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For me the best set at the North Sea Jazz Festival this year was the one featuring McCoy Tyner. I've been unable to find out where else in the UK he's playing, but on November 3 he's in Manchester at the Royal Northern College of Music. Don't miss the chance to see and hear him if you're within reasonable travelling distance. Get this recent album if you want a sample.
The something here is Gloria Salt's new blog Apropos of Nothing. Go check it out. You'll find a picture of Gloria looking pensive, and there are also dunes. The concerns of the blog are advertised so:
Ruminations on life, love and politics from an American-Israeli domestic sensualist.Amongst Gloria's first few posts this one, on two different scenarios following the Gaza withdrawal, attracted attention.
Round at Butterflies and Wheels, Ophelia has taken me to task for arguing (against David Goodhart) that human rights are more than just a matter of social convention. In one of her comments on the thread that follows, there's the suggestion that to believe this is to assume that human rights are a reality independent of anything we think and do, in the way that 'ribs or eyes' are - or to add my own examples to Ophelia's, just like trees or rocks.
But this wasn't my meaning, and from a subsequent email exchange between us it would appear that the disagreement, if there still is one, isn't as great as at first appeared. Ophelia has added an update to register that, but I'm posting this follow-up all the same in order to clarify what I do and don't think about the matter.
Between being merely conventional and being a reality altogether independent of human conception and action there are other possibilities. Note that what I said in my criticism of David Goodhart wasn't that human rights are not a matter of convention but that they are not merely that:
There's a sense in which all concepts are social constructs, but that doesn't necessarily mean - though it sometimes does mean - that what the concepts refer to are merely a matter of convention, of moral and cultural context, or what have you.The contrast I then went on to spell out was not one between human rights as natural objects, like ribs or rocks, and human rights as the product of social agreement; it was between the rights that people possess because of some particular status or membership, and those they possess just in virtue of being human beings.
To think that there are rights of the latter kind, I do not have to think either that they grow on trees (or can be dug out of the ground) or that they are purely a product of the social and political consensus in which they are recognized. I can think - and indeed do think - that, recognized, codified and enforced by communities as they may be, they are nonetheless also the expression of something underlying, and more basic than, the ideas of those communities; they are the expression of - or they embody - the fundamental interests of human beings in virtue only of the kind of beings human beings are. Put otherwise, what we have come to categorize as fundamental human rights embody and seek to protect the core interests that human beings share because of their human nature, all cultural specificities notwithstanding.
To believe in human rights as the expression or embodiment of universal human needs and interests, I don't have to believe that they are God-given - and I don't, and can't, believe this, not believing in the existence of any God who could have given them. But neither am I bound to think that human rights are merely a social construct or convention in the sense that David Goodhart specified: a privilege only of people belonging to communities in which those rights are upheld. I can think that as well as US or British or Italian or Indian citizens, Iraqis during the time of Saddam's regime and Zimbabweans today have rights against being tortured or murdered or made to starve to death. To hold that human rights are no more than social conventions leaves one intellectually defenceless against the (morally relativizing) argument that some particular group of people don't have the rights that we have because these are not part of their culture and/or the culture of those who oppress and kill them.
On quite another matter Andrew Anthony also writes (scroll down):
[A]s desperate as I was for England to win at Trent Bridge, I felt something worryingly close to ecstasy when Lee clean bowled Andrew Flintoff - and I bow to no man in my admiration of the greatest living Englishman.It was that kind of ball - not from hell, but from heaven:
Lee's delivery to dismiss Andrew Flintoff had cut back off the pitch and clipped the top of off stump before the all rounder could move a muscle.
Andrew Anthony explores some of the unprincipled compromises two well-known politicians of the left have been willing to make - as concessions, he argues, to religion. He writes:
[T]here are limits to political flexibility, and just now it's almost breathtaking to witness how often those limits are transgressed... nowadays it's quite common to see people expressing two irreconcilable opinions at the same time. And, invariably, the cause of this schism is a form of belief that has been granted a privileged place in debate, beyond rationalism and beyond argument: religionHe goes on to examine some of the recent positions of George Galloway and Ken Livingstone (who, incidentally, now faces a disciplinary hearing to determine whether he has breached the Greater London Authority Code of Conduct). In connection with the piece by Adam Curtis I mentioned below, Anthony notes:
Yesterday, Adam Curtis, the documentary film-maker, suggested that it was vital to distinguish between the political ideas of Islamism and the murderous beliefs of a "genuinely destructive minority". This makes sense, but only insofar as it makes sense to draw a distinction between the political ideas of fascism and those minority of fascists who turn to terror. However, it flies in the face of logic to say that there is no link between the two.
Adam Curtis, who previously gave us the thesis that politicians were falsely exploiting popular fear - falsely in that what we were going to be attacked by wasn't an organization but an idea, is today concerned to argue that we shouldn't get the wrong idea about what that idea is: it isn't Islamism, only a minority, terrorist, variant of it.
Coincidentally, on the same day in the International Herald Tribune, Professor Bassam Tibi traces links between jihadism, Islamism and Islam in a way that appears (to my inexpert eye, at least) to be less compartmentalized:
The jihadists are followers of the ideas of Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, who laid the foundations of Islamism as a political and military interpretation of Islam. Islamism aims not only to purify Islam but also to establish the "Nizam Islami," or Islamic order.(Thanks GW for the IHT link.)
... The intellectual father of jihadist Islamism, Sayyid Qutb, who was executed in Cairo in 1966, made the message crystal clear: Jihadism is a "permanent Islamic world revolution" aimed at decentering the West in order to establish "Hakimiyyat Allah," or God's rule, on a global scale.
Early Islamists honored Qutb's distinction between two steps, the local and the global, in the jihadist strategy: First topple secular regimes at home, and then move on to global jihad. What Al Qaeda has done is... to confuse the two steps in the jihadist strategy. This confusion continued to manifest itself in the terrorist attacks in Madrid and in London, because of the existence of a Muslim diaspora in Europe that has its own problems.
What can be done to counter jihadism? As a Muslim immigrant living in Europe, I wholeheartedly reject the idea of a "clash of civilizations." But it would be naïve to overlook the reality of an ongoing "war of ideas" - a struggle between global jihad and democratic peace as competing directions for the 21st century.
Instead of giving in to talk of a "clash of civilizations," what is needed is an alliance between Western supporters of democracy and enlightened Muslims against jihadist Islamists.
There's a piece by Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect in which he takes issue with Christopher Hitchens (among a number of writers who supported the war in Iraq). I find Meyerson's criticism of - and evident hostility towards - Hitchens less than scrupulous. He starts by seeming to allow that there might have been, in Hitchens's position, a certain case:
Hitchens' war pitted his comrades in the democratic Kurdish resistance and the Iraqi secular left against the fascist regime of Saddam Hussein - and today, against the murderous savagery of the Baath Party holdouts and Islamic fundamentalists. Were this the only aspect of the conflict, who on the left would not join Hitchens in his embrace of the war?Fair enough. Meyerson might have added here - to 'the democratic Kurdish resistance and the Iraqi secular left' - the great majority of the Iraqi people, no friends of the Baathist regime. But the line of thought is sufficiently generous to acknowledge that there were good reasons on the side of the war, before going on to suggest that there were other reasons against - and which for Meyerson himself must obviously have been more decisive. What happens next, however, is that, in Meyerson's representation, Hitchens can't simply have seen the balance of reasons stacked the other way than he did - as was the case for many of the rest of us who supported the war. No, it has to have been due to some malign element in Hitchens's thinking. And what this was was Marxism. Not just Marxism, but a Marxist inevitabilism which has been less and less popular with actual Marxists at least since the 1960s. After the above-quoted passage, Meyerson immediately continues:
To this analysis, Hitchens has appended what critic Irving Howe once called "the infatuation with History" through which some Marxists justified their support for numerous flawed causes. In Hitchens' Iraq, modernity and self-determination duel with primitivism and thugocracy, and History has ordained the outcome.There it is: 'History has ordained the outcome'. It is certainly the case that prominent for Christopher Hitchens in what is at stake in Iraq is a battle between modernity and anti-modernist, as well as anti-democratic, reaction. On the basis of his writing before the war, it is also accurate - and I'm relying on memory - to say that Hitchens expected things to go much better for the coalition than they have done. But I would be more than surprised if Meyerson could show, by an honest and integral referencing of Hitchens's writings, that the latter's expectations in Iraq were based on any Marxist-type belief in the inexorable movement of History, with a capital 'H' - a belief I doubt that Hitchens has ever held. Meyerson goes on to ascribe to him an indifference to the deaths of US soldiers. For Hitchens History's verdict, he says, 'makes right even the bad things that happen to good people'.
This is wretched stuff - yet one more demonstration, if such were needed, of how many opponents of the war have found it impossible to come to terms with the fact that a view different from their own could have been held for conscientious reasons. And all of them liberals and/or democrats to a man and even a woman. (Via Apostablog.)
A bit like us bloggers, cricket commentators feel they have to comment. So sometimes they say a bit more than they need to - a bit like us bloggers. One ought to indulge them, because all in all I reckon they do a pretty good job. (I particularly have in mind here the Channel 4 commentary team, who have been my source this summer when watching at home.) Still, this doesn't mean you can't have a laugh at some of the excess pearls of wisdom, like these (not necessarily exact) that I noted during the Trent Bridge Test. Geoffrey Boycott early after Australia had been asked to follow on:
The key thing from England's point of view is wickets; they need to get wickets.Tony Greig on one or other of the Australian batsman currently enjoying a less than successful summer:
The only way when you're going through a bad patch is to get out there in the heat of battle and make some runs.Greig again, in England's final innings, with the score at 57 for 2:
There's only one way Australia can win here: they've got to bowl 'em out, and bowl 'em out fast.On the other hand, there is the incomparable Richie Benaud, who rarely wastes a word - this one after Michael Clarke, having played with great caution and restraint, nibbled needlessly outside off-stump and was caught behind:
That's why bowlers exist, instead of sitting in the gutter waiting for a handout. Batsmen make mistakes.While on the subject of cricket punditry... there's something that has puzzled me about the last three Tests. England are winning because they have an outstandingly good bowling attack and a superb all-rounder in Andrew Flintoff, and because they've been well led. Three times in a row, however, Australia have shown, from positions that were all but lost, that they are capable of fighting to the last ditch - but only from a position already all but lost. That is, they have shown it too late. It suggests something wrong in their initial attitude this summer: perhaps a belief that they would always be able to turn things round. At Edgbaston they very nearly did; at Old Trafford they managed to save the game, just; and at Trent Bridge they caused England some serious worry when you wouldn't have expected it with so low a fourth innings target. But the desire not to lose seems only to have kicked in when the prospect of losing has become imminent. Maybe that's what Steve Waugh means by a lack of hunger.
Anyway, the better team has been winning, and if there's anything in the above it may even be good for Australian, as well as for English, cricket for Australia to lose the Ashes. In the way of these things, though, I'll be hoping they don't. Ponting needs to win the toss at The Oval. But will he? He's been made to pay in spades for his error at Edgbaston in not batting first. The fates may just have one more kick in the teeth saved up for him.
Well done, England - and here (courtesy of Tim Newman) is the splendid gesture referred to in this earlier post.
Via Mick, now back from his hols, WordCount:
WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness... [It] was designed with a minimalist aesthetic, to let the information speak for itself. The interface is clean, basic and intuitive.From WordCount you can learn that the word 'norm' comes in at 7055, and the word 'geek' at 66213. The word ranked in 25th place is 'but', and in 62nd place you'll find 'its'. You'll find 'find' in 198th spot and you'll spot 'spot' at 2081. Enough already. Or: he went mad and shot himself because he couldn't say 'espy "espy"' - 'espy' not being in the WordCount archive.
Sophie Hannah is a poet and novelist. She has won awards for her short stories and poetry, including first prize in the 2004 Daphne Du Maurier Festival Short Story Competition. In June 2004 she was chosen for the Next Generation poetry promotion as one of the best poets to emerge in the last decade. Next year Penguin will publish Sophie's Selected Poems and Hodder & Stoughton her first psychological crime novel, Little Face. A selection of her short stories, We All Say What We Want, will be published by Sort Of Books in 2007. Here Sophie discusses Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince.
Sophie Hannah on The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch is difficult to define or summarize, apart from as one of the most brilliant novels ever written. I pity anyone who has ever been assigned the task of writing a blurb for it. Like most of Murdoch's novels, it is almost impossible to 'blurb', in exactly the same way that real life would be. It's too eventful, too unpredictable, too absurd (in a good way), and it would make no sense when reduced to the skeleton of a storyline. The story sounds irrational unless you meet the characters, and the characters make no sense unless you're fully caught up in the textures and tones of the novel. Again, like many of Murdoch's novels, it is not neat. Her favourite subject matter is the muddles people get themselves into, so her novels typically involve a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and a lot of chaos, both practical and emotional. The Black Prince is no exception. Her writing is hectic and frenetic, but at the same time utterly controlled. No scene is too long, no detail superfluous.
The Black Prince is about love, betrayal, divided loyalties, friendship, rivalry, ambition and the heartbreaking ludicrousness of everyday life. Only at the end of the book does the reader discover that it's also a highly original mystery/crime novel. The narrator who has been leading us through events for nearly the whole book suddenly disappears, and several other characters in turn then narrate a short section. Each of these casts doubt upon everything we've been told by the main, original narrator. We know that someone has been murdered and someone is a murderer, but no definite solution is provided. The mystery remains unsolved, essentially, and it is up to the reader to decide which voice he or she wants to listen to. In the hands of almost any other writer, this sort of ambiguous, inconclusive conclusion would be irritating and feel like a cheat. But Murdoch manages to make it seem entirely right and proper, because by the time you get to the end, you believe in the world the book has created to such an extent that a neat ending would appear artificial. 'Oh, right,' you'd think. 'Suddenly she's just making stuff up.'
The Black Prince - again, like all Murdoch's fiction - seems at the same time to be very made up and not made up at all. A lot of people I've spoken to who don't like Murdoch's novels say that her created worlds (or world, rather, since all her characters seem to me to exist in the same one) are too strange and extreme, too unrealistic: characters fall in and out of love at breakneck speed, personalities seem to change from one page to the next, people behave in the most undignified and preposterous ways for reasons often so insubstantial or intensely personal that it is hard to identify with them.
I completely disagree with this point of view. Yes, it's true that in Iris Murdoch's books people fall in love in a matter of seconds and then, when it doesn't work out, fall in love equally quickly with someone else, someone they detested seven minutes earlier. And yes, the dialogue between the characters doesn't really resemble what most people would think of as realistic conversation. So on the surface Murdoch's characters might appear irrational, hysterical and over-the-top. But I believe that in many ways her portrayal of human beings is more realistic than other writers', ones whose books depict real life as it recognizably is on the surface. Murdoch's adherence to the truth about people and the world is far more stylized. Her dialogue is a chillingly accurate study in how people would speak if they did not feel obliged to mask their real, deranged psyches with the trappings of normality. Her characters might not speak as real people speak, but they certainly speak as real people think, in voices of need, strategic manipulation, desperation, insanity, contingency.
Another common criticism of Murdoch is that her characters are not likeable. But this is only true if you're a certain sort of reader, the sort that prefers writers pretty much to lie about what human beings are really like in order to make the reading public feel better about themselves and the world. In The Black Prince as in almost every other Murdoch novel, the characters are constantly screaming 'Never mind you; what about me?' to an audience of equally uncaring, self-absorbed people. In this sense, her fiction resembles the American sitcom Seinfeld, or Curb Your Enthusiasm, both also about how rewarding - and how hilarious - close relationships with needy, self-absorbed people can be once you recognize that those are the only sort of people. Murdoch's characters can be intensely irritating, insufferable even; they might make you cringe, but it is hard to dislike them once you see in their behaviour your own tendencies to behave ridiculously.
The Black Prince's hero, Bradley Pearson, falls, in an instant, insanely in love with Julian Baffin, the daughter of his best friend. After their meeting, once he's realised how much he loves her, he spends a while just lying on the floor in his house, with his face pressed into the carpet. He becomes so consumed with this unsuitable love that he completely neglects his equally self-obsessed suicidal sister, with tragic results. But, as always when I'm reading Murdoch's novels, I found it hard to blame or dislike him. The most terrible things can happen in an Iris Murdoch novel and the clear implication is that there's a certain inevitability about all of it, as if Murdoch is saying, 'This is the sort of pickle human beings will always get into, in their desperation to protect their frail egos and meagre lots in life.' And there is humour throughout, humour with a slightly manic edge, which suggests that really it is all desirable - the comedy and the tragedy; it's all better than a vision of life that's tidier, more well-behaved, sinister in its drabness.
The Black Prince is topped and tailed by a short introduction and conclusion by a mysterious fictional editor, P. Loxias. We never find out how he came to have this story in his possession, who he is or what his purpose is in the book, but it doesn't matter. Iris Murdoch, like God, knows more than we do.
[A list of the pieces that have appeared to date in this series, with the links to them, is here.]
