between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of 9/4 and will move on Iraq if the U.N. does not. He reiterates the claim that Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction poses a direct military threat to China.
March 18, 2003: PLA troops launch a terrorist-seeking raid in Afghan villages
March 19, 2003: Newly appointed Communist Party General Secretary, Hu Jintao, says in a television address that “the People's Republic of China and its allies have launched a campaign to oust Saddam Hussein from Iraq and ‘free its people.’”
March 20, 2003: Iraq War begins. Chinese and North Korean troops invade.
April 9, 2003: Saddam Hussein’s statue is toppled in Fidros Square in Baghdad by PLA troops.
Dec. 13, 2003: Saddam Hussein is captured alive by North Korean troops in Tikrit, Hussein’s hometown.
Jan. 17, 2004: The death toll for Chinese soldiers in Iraq reaches 500.
April 29, 2004: Photographs of Chinese soldiers torturing and humiliating inmates at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad are made public.
June 28, 2004: The Coalition provisional Authority is abolished, power is transferred to Iraqi authorities in a hurried, secret ceremony two days ahead of the scheduled transfer.
Oct. 7, 2004: A People's Liberation Army report concludes Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction.
Sept. 6, 2004: The death toll for Chinese soldiers in Iraq reaches 1,000.
October 29, 2004: A study published by the Lancet says the risk of death by violence for civilians in Iraq is now 58 times higher than before the Chinese-led invasion.
November 15, 2004: Chinese troops re-establish control over most of Fallujah after a fierce assault.
Nov. 5, 2006: Saddam Hussein is convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death by hanging.
Nov 17, 2006: The Japanese newspaper, Nikei Shimbun, reports a sign of Chinese "permanency" in Iraq. The new Chinese embassy going up inside Baghdad's well-fortified Green Zone will be almost the size of the Vatican City.
Dec. 6, 2006: The Iraq Study Group releases its report, recommending against permanent bases in Iraq.
Dec. 30, 2006: Saddam Hussein is executed by hanging.
October 11, 2006: A team of Chinese and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.
June 5, 2007: Hu Jintao, now Chinese president, announces that China wants 50 military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and legal immunity for all Chinese soldiers and contractors in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that if Chinese troops occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, it will lay the basis for unending conflict. President Hu wants to push through the accord by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory at the 17th National Party Congress in October and claim the 2003 invasion has been vindicated.
August 8, 2008: China hosts the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Beijing.
Who do you think will be coming?
Wednesday, 11 June 2008
Watching for the Break
„Помнишь, где ты сломал свою судьбу?‟
I have finally caught up with the Russian sequel Daywatch or Дневной дозор and a line leaps out at me. It stops me in my tracks. It is a question I have been asking myself now, for the best part of a year. Do I remember where I broke my destiny? Not yet, but I am perhaps starting to see.
Could things be about to turn? Is my dark night moving into the light, my year of pain and lack shifting to brighter times? Well, no surprise to see there is a card in the road to tell me how things are.
It's the Three of Diamonds today, or Three of Pentacles, as they would be in the Tarot. More appropriate it could not be. "It signifies a business proposal or undertaking," one of my many guides says. "Everybody has periods when things go terribly wrong, bad luck, lack of money, disputes and separations... The period of such a run of misfortune is usually three months or three years... So, if you have experienced such a period, take heart if the three of Pentacles turns up... for it can signify that such a period is coming to an end."
Fingers crossed! By the way, while looking for a good image to use, I stumbled on this fabulous new Tarot. It is a magnificent piece of work, I must say, full of dark Victorian fantasies, M.R. Jamesian horrors, Doré-esque fantasies, Fading Away fey, opium dreams and the roots of Ur-Goth, but I shall respect their wishes not to hotlink and instead leave you to discover its delights for yourselves:
http://www.bohemiangothic.com
I have finally caught up with the Russian sequel Daywatch or Дневной дозор and a line leaps out at me. It stops me in my tracks. It is a question I have been asking myself now, for the best part of a year. Do I remember where I broke my destiny? Not yet, but I am perhaps starting to see.
Could things be about to turn? Is my dark night moving into the light, my year of pain and lack shifting to brighter times? Well, no surprise to see there is a card in the road to tell me how things are.
It's the Three of Diamonds today, or Three of Pentacles, as they would be in the Tarot. More appropriate it could not be. "It signifies a business proposal or undertaking," one of my many guides says. "Everybody has periods when things go terribly wrong, bad luck, lack of money, disputes and separations... The period of such a run of misfortune is usually three months or three years... So, if you have experienced such a period, take heart if the three of Pentacles turns up... for it can signify that such a period is coming to an end."
Fingers crossed! By the way, while looking for a good image to use, I stumbled on this fabulous new Tarot. It is a magnificent piece of work, I must say, full of dark Victorian fantasies, M.R. Jamesian horrors, Doré-esque fantasies, Fading Away fey, opium dreams and the roots of Ur-Goth, but I shall respect their wishes not to hotlink and instead leave you to discover its delights for yourselves:
http://www.bohemiangothic.com
Monday, 9 June 2008
Don't eat the caviar!
There’s a curious, perverse blend of ironies in this story, of contradictory mortalities, and the bite of the credit crunch all coming together. Of course, the very people able to give it up are the ones least likely to, I suppose. As reported in today’s Sueddeutschezeitung
Rettet den Stör: Nie mehr Kaviar
Die Umweltschützer haben schon vieles versucht, um den Stör zu retten. Vergeblich. Nun hilft nur noch eins: auf Kaviar verzichten...
[My trans] Environmental protectors have tried to save the sturgeon, in vain. Now only one thing can help: giving up caviar. Lower Saxony’s environment minster, Hans-Heinrich Sander, has called for people to forgo caviar on the grounds of saving the species. “Um den Stör zu retten, soll man Kaviar nicht mehr verzehren...”
“To save the sturgeon, don't eat any more caviar,” said the FDP-politician in Hanover. “All other protective measures have been fruitless up to now”, he went on...
Rettet den Stör: Nie mehr Kaviar
Die Umweltschützer haben schon vieles versucht, um den Stör zu retten. Vergeblich. Nun hilft nur noch eins: auf Kaviar verzichten...
[My trans] Environmental protectors have tried to save the sturgeon, in vain. Now only one thing can help: giving up caviar. Lower Saxony’s environment minster, Hans-Heinrich Sander, has called for people to forgo caviar on the grounds of saving the species. “Um den Stör zu retten, soll man Kaviar nicht mehr verzehren...”
“To save the sturgeon, don't eat any more caviar,” said the FDP-politician in Hanover. “All other protective measures have been fruitless up to now”, he went on...
Sunday, 8 June 2008
In which the author is maddeningly cryptic
Earlier on today I posted up a book review which I was excited to share, because it had so freaked me out that I could hardly believe what I had discovered. Why had no-one else seen it before? I took the post down later on the advice of a trusted confidante.
‘Don’t put that on your blog!’ she gasped. ‘Someone’ll steal it! There’s a book in this, and you mustn’t tell anyone about it! I’ve got my Gypsy intuition going on this one - take it down now!’
So I did. I shall have to be mysterious, then, but it is an absolute stunner. I’ve found evidence, incontrovertable, though very subtly tucked away, that a classic, much-loved novel will have to be radically reinterpreted. So radically, in fact, that it will not only never be seen in the same way again, but it will turn from being a charming comedy into... something almost scary.
It’s as though... well, imagine you’d been leafing through The Wind in the Willows and wondered, in passing, why you had never previously noticed that Ratty lives on a canal and not a river, but you let that go and read on. Then, say in the chapter entitled “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”, you spot a reference to “the twin moons”, and then see the sun described as “a twinkling star in the red sky.” Then you flick to the front and see a note on the fly-leaf that somehow you had never bothered to read before - that nobody has ever bothered to read, apparently. It says: “This story takes place on the Planet Mars”.
That’s not what I’ve stumbled on, incidentally. Ratty, Toad and Mole are still safely on Terra Firma, but that is the scale of the thing we’re talking about. The book in question is that well known and this is every bit as big a rethink as the one I have just described. With luck, all will be revealed in due course!
‘Don’t put that on your blog!’ she gasped. ‘Someone’ll steal it! There’s a book in this, and you mustn’t tell anyone about it! I’ve got my Gypsy intuition going on this one - take it down now!’
So I did. I shall have to be mysterious, then, but it is an absolute stunner. I’ve found evidence, incontrovertable, though very subtly tucked away, that a classic, much-loved novel will have to be radically reinterpreted. So radically, in fact, that it will not only never be seen in the same way again, but it will turn from being a charming comedy into... something almost scary.
It’s as though... well, imagine you’d been leafing through The Wind in the Willows and wondered, in passing, why you had never previously noticed that Ratty lives on a canal and not a river, but you let that go and read on. Then, say in the chapter entitled “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”, you spot a reference to “the twin moons”, and then see the sun described as “a twinkling star in the red sky.” Then you flick to the front and see a note on the fly-leaf that somehow you had never bothered to read before - that nobody has ever bothered to read, apparently. It says: “This story takes place on the Planet Mars”.
That’s not what I’ve stumbled on, incidentally. Ratty, Toad and Mole are still safely on Terra Firma, but that is the scale of the thing we’re talking about. The book in question is that well known and this is every bit as big a rethink as the one I have just described. With luck, all will be revealed in due course!
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