History

My odds and sods page.

 
Jean Tinguely’s studio


I tip out my filing cabinet....

France: A Forgotten History
"The minister’s wife, Henrietta, dealt with this matter by calling on the editor in his office and shooting him dead. She was acquitted of murder by an assize jury on 28 July, a verdict which was applauded by radicals all over France, and one which may help explain why France has never acquired a gutter press worthy of the name."

Adam Curtis is a magician… of the BBC archives.  By pulling these films out of his employer’s top hat, he gives us an unusual perspective both into the “hooligans” of yesteryear, the Hell’s Angels and the Skinheads of the late 1960s, and the mainstream culture that reported on them.
Departments of ancient history the perfect place for the eccentric and the mad.
After reading a David Bromwich review what struck me is that civilisation simply means whatever power happens to be dominant at any particular time.  The powerful republic or empire sets the standard, and measures all other cultures against itself. 
I am always interested in the stupidity of clever people:
And the future….  Kindle, like Apple and Google, suggests a new model of consumption, where digitalisation reduces costs; so everything becomes more available and cheaper; but the texture and feel, the intrinsic worth of the object, is lost.  So that books may disappear and only the machine will remain.  Some people are attracted by the idea… 
I usually transfix people with the story of John Zorn: his apartment so full of books and records that he took out the kitchen for more space.  Earlier today I heard a story that trumps this.  It left even me speechless. 
This is not so much a review as a demolition.  We watch as Richard J. Evans wields the wrecking ball time and time again.  When he has finished Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands is left as a pile of bricks and dust.
Universities have grown enormously over the last two centuries; and the body of knowledge it has produced is colossal.  However, the idea that there is a steady progress of knowledge, at least in some disciplines, is undone by a book like this – here it is regression, if it is anything at all.  Its appearance suggests the academy may be suffering from another symptom of the age: obesity.
What the author describes is the impact of Western Capitalism on a culture that had not previously experienced it. 
I saw his work in my teens, but I would not have known his name.  He was an anonymous craftsman, simply a worker on our lord’s estate; those pieces of plastic I so carefully placed on my cheap stereo.
At the turn of the 20th century there was a recognition that description was a problem, across all fields. Our language, once thought of as a sheet of plain glass, had now become frosted or stained; no longer could we see the object clearly on the other side.