Ooooo, Big Waves

 

I'm no photographer but I snapped this image this morning down at the seafront in Benllech. Pretty cool eh? The prevailing winds mean that Benllech is generally a sheltered bay, but not today. I was half-way down the steps to the front and could venture no further - I even got an uplifting dousing in the sea-spray when a particulrly large wave crashed over the wall. Delicious.

As you will have gathered, I am here in Ynys Mon. I study best here and have been trying to get to grips with  the notion that Walter Bagehot was a nasty old racist. I won't bore you with the story but someone brighter than I am, put this notion in my head so it has to be tested. It troubles me, most notably in the context of Bagehot's Physics and Politics. I am reading a contentious tome that glories in the title, The Victorian Reinvention of Race: New Racisms and the Problem of Grouping in the Human Sciences, by Edward Beasley. He really has it in for my boy Walter. We all do it I know but Beasley ends up being reductivist. He is a better and more elegant writer than the Big Fat Pig but The Pig is nonetheless trying to mount a defence of the Boy Bagehot and, in the process, to rescue his doctoral thesis from the flames of redundancy. This is not simple when you are facing an opening paragraph as lucid (and thereby attractive) as Beasley's:

To classify the peoples of the world, we sometimes invent races. What I mean is that we cut the human continuum into discrete groups, each with a bilogical identity that we think of as passed down from one generation to the next.

Beasley goes on to throw Bagehot into the circle of Hell occupied by the French brute Gobineau. Check him out if you have a minute. Walter deserves better. 

Let us move to a more comfortable environment. I've been watching films again. This time it was something of a curiosity - The Sisters Brothers (available on iPlayer if you fancy it) - a beautifully mounted Western set in mid 1850s Oregon and California. I say it is a curious film because it has a lot going for it but somehow it fails to fire. Three of its four principal characters are played by Hollywood heavyweights. John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, and Jake Gyllenhaal are all excellent and matched by the not quite so stellar Riz Ahmed. All well and good. But somehow the movie can't make up its mind whether it is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or Unforgiven. The truth, I'm sure, is that it wants to be neither but to be itself. It is good but, in the end, the weight of the venerable genre pulls it down and it manages to be a good film from which a great one wants to escape. Its wistful ending is worth the effort. 66/100. Interesting to note that it attracted good reviews but bombed at the box office.