One Last Bit Of Quotable Stuff

Now you know well enough that this a misleading title, because there will always be stuff that I feel I have to share with you, for my own good, even if not for yours. But I shall relent for a few days in case I am risking overload - only after first sharing with you another bit of C.H. Sisson (I know, I know, my admiration for this Bagehotphobe is perhaps bad for my academic soul) culled from The Case of Walter Bagehot:

Economics used to be called Political Econmy, and has lost the adjective in the search for scientific status. But political it remains, like the behavioural sciences at large, which are sciences only in a large, old fashioned sense, whatever may be the claims of their academic exponenents, scrambling for the most profitable description in order to get a full share of the money flowing into universities.

Now that was written in 1972 but if I'd said that now I'd be pretty chuffed with myself. Provocative yes, but illuminated by more than a glimmer of truth. 

Quotable Stuff

In my eclectic reading over the past week there has been a surfeit of stuff that had me thinking, yes he's got a point there, possibly wrong but there's an arguable point to it.

First up is my favourite member of the commentariat, Rod Liddle, Milwall fan and provocateur. In this week's Spectator on the topic of the lockdown (of which he is broadly a supporter):

The notion that we might end up kindlier, greener, gentler as a consequence of our brush with this ineffectual Armageddon was always horribly misplaced. The only lasting impact will be that reform of the cumbersome and often fantastically inept National Health Service will be off the cards in perpetuity and instead we will probably still be forced to kneel down before it every Thursday evening to give praise, clutching a used face mask in lieu of a rosary.

Next, my favourite denigrator of all things Bagehot whose lucid vitriol when it comes to my old mate Walter has even me thinking again. This, from his one hundred and forty page rant against Bagehot The Case of Walter Bagehot, is C.H. Sisson:

The central object of Bagehot's writing - and it is a destructive one - was to give exclusive respectability to the pursuit of lucre, and to remove whatever social and intellectual impediments stood in the way of it. Intellectual pursuits, and whatever strives in the direction of permanence and stillness, have to give way to the provisional and divisive incitements of gain. In the end one is left contemplating numbers over a great void. 

Finally from Waugh's Officers and Gentlemen, the arrestingly crafted summary of Guy Crouchback's private desolation occasioned by the entry of Russia into the war:

It was just such a sunny, breezy Mediterranean day two years before when he read of the Russo-German alliance, when a decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason, when the Enemy was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off; the modern age in arms. Now that hallucination was dissolved.

I am not, of course, at all sure where I am going with all of this but I take mild comfort in the fact I am in my inefficient way still trying to get somewhere.  

Writers Write - Good Writing Has Its Own Necessity

By way of haphazard research I find myself reading a collection of C.H. Sisson articles, Anglican Essays. I say haphazard because I first came across Sisson because of his elegant but deeply felt animosity towards the work of Walter Bagehot. These very Anglican essays leave poor old Walter out of it. If you want to see Walter condemned then search out Sisson's The Case of Walter Bagehot.

Anyway here is a bit of Sisson that damns a lack of felicity in the written word. He puts it so well that you find yourself scared to go back to writing:

But these are large claims, and Good is a dangerous thing to be sure you are Doing. Moreover, good writing has its own necessity, a humble one no doubt, but even a divine should think carefully before he asserts that he is excused from it.

US poster

 Enough of this. Let me tell you about a nice film, underrated by the critics I think. Released here as The Perfect Catch, it is in fact (and as it was released in the USA) the americanised version of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch. As with the earlier film of Hornby's High Fidelity the change of continent does no harm, indeed in the case of The Perfect Catch the switch from football to baseball adds to the fun - Boston's miraculous season in 2004 being intrinsically more dramatic even than Arsenal's 1989 league title. 77/100. 

I'm Only Saying

a good thing

I'm only saying that I think Salman Rushdie is a good thing. I find him difficult to read but the whole fatwa business and his survival of it is a parable of western decency in the face of infantile religiosity. There's plenty of infantile westernism and religious decency to keep the books balanced elsewhere but I just thought I should say.

And of course something else which is a good thing is red cabbage, a portion of which I had with belly pork for dinner yesterday. Mm,  Mmmm. Washed down with Ned sauvignon blanc since you ask. In Four Oaks that's bloody close to rock n' roll.

I refereed a game of rugby yesterday. One sided but players from both sides seemed to have got something out of it and were kind enough to thank me. I didn't have a great game but nor did I have a bad one - I've been around and in rugby a long time now and I'm actually a pretty good judge of these things. I wasn't bad. So why was the winning coach so carping? I've thought about this a bit and I'm afraid there is a problem with the modern phenomenon of the nomadic professional coach - he has to be seen to find fault as a means of demonstrating to his employers that he knows oh so much more than the poor old referee. He feels an ownership of the game which in truth he does not enjoy. The game belongs to its participants and these sorts of coach are not participants, rather they feel themselves above the game, puppet masters. Now not everyone is like this, indeed there are glorious exceptions whose considered criticism I welcome. But there is just a tendency favouring the blustering rootless nomad which obliterates another little beauty spot on the lovely flawed face of the most wonderful game. I'm only saying ... haven't got an answer. Ah well.

C.H. Sisson -
a good thing

As I have previously said, there ain't half been some clever bastards (lucky bleeders, lucky bleeders) (well Ian Dury said/sang it of course) and another one has crossed my radar - C. H. Sisson, poet, translator, Anglican, very high Tory and arch despiser of my mate Walter Bagehot whom he rather marvellously termed ' the founding father of the apologetics of "fact". ' Now my problem is that I can see where Sisson was coming from in hating the apologetics of "fact" (for which look no further please than the usurpation by the technocracy of Italian sovereignty), but I'm not sure poor old Walter should get all the blame for starting us down that road. But it always is the damnedest thing when people cleverer than you start disagreeing with you. I'm only saying.

An early example of Sisson's art:

A Death

We dare not mourn
And will not look upon the face of the dead
Our inattention turns
Away the head
Our inattention spurns
Grief, love and death.