We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Best joke of the World Cup so far. Italy versus Ghana. An Italian gets an early yellow card for a nasty tackle, treading on the guy’s ankle. As Ghana’s Essien hobbles to his feet and we are shown the replay, John Motson says:
Yes, that’s the one FIFA want stamped out.
Not to say cracked down on.
It is now nearing half time, and although there have been no goals, it has been what they call end to end stuff. Ghana could well surprise. What have I said? Italy score! Someone called Perlo. Sorry, Pirlo. Earlier Toni nearly scored for Italy, and deserved to, slamming it against the underside of the bar with the Ghana goalie well beaten. Half time: 1-0 Italy. More goals to come surely, unless everyone gets heat exhaustion.
Earlier in the day, the first really crazy game. Japan 1-0 up over Australia with hardly any time to go, and I have to go out on an errand. Fine by me. You do not want to be sitting next to a computer (i.e. a fan heater) all day in this weather. And it must be far too hot out there in Germany for anything much to happen before the whistle. Out and about, only moments later, I hear yelling in a pub, look in, and find the Anglosphere celebrating Australia’s third goal.
What will Michael say?
Next up for the Aussies: Brazil. No worries.
Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic
Tom Holland
Little, Brown, 2003
One of the great joys of my teenage years was hearing, with titles and composers attached, the very same classical music core repertoire that I had first been exposed to in my infancy. So that’s what that is, I would cry out with joy, as yet another familiar tune would finally identify itself as whichever overture or symphony or concerto it was. Lost chord after lost chord, found.
Reading Tom Holland’s Rubicon has been a similarly joyous experience.
After my infancy of listening to the BBC Third Programme, there followed an expensive education during which I absorbed only bits and pieces of what was being said. I emerged from this education with a fairly thorough understanding of the Bible and its various contents, even as I became ever more unconvinced by its claims. Geography and post-1066 English history were a solid enough basis for further reading and learning. But when it came to the ancient world, the pieces of the puzzle were too few to join up, the fragments of the picture too closely associated with the grind of being made to learn Latin and Greek, which for me never really got beyond word games. I recall being awarded ninety eight percent for a “Latin verse” exam. Even then, I knew that my achievement, such as it was, had nothing to do with poetry. As far as ancient Roman history was concerned, most of what I emerged with from my Latin lessons was a jumble of mysterious names, such as Labienus, Cotta, Vercingetorix, Jugurtha, Mithridates. Much was made in my Latin lessons of Rome’s subjugation of Britain, but only a vague version even of that really stuck.
At some point I acquainted myself with an approximation of the Hannibal story, with its epic crossing of the Alps, its equally amazing massacres of various legions at Lake Trasimene and at Cannae (216BC), and later Hannibal’s defeat, in 202BC at Zama, which was the one where Scipio Africanus left gaps in his line for Hannibal’s elephants to charge uselessly through.
Later on, further pieces of the puzzle landed on the still largely empty table. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, for instance, and then Anthony and Cleopatra. I devoured Robert Graves’s I Claudius and Claudius The God, but mostly because of the evil Messalina’s exploits and because of all the gladiatorial gore. Not that long ago, I finally watched the movie Spartacus all the way through. More recently, I got hooked on Rome, the recent TV soap opera. But I missed the beginning of that, and was never really sure where the boundary was there between fact and fiction. (Verenius? Pullo? Still don’t know about them.) But it was still only bits and pieces. More big names had piled up in my head, like Crassus (Laurence Olivier in Spartacus), and I now knew rather more about Pompey (Kenneth Cranham in Rome). But I only caught these personages in the middles and ends of their careers. Given that Pompey’s career ended in defeat at the hands of Caesar, how did he get to be called Pompey Magnus, Pompey the Great?
For me, the joy of reading Rubicon is that the blanks have at last been filled in. Joy may seem an odd word to describe reading about events which involved so much suffering and disaster, both to Romans and to their enemies. But now that it has all happened, we might as well enjoy it. It would have been no fun to have been in a legion at Carrhae (53BC), say, where the career of Crassus came to its abrupt and appalling end, but me having a grand old time learning about it all isn’t going to make things any worse for anybody. And I really did enjoy this story. At no point while reading it was I ever bored or tempted to skip things. Seriously, it has been a long time since I have read a book with such rapt attention to what it was saying, with so little attention to what page number I had reached, and with such genuine disappointment when it stopped. → Continue reading: Tom Holland fills in my ancient Roman blanks
Not long ago I did a posting here about material progress, as illuminated by a book about the past which described a time before many of our modern comforts had been devised. A commenter commented, as at least one commenter always will during discussions of this sort: dentistry!
He was right of course. And it so happens that I have been reading another work of history, by Charles Spencer, this time about the Battle of Blenheim, in which the primitive dentistry of earlier times gets a particularly memorable mention.
The Battle of Blenheim was fought in 1704 between a coalition of allies under the command of the Duke of Marlborough and various French armies of Louis XIV. Louis XIV is of course the villain of the story, who gets his just comeuppance at Blenheim. However, it turns out that finding all his grand plans of European conquest thwarted by a supreme commander of genius, who, in the words of Sir Edward Creasy, “never fought a battle that he did not win, and never besieged a place that he did not take”, was not Louis XIV’s only bit of bad luck. We learn, from an early paragraph in Blenheim (pp. 20-21 of my paperback edition), that Louis had another huge misfortune to contend with towards the end of his life:
In the autumn of 1685, Louis developed an agonising and persistent toothache, and his doctors decided to extract the offending molar. However, they were ignorant of the importance of post-operative hygiene, and infection set in: the king’s gums, jawbone and sinuses became dangerously inflamed. A committee of nervous physicians concluded that drastic measures were called for. Louis underwent a truly terrible ordeal: they removed all the teeth from the top layer of his mouth, then punctured his palate and broke his jaw. This was all completed without anaesthetic, the king being fully awake throughout this procedure. The most powerful man in Western Europe was helpless before the primitive medical knowledge of his time. At least the wounds were kept clean on this occasion – cauterised with red-hot coals.
I almost feel sorry for the man. But having got this sad story out of the way, Spencer then goes on to describe what Louis XIV’s soldiers did to the people of the United Dutch Provinces – genocide, basically, to all of them that they could get their murdering hands on – and any sympathy you may feel for this abominable man immediately disappears.
But the point about dentistry remains. The average citizen of an average country now enjoys vastly less painful and more knowedgeable dental care than even the grandest of kings had to endure in earlier times.
Never knock progress.
Go here for video of Boris Johnson‘s amazing football tackle (actually more like an American football block), in that bizarre pro-celeb England Germany match about a month ago. Apologies if this has already been alluded to here, but a search through the archives suggests not. “Finest hour” is, however, an odd way to describe it. More like finest five seconds.
Talking of great sporting moments, ideal for the delectation of internetters, can anyone direct me to any video of Kevin Pietersen‘s equally amazing (and equally subversive of established order and decency) reverse sweep of Muttiah Muralitharan, last Friday? There are plenty of photos of this extraordinary stroke, but you need video to get the full flavour of what Pietersen did.
Immediately after this, Pietersen got out. But nobody cared, because that shot was one of those “worth the price of admission alone” moments. Not that I was there, or paid this price. I just heard about it on the radio, and then saw it on the TV highlights, which I sadly do not yet have the ability to process and pass on.
More ruminations from me about the wondrous enrichment of cricket fan memories offered by the internet here.
Recently someone added, or tried to add, a comment on to ancient (July 1st 2004) Samizdata posting of mine, about some great photos taken by a guy called Richard Seaman, of the SpaceShipOne launch. Such are the ways of Samizdata that I got an email about the comment, and was thus reminded about the original posting. Which was quite short and included the following:
Seaman used a Canon 1Ds digital SLR camera, a snip at $8,000.
Seaman is a fine photographer, but much of the genius of these photos lies in the automatic focus system that this camera has in it. More fuss should be made of the people who devise things like this, I think. Boy would I love one of these – but smaller and for nearer $80, in a couple of years time.
Well, even since about last November, I have had just such a system on my camera. This camera didn’t cost me $80. It cost me just under £130. But then, I only had to wait just over a year for it. But in about July of this year, exactly two years after that earlier posting, I reckon that a cheapo digital camera with automatic focussing will probably cost, I don’t know, around … $80?
Imagine a world in which politicians cut there prices for their “services” to the tune of about 99% (or whatever amazing figure it is), over a period of two years. Ah, statists will say. But what politicians do is so much more difficult. But that’s the whole point of capitalism. It concentrates its efforts on that which is not merely desirable but on that which has become, despite all appearances to the contrary, possible. If it can’t be done, they just walk away from the problem, and make a note to come back later when it can. Meanwhile, they don’t throw good money after bad.
Politicians spend fortunes merely shuffling back and forth the fact that this or that problem is indeed a very great problem, claiming all the while that ever more money must be pointlessly thrown at it, right now, so that we can continue to hope against hope for an answer, immediately, from them.
And of course many of the problems of politicians are self-inflicted and impossible. Like: how do you abolish a queue for something very nice that you are giving away, but which you have only a limited supply of? Answer: forget it, fools. Many politicians actually prefer impossible problems, because if their preferred urgent problems were solved, then no more money would be “needed”. (The whole environmental movement is best understood, I suggest, as a search process to invent problems which are impossible to solve, because impossible to really know about, but very, very important – thus requiring infinite money and political interference, for ever.)
Capitalism. I love it. Just so long as nobody tries to make it compulsory reading.
If I were his lawyer, I would point out that using a government office for having sex with his secretary was far less ruinous for Britain than how he might otherwise have been using it. While Prescott was harmlessly fucking his secretary, the rest of the cabinet were probably hatching schemes to make us all line up and be fingerprinted. Put it this way: would you rather he was shafting his secretary, or the nation? We got off lightly.
– Harry Hutton
Here is an interesting story. A friend of Jackie D (to whom thanks for the link) called Amy Alkon has discovered an artist. He is now homeless, but something tells me he is not going to be homeless for long.
His name is Gary Musselman, and here is one of his drawings:
Amy put that at the top of her posting, surely knowing that this would appeal to the blogosphere, although I rather prefer “Wichita” myself. Scroll down to see that.
These are the kind of drawings now sufficiently out of date in artistic style to appeal to large numbers of the general public, especially the sort who are internet-connected, but to be disapproved of by the regular art critics, who will not, I predict, approve. “Derivative”, “emotionally empty”, etc. Their real objection will be that their verdicts aren’t going to count. Not this time.
Jackie D has already equipped Gary Musselman with his own blog, and the story is now gathering pace.
Life is far more fun when you have a really good book on the go, and the only thing wrong with mine just now is that it weighs too much to be lugged about comfortably on my pedestrian journeyings around London. It is The Lives & Times of the Great Composers by Michael Steen. For me, this book is perfect. I know what most of the music that the great composers composed sounds like. But I am enjoying hugely learning more about the circumstances in which this wonderful music was composed and first listened to.
After an Italian prelude, the first big name composer Steen deals with is Handel, the German who ended up living in London for most of his life.
Handel’s London was an exciting place (p. 39 of my unwieldy paperback):
The year before Handel arrived, Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral had been completed at a cost of £1,167,474 paid for largely by the import duty on coal. Sir Isaac Newton, the great scientist was still at work. London, with its sounds of wheels rumbling on cobbles and cries from the street vendors, was well into a century of commercial and cultural prosperity: the country’s population grew by 71 per cent over the century; its merchant fleet more than doubled in tonnage between 1702 and 1776.
London, in other words, then as now, was making lots of progress. Perhaps because music itself can be such an otherworldy thing, even when composed by such a worldly figure as the energetically entrepreneurial Handel, Steen chooses in this book to emphasise the material aspect of things when describing the world in which this music was created.
The kind of people who enjoy the fruits of material progress, but who enjoy them more than they think about how they were first devised and are now cultivated, often dismiss progress as a small thing, perhaps because they dislike the kind of people who are needed to make it, and the methods they must be allowed to use. (Basically: commerce. And insofar as “public spending” is involved, someone has to make that money first before it can be spent.) Such people should ponder pieces of writing such as what Michael Steen says next about Handel’s London:
Behind its superficial prosperity and elegance, London was overcrowded, squalid and full of beggars. People had fleas, lice and few teeth. Most people defecated in nooks and crannies, or used public lavatories built over rivers such as the Fleet. For the more refined, with a small fee, the ‘human lavatory’ would provide a pail and extend its large cape as a screen. Lavatory paper did not exist, the alternatives ranged from a sponge on a stick in a container of salt water, to stones, shells and bunches of herbs.
Delightful.
But the most chilling observation Steen makes about the trials and tribulations of material life in the early eighteenth century – instead of the early twenty-first, say – is this, a couple of paragraphs later:
The political outlook was uncertain.
So? When was it not? But now, hear the reason:
Queen Anne, who was in her late 40s, had borne seventeen children; mostly still-born, none had survived.
Let an anti-progress person of now read that, and then try telling us that material progress of is no great importance, or of no “spiritual” significance, that it is merely a matter of brute, animal comfort. The Queen of England, no less – who presumably enjoyed, if that is the word, the very best medical attention then available – scored zero out of seventeen in the deadly game of childbirth and child-rearing; which meant that there was no obvious royal heir, which meant that the political outlook was uncertain. Poor, poor woman.
Later (p. 54), Michael Steen throws light on another kind of material progress, of a sort that is far more widely and deliberately scorned than progress in things like plumbing or medicine (which is often merely forgotten about), namely cosmetics. Steen has this to tell us about the way that the sort of women Handel often had dealings with – such as the highly paid and outrageously indulged and pampered opera singers whom he supplied tunes for, the crazy rock stars of their day – tried to beautify themselves:
Their faces were painted with compounds of white lead, rice and flour, with washes of quicksilver boiled in water with bismuth.
Suddenly, the progress made in female adornment, which has put incomparably more convenient and healthy – to say nothing of far more visually appealing – methods of adornment into the hands of any modern woman with a few quid to spare who wants them, appears almost as impressive as progress in plumbing, medicine, nutrition, travel, civil engineering, electronic entertainment, or even the wondrous progress that was about to be made in the two centuries after Handel, in music.
The frankly shocking discovery that this blog is being used as an educational aid for A-Level politics students is proof, if proof were ever needed, that state education is failing our children.
– Guido Fawkes yesterday (knowing that no-one will agree)
The constant temptation for writers here at Samizdata is to focus only on politics, and as a direct consequence to get depressed. Politics is always depressing. Depressing is what politicians do. They say they are going to encourage this or that, but these thises and thats generally involve extorting yet more tax to pay for such encouragement, which depresses taxpayers yet more, and the encouragement as often as not turns out to be the opposite, while nevertheless scaring away any non-governmental encouragers who might really have helped, which is especially depressing for everyone who got their hopes up.
So, I will now write about opera on DVD, which is not nearly such a depressing subject as politics, and especially not right now. True, opera is often paid for by governments – which goes a long way to explaining why most new operas now are such junk. And true, the stories told in operas are often themselves very depressing, involving, as they often do, politicians, as well as other sorts of bad people doing bad things. But, despite all that, the presentation on DVD of the operas that date from the time when opera was show business and when people ran opera houses for fun and profit, rather than out of a sense of cultural duty, is now getting seriously into its stride.
DVD has always seemed to me the obvious way to enjoy opera. The thing itself, in an actual opera house with actual live singers and players, is for me just too expensive and too chancey. For instance, a few years ago I attended an English National Opera production of Madame Butterfly. It was advertised as being sung in English, but it turned out to be that particular sort of unintelligible English that only opera singers sing. Waar-blaar-traar-hyaar etc. I couldn’t make out one single damn word of it. Since I was paying for someone else to be there too, that was a big slice out of a hundred quid in exchange for a few tunes that I already knew and already had on CD in several versions, all of them better.
And as for when they are singing in another language, well, where’s the fun in that if you don’t understand it? To enjoy that, you have to do a ton of homework, and for me that drains all the fun out of it. No, the answer had to be DVD, with subtitles (which I believe you can often summon up even if they are singing in operenglish). And the good news, for me, is that opera DVDs are finally coming within my price range.
I don’t buy opera DVDs new, any more often than I buy full price regular classical CDs new. I buy them new, that is to say, only very occasionally. Fifteen quid for one disc? No thank you. And operas on DVD still tend to cost nearer thirty quid than fifteen, if you buy them new. But, and this is the really good news, opera DVDs have finally started to show up in decent numbers in the second hand classical CD shops and market stalls that I regularly visit. So, for instance, I recently got the entire Levine/New York Met set of Wagner’s Ring Cycle for thirty quid, and, during the same trip, Beethoven’s Fidelio and Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier for a tenner each. Some operas are going now for even less. That, for me, is value. These prices mean that now, I can finally allow myself to enjoy opera, because if I become addicted to it, as I never have allowed myself to so far, the habit will not ruin me and mean that I have to die under Charing Cross Bridge in a cardboard box, instead of indoors and comfortable.
Have I disliked opera because I really did dislike it? – mostly because of the wobbly, incomprehensible way they so often sing it. Or did I dislike it in mere self-defence against being economically ruined by it? Hard to say. But, a few nights ago, listening to the closing scene of Der Rosenkavalier, I could feel myself getting seriously hooked.
Der Rosenkavalier contains many ridiculous things. The leading man is sung by a soprano, which takes some getting used to, however well she sings. And teenager Sophie, whom the leading man (well, more like a boy) eventually becomes engaged to in that melodious last scene, is, in this production, rather obviously nearer to forty than twenty, albeit a very nice looking forty-year-old. Above all, these people are all old-time Viennese, which means that not only does the villain have a thoroughly warped view of the world, but so, frankly, albeit to a lesser degree of course, do the good guys. I.e. the good girls.
But no matter. Richard Strauss’s taste in operatic singing is pretty much the same as mine. He adored the light soprano voice – as opposed to the heavy, wobbly, knock-a-giant-down-at-fifty-paces Wagner-type soprano voice – to the point where ever since, people have tended to call such sopranos “Straussian”. (Gundula Janowitz and Lucia Popp are two of my favourites, both of whom were sublimely wonderful performers of Strauss’s sublimely wonderful Four Last Songs, which I have adored for decades.) Der Rosenkavalier, like most operas, has its longueurs, when they do that annoying form of operatic talking which is half talking and half orchestrally accompanied singing, which is similar to what actors used to do, without music. But every so often, and the final scene of Rosenkavalier is definitely one such time, they get some actual tunes to sing, and as Sophie and the Boy/Girl Soprano sang away ecstatically, I could feel myself surrendering.
Good. For me, classical music is something to enjoy first, rather than to “understand”. But, there is no doubt that if you do want to deepen your understanding of this music, you have to at least be acquainted with opera. Mozart’s piano concertos, for instance, are intensely “operatic”, and a thorough study of the way they echo tunes in his operas will give you an order of magnitude greater feeling for what they are all about.
I already have a number of operatic DVDs, quite aside from the ones I have recently acquired, for the operatic DVD bargain is not an entirely new phenomenon. But, for all the considerations alluded to above, I have tended to keep them on the shelf, unsurrendered to. Now, I look at my little DVD opera collection with new eyes, knowing that I will soon be listening to it with new ears and watching it with those same new eyes, enthralled.
Yesterday afternoon I was out and about in the Parliament Square area, and saw yet another weird demonstration by Fathers for Justice, this version of them now known as Real Fathers for Justice. It would appear that they were a day early with their over-the-top visual metaphor, but maybe that was how they wrong-footed the authorities.
Click to get a bigger picture.
I genuinely do not know whether these people are publicity geniuses or publicity maniacs, forcing their case upon everyone’s attention, or just annoying everyone and proving how much better it would be if they were never allowed near their children again.
Much depends on what you think of their website, which they did at least advertise quite effectively with this demo, although most of the news pictures seem not to have included the banner that I chanced upon. No doubt their hit rate has been going off the top of the page.
So far it looks to be long on flashy graphics and feuding, and short on arguing their case. But, on balance, I suspect that they are doing quite well. This is how you do things these days.
It does make you wonder, though, how clever the system is for stopping people planting bombs in such places. That part of London has gone insane with physical barriers, armed policemen by the hundred, and numerous law changes from inside the buildings being protected. Yet still, a few nutters with a banner and a lurid piece of religious sculpture seem to be able to clamber about at will, and remain there for a couple of hours while all the world takes photos.
I reckon Real Fathers for Justice are an al-Qaeda front. (Come to think of it, those Islamists are also pretty obsessional about keeping hold of their children in the event of divorce, aren’t they? It fits.)
For the last ten days or so, and for about another week, I have been and will continue to be semi-unplugged. Unplugged because my pay-by-the-month internet connection was disconnected a while ago, by some insonsiderate person pushing the wrong button at my internet service provider, but only semi-unplugged, because I have at least been able, thank goodness, to revert to the previous pay-by-the-minute arrengement which preceded my current although currently interrupted arrangement.
I am, therefore, able to link to particular places on the internet that I already know how to get to quickly, such as to this blog posting which I did for the Adam Smith Institute, in which I explain the effect of my present internet miseries, but I am not, as I explained at greater length in that posting, comfortable about just going a-wandering. I can switch on, go somewhere, download it, switch off, and read it. But, I deeply fear switching on, going somewhere, reading it, going somewhere else, reading that, looking something else up, deciding to write something, looking up other stuff, deciding to write something else and making a start with that, . . . you get the picture. It might not cost all that much, especially at the weekend, but in sad old Britain where local phone calls still cost, it could cost me a whole lot too much for comfort. If I did the sums, I might well decide that my state of only semi-linked-ness is a false economy, and that I should just plug myself in regardless and do whatever I feel like doing. But I do not want to have to be worrying.
So, this has been what Americans call a “learning experience”, or what we know on this side of the pond as a considerable nuisance or words to that effect.
However, the particular combination of circumstances – not being permanently connected, but still being able to connect temporarily – has provided me with something you seldom experience in life, namely the contrast between two important stages in my life, with the full knowledge of what both states were like. It really has been a learning experience. → Continue reading: Semi-unplugged
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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