I was just reading Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. I hadn’t noticed before that, among all his great accomplishments, Rilke must be counted the originator of the most characteristic cliché of our time, the one about lemons and lemonade. Or rather, in Rilke’s telling,
Ist dir Trinken bitter, werde Wein.
If the drinking is bitter, become wine.
I’m glad he takes the English pronunciation of Farage rather than the rather poncey foreign-sounding one that he seems to prefer.
I just read The Picture of Dorian Gray, which I last read — not very attentively, I think — in high school, more than 30 years ago. (For the record, it seems to me now an inappropriate choice of reading for high school.) No question that it is a great novel, even if Wilde would have been well served by a more assiduous editor who pointed out just how many times his characters “flung themselves” onto sofas, divans, wicker arm chairs, and “a luxuriously cushioned couch”. (They occasionally “throw themselves” as well. I wonder whether Stephen Leacock had this example in mind in writing his famous line “Lord Ronald… flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.”)
The thoroughgoing misogyny of the book was familiar, but I had forgotten, or not noticed, the antisemitism. Early in the book significant attention is devoted to the peripheral figure of the low-rent theatre impresario who employs Dorian’s first idol, the young actress Sibyl Vane. He is first described as
A hideous Jew, in the most amazing waistcoat I ever beheld in my life, was standing at the entrance, smoking a vile cigar. He had greasy ringlets, and an enormous diamond blazed in the centre of a soiled shirt.
He is almost never referred to by name. He is always “the Jew”, “the horrid Jew”, “the old Jew” (and there is constant reference to his gaudy “jewelled fingers”). He is ugly, mean, wheedling, slovenly, an “offensive brute”, and even his “extraordinary passion for Shakespeare” is played for laughs, with the Jew blaming “the Bard” for his five bankruptcies, seemingly a parody of the only way a money-grubbing Jew could relate to the sublimities of English culture.
The pianist at the theatre, at his “cracked piano”, is also described as a “young Hebrew”, for no apparent reason other than to intensify the sense of artistic degradation.
Baroness Alison Wolf, professor of public sector management at King’s College London, has warned against new legislation that would make it easier to establish private universities.
Sweeping general legislation might make it easier to set up a really small, innovative, educationally wonderful institution, but it’s much more likely to mean we end up with the American-style catastrophe.
There are all kinds of catastrophes in America, many of them due to inadequate public oversight over the private sector. I’d be on her side if she were using the US as a bogeyman to warn us against conservative tendencies in healthcare, policing, schooling… pretty much anything. Not universities, or, at least, not in such a blanket fashion. It’s not clear, either, whether she is concerned primarily with improving educational opportunities or with national brand management, with a broad array of institutions “damaging the UK’s reputation for higher education”.
I think you would be hard pressed to convince anyone that private universities overall have damaged the US reputation in higher education.
I’ve just been reading the novel Infinite Jest, and immediately struck by the originality of Wallace’s conception of corporate sponsorship. Universities such as my own have been willing to paste sponsors’ names on buildings, institutes, libraries, posts, scholarships, quadrangles, and pretty much anything else that is identifiable on a map or organisational chart, but they have left the temporal dimension barely touched. Whereas in Wallace’s novel the naming rights to years are sold off, so that a date might be referred to as 1 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, or Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar, we still name our terms for medieval feast days: Michaelmas, Hilary, and Trinity terms. Imagine if, instead, we had Nuffield Term, Sainsbury Term, and (Your-Name-Here) Term.
Of course, that is not the limit. (Of course!) There are periodic arguments in my subject over abandoning the dowdy name of “Statistics”. “Information science” and “Data science”are two alternatives that have been proposed. But if we are going to change our name, why not get paid for it? We could become the Department of GlaxoSmithKline. Across the way the Computing Laboratory would become the Department of Google. And what we now know as the Department of Mathematics would be more recognisable to prospective students as the Department of Goldman Sachs. They’re not fooling anyone.
The role of chancellor is a difficult one: He’s the symbolic aristocratic authority figure, of modest intelligence but sterling character, set to superintend the carryings-on of the overly clever boffins.
Anyway, there’s been a bit of to and fro at Oxford over the position of Cecil Rhodes. Following the successful “Rhodes Must Fall” protests at the University of Cape Town, Oxford students have been demanding that Oriel College remove the statue of Rhodes prominently displayed in the college’s facade. Oxford’s chancellor, the failed Conservative politician and last colonial governor of Hong Kong Christopher Patten, has decided to stoke the flames by using his ceremonial platform, where he was supposed to be welcoming the university’s first woman vice chancellor, to attack those who wish to “rewrite history”:
We have to listen to those who presume that they can rewrite history within the confines of their own notion of what is politically, culturally and morally correct. We do have to listen, yes – but speaking for myself, I believe it would be intellectually pusillanimous to listen for too long without saying what we think…
Yes. “We” must say what “we” think. Since history has been written once and for all, correctly, it is inappropriate to rewrite it. And heaven forfend that the rewriters should rely on their own notion of what is correct, morally or otherwise! It’s about time we got rid of all those people who try to rewrite history, you know, what are they called? Historians.
It’s pretty bizarre. It’s not as though protestors are breaking into the Bodleian and excising the name of Rhodes with a razor blade. The existence of the Rhodes statue is clear testimony to his outsized influence and to the honour accorded to him in his day, and it would continue to serve this function if it were placed in a museum. To continue to display the statue on the façade of a college is a declaration of current respect for him. Which is a matter of public debate. In 1945 all the Adolf-Hitler-Strassen in Germany were renamed, and I don’t recall whether Patten protested the felling of the Lenin statues in Berlin in 1989, or the Saddam Hussein statues in Iraq.
(A friend of a friend of mine, when I was an undergraduate at Yale, made the unfortunate choice to issue the bootlicking pledge in her application essay for the Rhodes scholarship, that she would aspire to fulfil the spirit of Cecil Rhodes. At interview she was asked, “Were you thinking of Rhodes’s spirit as a racist, as a colonialist, or as a paedophile?” Her answer was not transmitted, but she was not awarded a scholarship.)
(Personally, I would have attended the ceremony, to have been present at the historic investiture of Oxford’s first woman vice chancellor, if only I’d been able to rewrite the historical dress code, since at the last moment I couldn’t locate the academic hood required for attendance.)
According to this article in PubPeer, PubPeer has been attacked by the editor-in-chief of the journal Plant Physiology, a man named Michael Blatt. This is a nominative determinism twofer, because Blatt in German can mean either “leaf” or “journal”.
The journalist Barbara Ellen, writing in the Guardian, has defended Cambridge historian David Starkey, who has come under attack for his racist remarks:
An open letter to the university, signed by hundreds of staff, students and alumni, accuses Starkey of repeatedly making racist statements. It cites his appearance on BBC Newsnight after the summer riots of 2011 in which he said: “A substantial amount of the chavs have become black. The whites have become black; a particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion.”
It also cited a more recent interview in the Telegraph in which Starkey said statistics “appeared” to show a black propensity to violence.
A twofer: He insulted all black people, and simultaneously applied an insulting term for the white working class. Ellen protests
Free speech is one of the most precious facets of British society, but here is proof that, for some, it is all too dispensable. The pre-emptive ban is replacing the enriching debate. Nuance and difference are being hounded into the shadows.
How long before society reaches a state of self-monitoring, self-censoring “offence-Stasi”, with everyone on permanent red alert?
That sounds terrible. Starkey was “pre-emptively banned” merely for making perfectly ordinary disparaging remarks about black people. What was he banned from? Appearing as the leading spokesman for one of the world’s most esteemed universities in a promotional fund-raising video. That’s exactly the sort of thing that used to go on in communist police states. Continue reading “The right to be honoured”
There’s an old joke — I’ve seen it attributed to Clarence Darrow, but I have no confidence in this attribution — that goes
I don’t like spinach, and I’m glad I don’t, because if I liked it I’d eat it.
I thought of this in reflecting on the lessons of Nina Teicholz’s book Big Fat Surprise, about the sorry history of public health recommendations about dietary fat, mainly in the US. This will surely go down as one of the most embarrassing disasters in public health history, so Teicholz’s efforts to uncover how a supposedly self-correcting process was able to go so badly wrong holds important lessons for all of us who care about either science or public policy. (It’s sort of The Innocence Project, with observational studies in place of eyewitness misidentification.) Continue reading “Fat and spinach”
I spotted this in Blackwell’s today:
I suppose an “unauthorised like” might be something a particularly surly poet would have on his Facebook page…
Common Infirmities 