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My left-handers' XI

A feature in today's Graun on left-handers in sport brings home to me a dereliction on my part: I have never picked a Test XI composed entirely of lefties. I have offered XIs of both writers and philosophers. There was also the Feuerbach XI. And my friend Bob selected a team of food-related cricketers. But an XI of Test left-handers - this has been sadly neglected. I make amends below.

I have confined myself to cricketers who played after the Second World War, which means that I've seen all of them play, most of them in the flesh, one or two only on TV. I had better say also that this is my XI, and you may not judge it to be the best one possible under the above - postwar - constraint. One selection here may be particularly controversial. But you are free to pick your own left-handers' XI, as I hope, indeed, you will.

1. Graeme Smith (South Africa)
2. Trevor Goddard (South Africa)
3. Graeme Pollock (South Africa)
4. Brian Lara (West Indies)
5. Allan Border (Australia)
6. Gary Sobers (West Indies)
7. Clive Lloyd (West Indies - capt)
8. Adam Gilchrist (Australia - wk)
9. Alan Davidson (Australia)
10. Wasim Akram (Pakistan)
11. Derek Underwood (England)

The disputable selection here is Trevor Goddard. There are plenty of left-handed opening batsmen with a much better batting average than he had. But Goddard also took 123 Test wickets at an average of 26.22 and, with Adam Gilchrist coming in at number 8, this team is not short of batting. David Gower can be twelfth man.

Global jazz

The second International Jazz Day takes place on April 30 this year, featuring musicians from all over the world. Leading up to that is the whole month, which has been designated Jazz April: 'Whoever you are, wherever in the world you live, there's a way for you to help spread the word about jazz...' As the man (Ken Burns) said:

Jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities.

It's also great music. In April I shall be listening to (even) more jazz. (Thanks: DA.)

Bach in the world

Telling us that it's now possible to get the recordings of nearly every note that J.S. Bach composed - 'the equivalent of 155 CDs' - on one USB memory stick, Richard Morrison writes (£):

For some people he is a conduit straight to God - or at least a means of experiencing, vicariously, an extraordinary spiritual uplift, even if you aren't religious. Others marvel at his unearthly genius for counterpoint.

He (Morrison) also tells that Bach used to smuggle girls into his organ loft, a fact to be relayed tomorrow in 'Bach: A Passionate Life' on BBC2. A combination of the sublime and the down to earth, if I may so express what possibly went on in that loft. The world is a place of many parts.

Public opinion rules, OK

It is a truth universally overlooked that the only number in the world larger than the number of people on the anti-war march in London on 15 February 2003 is the number of those who have said, implied or emoted what a body blow to democracy in this country it was, and to the civic sensibilities of the young, that the marchers were not listened to. Well, here's a shock for everybody of that second number, the larger one. It would appear that a majority of the British public support the [scare-quotes]war on terror[/scare-quotes]:

A majority of Britons support the "targeted killing" of terrorists, both overseas and at home, according to a YouGov poll.

The survey, carried out for the defence policy thinktank RUSI and launched in London on Tuesday, finds 54% of the public support assassinating individual terrorists abroad, against 31% who object. Killing terrorists in the UK is backed by 52%-34%.

Will those of the we-marched-but-sob theory of parliamentary democracy now be lining up to insist on the war on terror taking its course with full drones? I somehow think not.

Realism against pessimism in the Middle East

Further to Obama in Jerusalem, here's a piece by Gershom Gorenberg setting out the importance of the president's speech. 'One speech', he writes, 'doesn't make a peace process. But as the beginning of a process, this speech was a revolution.' (Via Jeff.)

Commending the NYT exception

In line with what is now a clear trend, the Daily Telegraph is about to start charging readers for access to its website:

People will be allowed to read just 20 articles a month on the paper's site for free. If they wish to read more then they will be able to choose between two digital subscription pages...
.....
This metered model is favoured by newspapers across the US - notably at the New York Times - and Canada. It is also employed in Britain by the Financial Times, but the Telegraph becomes the first general newspaper in the UK to introduce it.

By contrast, The Times and Sunday Times site is protected by a full paywall, restricting all access... unless users pay for a subscription.

One feature of the New York Times paywall that is specific to it, so far as I know, and worth mentioning, is that the paper allows free access to a certain category of 'visitor':

Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit.

As a blogger, I obviously have an interest in recommending this enlightened practice to other newspapers. But then people at the NYT must think that there is an interest on its side too in encouraging blogger and social network links to their site.

Nothing but bad

From a piece by Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker:

Today, in 2013 - a decade later - it's not fashionable to suggest that the American invasion of Iraq served any useful purpose. It was a catastrophe, born of original sin - of lies and exaggeration and trumped-up intelligence. How many times have you heard that this week? There are a hundred thousand dead Iraqis, more than four thousand Americans killed, and a bill for a trillion dollars. Indeed, the near-universal certainty that America's war in Iraq was nothing but bad is as widespread and unbreachable as the notion, in 2003, that Saddam had to go.

But what are we to make of Iraqis like Al-Musawi? Or of torture chambers like Al Hakemiya? Where do we place them in our memories? And, more important, how should they shape our judgment of the war we waged?

I'd say: Ask the Iraqis - that is, if anyone, in this moment of American navel-gazing, can be bothered to do so. My guess is that the answers would be richer and more surprising than the one-dimensional debate we are engaging in at home.

Read the whole thing if you've the stomach for it, and see if a 'nothing but bad' judgement is sustainable. (Via Mick.)

Figures from a dark time XVIII

People who think they've heard too much about the Holocaust possibly haven't come across these stories. It would be a shame to leave them in ignorance.

67. Henry Greenbaum:

When Mr. Greenbaum... tells visitors today about his wartime odyssey, listeners inevitably focus on his confinement of months at Auschwitz, the most notorious of all the camps.

But the images of the other camps where the Nazis imprisoned him are ingrained in his memory as deeply as the concentration camp number - A188991 - tattooed on his left forearm.

In an interview, he ticked off the locations in rapid fire, the details still vivid.

First came the Starachowice ghetto in his hometown in Poland, where the Germans herded his family and other local Jews in 1940, when he was just 12.

Next came a slave labor camp with six-foot-high fences outside the town, where he and a sister were moved while the rest of the family was sent to die at Treblinka. After his regular work shift at a factory, the Germans would force him and other prisoners to dig trenches that were used for dumping the bodies of victims. He was sent to Auschwitz, then removed to work at a chemical manufacturing plant in Poland known as Buna Monowitz, where he and some 50 other prisoners who had been held at the main camp at Auschwitz were taken to manufacture rubber and synthetic oil. And last was another slave labor camp at Flossenbürg, near the Czech border, where food was so scarce that the weight on his 5-foot-8-inch frame fell away to less than 100 pounds.

68. The figure 42,500:

Thirteen years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler's reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.

69. Ari Rath:

"The most terrible thing was not the way hundreds of thousands of Austrians celebrated Hitler's arrival, but the enthusiasm with which they dispossessed the Jews," recalled Ari Rath, a Holocaust survivor who fled Vienna at the age of 13.

Rath... was back in the city of his birth speaking to a group of schoolchildren about his experiences, as part of a parliament-sponsored education project.

"We went from being people to non-persons overnight," he said in fluent German, a language he suppressed for decades.

70. Tomi Reichental:

Reichental lost 35 relatives in the Holocaust. As a boy he was profoundly traumatised by his experiences after being uprooted from the family farm and forced to go on the run.

In late 1944, the Gestapo cornered Reichental and his brother Miki in a shop in Bratislava. They beat the boys and captured the rest of the family. Their next ordeal was Bergen Belsen. Reichental describes it as "hell on Earth". Here he saw his grandmother Rosalie die of starvation and her body dumped on the piles of rotting corpses that ringed Belsen in the spring of 1945. For 60 years Reichental couldn't speak about the horrors he lived through.

71. The figure 11,343:

Bulgaria has expressed regret that more than 11,000 Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps from areas under Bulgarian control during World War II.

A Bulgarian parliament declaration did however praise Bulgarians for having blocked the deportation of more than 48,000 Jews during the war.

It said it could "not be disputed that 11,343 Jews were deported from northern Greece and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia".

Most Jews sent to the Nazi German death camps in Poland died.

Referring to the 11,343 deported, the MPs' declaration said "we denounce this criminal act, undertaken by Hitler's command, and express our regrets for the fact that the local Bulgarian administration had not been in a position to stop this act".

72. Efthymios Kontopoulos, witness:

It was spring in northern Greece, 1943. Efthymios Kontopoulos, 13, had come to Thessaloniki for the day when he saw Nazis rounding up the city's Jews.

"My father brought me into town," Kontopoulos, who is not Jewish, said. "We saw them being taken away. They were with their [yellow] badges."

On March 15, 1943, the Nazis began deporting the Jews of Thessaloniki. Some 4,000 people were loaded onto cattle cars and shipped off to Auschwitz. Eighteen more convoys followed. By August, the Jewish community of the city, known as the Flower of the Balkans and a major center of Sephardic Jewry for 450 years, was no more. Of the 55,000 Jews in the city on the eve of the war, 49,000 were deported. Only 1,950 survived.

This month, as the remnants of the Thessaloniki Jewish community prepare to mark the 70th anniversary of the deportations, Kontopoulos believes he has a powerful symbol of the community's destruction: four of the railway cars used in the transports to the death camps.

(For an index to the whole series, see here)

It's their party

The word is going up over here for 'a new party of the left'. Its central aim would be to put a stop to austerity policies that are 'destroying all the social and economic gains of ordinary people since the second world war'; would be, on the contrary, to 'improve the lives of ordinary people'. For Labour isn't now a suitable vehicle for doing this.

I'm guessing that many will make up their minds about whether or not to sign up for this initiative once its stall has been properly set out - by way of central programmatic aims and policy proposals. In the meantime, however, one thing one can do is to look at who's commending the intitiative. Here it's Ken Loach, Kate Hudson and Gilbert Achcar. Hmmmm...

Ken Loach is, of course, a famous film director, but he must count among his lesser achievements his statement that the rise of anti-Semitism is 'perfectly understandable' (on account of Israel). He also stood as a candidate for Respect and supports an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. Kate Hudson was on the steering committee of the so-called Stop the War Coalition when in October 2004 it issued a statement recognizing 'the legitimacy of the struggle of Iraqis, by whatever means they find necessary' (my italics); this was at a time when such 'necessary' means accommodated out-and-out crimes against humanity. And Hudson has other form as well. Gilbert Achcar is on record as thinking that, while Holocaust-denial in the West is an an expression of anti-Semitism, in the Arab world it primarily... isn't.

Speaking for myself, though I am very much in favour of improving the lives of ordinary people, I'll be giving this new party a wide berth. The above-recorded items are only symptoms, but you know what they are symptoms of, don't you? Gimme a V, gimme an E, gimme an R... etcetera.

Writer's choice 378: Patrice Hannon

Patrice Hannon is the author of Dear Jane Austen: A Heroine's Guide to Life and Love and 101 Things You Didn't Know About Jane Austen. She has also just completed a novel and hopes to have news about its publication soon. In this post Patrice discusses J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

Patrice Hannon on The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Lord of the Rings was my favourite book from the time I was around twelve years old until I was in college (that is, university), at which point it wasn't officially replaced in that role by another book, but I stopped reading it again and again as I had done. In fact, I didn't pick it up again for over two decades, when I learned that a film version was in the works. I wondered if I would find The Lord of the Rings as utterly enchanting as I had found it in my youth. After all, I had in the meantime earned a PhD in English, which meant I had studied a great deal of difficult, 'serious' literature and literary criticism and theory. Was The Lord of the Rings also serious adult literature?

I'm happy to say that the book enthralled me once again, though it struck me that I had not remembered that it was so very, so unrelentingly, sad. Melancholy is by far the dominant tone, interrupted almost exclusively by terror. The Lord of the Rings is a continual alternation between these moods, which are only rarely interrupted for moments of lighthearted humour or heroic grandeur. Fear (in all its variations - dread, horror, anxiety, etc.) drives the many scenes of flight and pursuit and battle. The sadness is in large part expressed in and evoked by the many ancient tales that are recounted. It is found in the ruins, skeletons, graves, and songs of lamentation that are everywhere, and in continual farewells to the many people and places that are never to be seen again. That 'never again' is a refrain encountered very often throughout the book. The histories and legends and songs are almost all elegiac, full of longing for a lost paradise that was itself, as William Empson said of Milton's Eden, 'inherently melancholy', and not so only after the fall. When these narratives are recounted they arrest the rapid forward movement of the action before us, and they frequently do so in the very midst of that action at its most furious. These continuous elegiac moments establish and maintain the dominant note of melancholy in the book.

I did not expect much from the film version of 'The Fellowship of the Ring', and was pleasantly surprised by how good it was - how good all three movies turned out to be. Nonetheless, for the most part they do not convey this extraordinarily powerful aspect of the book. The emphasis tips the other way, towards the plot and particularly the many physical engagements with the enemy. The book's language in the dialogue and the narrative, though often formal and slightly archaic, is what gives the action power by reminding us - indeed, by establishing - just what ideals are opposed in this war, and what has been and will be lost no matter which side triumphs. Éowyn's exchange of words with the Lord of the Nazgûl is as thrilling as any exchange of blows in the story.

The Lord of the Rings is certainly a page-turner but the suspense created in its pages is secondary to the sense there conveyed of present action slipping into or already become part of an irrecoverable past. What was so vivid and urgent becomes frozen in a tableau, part of a vanished world, accessible only through memory or elegy. A surprising note of finality abruptly ends even a comic scene like Bilbo's disappearance during his birthday party: 'he was never seen by any hobbit in Hobbiton again'. And then: 'Mad Baggins, who used to vanish with a bang and a flash and reappear with bags of jewels and gold, became a favourite character of legend and lived on long after all the true events were forgotten'. And so the events and characters that seemed so immediate are removed from before us into a remote past, separated from us by an unbridgeable chasm. This movement does not - and perhaps could not - occur in the film, but it recurs with great frequency in the book.

During the filmed siege of Gondor, as in the written account, the heads of the slain men of Gondor are catapulted into the city. The image of the severed heads is gruesomely realistic on the screen:

For the enemy was flinging into the City all the heads of those who had fallen fighting at Osgiliath, or on the Rammas, or in the fields. They were grim to look on; for though some were crushed and shapeless, and some had been cruelly hewn, yet many had features that could be told, and it seemed that they had died in pain; and all were branded with the foul token of the Lidless Eye.

So far, the images faithfully reflect the written words. However, this line of Tolkien's follows:

But marred and dishonoured as they were, it often chanced that thus a man would see again the face of someone that he had known, who had walked proudly once in arms, or tilled the fields, or ridden in upon a holiday from the green vales in the hills.

In the midst of battle, the horror of the severed heads recedes and elegy takes over. It is the lost idyllic past, not the horrific present, that holds the most power in The Lord of the Rings and continually has the last word in this way. In the films, images of death almost always evoke fear and revulsion rather than what Tolkien in his great essay on Beowulf called 'that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote'.

In my re-reading of The Lord of the Rings I cried several times: once, during the scene at the end of The Two Towers when Sam, thinking Frodo is dead, makes the wrenching decision to take the ring from him. The scene goes on for several pages, during which Sam looks not so much forward as back as he considers his choices: he hears echoes from Hobbiton and from Rivendell; he recalls Lothlórien and the Barrow-downs. This moving scene has been cut out of The Return of the King film (where the Shelob episode was relocated) for the sake of suspense: it has to go, evidently, so the audience doesn't learn just yet that Sam has taken the ring. For a short time it appears that the orcs must have taken it. Fear and anticipation and then a moment of surprise - some in the audience must be surprised - are thereby substituted not only for the sadness of the present, with Frodo seemingly dead, but also for the powerful emotion, evoked by the memory of events and words whose value was unfathomed until that moment, that comes flooding in on the grief-stricken Sam.

What I found in re-reading The Lord of the Rings after so many years was that something of the effect suggested by Tolkien's phrase, the 'echo of an echo', was not only intrinsic to the work but magnified by the distance between my last youthful reading and my adult experience of the book. The built-in nostalgia moved me in a way it could not have earlier; 'the touch upon the heart' of its elegy was even keener. Not to sound too sombre about it, though, re-reading The Lord of the Rings was great fun and I urge anyone else who once loved the book but has not picked it up for many years to read it again. A great treat is in store.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]