Hemingway

I've not long finished reading A Farewell to Arms and have to admit that I fell for the lucid power of Hemingway's prose. The style is sparse but evocative and the product of a profoundly masculine experience. And that is, of course, the problem - even allowing for the strictures of Barthes in The Death of the Author (which properly posits that an author has no sovereignty over his/her words) it is near impossible to read Hemingway without being affected by his acknowledged brutisness. This is particularly so if one has just seen (and if you haven't you really must - it's on iPlayer) Ken Burns' typically magisterial documentary on the writer's life. Hemingway was a bit of a pig, particularly to his women. He loved bull-fighting, big game hunting, and alcohol. None of this makes him acceptable to modern sensitivities. But good old Barthes had a point - put your preconceptions aside and admire the quality of the writing. 

RWC Bulletin 9

Simply the best

Not that much need be said really. The two best teams (notwithstanding Scotland's peculiar ill luck) have reached the final and that game will be refereed by the best referee. So good luck to Australia, to New Zealand and to Nigel Owens. May they between them conspire to give the world a game it can cherish, to the benefit of my precious sport.

I had some hunches before the tournament, most of which have been wide of the mark. I always feared that England would lose to Wales and I near as dammit knew Wales would lose to Australia, but I figured that England would beat Australia and that Wales would be eliminated to nurse yet another persecution complex. As it turned out Australia produced one of the three seminal performances of the competition to floor England and England went out because they were too stupid/arrogant (take your pick) to kick a goal against Wales. The other two seminal achievements? Japan's heroics against South Africa and the All Black evisceration of the poor old French.

My other wayward hunches: Ireland went out tamely and were feebler than I had predicted; Argentina have taken a meaningful step forward in their method - I hadn't seen that coming, probably because I wasn't looking very closely.

The final? Really can't call it. New Zealand are the better team but it is difficult not to admire what Cheika has done with his Australian team and David Pocock is my player of the tournament. One to watch rather than bet on. Enjoy.

By the way I have discovered the joys of Spotify and am currently listening to 10cc's back catalogue. Nice. I will be breaking away shortly to try to get my head around Bourdieu's The Field of Cultural Production. Will the Boy Bourdieu be able to hold a philsophical candle to my favourite Frenchman, Roland Barthes? I wouldn't bet on that either. Cheery bye.

Bagehot And Problematic Presentism

What we might still attempt to do in this current conjuncture to offset this historicizing reflex is to begin the difficult labor of creating a discourse on modernity that speaks to the world, one centered principally in understanding the history of our present as the unity of uneven temporalizations differentiating global geopolitical space, rather than merely affirming or cheering on a globalizing project that sees the world only as the true space of the commodity relation.    Harry Harootunian 

Which I think you'd agree is a pretty mind-boggling sentence. My brain has today been trying to unravel this ontological ball of wool whilst also thinking about Shakespeare, Bagehot (yes them again), and the conflict of presentism and non-contemporaneous contemporaneities. The conclusion of all this unfocused thinking is that it's a funny old world that defies easy analysis. As if you hadn't figured that out for yourself.

Did Bagehot anticipate modern presentist criticism? Would he care? Is presentist criticism in fact nothing more than old criticism dressed in post-modern clothing? I have previously (mischievously) advertised myself as a post-structuralist - that sentiment being based on seeing a photograph of a very cool looking Roland Barthes smoking a vast cigar. I must now disavow that school and align myself with a division of criticism I have invented for myself. Ladies and gentlemen I give you Fluid Presentism. Or is it Multi-Layered Historicism? Or Multiple Contemporaneous Materialism?

Sod it. I give up. Put it this way - I like Shakespeare and I like Bagehot and I think each has something interesting to say about the other. All I now have to do is say this in eighty thousand or so original words and then you can call me doctor. Don't hold your breath.

Titus Andronicus And Professional Wrestling

I drove on clear roads at relatively high pace in my precious Jag from home to Stratford-upon-Avon. I walked between the raindrops toward the theatre but deviated to buy a bag of chips which I then ate as I walked by the river. I disposed of the chip paper responsibly. Thus fortified I entered the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and enjoyed a glass of white in the bar before I took up my standing position in the Swan auditorium - my ticket had cost all of £5. The programme contained an article by the matchless Jonathan Bate and the show in question was my old favourite Titus Andronicus. Professor Bate has these wise words,

Critics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could not cope with such incongruity. Its affront to stylistic decorum  was thought to be on a par with the play's shocking lack of respect for the principle of poetic justice, in which the evil are punished and the good. are duly rewarded. In our time, though, we have become sceptical about easy divisions between good and evil, black and white. 

Perhaps this modern scepticism explains the success not only of this RSC revival but also the National Theatre's recent revisiting of the misanthropic Timon of Athens. Two under-performed plays which catch the disenchanted Cameroon zeitgeist. And this thought leads me, as these things often do, to professional wrestling and the works of Roland Barthes. All of this was brought into plain sight on television this morning as I watched Daniel Bryan launch himself over the ropes onto the conveniently assembled Shield before springing back into the ring to pin Randy Orton.

Then these same people wax indignant because wrestling is a stage-managed sport (which ought, by the way, to mitigate its ignominy). The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees. (Barthes, Mythologies, 1957, trans Lavers 1984)

So, put plainly I enjoyed this Titus thanks to a cocktail of a fast car, some fast food, some English criticism, some French philosophy and some American grapple. It's good to be back.

Bloody Students

Student unrest is back! The spirit of '68 lives! Well that's probably a bit strong but nice to see the streets of London paved with spotty protestors again after all these years. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11726822 Quite takes me back to the days (well day really) when I marched under the NUS banner through the streets of that London. I was telling some of the youngsters at university about it and it reminded me just how far we have come in the three decades that separate my two degree courses.

Now nobody has ever called me a socialist and lived to tell the tale but I took to the streets back then in support of the NUS campaign for full grants for all students, regardless of means. Grants, yes bloody grants. They used to pay us to go to university and the amount you got depended on how rich your folks were. Never mind fees, we didn't have to worry about those. No, we got a grant to live on. Oh and we were taught in groups that could be managed without crowd control skills. A golden age? That would be a tad strong but it does make you think doesn't it. My thought process back then at the dawn of Thatcherism (befuddled of course by the drink I bought with my grant) was something like this:

• public funding of  further education was a good thing, a privilege which some of us abused but one worth preserving
• public funding should be applied even-handedly - we were old enough to vote and to fight in wars and it was insulting to be rewarded/punished for the poverty/wealth of our parents 
• a social contract existed which conferred on me certain privileges which came with matching reponsibilities. Quite possibly this last one was rather old-fashioned and Pooterish of me but it was how I had been brought up, also incidentally how my (state) education encouraged me to behave 

Which of these doesn't hold up today? I'm serious please tell me, and also tell me why we can't have a sane debate about precisely how many people we want to pay to go university (if any - I'm persuadable on this point I suspect). Current political debate is intellectually bereft which really is a bugger given how many of the people in it have had a university education. The whole issue makes me very sad. Does anyone other than me talk of a social contract any more? Is it the same as the Boy Cameron's bloody Big Society?

There is hope despite all this bollocks. I thought as much as I left the pub at lunch time after an illuminating chat about all sorts of guff but mostly about why I am now a post-structuralist having come out of my radical feminist phase, which, let's face it, lasted longer than anyone expected. I've never been a marxist so maybe I should give that a go as well, particularly since it is now so unfashionable. That Roberts, what are we going to do with him eh? I'm the only man who drifts leftwards as he gets older. We finish with another question - who is that in the picture? He's my new hero. A gift voucher for the Overgraduate gift shop for the first correct answer.