Quote of the Day: Adorno Series (4)

"For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live."
Theodor Adorno (1903-69)

The Bible, The Biography (1)

Whatever one's views on religion, this fascinating book provides considerable insight into one of the abiding dichotomies in human psychology — that some people see the wood while others can only spot the trees.

Karen Armstrong was briefly a member of a teaching order of Catholic nuns before ducking out of it as an undergrad. She has since become a leading academic voice in the field of "comparative religion", an admirable but probably pointless effort to demonstrate that we can all be made to see the trees.

Three pages in and the lapsed monja delivers the the eye-catching statement that "until the nineteenth century, very few people imagined that the first chapter of Genesis was a factual account of the origins of life," one of those over-broad and actually rather falsifiable historical generalisations - like 'before Colombus hardly anyone suspected that the world was spherical' - which here serves to announce her broader intention of taking on those perennial wood-seers, the fundamentalists, and perhaps also the very notion that all we can ask of the Bible is how much factual information it might contain.

She insists that the holy book's earliest writers and readers saw it as a handy gadget for assisting exegesis, then considered "a spiritual discipline rather than an academic pursuit." Their goal was a glimpse of transcendence, the so-called coincidentia oppositorum, an ecstatic sense of wholeness.

Students of comparative religion will no doubt thus start pondering whether Eastern and Western spiritual traditions can be reconciled as easily as the wood and the trees. But then they might also recall that this is a Latin term deriving from Platonism, itself not to be taken up once more by Western monotheists until Christendom's re-encounter with ancient wisdom via Islamic scholarship...but Armstrong isn't really interested in these sort of historical niceties.

She explains that the ancient Israelites appear to have had two separate monarchies each with its own scriptural tradition. Israel called its principal deity Elohim, while Judah in the south referred to Him as Yahweh. The former presided over a more 'transcendent' kind of religion but was ultimately to be ousted by Yahweh as chairman of the Divine Assembly. "But the Bible shows that right up to the destruction of the temple by Nebudchadnezzar in 586BC Israelites also worshipped a host of other deities", Armstrong asserts. These included the fertility god Baal and his sister-spouse Anat, agricultural experts who effectively compensated for Yahweh's over-specialisation in the martial arts.

And, Fundamentalists please note, Genesis wasn't the part of the Bible that was written first.

After the destruction of the temple a priest (or maybe en entire new school of priests) emerged that scholars have dubbed "P". He revised the Israelites' concept of God to permit Him to reside wherever his people were, and not just in a purpose-built place of worship. Unlike the Deuteronomists before him P's religious vision was inclusive with a strong stress on reconciliation.

Armstrong feels that P deliberately contrasted Yahweh's creation of the cosmos with that of Marduk, God of the then gloatingly victorious Babylonians. Instead of creation emerging from conflict - and needing to be renewed annually - P insisted that it was all done and dusted in six days.

Creation myths had a practical value for the Bible-bashers of antiquity, Armstrong advises, tending to be recited at the start of the new year or when individuals undertook a new project. "In the ancient world cosmogony was a therapeutic rather than a factual genre". There she goes again.

More to follow....

Maya Deity of the Day: Ixchel

In modern representations Ixchel is usually sensualised. However, the Maya themselves liked to depict her as a hideous old crone crowned by a snake.

The confusion of identities persists to this day. It would seem that the classic Maya moon goddess was more often represented as a young and fertile woman, so Ixchel, as seen here, was probably associated principally with the waning moon, which the Maya like to describe as "our grandmother".

Diego de Landa referred to her as "the goddess of making babies," and we can today ascertain that Ixchel was venerated for her role in midwifery and other kinds of practical healthcare...and divination.

Las Casas relates a myth from Verapaz in which Ixchel and her hubbie Itzamná, have thirteen sons, two of which (corresponding to the Howler Monkey Gods) go on to create heaven and earth. In another she runs off with the king of the vultures and he has to enter his rival's palace in disguise in order to retrieve her.

In the 16th century Cortés discovered that Cozumel had become a major centre of goddess worship and the stack of feminine idols found on another nearby island by Hernández de Córdoba, led to it being christened Isla Mujeres.

Chekhov's Stories (1): Enemies

This story is about the generation of an emnity between two men. For one it is fleeting and personal, but for the other it is more general and will last for the remainder of his life.

At the start we are taken into the home of a doctor called Kirolov just after his only child has died from diptheria. A man called Abogin appears and insists that the doctor follow him back to his house to treat his wife, a woman he claims is close to death herself.

As a writer two things appealed to me most of all about this tale. Firstly Chekhov waited before presenting us with descriptions of both men, playing quite subtly with assumptions his readers might already have made. Secondly, the story demonstrates how a single event can have a superficially similar, but ultimately very different impact on the lives of two characters.

When asked, I usually cite Joseph Conrad as my favourite author. But in spite of the fact that I have a long unrealised plan to re-read Victory, it has been over a decade since I picked up one of the old sea dog's novels. While Anton Chekhov is nominally one spot down at No2 within this private canon, I do keep coming back to his wonderful stories. (Quite possibly because they are short!). This blog post series will cover my latest re-immersement...

Quote of the Day: Adorno Series (3)

"The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings. Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense."
Theodor Adorno (1903-69)

[But then this is also the man who claimed that "He who integrates is lost".]

Eden Lakeview

Talking of Salman Rushdie...I have recently been pondering how it remains — just about — acceptable to construct a formulaic thriller or horror movie around the fears flowing out of those ever prickly issues of class and race, but only someone with a death-wish would develop a script based on a particular treatment of religious conservatism. 

Consider this prototype plot - 'Honour Killing' —  in which a young Bangladeshi girl is left for dead in a London canal, crawls out covered in gunk, and then systematically revenges herself on a dozen close family members. There would be a particularly nasty scene in a Balti House kitchen....

I'd soon be nominated for Best Fatwah wouldn't I? No amount of postmodern irony would get me out of it.

Still, the notion that even the most loosely benevolent ethos can end up cloaked in cultural bigotry is one that I might one day have the coyoles to explore creatively. 

The Zoroastrians might make excellent base material for this. There are only 200,000 of them left and I doubt whether many are armed and out here in Guatemala. For every one that is born, four die. 

In fact, that could be my strapline! 

Quote of the Day

At a dinner party that will forever be green in the memory of those who attended it, somebody was complaining not just about the epic badness of the novels of Robert Ludlum but also about the badness of their titles. (You know the sort of pretentiousness: The Bourne Supremacy, The Aquitaine Progression, The Ludlum Impersonation, and so forth.) Then it happily occurred to another guest to wonder aloud what a Shakespeare play might be called if named in the Ludlum manner. At which point Salman Rushdie perked up and started to sniff the air like a retriever. "O.K. then, Salman, what would Hamlet's title be if submitted to the Ludlum treatment?" "The Elsinore Vacillation," he replied—and I find I must stress this—in no more time than I have given you. Think it was a fluke? Macbeth? "The Dunsinane Reforestation." To persist and to come up with The Rialto Sanction and The Kerchief Implication was the work of not too many more moments."
Christopher Hitchens writing in Vanity Fair.

Burn After Reading

Ideally somewhere between Newbury and Swindon...as the gags back in Britain go. 

"Not so much a movie as a guest list," concluded Mark Kermode, but then he doesn't really rate The Big Lebowski either. 

Perhaps some of the characters here are a bit too sketchy and the plot somewhat roughly assembled, but the star cast does in fact adequately compensate for this - and I don't see why that should necessarily be notched up as a defect. (Clooney is goofily entertaining and McDormand almost moving, but Pitt over-eggs it a bit.)

We ended up feeling this was a more subtle and substantial movie than many of the critics have allowed. That's not to say there isn't a better one trapped inside it - the theme I'd have liked to see developed in a slightly more mature fashion was that of how members of the 'intelligence' community end up acting on incorrect assumptions and mis-comprehended information. 

Grade: B+

Well Hedged

On the one hand Professor Niall Ferguson suggests that the de-coupling of 'Chimerica' may be hastened by the Credit Crunch leading to a post-American world faster than anyone had anticipated. All three of his conditions for conflict in the twentieth century now apply in our own: an empire in decline, ethnic disintegration and economic instability.

On the other hand he notes that America remains the global centre of innovation, has always managed to rely on strong leadership in hard times and historically the rest of the world always seems to suffer more even when the crisis originates in the US.

As far as the fate of the world goes, I'm back with the optimists these days. Indeed it is my New Year's resolution to stay that way as long a possible in 2009! This is partly because I've seen that many of the people doing all the doom-saying right now are Johnny-come-latelies to ardent pessimism; they are in fact the same people who were being defiantly optimistic back in late 2007 when I was offloading all my equities. (At least Nouriel Roubini is a mighty consistent downer.)

There's a good deal of gloating going on about the likely edging out of both neocons and neolibs from Western political and economic life, but those two groups' most trenchant enemies appear, oddly enough, to have largely internalised some of the neos faultier tenets - such as "money makes the world go round" and "America is an imperial power".

There are cultural factors in play here which many of those predicting the doom of the dollar are failing to pick up on. Britain no longer has an empire yet Greenwich remains the centre of global time. Likewise the Dollar and the English Language remain important standards of convenience worldwide and the Internet gives both an important edge in the globalised world.

Most Latin American countries have a love-hate relationship with the unfortunately-named Washington Consensus, but those that have consolidated democracy, cut back on trade barriers and simplified the red tape choking their economies have gone on to benefit from greater prosperity. I don't see China displacing America and the wider West down here any time soon.

Quote of the Day: Adorno Series (2)

"Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength."
Theodor Adorno (1903-69)

TV Viewing Diary: Dog Whisperer

In almost all cases it's the owners who need to be taken out and shot...but in this Animal Planet series self-styled pack leader and Culiacanero Cesar Millan provides a good deal of free therapy via canine surrogates. Compulsive viewing!

The Transporter 3

Fans of the homoerotic high-kicking of Jean-Claude Van Damme and the environmentally-concerned plotlines of Steven Siegal, have only Jason "Im not the gay" Statham to console themselves with these days.

This movie is fairly watchable - but not especially listenable - because almost all the cast, Statham included, could do with subtitles.

Perhaps Luc Besson will be invited to script the next 007 movie, because Transporter 3, baddish as it is, is nowhere near as bad as Quantum of Solace. On the one hand you get props like the exploding bracelets which look like cast-offs from Blake's 7, but then you also get the highly ingenious set piece where Frank Martin refloats both his lungs and his Audi after driving off a bridge into a lake.

Anyway, you get what you'd expect from a director called Olivier Megaton...

Grade: B

8th Biggest

This graphic from The Economist disguises the fact that most of Brazil's output is the crappy C-grade stuff, not the gourmet beans we grow here.

The accompanying article notes that, perhaps surprisingly, more coffee is drunk in Germany and Japan than in France and Italy.

Slumdog Millionaire

The poster above would have SO put me off, but Danny Boyle's latest offering turned out to be one of the most enjoyable films I've seen since starting this blog back in 2003.

It may have the most exhilarating musical ensemble ending since Zatoichi, but the first half hour of the "feel good film of the decade" features extended scenes of torture, a child being blinded with acid and another taking a dip in a pool of shit. Indeed, while the underlying structure is a traditional rags-to-riches fairytale, fans of films like Bride and Prejudice will probably be getting a far grittier portrait of modern India than they might have expected. So gritty in fact I could just imagine the groans of those poor beleaguered folk at the Mumbai Tourist Office...

The conceit of Vikas Swarup's novel is that a call centre assistant called Jamal is under interrogation by some rather unpolished officers of the law, having got to within one question of winning the big prize on India's version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? The cops assume he has cheated; a 'slumdog' couldn't possibly know all the answers. But by cutting back to excerpts from the show and from Jamal's life experiences in the 'real India', we begin to see how 'it is written' that he will get both the money, and the girl.

V did make me laugh though when she noted that Jamal had clearly failed to turn up at the railway station at the end with a suitcase full of Rupees and that "where's the bloody money?" would have been the most appropriate line at that point from Latika (The movie's love interest, who hails from Mumbai, and not in fact Costa Rica!)

I can't imagine that there will be many better movies in 2009.

Grade: A

Eden Lake

Superbly disturbing oikophobic British horror movie in which a pair of fairly standard Claphamites head off to a flooded quarry for a romantic summer weekend, which duly degenerates the moment they find themselves chafing against the feral instincts of a pack of unhuggable hoodies.

The influence of the rednecks in the woods horror genre from the States, where the kids are bad but the parents are worse, is plainly felt.

Grade A-

Quote of the Day: Adorno Series (1)

"The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own."

Theodor Adorno (1903-69)

I told you so...

Says Professor Niall Ferguson.  

His new book The Ascent of Money was plugged by Ed Vaizey (OP) recently on BBC Parliament's BookTalk and I'm definitely tempted to get hold of a copy later in the year. 

I only caught two episodes of the accompanying Channel 4 series which appeared to have been hastily re-edited after the events of the late Autumn on Wall Street. 

Ferguson is famously a counter-factual historian - building his analysis of major world upheavals from what-if scenarios, such as the notion that Europe might have done a lot better for itself if Britain and Germany had avoided such a head-on conflict in 1914. 

The marriage of economic convenience between Britain's empire (then rather nicely plugged into China) and German manufacturing was the pinnacle of the first great era of globalisation and it all fell apart when some Balkan loon whacked Archduke Ferdinand. 

Now we have Chimerica, explained Ferguson in Part 6 - a system whereby China saves using US Dollar Treasury Bonds which keeps itc currency weak and its products cheap for American consumers, who meanwhile have (or had) access to one of the largest sources of easy credit in economic history. 

In Part 4 Prof. Ferguson had been not so much counterfactual as not-all-the-factual, something I was taught very early on at Cambridge was the greatest sin a historian could commit. An episode that would supposedly explain why insurance doesn't really work in truly exceptional moments of crisis and disaster went off on an extended ideological gripe about welfare spending. 

Ferguson rather too blithely permitted the 'Chicago Boys' their moral compromise with Pinochet's murderous regime in Chile, failing to point out that a) the Friedmanites' policy's led to the biggest banking clusterfuck since, well, now...and b) that it was the series of consecutive socialist administrations that have followed the reintroduction of democracy in Chile which have really consolidated the 'economic miracle' there. 

It was Professor G.R. Elton who greeted the '86 intake of historians at Cambridge with a valedictory speech detailing his long fight against ideologues in the faculty. Historians' job was not to generate new theory through a selective gathering of the facts, but rather to make sure that theories developed elsewhere were exposed to the maximum number of historical facts in order that complex, muddled reality would always triumph over simplistic models (such as Marxism, his own great bugbear!). 

Ferguson himself concluded his series with the suggestion that the 'Quants' - those fiendishly clever mathematical types dedicated to predicting future market movements  - are prone to basing their prognostications on their own, inevitably limited, experience of the past.  As a result many were chewing on roast black swan this Christmas...

Cat facts...and mysteries (3)

19.7% of Guatemalans profess to dislike them - nearly twice the number that claim to hate snakes.

Quote of the Day

"One consequence of the financial crisis will inevitably be capital outflows from developing countries. The necessary corollary of capital outflows is trade surpluses. Without running a trade surplus no country can consistently support capital outflows...This is just another way of saying that a lot of developing countries that had been running trade deficits will soon be, if they aren’t already, running trade surpluses. Instead of contributing their net demand to the world economy, as they had via their trade deficits, they will now be contributing their net supply...This will not help the world imbalances. The biggest contributors of net demand are the US and non-Germany Europe, and both of these regions are seeing a rapid decline in their net demand contribution (i.e. their trade deficits are expected to shrink). To adjust to this decline the world needs new sources of net demand or else global production must contract sharply via factory closings and rising unemployment. But the largest net supply country, China, is increasing its export of net supply (its trade surplus has been rising) while several trade deficit countries in Asian and elsewhere are switching to trade surplus or otherwise trying to reduce their deficits...This cannot be sustainable. We cannot expect production to rise while consumption declines except if it comes with a dangerous rise in forced investment (also known as inventory). The crisis cannot even begin to be considered in its final stages until this issue is resolved."
Michael Pettis, Professor at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management.

Quote of the Day

Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary