the greycat blog

Very occasionally the World Wide Web throws up a jewel of a site; even more rarely, a jewel of a blog. I came upon one such today, the genuine sparkling precious article: JSBlog, ‘The weblog of Joel Segal Books - on varied topics inspired by working in a secondhand bookshop’.

The secondhand bookshop concerned is Joel Segal Books in Topsham, Devon, and it looks to be a wonderful place (I speak as someone for whom an hour in a good secondhand bookshop is nothing less than an anticipation of paradise). What drew me to JSBlog was a fascinating article on ‘Trains in literature’ which discusses an extraordinary range of rail-related topics from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including my old favourite, ‘Railway Spine’. Everything’s fully referenced and linked to aid further exploration - start following the links from this article, or any other on this blog, and you’ll be engrossed for hours.

There’s much, much more at JSBlog: to list just a few articles which caught my eye, ‘Further beyond the woodshed’ (on Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm), ‘Encyclopaedic thoughts’ (very good on Wikipedia), ‘Predictions’ (on c19th views of the future, and has interesting things to say about Anthony Burgess’s 1985), and ‘Bizarre historical affectations’ (from the Alexandra Limp to the Bush/Blair Power Walk).

Blog Of The Year.

Two new essays are published at greycat.org today (well, the model railway essay is a revised version of a draft that has been around for some time, but the revisions are so extensive that it counts as new).

‘Miniature railways and cultural microcosms: railway modelling in Britain, c.1900-c.1950′ - a study of the sociocultural history of railway modelling in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century, examining issues from philosophical and historical questions of the nature of leisure to the presence of modernism and nostalgia in model railways.

‘Killdozer: on the tracks of a monstrous machine’ - in June 2004 Marvin Heemeyer used an armoured bulldozer to stage a destructive assault on the town of Granby, Colorado. Taking this incident as a starting point, ‘Killdozer: on the tracks of a monstrous machine’ explores the significance of the bulldozer as a weapon, ‘simultaneously tank and tractor, tool and weapon, creator and destroyer’.

Theodore Sturgeon’s short story about a killer bulldozer, published in 1944, is the origin of the term ‘killdozer’. The story was turned into a film in 1974. This flash game is much more exciting than the film. Make sure you have your sound on.

Reporting on the arrest of the cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot in the Netherlands, the Wall Street Journal reveals that the Dutch Government certainly has its priorities right in the fight for free speech and liberty against obscurantism and religiously-inspired totalitarianism. Officials from the intelligence service, the interior ministry, the prosecutor’s office and other high-powered state bodies, under the leadership of a senior counter-terrorism officer, to create the top-secret …

Interdepartmental Working Group on Cartoons.

The title hardly sounds ominous, but the existence of this body is deeply troubling to anyone concerned about free speech (not to mention the priorities of government). The group is intended to alert Dutch officials to any cartoon-related dangers the Netherlands may face (unfunny Garfield strips? No, I don’t think that’s what they mean) and has no censorship role, we are assured. But then, no imposition of censorship is needed when an entire culture is bending over backwards to censor itself.

More at Greenspiece and Gates of Vienna.

‘Dreams’ is the theme of the July 2008 issue (PDF) of All The Rage, the world’s favourite freely-available PDF magazine. I’m in it, as usual, writing about the dark dreams of the Spanish painter Francisco Goya.

And what fills the author’s dream? Behind his figure gather the monsters of the image’s title: owls, bats, cats, nameless creatures with wings and horns. Creatures of the shadows, half-glimpsed, cluster at his back and flutter about his lowered head. Eyes glow in the dimness, beaked mouths open to utter cries that we cannot hear but the dreamer, perhaps, can. Bats that seem horned like devils circle menacingly, an oversized cat or lynx crouches on the floor, head raised and eyes staring. On the author’s right an owl raises a pen in its talons, inviting him to continue with his work, to make new images, filled with the shapes that emerge from his dreams.

Much more excellent content can of course be found in the July 2008 issue (PDF), available now from the All The Rage website.

It’s spreading and it has to be stopped. I refer to the tendency, widespread in the United States but increasingly evident here, to use ‘alternate’ as if it means ‘alternative’.

It doesn’t, and there’s no excuse for getting it wrong. These two words mean quite different things. Here is the distinction, in capitals, so that nobody misses it.

‘ALTERNATE’ MEANS ‘EVERY OTHER’. ‘ALTERNATIVE’ MEANS ‘ANOTHER’.

Visualize yourself on an upper floor in a burning building. In front of you is a staircase, but it is enveloped in flame. ‘Use alternate stairs!’ shouts a voice from somewhere outside. So you do: you set off down the stairs using every other tread, because that is what it means to use alternate stairs. And you burn to death. Your would-be rescuer knew that there was another staircase at the other end of the building, unaffected by the blaze. That’s what he wanted you to know about, and that’s why he should have shouted ‘Use alternative stairs!’

Next week: why you are very stupid if you use ‘decimate’ to mean ‘destroy’.

If this report is correct, Brown’s Britain is about to achieve a new low.

The government is expected to offer a last-minute compensation deal to help push the 42-day detention plan through. Under this, any suspect held for more than 28 days and later not charged could receive £3,000 for each extra day in custody, the BBC has learned.

We have now reached a point where the British Government is happy to put civil liberties up for sale.

Back in November I had pedantic remarks to make about a tragic story from Afghanistan: ‘BBC English: the decline and fall continues’. The point was that the BBC, in reporting the possibility that UK ‘friendly fire’ had killed two Danish soldiers, reported the story as MOD investigating claim UK ‘friendly fire’ killed two Danish troops. ‘If one individual had been reported dead’, I mused, ’would the headline have referred to the killing of “one Danish troop”?’

Well, CBS News has indeed broken that particular stupidity barrier with their headline today, reporting on the deaths of three British soldiers in Afghanistan: ‘Afghan Violence Claims 100th British Troop’.

Why is this stupid? Here’s an article that explains all. Here’s another, with added lefty hand-wringing (more of the same here, in the fourth paragraph down).

UPDATE: They’ve corrected it to ‘100th British soldier’, which is nice to see but doesn’t really make up for their initial dumbness.

There’s some great stuff striving to break out of the June 2008 issue (PDF) of All The Rage, which is on the theme of ‘escape’.

We might not like meeting Jack Sheppard, still less being threatened, beaten and robbed by him, and he did little of value with his hard-won freedom. Yet the image of this slight, shabby figure quietly and dextrously prising apart every lock, breaking every chain, springing open every door that stood between him and the grubby liberty of the London street resounds across the ages, a more inspiring symbol of the uncrushable human desire for liberty than any statue, painting or political manifesto.

That’s from my piece on eighteenth-century serial escaper Jack Sheppard. Read all about him, and much more besides, in the June 2008 issue (PDF) of All The Rage, and visit the All The Rage website for more top-notch content.

The May 2008 edition (PDF) of All The Rage is organized around the theme of ‘age and maturity’. I contribute an essay on Camille Claudel’s sculpture ‘L’age mur’ (’maturity’).

If it is Camille’s own maturity that the sculpture is asserting it seems an ambiguous celebration. Perhaps the paradox of the sculpture is that this kneeling figure is the only one of the three to be asserting independence. The man has let himself be conquered by age, who is herself a force of destiny rather than a willed individual, but the y6oung woman, even as she implores, lets him go, does not rise to restrain him. This is the maturity of the title: however painful the parting, the time is ripe for turning away from the past.

You can find the May 2008 All The Rage here (PDF), and the main All The Rage site here. There was no April 2008 edition, by the way.

Jane Kramer’s New Yorker article about Nadia Abu El Haj is a piece of one-sided puffery in which Abu El Haj is depicted as a martyr to the dark forces that threaten scholarly freedom of inquiry and expression in the academy, and any notion that there might be serious criticisms of her work based on scholarship rather than politics or ideological bias is dismissed out of hand. The less than even-handed approach taken by Kramer to Abu El Haj’s work is made clear from the outset, in passages such as this, discussing the responses to Facts on the Ground:

The book was praised by colleagues who responded to the critical tropes that were Abu El-Haj’s legacy from scholars like Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking, Bruno Latour, and Edward Said, and dismissed by colleagues with a theoretical or a political or simply a turf interest in dismissing it.

So those who liked the book were scholars engaged with the intellectual movement of which it was part; those who didn’t were acting from motives of bias or vested interest.

Perhaps the most striking and questionable aspect of the article, however, is its depiction of Abu El Haj as an innocent abroad, a high-minded scholar taken aback by the very idea that anyone could see her work as controversial in any way that goes beyond ‘an exchange of letters in the kind of scholarly journals no one outside the academy reads’. Kramer quotes Abu El Haj’s description of herself as ’not a public intellectual. I’m drawn to archives, to disciplines where the evidence sits for a while. I don’t court controversy’. Perhaps she is sincere in saying that: after all the view that Israel is a repressive illegitimate colonial state is hardly controversial within the academy. On the contrary, it’s Middle East Studies Groupthink 101. It’s when people outside her own inward-looking peer group start to challenge the things she says - pointing out, perhaps, that she certainly didn’t let ‘the evidence [sit] for a while’ in her sympathetic account of the violent destruction of Joseph’s Tomb in Facts on the Ground - that she finds things uncomfortable. If you write books containing that kind of thing, and publish them, and have people buy them and read them, controversy will find you out. If you don’t like it, perhaps you are in the wrong line of work.

The account given by Kramer of how Nadia Abu El Haj came to be working on Israel is rather touching. If we are to believe what Kramer tells us, Abu El Haj was this close to devoting herself to the anthropological study of Palestine: ‘She wanted to figure out the place, the issues, the source of nationalism there’. But her dissertation adviser at Duke University changed the current of her studies by suggesting that she look at Israel instead: ‘you need to understand the institutions that have the power - the institutions of Israeli nationalism’. And that was that. This promising young scholar would henceforth devote herself to the study of Israeli national identity and Israeli institutions of power. What a radical choice to make. Picture the scene:

Dissertation Adviser: So, you want to analyze and critique the sources and nature of Palestinian nationalism and national identity?
Promising Young Scholar: Yes, that’s right. Palestine needs serious study. I want to figure out the place, the issues, the source of nationalism there.
Dissertation Adviser: Nah. Power’s the thing. Israel has the power. Study Israel.
Promising Young Scholar: Gosh, could I? That had never occurred to me. I bet hardly anyone ever critiques Israeli nationalism.
Dissertation Adviser (thinks): Booya! Another victory for intellectual diversity in the academy.

It’s hard to see what good Kramer’s article, with its patent biases, will do: it doesn’t inform, it doesn’t analyze, it doesn’t investigate, it doesn’t question. Written as it is in the dead-in-the-water prose that characterizes so much American big-title journalism, it doesn’t even entertain. It fails to engage with any of the serious criticisms of Nadia Abu El Haj’s work, and barely acknowledges their existence. It seeks to relate the Facts on the Ground controversy to the wider issue of the politicization of Middle East Studies, but does so in a way so skewed and blinkered that what it tries to say is rendered worthless; how seriously can you take someone who quotes Rashid Khalidi as an authority on academic ethics, and does so apparently with a straight face?

On the plus side, this being The New Yorker, there are some good cartoons in there.

Jane Kramer on Nadia Abu El Haj: further reading
‘The Petition’: link to the original article in PDF format
Phoebe Maltz: A balanced account
Orthodox Anarchist: The New Yorker takes aim at the Zionist thought police
Solomonia: The New Yorker dances to Nadia’s tune
The Bwog: Nadia Abu El-Haj speaks
Martin Kramer: Are Columbia’s Palestinians … Palestinian?