There’s a brief reference this morning in the Guardian to how, back in 1964, Stuart Christie tried to blow up Franco. Christie, after three years in prison here, went on to become mates with the terrorists who attempted to do the same to the Heath government, the BBC and various other symbols of fascist oppression…
When the inspector calls, the chief weapon of fundamentalist fishermen–particularly those with long white beards–is Genesis 1:26-28: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all…
When the Maoists take Kathmandu, what do you think they will say to the entrepreneurs who sell Che Guevara t-shirts to Westerners looking for an alternative? “Hey, no sweat, Che was one of ours.” “Who? See that wall?” Elsewhere on the Nepali Times site there’s a review by Kunda Dixit of an interesting new book…
Burglar and ex-Libertines singer Pete Doherty was caught in June carrying a flick knife. “If the law was to send me to prison it wouldn’t be able to look itself in the eye,” he commented after yesterday’s hearing, in what critics are taking as a clear rejection of the post-Surrealist aesthetic currently sweeping East London…
Bush and Blair are not at all welcome in Spain at the moment, so guess who is: Marbella anxiously awaits the antidote to Jult [you try saying July with half a gram up your nose] which was slow month tourist-wise, with not too many famous faces around either. Now the town is getting ready for…
To be fair, Austrian writer Robert Menasse is going after The System in his German spelling reform diatribe, not the 2 l8, m8 clan, but it’s still heavy stuff. Apparently–and I find him a bit difficult to follow–the reform was racist because it Germanised both “German” and “force-assimilated” immigrant words, neoliberal because it has created…
David Bell, the British Chief Inspector of Schools, said last summer that infants increasingly lacked speaking skills because of the “disrupted and dishevelled” lives some were forced to endure. So how come George W’s oracy has declined now he’s no longer a boozer? Mr Bell thinks that the answer to the problem lies in more…
I thought this was rather special, especially when you consider all the one-note-samba rubbish still floating around: an early C20th recording (MP3) by El Canario Chico which concentrates a maximum of micro-variation within a minimal compass. More here on the Centro Andaluz de Flamenco site. A prior engagement with a tarantula means I’m not going…
I’m terribly sorry: I meant conservative in the sense of a nostalgia for things just past, which does, I think, make Habermas and Derrida conservatives. Mark Liberman, on the other hand, is nostalgic for times long past, for the Enlightenment–buckled shoes, open drains, and, quite possibly, beating well-loved columnists with clubs–which makes him not so…
Re Mark Liberman’s European Politics 101, I’d have thought that one would describe Derrida and Habermas as conservatives not because of any association with any particular dogma but because they both clearly long for times past. The 70s, let us not forget, were a period which combined rampant collectivism with reasonable sales for the writings…
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