Mary Beard's blog about Social Mobility:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/01/social-mobility-down-and-up.html
My response to a comment:
Ysabel H writes:
"I could read at 3. That is the true privilege the educated middle-classes confer on their young. Others arrive at school barely able to speak."
The reading bit is a real discriminator in favour of the literate ie it's not enough to be born human, you've got to choose your parents and your place of upbringing.
The second point is brain-dead prejudice.
All kids in a social context can think and speak perfectly adequately. It's just that their thoughts and speech are spat on by the privileged and their parasites (eg teachers).
Their concepts develop in their own social context for the purposes of this context. If the context is local - a sink estate, a slum, a ghetto, a discriminated and excluded group (travellers, blacks, women) - then these concepts and non-standard language can form a very strong disincentive to moving out into broader (received) society.
I taught at a school in Sweden's third or fourth most underprivileged district for 15 years. This taught me that what we were doing as teachers was providing a bridge for some of the kids into wider society. Of course some teachers (the bouncers) spent most of their time and effort trying to blow the bridge to kingdom come - as NATO did to the Petrovaradin bridge in Novi Sad while it was bombing the shit out of Serbia.
For a devastating scholarly counter-attack on this prejudice read Labov's paper “The Logic of Nonstandard English” from 1969 (plus ca change..) (Labov himself on this: http://www.pbs.org/speak/speech/sociolinguistics/labov/ ). It vaporizes Bernstein's pretentious bombast.
It's a linguistic commonplace that every language is as adequate as any other for the socio-cultural purposes of the community in which it's native. Just as it's a democratic commonplace that every person is born equal and is just as adequate as a human being as any other.
All people are born free, but everywhere they're in chains.
And these chains are often mind-forged manacles.
In fact, for most of us, all we have to lose are these chains.
QED.
25 February 2010
23 February 2010
Using "plagiarism" to attack ideas as a public good
More on plagiarism at Mary B's blog:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/02/are-you-at-risk-of-plagiarism.html#more
My comment:
Fascinating thread!
Brian Lewis writes: "I came into this world with nothing and all I know has been learnt from others and from books."
Surely not! Socrates (out of copywrong) spent his best years showing that all we know is actually inside us from the start. So we're like scratchy cats with our mewticks.
Scratching away, I notice nobody's yet mentioned ideas and culture as "gifts of nature", like air, sunlight, or the oceans. Otherwise known as "public goods".
However, fresh water has been made into a marketable commodity, and territorial waters are encroaching on the oceans.
Economics discusses various kinds of "natural monopolies" where a single provider is the most efficient solution, eg gas and water utilities.
The interesting thing for us is how market forces are encroaching on human infrastructure, like flesh and blood and internal organs. And how ideas and culture are being trapped and flayed and sold as furred robes to the rich and privileged.
Inadequate provision of necessities often results - causing "market failure". These days education is a blatant example.
So in view of all this the very idea of plagiarism is a mind-forged manacle (out of copywrong) with sharp spikes facing inwards.
Am I stealing by breathing?? Or strolling in the sun? I certainly am if I wander the city streets, or use roads or public spaces. Plagiarism and the sanctions tied in with it is just a new but equally vicious form of Enclosure and the Vagrancy Laws (see for instance http://homepage.ntlworld.com/janusg/landls.htm )
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/02/are-you-at-risk-of-plagiarism.html#more
My comment:
Fascinating thread!
Brian Lewis writes: "I came into this world with nothing and all I know has been learnt from others and from books."
Surely not! Socrates (out of copywrong) spent his best years showing that all we know is actually inside us from the start. So we're like scratchy cats with our mewticks.
Scratching away, I notice nobody's yet mentioned ideas and culture as "gifts of nature", like air, sunlight, or the oceans. Otherwise known as "public goods".
However, fresh water has been made into a marketable commodity, and territorial waters are encroaching on the oceans.
Economics discusses various kinds of "natural monopolies" where a single provider is the most efficient solution, eg gas and water utilities.
The interesting thing for us is how market forces are encroaching on human infrastructure, like flesh and blood and internal organs. And how ideas and culture are being trapped and flayed and sold as furred robes to the rich and privileged.
Inadequate provision of necessities often results - causing "market failure". These days education is a blatant example.
So in view of all this the very idea of plagiarism is a mind-forged manacle (out of copywrong) with sharp spikes facing inwards.
Am I stealing by breathing?? Or strolling in the sun? I certainly am if I wander the city streets, or use roads or public spaces. Plagiarism and the sanctions tied in with it is just a new but equally vicious form of Enclosure and the Vagrancy Laws (see for instance http://homepage.ntlworld.com/janusg/landls.htm )
State snooping - get at the cause not the symptoms!
This is an article in New Scientist about a new and highly invasive snooping law being surreptitiously in many countries.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2010/02/online-copyright-clampdown-con.html#_login
And this is my comment:
Two very clear tendencies here.
One is the explosive and accelerating development of the forces of production - hardware, software and wetware (ideas, culture, science).
Two is the growing incapacity of our current bourgeois-capitalist relations of production (private property, eg patents and copywrong) to contain it.
This incapacity is causing accelerating desperation in the ruling class (and its willing and less willing tools), which in turn generates an accelerating juggernaut of repressive measures - censorship, spying, "security" operations, and military aggression.
The big beneficiaries of the present setup - the Big Bourgeoisie - are shrinking in number nation by nation and worldwide. The losers - those with nothing to sell in the market but their labour power - have hugely increased in number over the decades following the second world war by means of subsistence rural populations being expelled from the land and forced into big city slums. This is not "urbanization" but proletarianization.
We need to start reacting to the totality of the developing totalitarian repression, not just symptoms like this latest snooping law. Symptoms are painful and important - but until the underlying causes are removed they will break out anywhere and everywhere at any time.
It's clean, fresh air we need, not facemasks.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2010/02/online-copyright-clampdown-con.html#_login
And this is my comment:
Two very clear tendencies here.
One is the explosive and accelerating development of the forces of production - hardware, software and wetware (ideas, culture, science).
Two is the growing incapacity of our current bourgeois-capitalist relations of production (private property, eg patents and copywrong) to contain it.
This incapacity is causing accelerating desperation in the ruling class (and its willing and less willing tools), which in turn generates an accelerating juggernaut of repressive measures - censorship, spying, "security" operations, and military aggression.
The big beneficiaries of the present setup - the Big Bourgeoisie - are shrinking in number nation by nation and worldwide. The losers - those with nothing to sell in the market but their labour power - have hugely increased in number over the decades following the second world war by means of subsistence rural populations being expelled from the land and forced into big city slums. This is not "urbanization" but proletarianization.
We need to start reacting to the totality of the developing totalitarian repression, not just symptoms like this latest snooping law. Symptoms are painful and important - but until the underlying causes are removed they will break out anywhere and everywhere at any time.
It's clean, fresh air we need, not facemasks.
18 February 2010
Central planning, socialization...
This is my response to a tech magazine piece on Google's plans for developing ultra-fast broadband access in the US.
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/Google-Broadband-Play-Pushes-Network-Neutrality-in-Googles-Favor-681320/?kc=EWKNLGOV02172010STR1
Well, if ordinary capitalism (Verizon etc) is unable and unwilling to unleash the full potential of high speed broadband access for a nation and its citizens, then socializing, centrally planned, innovational and let's do it ubercapitalism will. Google is showing not just the potential of high-speed universal access broadband provision, but also the huge and incontrovertible superiority of blatantly creative and socially oriented large-scale operations.
Their recipe for satisfying humanity's thirst for knowledge, ideas and culture is to make these things instantly available to everyone. Revolutionary, ANTI- monopolistic, and absolutely necessary.
When it comes to collective social progress and responsiblity, Google puts even the cutting-edge innovative excellence of Apple into the shade. Apple is a one-man show, and giving society what it needs is not where it's at. It releases its products in tightly controlled pellets, so to speak. Compared to Google Apple is constipated and Steve Jobs screams when he shits.
So Google isn't perfect. Who is? But it's decades ahead of the zombie capitalism suffocating the US and the rest of the world today.
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/Google-Broadband-Play-Pushes-Network-Neutrality-in-Googles-Favor-681320/?kc=EWKNLGOV02172010STR1
Well, if ordinary capitalism (Verizon etc) is unable and unwilling to unleash the full potential of high speed broadband access for a nation and its citizens, then socializing, centrally planned, innovational and let's do it ubercapitalism will. Google is showing not just the potential of high-speed universal access broadband provision, but also the huge and incontrovertible superiority of blatantly creative and socially oriented large-scale operations.
Their recipe for satisfying humanity's thirst for knowledge, ideas and culture is to make these things instantly available to everyone. Revolutionary, ANTI- monopolistic, and absolutely necessary.
When it comes to collective social progress and responsiblity, Google puts even the cutting-edge innovative excellence of Apple into the shade. Apple is a one-man show, and giving society what it needs is not where it's at. It releases its products in tightly controlled pellets, so to speak. Compared to Google Apple is constipated and Steve Jobs screams when he shits.
So Google isn't perfect. Who is? But it's decades ahead of the zombie capitalism suffocating the US and the rest of the world today.
15 February 2010
Plagiarism is very very dangerous!!
Mary Beard's latest blog is about plagiarism.
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/02/are-you-at-risk-of-plagiarism.html
I made the following comment:
The problem is "ownership", innit? Whose seed impregnates which belly, and who owns the issue - sorry "outcome".
You have all kinds of transgressions here, some mortal, some venal. Rape, teenage lust, marriage (oops, that's legal!), normal infidelity, the occasional fling, party-party, the Lady and the Local Lad, bigamy...
So what kinds of egg-kidnapping deserve Hell, and are there any that deserve Heaven??
And isn't reproduction all about expanding the gene pool and serendipitous mutations? Silk purses from pigs' ears?
In the worlds of ideas and culture (to name a few), copywrong and patents (intellectual property) are far, far more destructive than borrowing humanity's collective creations and developing them. Emulation, progress, prosperity - they're all bound and gagged and chained upside down in inaccessible dungeons. (Inaccessible presumably meaning you can't access the outside, in NewSpeak.)
If a student can present commonplaces better than the last documented presenter then good on her! If not, tough titty and down go his grades. Always provided the grader a) has the knowledge to spot the copywronged commonplace, and b) has the skill and judgement to evaluate the quality involved.
So, if the community (say the ideas crowd in ancient Athens) is intelligent, perceptive, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed - what's yer problem? And if it isn't - who gives a fuck?
And - to state the obvious - the honour due to an original take on things can be very well shown by an IPBB community. And materially rewarded by a society in which IPBB communities are respected.
It's blatantly obvious that our present society/mode of production is not just disrespectful, but downright hostile to IPBB communities. And that our present society is more intent on binding and gagging original (or more generally, creative) people, and chaining them upside down in inaccessible dungeons, than it is in rewarding them materially.
So:
"Plagiarize!
Let no one else's work evade your eyes!
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes!
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize!
Let no one else's work evade your eyes!
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes!
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize!
Only be sure always to call it please "research"..."
[Etymological footnote: "Latin plagiarius, kidnapper, plagiarist, from plagium, kidnapping, from plaga, net; see plak-1 in Indo-European roots", American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. (http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/plagiary)]
13 February 2010
Educational policy and gambling in Pompeii
An article in the Times Higher Education reported and commented on Mary Beard's remarks on Roman gambling being more honest than our government's current policy-making on education.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=410349
I commented:
Mary B's right. Why? Well, the factors involved in evaluating the risks and benefits of a high general level of education and of research are just not accounted for in the models being used in relation to higher education to close departments and exclude working class youth, etc. Same goes for the models used for creating bad schools and criminalizing working-class kids and their parents (aka promoting excellence and freedom of choice). (Criminalizing because parents can be jailed if their children play truant, for instance.)
It's an obvious case of market failure that those running the system will never admit. The best example of this kind of thing is the market failure of capitalism itself. The models used there assume that the system is basically in equilibrium and basically rational. This isn't the case. The system is out of control, as its recurrent crises since the 1850s (say) demonstrate clearly enough, together with the permanent state of war within the system between the states constituting the system.
People like Mervyn King talk of the economy returning to a "normal state" - but boom and bust are just as much normality as the ups and downs between them. So the assumptions used in the models explicitly exclude crisis, for ideological reasons.
Education and economic systems are excluded from rational scientific investigation, whereas most insurance statistical work isn't. You can't be actuarial about developments you refuse to understand. So toss those dice! And shoot yourself when you lose the society you've staked on the outcome.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=410349
I commented:
Mary B's right. Why? Well, the factors involved in evaluating the risks and benefits of a high general level of education and of research are just not accounted for in the models being used in relation to higher education to close departments and exclude working class youth, etc. Same goes for the models used for creating bad schools and criminalizing working-class kids and their parents (aka promoting excellence and freedom of choice). (Criminalizing because parents can be jailed if their children play truant, for instance.)
It's an obvious case of market failure that those running the system will never admit. The best example of this kind of thing is the market failure of capitalism itself. The models used there assume that the system is basically in equilibrium and basically rational. This isn't the case. The system is out of control, as its recurrent crises since the 1850s (say) demonstrate clearly enough, together with the permanent state of war within the system between the states constituting the system.
People like Mervyn King talk of the economy returning to a "normal state" - but boom and bust are just as much normality as the ups and downs between them. So the assumptions used in the models explicitly exclude crisis, for ideological reasons.
Education and economic systems are excluded from rational scientific investigation, whereas most insurance statistical work isn't. You can't be actuarial about developments you refuse to understand. So toss those dice! And shoot yourself when you lose the society you've staked on the outcome.
9 February 2010
Public schools and student sex
Mary B on public schools and sex at Newnham (the women-only college at Cambridge where she's professor of Classics:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/02/are-public-schools-a-blight-on-british-society-and-sex-at-newnham.html#comment-6a00d83451586c69e20120a87b20c1970b
My comment:
Well, there's a lot to chew on here!
1) "Education is about civilisation not dumbing us all down." Nonsense! And no offence whatever to Priscilla - this nonsense is so widespread it's a commonplace. As Michael B makes very clear, the dumbing down is not "civilization" at work.
I'd develop that further to argue that it's capitalism doing its damndest to deskill us as much as it can. Why else do they pour all this money into the perpetuum mobile of machine translation? And since deskilling only pays dividends in the capital/wage-slave relationship, then anything outside that is irrelevant - as we are seeing.
Deskilling by the way is probably better called despecializing. If everybody has a high level of training, then this higher level becomes the norm and can be paid normal (low) wages as against specialist (high) wages. As we see in medicine and education, frinstance.
1) "Education is about civilisation not dumbing us all down." Nonsense! And no offence whatever to Priscilla - this nonsense is so widespread it's a commonplace. As Michael B makes very clear, the dumbing down is not "civilization" at work.
I'd develop that further to argue that it's capitalism doing its damndest to deskill us as much as it can. Why else do they pour all this money into the perpetuum mobile of machine translation? And since deskilling only pays dividends in the capital/wage-slave relationship, then anything outside that is irrelevant - as we are seeing.
Deskilling by the way is probably better called despecializing. If everybody has a high level of training, then this higher level becomes the norm and can be paid normal (low) wages as against specialist (high) wages. As we see in medicine and education, frinstance.
2) Classroom disruption. Good article on ways of handling this in the Guardian today:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic/2010/feb/09/pupil-behaviour-management-tips
I have a comment on this at around no. 20 that deals with this issue.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic/2010/feb/09/pupil-behaviour-management-tips
I have a comment on this at around no. 20 that deals with this issue.
3) Making love/fucking. Well, the higher the proportion of making love (hi girls!) to fucking the better. Authoritarian repression and anti-sexual brutality and ignorance don't improve this proportion. They increase the proportion of violent and savage sex to consensual and pleasurable (or even boring old once-a-month that'll-do-him) sex.
4) There's a wonderful private school (US) in the wonderful film (learn all you need to know about practical rhetoric and advocacy here!) "Thank You for Smoking". It's name is St Euthanasia. Which says it all.
Managing behaviour in the classroom
Interesting and potentially useful article in the Guardian on how to manage classroom behaviour:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic/2010/feb/09/pupil-behaviour-management-tips
My comment:
I can endorse all of this and could even add some frills of my own... which I won't cos the suggestions given here will work if they are put into practice. But they do need a personal confidence and maturity and serenity of soul that you can't get off the shelf. Which is a big but given the social origins, upbringing, and training of most teachers.
The one thing I will add is an expansion of "walkie talkie as back up". Never walk alone!
If you feel it's only you and the kids you're dead unless you find some ad hoc system that works for both the kids and you - with the emphasis on the kids.
The best thing is for school management to be a supportive and familiar presence throughout the school.
Fat chance - so the next best thing is to have some reliable allies among your colleagues. One for all and all for one. Work out rapid communications methods, and feasible ways of joining the ruck without creating a bigger one in the hole you leave when you go to help. School layout and timetabling will play a big part in this.
If you're not lucky, then welcome to the club and get some training in mental and physical self-defence and keep your eyes open for alternative work, or you'll be a basket case by 45.
There *are* good schools of course, but then, there are also good estate agents and good second-hand car salesmen.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic/2010/feb/09/pupil-behaviour-management-tips
My comment:
I can endorse all of this and could even add some frills of my own... which I won't cos the suggestions given here will work if they are put into practice. But they do need a personal confidence and maturity and serenity of soul that you can't get off the shelf. Which is a big but given the social origins, upbringing, and training of most teachers.
The one thing I will add is an expansion of "walkie talkie as back up". Never walk alone!
If you feel it's only you and the kids you're dead unless you find some ad hoc system that works for both the kids and you - with the emphasis on the kids.
The best thing is for school management to be a supportive and familiar presence throughout the school.
Fat chance - so the next best thing is to have some reliable allies among your colleagues. One for all and all for one. Work out rapid communications methods, and feasible ways of joining the ruck without creating a bigger one in the hole you leave when you go to help. School layout and timetabling will play a big part in this.
If you're not lucky, then welcome to the club and get some training in mental and physical self-defence and keep your eyes open for alternative work, or you'll be a basket case by 45.
There *are* good schools of course, but then, there are also good estate agents and good second-hand car salesmen.
Sceptics of the world - dissolve in crocodile tears...
A completely undialectical article in today's Guardian about the "death of the left".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/08/new-labour-liberalism-david-cameron?showallcomments=true#end-of-comments
My comment:
Right...
Except that the working class is still there and still has the same fundamental needs as always - emancipating itself and humanity by ridding each nation and the world of bourgeois rule and the blatantly unsuccessful and pitifully inadequate capitalist system based on private property and wage-slavery.
Workers will always be there (but not always as wage-slaves), cos someone has to actually design and make and maintain the things we need. The capitalists need us.
But the bourgeoisie is in an historical pickle, to say the least. The workers don't need them or their capitalist system. Not never nohow.
So the New Left (more properly the Fake or Sceptical or Agnostic or Not-Really-Left Left) is no longer sitting on a fence between workers non-capitalist socialism and bourgeois capitalism, but is hovering over the abyss that has opened up between the classes following the tearing up of consensus and the clawing back of the crisis (of capitalist survival) measures of the Welfare State.
When it plummets, no one will shed a tear. Who the hell remembers or gives a shit about the Mensheviks? Or the Fabians, for that matter?
Which side are you on? is becoming a crucial question. Not "is there any more room on that fence?"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/08/new-labour-liberalism-david-cameron?showallcomments=true#end-of-comments
My comment:
Right...
Except that the working class is still there and still has the same fundamental needs as always - emancipating itself and humanity by ridding each nation and the world of bourgeois rule and the blatantly unsuccessful and pitifully inadequate capitalist system based on private property and wage-slavery.
Workers will always be there (but not always as wage-slaves), cos someone has to actually design and make and maintain the things we need. The capitalists need us.
But the bourgeoisie is in an historical pickle, to say the least. The workers don't need them or their capitalist system. Not never nohow.
So the New Left (more properly the Fake or Sceptical or Agnostic or Not-Really-Left Left) is no longer sitting on a fence between workers non-capitalist socialism and bourgeois capitalism, but is hovering over the abyss that has opened up between the classes following the tearing up of consensus and the clawing back of the crisis (of capitalist survival) measures of the Welfare State.
When it plummets, no one will shed a tear. Who the hell remembers or gives a shit about the Mensheviks? Or the Fabians, for that matter?
Which side are you on? is becoming a crucial question. Not "is there any more room on that fence?"
4 February 2010
Paleography - about to be axed at King's College, London (2)
The Mary Beard blog I mentioned a few items ago takes up the issue of unprofitable subjects in higher education, exemplified by paleography, the study of ancient and pre-modern handwritten scripts:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/01/university-cuts-redundancies-and-byebye-palaeography.html
My comment:
This comment might look long, but I guarantee it will excite any of you who read it.
Let's look at some pointers to what can be done with state encouragement in the form of centrally funded centres of excellence. First two examples concerning Soviet paleography, that might surprise some of you:
http://hebraica.orientalstudies.ru/eng/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1325&Itemid=128
This second example is quite fascinating, and shows the contribution of dedicated paleographers to the wide range of human endeavour illuminated in recorded history:
http://ranumspanat.com/lublinskaya_obit.htm
"Historians of medieval and modern Europe have suffered a grievous loss with the death of Alexandra Dmitrievna Lublinskaya, who died of a heart attack on January 22, 1980, shortly after taking part in a defence of a doctoral thesis at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad.
Alexandra Dmitrievna was born in 1902, a daughter of the Rev. Dmitri Stefanovitch, a historian of the Russian Church, who was made, in 1911, rector of St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg. She enrolled in the Petrograd University, where she attended the courses of the noted medievalists I.M. Grevs, L.P. Karsavin, and Olga Dobiache-Rozhdestvenskaya, a disciple of Ferdinand Lot. It was Professor Dobiache who soon recognized the talents of her student and put her, in 1922, on the staff of the Public Library with its rich collection of medieval West European manuscripts. This was fortunate, for soon thereafter regular teaching of history was discontinued in Russian universities, not to be revived until 1935. At the Public Library, Alexandra Dmitrievna, under the guidance of Dobiache, fully developed her talents as a paleographer. The features peculiar to this science attention to minute detail that often leads to a significant discovery put a special imprint on all her subsequent scholarly work. In the 1930's she began to teach courses in West European paleography in the Leningrad University, and in 1949 was appointed to the chair of Medieval History. Eight years later she joined the Institute of History in the Academy of Sciences, while continuing her active involvement in the life of the Leningrad University.
The scholarly output of Professor Lublinskaya comprises close to 200 publications dealing with a great variety of topics. It is quite impossible to do justice to them all in this short review. Very roughly they can be subsumed under three categories: works on paleography, critical publication of historical documents, and monographs and articles on the social and political history of medieval and early modern France. It should be noted that in the periodization of history commonly accepted in the Soviet universities, the "Middle Ages" extend to mid-seventeenth century. One of the results of Lublinskaya's many years of paleographic studies was the publication, in 1969, by her and several of her disciples of a manual on Latin paleography from the first century to the eighteenth. This textbook is a model of clarity and conciseness; its chronological and geographical breadth is quite unusual in works of this sort.
During her work in the Leningrad Public Library, Mrs. Lublinskaya began a systematic study of the Dubrovsky Manuscript Collection housed in it since 1805. This collection comprises over 14,000 documents dealing with France, Italy, Spain, England, Germany and other countries from the 13th century to the 18th. P.P. Dubrovsky, a secretary of the Russian legation in Paris, acquired in 1791-92 a mass of manuscript materials from the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, among them many of the papers from the collections of Achille de Harlay and of Chancellor Séguier. The Harlay collection contains a large number of letters from the official correspondence of Catherine de Medici and of Constable Anne de Montmorency. In 1962 Lublinskaya published 128 documents from this collection under the title Documents pour servir à l'histoire des gueres civiles en France (1561-1563). These documents fully vindicate the views of L. Romier and R. Mandrou that the Wars of Religion had started much before the "Vassy Massacre" of March 1562; they also reveal the impotence of royal government in those years."
And here's different example of what paleography can do, involving collaboration between state-funded historical work (Chinese universities) and specialized US paleographical work. In the field of Judiac history in China god help us all...
http://www.sino-judaic.org/index.php?page=current_issue_highlights
**************
There's a blog and petition protesting against the projected axing of palaeography at King's.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=303202385890&ref=share
Read it and sign it!
**************
I just added a follow-up general comment:
A present without history is like a human being without a birth or childhood. An abomination. Hail Mary! (Not you, Mary - the other one...)
And a present like this that doesn't care to know where it's coming from, will run full speed ahead on to rocks or into an iceberg.
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/01/university-cuts-redundancies-and-byebye-palaeography.html
My comment:
This comment might look long, but I guarantee it will excite any of you who read it.
Let's look at some pointers to what can be done with state encouragement in the form of centrally funded centres of excellence. First two examples concerning Soviet paleography, that might surprise some of you:
http://hebraica.orientalstudies.ru/eng/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1325&Itemid=128
This second example is quite fascinating, and shows the contribution of dedicated paleographers to the wide range of human endeavour illuminated in recorded history:
http://ranumspanat.com/lublinskaya_obit.htm
"Historians of medieval and modern Europe have suffered a grievous loss with the death of Alexandra Dmitrievna Lublinskaya, who died of a heart attack on January 22, 1980, shortly after taking part in a defence of a doctoral thesis at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad.
Alexandra Dmitrievna was born in 1902, a daughter of the Rev. Dmitri Stefanovitch, a historian of the Russian Church, who was made, in 1911, rector of St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg. She enrolled in the Petrograd University, where she attended the courses of the noted medievalists I.M. Grevs, L.P. Karsavin, and Olga Dobiache-Rozhdestvenskaya, a disciple of Ferdinand Lot. It was Professor Dobiache who soon recognized the talents of her student and put her, in 1922, on the staff of the Public Library with its rich collection of medieval West European manuscripts. This was fortunate, for soon thereafter regular teaching of history was discontinued in Russian universities, not to be revived until 1935. At the Public Library, Alexandra Dmitrievna, under the guidance of Dobiache, fully developed her talents as a paleographer. The features peculiar to this science attention to minute detail that often leads to a significant discovery put a special imprint on all her subsequent scholarly work. In the 1930's she began to teach courses in West European paleography in the Leningrad University, and in 1949 was appointed to the chair of Medieval History. Eight years later she joined the Institute of History in the Academy of Sciences, while continuing her active involvement in the life of the Leningrad University.
The scholarly output of Professor Lublinskaya comprises close to 200 publications dealing with a great variety of topics. It is quite impossible to do justice to them all in this short review. Very roughly they can be subsumed under three categories: works on paleography, critical publication of historical documents, and monographs and articles on the social and political history of medieval and early modern France. It should be noted that in the periodization of history commonly accepted in the Soviet universities, the "Middle Ages" extend to mid-seventeenth century. One of the results of Lublinskaya's many years of paleographic studies was the publication, in 1969, by her and several of her disciples of a manual on Latin paleography from the first century to the eighteenth. This textbook is a model of clarity and conciseness; its chronological and geographical breadth is quite unusual in works of this sort.
During her work in the Leningrad Public Library, Mrs. Lublinskaya began a systematic study of the Dubrovsky Manuscript Collection housed in it since 1805. This collection comprises over 14,000 documents dealing with France, Italy, Spain, England, Germany and other countries from the 13th century to the 18th. P.P. Dubrovsky, a secretary of the Russian legation in Paris, acquired in 1791-92 a mass of manuscript materials from the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, among them many of the papers from the collections of Achille de Harlay and of Chancellor Séguier. The Harlay collection contains a large number of letters from the official correspondence of Catherine de Medici and of Constable Anne de Montmorency. In 1962 Lublinskaya published 128 documents from this collection under the title Documents pour servir à l'histoire des gueres civiles en France (1561-1563). These documents fully vindicate the views of L. Romier and R. Mandrou that the Wars of Religion had started much before the "Vassy Massacre" of March 1562; they also reveal the impotence of royal government in those years."
And here's different example of what paleography can do, involving collaboration between state-funded historical work (Chinese universities) and specialized US paleographical work. In the field of Judiac history in China god help us all...
http://www.sino-judaic.org/index.php?page=current_issue_highlights
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There's a blog and petition protesting against the projected axing of palaeography at King's.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=303202385890&ref=share
Read it and sign it!
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I just added a follow-up general comment:
A present without history is like a human being without a birth or childhood. An abomination. Hail Mary! (Not you, Mary - the other one...)
And a present like this that doesn't care to know where it's coming from, will run full speed ahead on to rocks or into an iceberg.
2 February 2010
Chatting to God
My friend A's girlfriend halfway round the world, O, has a chat with God as an introduction to her blog page. A asked me what I thought, and wondered if I'd write to her about it.
So I did. And here's what I wrote:
Hi O!
A asked me what I thought of your chat with God. It reminds me of my friend in Jakarta, U. She's a devout Muslim, and prays five times a day, and must be one of the most deeply religious people in Indonesia (not superficial shit like a lot of her political-religious leader "friends"). She writes books about Islam, and the Hadj and so on.
Anyway, I'm an atheist and disagree completely about surface religion - churches, mosques, this god or that god, but she still thinks I'm one of her very best friends. Cos she wrote a lot of poetry - and I was one of the few people who knew what she was talking about. It was real - sex and guilt and duty, temptation and not knowing what to do.
And I know what she's talking about (most of the time) when she talks about religion. Most times we chat, I ask her to say Hi to Allah from me and she does.
So, if a personal feeling is deep and heartfelt, no problem in my view, unless it's hateful and intolerant - but I wouldn't call feelings like that (witch-hunting, racism, bigotry) deep or heartfelt. Deep is human - they haven't got that far down in themselves. Heartfelt - well, you need a heart for that.
And for me, a deeply private relationship between someone and their god is no political problem at all - the problems start with the churches and the mosques - the Popes and Vaticans of the world. The born-again Baptist bastards like Bush.
It's a bit like ice cream - if you pay it's yours to do what you like with, any flavour you like. You pay, you pray ;-)
Which means churches and so on are fine as long as the believers pay for them themselves.
I myself wouldn't have a chat with God or Allah in my page, but I'm not you ;-)
Nice warm hug from chilly Stockholm,
Chops
So I did. And here's what I wrote:
Hi O!
A asked me what I thought of your chat with God. It reminds me of my friend in Jakarta, U. She's a devout Muslim, and prays five times a day, and must be one of the most deeply religious people in Indonesia (not superficial shit like a lot of her political-religious leader "friends"). She writes books about Islam, and the Hadj and so on.
Anyway, I'm an atheist and disagree completely about surface religion - churches, mosques, this god or that god, but she still thinks I'm one of her very best friends. Cos she wrote a lot of poetry - and I was one of the few people who knew what she was talking about. It was real - sex and guilt and duty, temptation and not knowing what to do.
And I know what she's talking about (most of the time) when she talks about religion. Most times we chat, I ask her to say Hi to Allah from me and she does.
So, if a personal feeling is deep and heartfelt, no problem in my view, unless it's hateful and intolerant - but I wouldn't call feelings like that (witch-hunting, racism, bigotry) deep or heartfelt. Deep is human - they haven't got that far down in themselves. Heartfelt - well, you need a heart for that.
And for me, a deeply private relationship between someone and their god is no political problem at all - the problems start with the churches and the mosques - the Popes and Vaticans of the world. The born-again Baptist bastards like Bush.
It's a bit like ice cream - if you pay it's yours to do what you like with, any flavour you like. You pay, you pray ;-)
Which means churches and so on are fine as long as the believers pay for them themselves.
I myself wouldn't have a chat with God or Allah in my page, but I'm not you ;-)
Nice warm hug from chilly Stockholm,
Chops
Unmasked - Akseli Gallen-Kallela
"Demasquée" (1888) by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Finnish fin-de-siecle painter (1865-1931).
One of the comments started:
""Lily: Symbolizes purity, chastity, and innocence. White lilies represent the purity of the Virgin Mary. The Angel Gabriel was often painted presenting Mary with a white lily when he announced to her that she would give birth to the Son of God." ...
And I replied:
Actually, everybody, this is a scary pic. The surface belies the deeper meaning. "Unmasked" (demasquee) doesn't just refer to her being naked. It refers to surface beauty and life being unmasked. If you look closely at her, you'll see the marks of age and fatigue. The colours are subdued - and the red of life is muted, the black of death is strong, and there's so much white - and the white lilies are a symbol of death, too. And her skin is white. the guitar is old and used.
But the clincher is on the table behind the highest lily - see the skull?
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Gallen-Kallela is a favourite painter of mine. You can see some of his work at:
And here's a wild poster that could well have inspired Bulgakov in The Master and Margarita if he'd seen it:
(More on The Master and Margarita on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita)
My finger's in quite a bit of the pie)
1 February 2010
On an art exhibition
Germaine Greer's blog in the Guardian:
My comment:
Well, Titian was hugely/grotesquely successful in his day, and worked to a formula that appealed to his patrons. Of his time, and surpassing it - a bit like the Beatles, or the Dixie Chicks.
Anyway... this modern trio seems to be of their time and drowning in it (cesspool?).
So what aspects of their time don't they surpass? My guess would be along the lines of Walter Benjamin and Georgie Lukacs. Naturalistic "nostalgie de la boue" with no need for nostalgia - they're in it face down. Unlike Baudelaire, who "takes us to a realm beyond" the sludge. Or, in painting, the Finn Akseli Gallen-Kallela.
(http://www.groningermuseum.nl/uploads/Demasquee.jpg)
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That's Sickert and Spencer.
Sargent is the same thing face up. Phosphorescing like the cadaver in Baudelaire's 'Une Charogne'. In Lukacs's take, the Salammbo to Madame Bovary.
All very dialectical - opposite poles trapped in the same magnet. One can't exist without the other. The "greats" make their own magnet, aren't just passive elements of a piece of Zeitgeist iron.
So Germaine's points are just that, and she manages to put em in English, too.
On Desert Island Discs :-)
Mary Beard's blog:
My comment:
Anthologies, anthologies. Like a meal with nothing but the "best bits" - a Swedish smörgåsbord. Very nice, but...
But very nice as an appetizer! And a pointer to breadth and depth - Go, Mary!
But where can you find the main course? Or that special unexpected dessert? In libraries and universities, or their analogues. That's where. And what's happening to them?
And what if the main course is junk junk junk till you explode?
Time to exorcise the TimeGhost and vanquish its servile demons.
On cutting palaeography at universities
Mary Beard's blog:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/01/university-cuts-redundancies-and-byebye-palaeography.html#comment-6a00d83451586c69e20128773e8248970c
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/01/university-cuts-redundancies-and-byebye-palaeography.html#comment-6a00d83451586c69e20128773e8248970c
My comment:
Governments exist to handle the general needs of the ruling class. At the moment the ruling class is the imperialist bourgeoisie. Its general needs are evidently pumping as much gold into the gullets of their rich and powerful big bourgeois buddies as possible, including themselves (eg Bliar post-PM). And protecting it by any means needed, including the Big Lie and the grotesque war juggernaut.
Culture is just as evidently no longer a general need of the ruling class.
So if we love palaeography - and I do - then our first priority should be to dump this ruling class and out ourselves in its place as the new ruling class. Ourselves ruling ourselves in our own best interests, including culture. This would eliminate private profit (a 15% surcharge on everything to "satisfy" the insatiable, vampires and leeches all...), and the lunacy of war. Good enough reasons??
Culture is just as evidently no longer a general need of the ruling class.
So if we love palaeography - and I do - then our first priority should be to dump this ruling class and out ourselves in its place as the new ruling class. Ourselves ruling ourselves in our own best interests, including culture. This would eliminate private profit (a 15% surcharge on everything to "satisfy" the insatiable, vampires and leeches all...), and the lunacy of war. Good enough reasons??
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