We thought perhaps that we had seen everything on television you could possibly see. The Vietnam War. Famine in Africa. The images that return from history, of the Nazi concentration camps and the atom bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Airplane hijacks. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall. 9/11. The litany is substantial, and has expanded with the spread of consumer video and mobile phone cameras and what is loosely called citizen journalism. Read more
I should like to pay tribute to Oliver Stutchbury, who has died aged 84, and was instrumental back in the early 70s for helping me get started as a film-maker. I first met Oliver when I was a student at Sussex University and he was a part-time philosophy tutor—my first. In fact it was he who was in part responsible for my decision to switch to philosophy as my major. We bonded through a shared love of music—if I remember correctly, it was his father who in the early 30s had introduced John Christie to Fritz Bush, who thus became the first conductor of Christie’s opera house at Glyndebourne in the Sussex downs, which I visited as a student music critic. Read more
It’s a curious business. You’ve got these two nutters. One of them, let’s call him Rajiv, has culled some emails from a discussion list from which he’s been excluded for assorted ravings, and sends out plaintive missives couched in terms of eastern philosophy which no-one can understand. The second nutter, we’ll him Jack, receives one of his messages, and knowing something about eastern philosophy, takes it seriously and replies. One or two others complain to the discussion list which they mistake it as coming from, to which Nutter No.2 responds in terms that people on the list find pretty offensive (and it’s not the first time his interventions on this list have caused unhappiness either).
Seems to me this incident should be understood symptomatically. Read more
by Hans Kundnani
Published October 23, 2010
Although Paul Celan is my favourite poet, I was somehow unaware of his
poem, “Mapesbury Road”, which refers to a street that is about five minutes
from where I live in north-west London and was written in 1968 immediately
after the death of Martin Luther King and the attempted assassination of
West German student leader Rudi Dutschke. As I learned from a fascinating programme on Radio 4 about the short poem last week, Celan’s paternal aunt Berta Antschel – one of the few relatives of his who had survived the Holocaust – lived in a flat in the eponymous street, where Celan visited
her in April 1968 and wrote the poem, which was published posthumously
in the collection Schneepart in 1971. Like most of Celan’s late poems, it is
incredibly dense with compound words (e.g. “Mitluft”, which Michael Hamburger
translates as “co-air”) and therefore difficult to decipher. As George Steiner
says in the programme, Celan’s poems are “on the other side of our
current horizons”.
However, as the programme showed, the time and place at which
“Mapesbury Road” was written offer a couple of intriguing clues
to its meaning. It seems likely that the bullet in the poem refers to
the shootings of King (which took place in Memphis on
April 4) and Dutschke (which took place in West Berlin exactly a week
later on April 11). In a letter to his wife Gisèle Lestrange on April
10, Celan describes a meeting with the Austrian poet Erich Fried, who
lived just around the corner from Berta Antschel in Dartmouth Road and
knew Dutschke (in fact, Dutschke would come to stay with him in London
that autumn). Celan and Fried talked among other things about Israel
and left-wing anti-Semitism, so it seems likely that the West German
student movement was on Celan’s mind even before Dutschke was shot a day
later. The reference in the poem to magnolias, meanwhile, was probably
prompted by the trees in Mapesbury Road that would have been in bloom in
the spring when Celan was there and reminded him of his childhood in
Czernowitz (and also connects, via the Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit”,
to the murder of King).
An exhibition on the poem is also about to open at the Southbank Centre in London.
37 Mapesbury Road
Out of curiosity, I had a look at 37 Mapesbury Road, Oliver Sacks’ old home.
It is enormous, even for a large family. It is now the headquarters of
the British Association of Psychotherapists.
from http://jamespowney.blogspot.com/2010/09/37-mapesbury-road.html
or, Advice for Writers in the Age of Digital Orthography
In his book of aphorisms, One Way Street, published in 1928, Walter Benjamin has a remarkable premonition. ‘The typewriter’ he says, ‘will alienate the hand of the man of letters from the pen only when the precision of typographic forms has directly entered the conception of his books. One might suppose that new systems with more variable typefaces would then be needed. They will replace the pliancy of the hand with the innervation of commanding fingers.’ [p63-4]
This is exactly what started to happen with the advent of the desktop computer six decades later, and with the internet, email and the web, digital command extended into a virtual domain which even a prescient fellow like Benjamin couldn’t have imagined. Read more
I’ve started a new blog for snippets of news and items which interest me for one reason or another. You can find it here: Michael’s Digest.
Anyone who still thinks the privatisation of utilities was a good thing needs their head examined. When I moved back to London some three years ago, I elected to take both gas and electricity from British Gas. Sometime later, must have been when new neighbours moved in upstairs, EDF came along and somehow took over my gas account without asking. At first I didn’t realise. When I did, it took a good deal of effort to get it corrected (including writing to my MP). Read more
Aix-en-Provence, 1995
It’s the first time that a General Election in the UK has seen a televised leaders’ debate, and the unforeseen result has unsettled the political establishment by providing Nick Clegg with a visibility which previously evaded him. The resulting boost for the Liberal Democrats in the opinion polls seems to have sustained itself, and everyone is preparing for a hung parliament. The two big parties are running scared, the hidden establishment are laying in plans to maintain the stability of the pound. The media pundits are enjoying their own bewilderment, outdoing themselves with speculation on what a hung parliament would mean. Read more
