Weblog

As any fule no, a blog is a weblog, and it started out by being a list of sites visited. As an antidote to Blytonia, here are some of the more interesting items I've come across in the past few days.

Jim Murdoch ponders the dearth of modern nursery rhymes.

Lorna Watts is refused the loan of scissors by a north London librarian: They are sharp, you might stab me.

Anton Vowl suggests what Gordon Brown should have answered to that question from Andrew Marr.

Belle Waring has an impassioned post on Crooked Timber about sexual harassment in the academy, with a sideswipe at "look but don't touch" Kealey from Buckingham. Mary Beard isn't so bothered. Is Terence Kealey as misunderstood as Juvenal? (Or as contemporary? I'm inclined to add.) Yes, it may have been satire, but it's pretty lame satire.

In a post entitled Because Men are Stupid and Shallow, That's Why, Jeff Fecke demonstrates that some men are capable of seeing the person beyond the breasts. He challenges the Canadian Rethink Breast Cancer campaign (aimed at raising men's awareness by concentrating on breasts):

the thing about breasts that I generally like the most is that they’re usually attached to living, breathing women, and I like women, because, you know, they’re people. Many of them are people I like, and consider friends. All of them are worth far more than the breasts attached to them; that should go without saying.

Ben Goldacre considers the AIDS-denialist film House of Numbers, which was shown at Cambridge Film Festival and (temporarily) hoodwinked rationalist sceptic Caspar Melville. Goldacre starts a lively discussion about how to deal with moonbats - exposure, ridicule, debate? Or by ignoring them? (There's no widely accepted noun for that, but ignoral might suit.) This comment in particular struck me:

The best advice my late Dad ever gave me was; “Never argue with an idiot, because people watching lose track of which is which”. The older I get, the more I appreciate his words. Several times a week, I’m given cause to think of them.

Teach the debate is what creationists say.

Jack of Kent argues why English libel law is a danger and makes a proposal for reform.

Shuggy has a go at performative theists aiming for the class prize.

no man ever forsook his father, mother, brother, sister, son or daughter and took up his cross in order to support the nuclear family, preserve the work ethic, reduce crime in the neighbourhood or foster charitable giving as an important ingredient in civil society.

Terry Glavin doesn't know how to handle the human tide, except that the handling should be humane. Who could disagree?

Right, I'm off to Oxford now for the launch of See How I Land.

Cantuar

It's not clear from the press what Dr Williams had in mind, but it won't be the sort of thing the mad dogs have been howling over. There is no way even he, with his knees on a hassock and head in the clouds, could seriously suggest applying sharia law to anyone who doesn't consent. So it couldn't apply in matrimonial cases (children to consider, even if women can be assumed to be giving free consent) or family inheritance cases (what about potential beneficiaries who don't consent to the sharia court?) let alone in criminal cases.

There may - just - be an argument for using a sharia court as an agreed arbitrator in contract cases, much as one might have the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors written into a contract as arbiter for development disputes. Consenting adults should be able to decide how to settle their disputes. However, this would be fair only between bargainers of equal bargaining power. And even then, just imagine the hoohah when someone appeals against the decision of such a sharia court because it's partial (judges related to plaintiff), incompetent (judges comatose) or capricious (judges didn't consider evidence), just to take three examples that might happen in any tribunal. In such a case, the appeal would lie to the civil courts in the usual way. "English Law Overrules Sharia!" "English Rules OK!" Just imagine. And heaven forfend that it's a Jewish judge in the Appeal Court.

The prelate espouses a misguided pluralism, to put it mildly. Nevertheless, it doesn't take too much imagination to foresee this as encouragement and sanction for enclaves of sharia law in the sort of place where young men like Abu Izzadeen can say to the Home Secretary: "How dare you come here, to a Muslim area, after you have arrested Muslims..." It's already happening informally. There are tribal areas in New Zealand which apply tribal law with the consent of the state, and I believe there are many other places around the world with such enclaves, where colonisers have exempted certain areas from application of their Law. Should it make any difference whether such enclaves are indigenous or immigrant? Personally, I deplore that sort of separation whatever its genesis, but then I'd do away with faith schools and the established church and -- don't get me started. Let's keep one law for all, please.


Update
Here's what he said.

Tenebrae

On the spur of the moment, we went to the performance of Gesualdo's Tenebrae in Trinity Hall Chapel, where de Waal's installation Tenebrae sat in a row on the floor down the aisle, up at the holy end. It consisted of a number of large, shallow pots somewhat larger than dinner plates, about 3 or 4 inches deep, and in each sat what looked like an inverted cylinder, almost filling the interior. Down the insides, like the gap between a boat and the dock, you could just glimpse the fact that the bottom of the larger piece was coloured, but not what the colour was, beyond its darkness. The pieces difffered slightly in size and proportion, and in glaze, but they had more in common than not. I didn't know what to make of them, really - they were mute, and from where I was sitting during the performance I couldn't see them. But I could imagine them, with the sound of the voices falling into them, and the shadows darkening, while they harboured their own secrets in their interior.

I hadn't been in TH chapel before. It's small and rather lovely in an 18thC way. A huge sub-Poussinesque altarpiece, lots of natural light, lots of oak, and a pretty gallery. There were, J told me, 26 candles, and these supplied the majority of light as day began to fade.

And having done no homework about the music, and having been kept away from churches in my childhood, I didn't know about the religious service, though something of its nature became clear through the music itself, and the odd snatches of Latin I was able to recognise. So my experience of the installation and the performance was not well-informed, and I was reacting on a fairly visceral level.

It was perhaps a strange time of year to be singing Tenebrae or celebrating the Passion. The music wasn't a piece I knew, and I had misgivings about its discordances - it wasn't clear if they were Gesualdo's or something incidental. Yet no-one else seemed disconcerted. It was rather long, too, though this only bothered me when I thought someone was off-key. It became clear that the piece was deliberately timed to start in daylight and end in total darkness. It was certainly an experience watching the candles come into their own. Afterwards, everyone milled around and looked at the pots in - it has to be said - a somewhat cursory fashion, as there were about 60 of us - and then afterwards to the Master's Lodge for a glass of wine and a chance to meet the great man himself.

Fourteen pots, I counted.

The Master's Lodge! Oh, I could live like that! And there was a de Waal on a window ledge: two huge cylinders like those tube-worms that live near underwater volcanic vents... tall and thin, and swaying slightly in unison. They were almost identical, but one had a very shiny glaze and the other silkier. From across the room, you could tell instantly they were de Waal's.

There was a lull when de W was standing by himself, so I told him how much we'd enjoyed the exhibition in the gallery, the subtleties, the wit, and the way he withheld things - how we'd nearly missed 'All You Can See' (the red shelf piece) and he was amused and touched, I think. (It was more of a conversation than I'm making it sound.) And he said how he'd always longed to do an installation in the chapel. I should have asked him about the spiritual dimension, and his asceticism. I wanted to ask him about Morandi too, but more people came up then to talk to him.

J was edgy throughout (his seat was uncomfortable, and it's not his sort of art or music anyway) but even so we came away, as we usually do from such events, with a sense that we are enormously privileged.

Still thinking about it later. I cannot know how differently I'd have experienced the evening if I'd known something about it at the outset, if I'd bothered to do the slightest research rather than just looking at my watch and saying: it starts in half an hour - we can catch it if we leave right now! without a sense of what 'it' really was. A concert, we thought. I doubt I'd have persuaded J to come with me otherwise.

Fourteen pots. Fourteen Stations of the Cross. I should have realised. Yet it's a curiously flattened interpretation of the Passion, even allowing for what's concealed. Then again, it fits with the stripping down of the altar that traditionally accompanies the service. We couldn't have counted them from where we were sitting, so it can only affect the experience retrospectively. And retrospectively, I wonder if I'd have felt the pots, lovely and mysterious as they are, equal to their metaphorical burden, if I'd been thinking clearly about the religious meaning. It was a very secular audience - the couple next to me were the only ones who didn't applaud. I'm bothered, really, by treating something like that as a purely aesthetic experience, even though I can't partake of the spiritual side of it. It's cultural tourism, isn't it? I wish I'd got my mind engaged before I went - we left in a rush, and didn't think about it as more than listening to some music. Is it simplistic to hope that music, art, will create its own conditions for attending to it?

Oh, and apparently Gesualdo was a murderer.

Tenebrae (de Waal 4)

If you dare tell it honestly. The chapel. The empty vessels. How you were one yourself. The light faded. Candles brightened. Music went in and out of harmony. Went on forever.

It should have been Easter. They should have stripped the altar.

14 pots. 14 Stations of the Cross. How similar they were, how each concealed something.

De Waal's work enacts individuality and withholding. It seems like endless attempts to identify what makes the unique precious, while valuing what we hold in common. The withholding is what's reserved for mystery, the ineffable.