Foreshadows

A neat little piece today in the Guardian about the influence of the Berlin studios of the 1920s on Hitchcock's films:

From Murnau and his Babelsberg colleagues, Hitchcock learnt that film is a visual medium, that its main means of communication is images, not words. At Babelsberg, directors strived to shoot their films with as few subtitles as possible, and even after the advent of sound, Hitchcock stuck to this house style. In this exhibition there's a scene from Marnie, made almost 40 years later, which shows he never forgot this lesson. The scene lasts several minutes but there's only one line of dialogue. As Warnecke says, "the visual power of German cinema at that time is in almost every Hitchcock film".

Details of the exhibition referred to above can be found here. Here's hoping it will tour to the UK. (Good excuse, however, to arrange a trip to Berlin!)

Salle des pas perdus

Bouriaud is Bourriaud

I checked his name, not being totally familiar with it anyway, several times, and the Tate website had it as 'Bouriaud', which it isn't; it's 'Bourriaud'. So when you read the previous post, please see the correct spelling.

The resources page for the Triennial exhibition does not work. Apparently the links are 'errors'. Is this a ploy for us to buy the catalogue? Why is it the links you want to work rarely do? And when you contact the email address they give to report the 'error', they never reply or rectify the matter!

Altermodern . . . Sebald

Sebald's influence is growing, despite his initial 'cult' status having waned in the wake of his death in 2001. What is most intriguing for me is that Sebald's work is increasingly influencing visual artists. The recent Waterlog exhibition and the publication of Searching for Sebald: Photography After W.G. Sebald testify to a burgeoning field. Numbered among Sebald's most avid readers in the contemporary art world fraternity is Tacita Dean. Dean wrote a biographical essay on her own family after reading about Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement in The Rings of Saturn. No doubt it was the same text that led her to make the short film portrait of Michael Hamburger, one of Sebald's friends and also the subject of one chapter in The Rings of Saturn. These interlocking paths could be glossed even further, but perhaps this should be left for another occasion. At the root of visual artists' fascination with Sebald's work, though, is his practice of interspersing visual narrative with photographic images. Perhaps this explains why his influence has spread into the contemporary art world in a way that no other writer can match.

It is possibly not surprising then that Sebald lies behind the curatorial concept of Altermodern: Tate Triennial, currently at Tate Britain until 26 April. Nicolas Bouriaud, the show's curator, has conjured up a term whose ramifications will reach well beyond the exhibition itself: Altermodern or Altermodernism. Altermodern(ism) resurrects the old ritual of questioning where we are 'at'. It discloses a perennial desire for periodicity, revealing the extent to which we yearn for boundaries that either control or create the zeitgeist. Behind Bouriaud's formulation of the Altermodern is a distaste for the tattered binary of Modernism/postmodernism. The Altermodern cancels this binary by relinquishing all subjects of the Altermodernist age from the coitus interruptus of the Second World War. Globalisation defines our everyday lives and us all as subjects, which is why it lies at the core of Bouriaud's definition. Modernism, he argues, is largely a Westernised concept that arose from the dominant powers of nineteenth century European imperialism. Ostensibly Modernism did not embrace the globalised interconnectivity of the world we live in today, and nor did postmodernism, which I assume Bouriaud conceives as being the refashioned residue of High Modernism. This is borne out by debates about postmodernism, which depart from the term's reliance on its precursor. Altermodernism, expressive as it is of globalised connectivity in an age in which international borders are rapidly being redefined (with China and India embracing global capitalism and challenging the hegemonic West), erases this parasitic binary which only ever articulated humanity's transition from the catastrophes of the period 1933-1945. Having cleared the decks and relieved us from Modernism/postmodernism, Bouriaud does not cancel out the rigours of Modernism so much as refashion its propensity for monolithic singularities into that of our age's penchant for frantic multiplicities. It's a term that implicitly embraces the Other and rejects the old order of a hegemonic imperial power. The contemporary world's concern for eradicating poverty and reversing climate change places globalisation rather than colonial localisation at the heart of our narrative, which in a positive way resists boundaries of race, religion, caste, and sexual orientation.

But in a way, all of the above is a paraphrased extension of the almost parodically succinct Altermodern Manifesto, according to which, postmodernism is dead. 'Increased communication, travel and migration are affecting the way we live,' the Manifesto says, prompting the clarification that it is the advanced economic migration in our world that distinguishes us from the more political migration with which Modernism and postmodernism dealt in the past. In the post-Holocaust world, which really gave rise to the postmodernist one (not to mention the period after 1933, the year of Hitler's coming to power as the chancellor of the Third Reich), emigration defined the movement of people away from totalitarian power. It is therefore intriguing, given Sebald's exploration of the catastrophic effects of the Third Reich on European Jewry, that his work constitutes one of the sources for Bouriaud's theory. Reluctant though most of Sebald's critics might be to describe the author as a postmodernist, Sebald's writing very much participates in the representation of the aftermath of catastrophe. This phenomenon is of course at the foundation of postmodernist theory such as can be found in the work of Jacques Derrida. So it is not that Sebald is intrinsically a postmodernist writer (as Richard Sheppard has declared, he is more of a belated modernist), but that he shares with his distant postmodernist cousins in the worlds of philosophy and literature a post-Holocaust concern for 'the aftermath'. Though I have not been able to read the publications attached to the Triennial exhibition, my suspicion is that Bouriaud and his team extrapolate from Sebald's work its prophetic concern for ecological disaster such as we are now dealing with and which has piqued since Sebald's death in 2001. However, the following item from the Altermodern Manifesto certainly evokes the kind of textual practice that I would argue is an inescapably Sebaldian one. In it, we are reminded of the question of influence raised by Sebald's work, very much in the mould of Tacita Dean, as referred to at the beginning of this post.

Today’s art explores the bonds that text and image, time and space, weave between themselves.

Go to The Rings of Saturn to find the ne plus ultra of this maxim.

An encounter with Banksy

Is it me or is Banksy a genius? Why bother thinking about him in this way - it's not productive in general or even conducive to appreciating his work. But just then I was looking through some images on his website and I was startled by every one of them. This got me thinking about the idea of genius: he stands alone from all other artists, possessed of the kind of 'signature' that distinguishes him from them. Like Picasso or Stravinsky, his work is unmistakably his.

Banksy's ironic juxtapositions are startling and sometimes poignant. Street interventions in the form of graffiti art must surely do this at all times, given that its medium is resisted by the civil and legal rules of everyday life and behavioural norms. Banky's particular ironies almost always relate to political commentary. Think of his interventions on the wall in Israel/Palestine; think of the iconic photographic image of the Vietnam War of the young naked female running in horror, it seems, at the photographer, and which Banksy reappropriates by having Ronald McDonald and Mickey Mouse holding her hands on either side.

No doubt most people will think he deals in cliches. But is his work itself cliched, given that he reinvigorates the icons of our age in a way that thrashes out the political meaning of their ironic juxtapositions? And we're talking about layering with Banksy; the kind of layers of meaning we normally extrapolate (as you would say in such a situation) from works of art whose codes are perhaps more accessible to the practice of criticism in general.

But something tells me that Banksy would think all this was..

A Zero-Carbon House of One's Own

Safe and warm and silent. This is how a friend described this zero-carbon house. I'm always reminded of Virginia Woolf when I see such things. I would have no qualms about writing all day and all night in this house. You need a place that is safe, warm, and silent to write, or at least I do. This frees your ideas from their ceaseless orbiting and grounds them in the written sentence that you write, unhindered from the outside world or an agent (of antagonism) who wishes to drag you away from your train of thought. This is what I crave in my life: not so much a super-luxury zero-carbon house but a place that affords the necessary conditions to write. Call me neurotic or over-sensitive to disruption..

Nothing but rhetoric

David Cameron proposes in the Guardian today new models for the redistribution of power. Included amongst his proposals is that councils should be given greater powers. I dread to think. Imagine it: giving greater power to councils like Wirral's, who are to close 11 public lending libraries. If they were untethered from centralised government in Westminster, how many more cuts would they attempt to push through? And if legislation substantiates their decision-making, then what recourse would the taxpayer have against a ruthless council gloating over their new-found and irreproachable powers?

But Cameron also proposes that power should be redistributed to the people. Surely this nothing but cant, coming as it does from an individual whose party has historically clamped down on the autonomy and agency of its electorate? In any case, he's not clear about what form this 'power to the people' would take, nor does he clarify how it would fit in with the increased independence of councils. You have to question how effective the people aspect of this would be: after all, Wirral's taxpayers protested in substantial numbers against the massive cuts that will soon disrupt their lives, and yet the council decided anyway to go ahead with the closure of 11 libraries, amongst community and arts centres.

So I don't understand Cameron's ideas for the redistribution of power from Westminster. Evidence suggests that the convictions of taxpayers and their elected councils are anything but symbiotic and progressive. And if he intends for these ideas to be progressive for the people, then he should revisit his proposals for the power of the councils.

The luck of it

Tales from the Vienna Woods was written
by a Hungarian writing in German, who
escaped before the Nazis invaded. He was
exiled to Paris where, after consulting a
clairvoyant who warned him to avoid the
city of Amsterdam, never to ride on trams,
and on no account to go in a lift, he was
walking on the Champs Elysées when the
branch of a tree fell and killed him.

Sebald, again.

On videos

I went into my local video shop. It’s filled
with video nasties. A generation which has
never known war is being raised on horror.

W.G. Sebald, as recorded by David Lambert and Robert McGill in their selection of 'Maxims', quotations taken from their creative writing seminars with Sebald at the University of East Anglia a mere week before his death.

What complexity is embedded in this otherwise succinct statement. I urge you to look up the other Maxims in the aforementioned Five Dials .

Best shot

This put me in mind of Nabokov's discussion of his grandmother in Speak, Memory.

Sebald fever

What is going on? Sebald is the man of the moment. The fifth edition of Hamish Hamilton's Five Dials is out now and is dedicated to Sebald.

Wirral peninsularity

Oh, correction: not all of Wirral's libraries are closing; just 11. The 27 total is more than it should be, anyway, because included in it are 'reference libraries' which don't exist in separate buildings but are accommodated in the larger branches.

I was never under any illusion that all of the libraries were closing. That eleven are is dire enough, especially for those frequent users who have loved visiting their local lending library for years - or even those young ones who have just started, only for the rug to be pulled from underneath them.

Any readers who fundamentally disagree with the closing of lending libraries are more than welcome to sign this petition on the Prime Minister's website. Meanwhile, here's Alison Flood from a recent edition of the Guardian's Saturday Review:

The planned closure of half of Wirral's 24 libraries has galvanised a group of authors. Petitions and protests against the closures have been ongoing for weeks, but the council has announced that it will go ahead regardless with plans to close the 12 libraries as part of a modernisation of the service "to take account of current and likely future expectations of users". Experts predict that by the end of March, more than 100 UK libraries will have been closed over the past three years.

But the group of authors, led by children's writer Alan Gibbons, and including Carnegie winner Beverley Naidoo and Carnegie nominee Bernard Ashley, are now taking their campaign to a national level, and writing to culture secretary Andy Burnham. "As a former teacher and education adviser, and as a writer for young people, I know that access to books - and, in particular, good literature - is vital for our intellectual and emotional lives, for widening our horizons and understanding," Naidoo wrote in her letter. "Shutting down libraries wherever in Britain ultimately affects all of us because it signals a shutting down of minds in the society that we all share."

Even the poet laureate has protested. But in the end, what's to come of it?

Clampdown on culture: a sad day

In the north west of England there is a place called the Wirral. It has long been at the receiving end of many jokes. It is even mentioned in the Middle English epic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Malcolm Lowry, author of the late modernist classic Under the Volcano, was born there. He didn't stay long, though, moving to Cambridge and, as readers of the latter book will gather, to South America.

Wirral has 27 local libraries. Today the council has voted in favour of closing practically all of these branches, save one or two, especially in the main town of Birkenhead. That's 27 local lending libraries. In place of these branches, the council proposes to spend £20 million on five all-in-one centres for particular communities. These centres will have libraries in them. But no design or in-depth details have been given of what these new centres will look like, where and how useful they will be to taxpayers. Community centres and other places owned and run by the council are also to go alongside their bookish relatives.

This is an astonishing decision for a council in a modern democracy to be making. We think we are more connected than ever. We are wrong. We have at our fingertips less, not more, facilities. Our transportation system is in uproar, and yet we are asked to pay handsomely for it. We pay our taxes, but councils such as the Wirral's close the kind of facilities that we thought so naively to be essential components of our everyday civic lives. Libraries are now luxuries. One of the branches to be closed is on a housing estate that for years has had an unfortunate reputation for drug dealing and drug taking. It is isolated from the centre of things, and it will be even more so now that its modest library and possibly its community centre are to close.

How can Wirral Borough Council claim it provides for its communities when it makes decisions like this? In years to come, when we witness the crime rate steadily rising and possibly more widespread violence in the community, we will ask whether it was because the local council availed itself of the responsibility to send out the message that learning, book reading, and education are vitally important to life, and that without such things, the world would be far, far darker than it is now.

And how many more stories will we hear in years to come, of a child being introduced to books and finding that that moment in his or her life was a catalyst for a massive range of positive outcomes? It depends on whether that child lived near or was able to access one of the very few libraries and community centres that will exist.

Rare Find

It is astonishing what you discover on Amazon's website. This edition of Walser is translated by Susan Bernofsky and is (apparently) published by New Directions, but I failed to find it on their website. I look forward to buying it, though, not least because of Sebald's introduction.

[Update: since writing the post, I have discovered more information about this book from here and here.]

Landscape biography

Another neat coincidence, this time in the Observer. Rachel Cooke's ramble with Iain Sinclair through his life and work reminded me of Sebald, particularly so in the case of the following:

He talks about the poet John Clare, who as a child walked beyond his knowledge, beyond what he knew, only to find that he no longer knew who he was because the birds and the trees didn't know him. "This is what I feel about this landscape. I've walked out into it so often that it accepts me. Bits of stone and river accept me, and I know myself by that. If the landscape changes, then I don't know who I am either. The landscape is a refracted autobiography. As it disappears you lose your sense of self.

Readers of Sebald know more than most this tropic relationship between landscape and human subjectivity. The landscape Sinclair refers to here is Hackney, the subject of his new book, a biography of the the area he has lived in for most of his professional and private life. London's East End generally will be familiar to readers of Austerlitz as being the residence of the work's protagonist, a retired architectural historian. I wonder to what extent Sebald's and Sinclair's paths crossed. The tone and content of their respective books are different, of course, there being not a whiff of popular culture in Sebald, nor the parochial issues of council politics as importantly highlighted by Sinclair in his discussion of the impending 2012 London Olympics. Not many critics would describe Sebald as a psychogeographer, either, and now, it seems, Sinclair is not too enamoured of the appellation himself. But there are demonstrable connections.

Theatre of history and memory

It's a shame there hasn't been more widespread coverage of this season at London's Royal Court. If the season had been a film one, we would have sat up straight and paid attention. It is certainly a neat coincidence, given Will Self's article on Sebald in Saturday's Guardian Review, that the Independent talks today of a new generation of German writers wishing to challenge the strategies for exploring Germany's implacable situation with history and memory. As Sebald's readers know more than most, the writer himself critiqued post-war German and Austrian playwrights for their own confrontation with the past, and in Luftkrieg und Literatur (Air War and Literature), Sebald controversially questioned why it was writers ignored the task of coming to terms with their own suffering during the Allied bombing campaign. The general drift of Sebald's lectures addressed questions that refuse to go away as time distances us from history and memory proves to be a most intractable companion.

Self on Sebald

In today's Guardian Review.

More sense and sensibility

The fact that so many white commentators have deigned to tell me they don't find the term offensive only makes matters worse. I'm not saying you have to be black to have a point of view on this, but you certainly have to be black to have ever been called a golliwog, so when a white man tells me he doesn't see what the problem is, well, am I really expected to take him seriously?

Hannah Pool in yesterday's Guardian.

Sense and sensibility

No surprises here that I should correct the compass of bad writing by referring to Joanthan Freedland's article on rising antisemitism in Britain. This is a deeply worrying situation. It proves revenge is a dead end strategy, not least because it perpetuates the very violence against which the dead-endist protests. No sense at all. Freedland explains where sense really should be.

Norman Geras offers a detailed analysis of the one-sided reactions in the press to Israel's attack on Gaza. Both Freedland's and Geras' articles link in their coverage of the antisemitism of today.

Offensive Language

I had the distinctly useless task before of having to read an article by Peter Hitchens on his Daily Mail blog. He thinks because 'homosexuals' have received tolerance from 'right-minded' people like himself and all his petty Daily Mail entourage, then we should be ever so grateful. Instead, he tenuously argues, what the 'right-minded' snail of progress brigade receive is 'tyranny' from 'homosexuals'. And it goes on and on and on. It's not worth writing about, really, except for the fact that one of the sideline offences in Hitchens' blog post is his hyperbolic use of the English language. He does himself no favours when he refers to the (presumably Political Correctness) 'Thought Police', nor does he do so in that gem of a sentence in which he refers to the "multiple horrors of our 'liberated' society". Horrors? Bit much. He should consult his dictionary. Other phrases like it include: 'totalitarian rage' [regarding the language of gay liberation]; 'insane, sex-obsessed Stalinist state' [self-explanatory, this]; 'regime' [referring to our society, which is anything but the totalitarian thing he describes it as]. So above his pond life thinking, Hitchens' other great offence is for being a bad writer. He writes a variety of purple prose, clad in old tin and unyielding to sense.

You can find his drivel on your own. I'm not linking to a Daily Mail article on my blog!

Still Awaiting Appropriate Response

Still, according to a German politician who met with Benedict following the papal audience on Wednesday, the pope is angry at the tone of German criticism. "The Vatican is horrified by the discussion in Germany," Georg Brunnhuber, a parliamentarian from Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU), told the Financial Times Deutschland. "The impression there is that all of the anti-Catholic resentments hiding under the surface in Germany are now coming to the surface."

Anger again from the Vatican. The Pope's reaction is astonishing, particularly when he raises 'the anti-Catholic resentments'. Forgive me (and that pun), but might Germany's reaction have something to do with the Pope's welcoming a Holocaust denier back into the fold? What doesn't the Vatican understand in this?

SHUSH!

The example given here of a family being thrown out of an exhibition is a little excessive. I would think the child's response to the exhibit was perfectly pitched and should be encouraged, but a balance has to be struck when it comes to families and public behaviour. Of course, most of the time it is wonderful to be surrounded by families enjoying stuff in exhibitions and so on when you yourself are not with one at the time. Families create a positive, exciting buzz. But not always. I know from experience that parents can sometimes put their child's interests above and beyond those of other visitors enjoying stuff in their own way. Having worked in a gallery for some time, I have experience of parents allowing their children to run around as if the gallery was as supermarket; in other words, not a place where people go for contemplation and hopefully sometimes quiet elation. Galleries and museums are considered to be havens from city life. Not just families but all of us must consider this when we visit such places. But why level with parents? Supposedly grown adults behave inconsiderately in galleries, and they don't have the child's excuse of naturally lacking maturity. I understand where the campaign is coming from, but it's something that highlights a general situation in life: a one-off reaction is fine, but relentless noise and bustle in an environment that may not be designed for such purposes is going too far and encroaches on other people's quiet enjoyment. Good parenting demands that we tell our children this in a way that doesn't damage their enjoyment.

Look into thyself (3): Roman Catholic edition

Particularly embarrassing for the Vatican is the fact that one of those rehabilitated, Bishop Richard Williamson, told Swedish television just days before the pope's decision that there had been no gas chambers in German concentration camps during World War II and that "only 200,000 to 300,000 Jews" died in the camps, instead of the 6 million figure widely accepted by historians.

Do you find it strange that part of the Bishop's denial has to do with numbers? As he should know, the loss of a single life to hatred such as the Nazis propounded is more than enough; that 200-300,000 lives are lost in a historical calamity is immense. The actual figure of at least six million stands, and refers to an immensity that humanity has had difficulty in mourning. We are locked inside an interminable melancholia.

Many say that Benedict was not aware of Williamson's position on the Holocaust and that his decision represents a failure of his advisors. According to a story in Wednesday's Stockholm daily Svenska Dagbladet, some in the Vatican are even accusing the Swedish television station responsible for the Williamson interview of being part of a conspiracy to damage the pope. The station denies the accusations.

The words came from the Bishop's mouth. He was not forced to say them, nor was he was influenced to say them. They came from his mouth. He said them, he meant them. He can't recover these words. That's it. That the Vatican shifts responsibility onto a paranoid fantasy of persecution exercised by the television station speaks volumes about the level of contrition over the Pope's decision itself.

Roman Catholic church: look into thyself.

Angela Merkel has done the right thing.

Look into thyself (2)

There is a part of me that regrets writing the first Look into thyself. It feels like class betrayal. (Some might even call it class hatred.) That post's detractors (fierce as they possibly might be) forget that though there are the usual exceptions to the rule, the everyday evidence supporting my statements is irrefutable. Such things have to be said in order for the proverbial bullshit to be cleansed, and to move forward once the strategy for denial has been strongly weeded out. So I'm not recanting what I said earlier. Bitterness takes root, especially when the fight is hard-won. So much of the news these days concentrates on where the blame for the way such-and-such a part of contemporary life is to be laid. This means that if higher education spends millions of hard cash and years of time in the somewhat futile attempt at greater levels of inclusion, then why should its failure - and the sense of futility consequently felt - be attributed to the universities? Dialogue depends on both sides speaking, not merely listening with no intention to respond.

Notes of despair

The Nouvel Obs prints excerpts from Roland Barthes's diary, which he kept for two years following the death of his mother in 1977. The "Journal de deuil" has just been published by Seuil. On November 5th, for example, two months after her death he writes: "Sad afternoon. Short walk. At the bakers (futility) I buy a financier. The little salesgirl serves a customer and says voila. This was the word I would would say to Mama whenever I brought her something, while I was caring for her. Once, when she was nearing her end, she repeated the word in her semi-conscious state: Voila (I'm here, je suis la, a word we said to each other throughout our lives). When the salesgirl said the word tears filled my eyes. I weep for hours (back in the soundproof apartment)." And on November 30th he notes: "Don't use the word mourning. It is too psychoanalytical. I am not in mourning. I'm in despair."

From signandsight.

Look into thyself

One minute higher education is attacked for its inability to provide jobs, practically branded as useless by students and the general mass of unreasonable opinion; the next minute it is attacked for its failure to accommodate the working classes.

So what is higher education actually getting right? Or is there such a dearth of ideas in journalism that such a relentless negative drive against universities has to be confected? Oh, they always drag out the latest statistics and polls and blahblahblah, but in my view there is a problem endemic to working class life that is hardly ever mentioned: it's anti-intellectual; sometimes it's even anti-education. The top universities teach conventional, traditional academic subjects from which careers don't easily follow. It is not always clear to families not used to reading or thinking culture as to what the purpose is of such subjects as English literature, history, and worse still, philosophy. (You can forget anthropology and classics.) But even before graduation, working class students suffer from the disadvantage of being born into a class that suffocates intellectual life and reasonable debate. Given that the main source of reading in working class life are the red-top tabloids and glossy magazines, this is not surprising. There are millions of houses in this country without books and more than likely they'll be owned by working class people. It's just the way things are. But why criticise higher education for not fulfilling their side of the bargain when the families of potential working class undergraduates fail to meet theirs?

Oh, and just in case you think I'm another uppity middle class educated idiot ignorant of the realities of life in other sections of society, I'm not: the situation I described above is very familiar to me. It's something I've continually fought against.

An improbable list

How these things pass one by! Here's Robert McCrum on a list of 'greats'. It includes: W.G. Sebald, Zadie Smith (?), Ted Hughes (surely Sylvia Plath should take precedence here), and . . . Barack Obama (Dreams from my Father is proving to be the book of the year - decade, even). I suppose I'm biased, but Sebald is without doubt deserving of his place in the 'pantheon'. It was recently suggested that had he lived longer, he would almost certainly have been a recipient of the Nobel Prize. I believe Smith intends to write on Sebald, if she is not already doing so now. I'd be more than interested to read her thoughts. Most unusual for me, though, is the placing of Obama and Sebald in the same article. It's one of those things that stops you in your tracks, forcing you to think that the world in which Sebald died is no longer our world; that it has moved on relentlessly, regressively; that the cycles of history Sebald dedicated himself to delineating in his writing have spun out other cycles and patterns since his death, a phenomenon massively indicated by the election of Barack Obama. To view our current sitation through a Sebaldian perspective, or to think of the world that has been left behind in the wake of his death? What I mean to say is that 2001 is history.

Photographic image, uncertain provenance

Type 'Sebald' in the search engine here. One of these images was used for Robert MacFarlane's recent summary of Sebald's work in the Guardian's 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read series. Look at the date: Paris 07 March 07? Might they mean Paris 07 March 2001? Of course, Sebald died at the end of that year. I suspect it is 2001. And I fancy that these images were taken during what must have been the very late research stages for Austerlitz. But publication chronology would surely prove me wrong here: Sebald would have submitted the final manuscript before the beginning of 2001 in order for it to be published at the end of that year, which if memory serves me right was in December before his death. Or perhaps this is all way off and that the images we see here (if they are indeed of Sebald in Paris; the location must be just as wrong as the date) are actually of Sebald after a day of flanerie through Paris, subsequent to a psychogeographic morning in the Bibliothèque nationale de France..

Late sleigh bells ringing..

It has landed.

Blasting it around for momentary joy?

Courtesy of L.S. Lowry.

Glad to be alive.

Victim of My Own Semantics

When I said in the post below that Darwin's theory of natural selection was 'a scientific theory that at the moment needs more support possibly than ever before', it was not my intention to fall into a semantic trap entirely of my own making. Declaring in this way that the theory needs support is tantamount to saying one needs to believe in it, which moral support buoys up, allowing for it to take precedence in the epistemological field. Clearly Darwin's work requires no such support; all that needs to happen is that we continue to educate young people about its essential facts. One of the many things that crossed my mind as I watched Attenborough is how familiar it all was to me. And it occurred to me that by extension, its familiarity was a result of the fact that I had been taught it at school, which is why this scientific theory had entered my unconscious of learning, if you like. The dread thought then crossed my mind: what if creationism and intelligent design were taught alongside Darwin's theory of evolution? How could it be taught, seeing as creationism forms part of a personal religious belief? Does it not follow, then, that 'teaching' creationism also indoctrinates young people into the ways of ideological institutions before whose might they are docile (remembering that we also refer to young people as 'vulnerable')? Religious thought should not make itself felt in the objective, intellectual environment of the science classroom. The mind boggles that religion should creep into this forum, conditioned as it is to fulfil the need for knowledge based on evidential support. Attenborough's overture to the Bible at the beginning of his programme revealed how circumspect the 'evidential support' of a linguistic text such as the Bible provides. It is astonishing what immensities are contained in those paragraphs from Genesis! Immensities, I must add, in the pejorative sense in that those phrases ring hollow alongside the work of science.

Sales Should Go Up

Published in November last year, this revised edition of On the Origin of Species contains a Postscript addressing the recent revival of creationism and intellgient design. Edited by Gillian Beer, this is certainly the one to have, and I hope millions of people agree.

The Moving and Evolving Tree of Life

This has got to be one of the most inspiring moments of television I've seen for some time, not least because it dramatised, in an almost Spielbergian way, a scientific theory that at the moment needs more support possibly than ever before.

Attenborough narrates the theory of evolution. The wonderful Wellcome Trust developed the glorious animation, linking the millions of years of strata in evolution by, it appeared to me, an ever-evolving menorah. Ostensibly this was never the intention, but my radar of irony overloaded during this programme and I can't resist reporting my observation. The radar of irony was kick started before it even began, when the BBC idents introducing the programme went all ethereal with the fairies-at-the-bottom-of-the-garden version. A touch of irony on the continuity team's part, maybe? I like to think so. Giving the ethereal creatures short shrift before the longer, more magnificent, and vastly eloquent documentary on Darwin somehow undermined creationism and intelligent design.

You must watch that six minute excerpt from the programme. It's oddly moving. Judging by the crashed system that was meant to support requests for the Darwin poster, a great many people thought so too.

Hide and Seek

It's not all semantic!

People need to stop believing in evolution and instead understand it as fact. People need to use their own language accurately: you cannot believe in fact; it is there to be understood as such.

The excessive italicisation in this post indicates my rage at this. Read that and sit in front of the TV or iplayer, depending on when you read this post, and enjoy understanding David Attenborough's programme on Charles Darwin.