'What if the Lost Decade is not what we are going into but coming out of?'

Great quote from Howard Jacobson in The Independent with which I think history may agree:

 'What if the Lost Decade is not what we are going in to but coming out of – the Bankers' Age, the decade of footling technology, globalised junk, celebrity, stuffing our faces, a Lost Decade of human incuriosity in which we haven't cared "how people walk" or what their eyes and hands look like, in which art has been the lackey of advertising and imagination has declined into mere fantasy? I don't minimise material hardship, but we don't have to be supine before the system. The world is interesting beyond money; there is infinitely more to us than is dreamt of in the materialists' philosophy.'

Very well then, alone!

‎"From the concept of habeas corpus to the BBC, to Elizabethan poetry to John Le Carre, from rock to the invention of the Sixties, from London springtime concerts to Wimbledon, via Liverpool FC. So many things do we hold dear from across the Channel... But Germany, France and the majority of the other EU member states were right, at daybreak on Friday 9 December, to say No to London." (Le Monde). The 1960s was not one of our better ideas. Using the veto on Friday was.

A hundred years hence

This macabre song often runs through my head. It was written at a time when "The year of One Thousand Eight Hundred and Three" was a hundred years in the future. It seems appropriate on the eve of my birthday. The hot girls in 1703 were just as painfully attractive as the ones today, although their breath was less sweet.

1703 is such an interesting moment when modern England is inchoate. The King has been exiled, what Disraeli called Dutch finance has been brought in, the United Kingdom is about to be created and yet we still have the very last Cavalier Poets and the faint traces of the Elizabethan lyrical tradition.

Let us drink and be merry, dance joke and rejoice,

With claret and sherry, the oboe and voice,

This wicked old world, to our joy is unjust,

All treasures uncertain, then down with your dust.

In frolic dispence your pounds, shillings and pence,

For we shall be nothing an hundred years hence.

We will sport and be free with Fran, Betty and Dolly,

Take lobsters and oysters to cure melancholy.

Each dinner we'll take them and spring like a flea

Dame Venus, thus maybe, was born of the sea.

With her an with Bacchus, we'll tickle the sense

For we shall be passed it an hundred years hence.

Your beautiful piece, who has all eyes upon her

Who, her honesty sells, for an hogo of honour,

Whose lightness and brightness doth cause such a splendour

That none are thought fit, but the stars, to attend her.

Although she seems pleasant and sweet to the sense,

She'll be damnably mouldy an hundred years hence.

Your plush coated quack who, his fees to enlarge,

Kills people with licence and at their own charge,

Who builds a vast structure of ill-gotten wealth

from the dregs of a piss-pot and ruins of health.

'Though treasures of life, he pretends to dispense,

He'll be turned into mummy an hundred years hence.

Your usurer who, in one hundred, takes twenty,

Who mourns in his wealth and who pines in his plenty

Saves up for a season he never shall see

The year of One Thousand Eight Hundred and Three

When he'll turn all his bags, all his houses and rents

For a worm eaten coffin an hundred years hence.

Aye, the poet himself, who so loftily sings

That he scorns any subject but Heroes and Kings,

Must to the capricios of Fortune submit

And oft times be thought a fool for his wit.

Thus Beauty, Wit, Wealth, Law, Learning and Sense

Must all come to nothing an hundred years hence.

 Thomas Jordan

The purpose of this blog about Bucharest and Romania - when I remember

‎'All that a man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love -- and to sing; if he is fortunate and keeps alive, he will be forever in love.' Thoreau

Dr Johnson I love more than any other man I never met.

Friendship, “the wine of life,” should, like a well-stocked cellar, be continually renewed; and it is consolatory to think, that although we can seldom add what will equal the generous first growths of our youth, yet friendship becomes insensibly old in much less time than is commonly imagined, and not many years are required to make it mellow and pleasant. 'If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.' 

Inequality gets too bad a press

Interesting point from a note I was sent by Plamen Monovski, CIO of Renaissance Asset Managers

The richer the society, the more its citizens seem to be affected by inequality. Every day, the pulpiteers in the press produce irate editorials about the gargantuan pay discrepancies between management and workers of western corporations. Research has shown time and again that human beings are much more stirred not so much by their absolute standard of living, but by how much it differs from their immediate peers. Positioning in the social order seems to be the major determinant of happiness. Huge differences in wealth then are offensive, as they relegate the majority to lower strata of society. Like in the animal kingdom, low social status is an evolutionary dead end. Hence, it is of paramount importance to present oneself credibly in society without the shame and stigma of apparent poverty. Advertisers and consumer goods companies play on that insecurity and ballyhoo conspicuous consumption as proof of self-worth. Thus purchases say more about the identity of the individual than the good itself; second-rate goods reflect second-rate people.  The rise of anxiety and its associated depression are at the same time accompanied with levels of self-promotion unseen in history. According to an influential study on the subject, in 1950 10% of teenagers agreed with the statement “I am an important person”. These days that number had risen to more than 80%. The meteoric rise of reality shows, with their the promise of instant fame and where judgments on one’s abilities are passed swiftly, are laying bare the character of a generation of narcissistic nervous wrecks. This “cortisol”-laden tribe reports extreme stress levels driven by low social status and loneliness (aka. lack of friends). Perhaps this loneliness results from the collapse of communities where an individual used to pass his or her life surrounded by the same people, to an altogether different mode of existence. The rapid rise of urbanisation, the uprooting of communities, means that one’s life is spent in the company of strangers who need to be impressed on the spot.

Does inequality make people unhappy? Or the combination of advertising, celebrity gossip, affluence and an official ideology of meritocracy and equal opportunities. these things make people who do not get on feel either like failures or victims. I wonder if more deferential, hierarchical societies are not happier.


He goes onto talk about the loneliness and alientaion of modern life - this can be explained by social fluidity, the decline of religion, mass immigration and in many other ways. But egalitarianism is the ruling ideology of our age.


But perhaps my backward looking nostalgia like all political stances is an expression of my psychological state. 


Actually I think there is a  great deal of happiness around in England and Romania - and probably most places. Obviously except Hungary.

Spectator cartoon in 1989 of the Prince of Wales

I periodically remember a Spectator cartoon in 1989 of the Prince of Wales (who had admitted he talked to his plants) with hands behind his back bending over a dahlia and saying, 'And how long have you been a dahlia?'

Primoridial slime somehow turned into Bertrand Russell?

Malcom Muggeridge once asked "Wouldn't it be a dreary story if all there was to existence was that primoridial slime somehow turned into Bertrand Russell?"

The modern equivalent would be to substitute Richard Dawkins for Bertrand Russell.

Bertrand Russell of course inherited the earldom bestowed on his grandfather, Lord John Russell, the Liberal Prime Minister, who met Napoleon en route to St. Helena and presided unperturbed over the Irish Famine. I remember passing Bertrand Russell's son each morning sleeping on the red leather benches of the House of Lords behind the throne when I made my way carrier bag in hand  to my first job in the Victoria Tower, when my life was just beginning and, in a sense, certainly as I thought, ending. The fourth Earl Russell  attended daily and slept in the House of Lords but only once spoke in the House, an occasion on which he suggested inter alia that the peers leave London for the south seas and take hallucinogenic drugs. The speech lasted for several hours till the Lords, which has, or had in those days,  no speaker and no closure, finally got him to sit down by barracking. This had been in the 1960s and the speech had been published by a hippy publishing house and enjoyed some success. 


The fourth Earl, whose beard reached to his torso and who dressed like a tramp (but was I was told a man of some means), lived in a squalid caravan in, I think, St. Austell. What a terrible shame the Labour Party reformed the Lords.

Tempora non mutantur

A thought-provoking quote from Livy's "History of Rome": "I would have [the reader] trace the process of our moral decline, to watch, first, the sinking of the foundations of morality as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the rapidly increasing disintegration, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them. The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings: fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid."


It could have been written this year. When I read these lines aged 13 they did not seem topical but surely they do now or have I grown old? 


(I wish I did not have the misfortune to study the Cambridge Latin course - I got grade A in A Level but cannot read a word because I was not taught to write it.)

Imperialism

I started writing a book called Imperialism when I was 7. I still have it complete with many maps. It did not win the prize which went to a project on motorbikes which won because, the headmaster said frowning at me, it was not taken out of books. He was a red. What a great conservative polemicist was lost in me.

St. Edmund King and Martyr, pray for us

I learnt today that Sunday was St Edmund's Day.  My patron saint and I did not know. I had forgotten that he was patron saint of England before St. Edward the Confessor and then latterly St. George. I have sometimes wondered - although I chose him at my confirmation - how saintly those warrior saints really were. St Stephen the Great, recently canonised by the Romanian Orthodox Church, is said to have fathered a child in every town he conquered or laid siege to. But St. Edmund was a great hero certainly.  I am not convinced of the Confessor's sanctity either which seems to be based on his not having children, thus allowing William I to invade and conquer England. . And I am not sure who St George was but am old enough to remember him being decanonised much to the indignation of patriotic Anglican Englishmen. That really was Papal Aggression.

Congolese independence 50 years later: an idea whose time has come and gone

A Congolese telling the BBC this morning how much better things were under colonialism. He brushed aside the BBC man's objection that the Belgians were self-interested. 'The people who made Britain rich were not acting in the interests of the workers.'




The BBC does allow pro-colonial views, it seems, if expressed by Africans.

Books Read This Year of Grace 2011

The Fry Chronicles                                            Stephen Fry

When the Lights Went Out                                  Andy Beckett

Any Souvenirs?*                                               George Mikes

How to Make Friends and Influence People             Dale Carnegie

Origins of the Cold War (1983 ed.)                        Martin McCauley

Precarious Living                                                Dr. Martin Israel

The Crisis of Islam                                              Bernard Lewis
Yezidism in Europe                                    Philip G. Kreyenbroek 

With Friends Like These                                     Larry L. Watts

Ataturk                                                            Andrew Mango

Snow                                                                       Orhan Pamuk

The Balkans*                                                          Mark Mazower

The Yezidis                                                              Eszter Spat

Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece                   Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor

Black Mischief*                                              Evelyn Waugh

The Transformation of British Life 1950-2000     Andrew Rosen

The Comedians                                               Graham  Greene

Reflections on the Impact of the French Revolution  Alexandru Zub

The Spy who Came in from the Cold                 John Le Carre

From the Holy Mountain                                        William Dalrymple

The Lady in the Lake*                                      Raymond Chandler

The Catholic Church And Nazi Germany                   Guenter Lewy

Farewell, My Lovely*                                        Raymond Chandler

* =  reread

bold = I loved it

I am proud I read five novels (one recent) instead of the usual one a year. All the books were worth reading except for the Stephen Fry book which interested me  a lot for personal reasons. Two I read on-line. Dale Carnegie and Martin israel are the ones I most recommend but I haven't nearly finished either. I wonder why I only liked From the Holy Mountain a great deal rather than loving it. Larry Watts' magnum opus is very good. Black Mischief is a book to read in your teens or early 20s. At 13 I wept copiously. With The Comedians you can hear the wheels turning. Raymond Chandler never fails to exhilarate even on a fourth reading. Like a great ballet dancer doing pirouettes.Eszter Spat's slim book was the one I liked best, partly because she writes well, partly because of the subject matter, partly as an aide memoire of an afternoon spent in Lalish in March

 I also - an unusual achievement for me - manged to see two films, both dire, both set in Paris: To Catch a Thief and the new Woody Allen.

The Kray twins were always good to their mum

Himmler's postcards to his mother were auctioned this week and reveal him to be a mother's boy.

Richard Westwood-Brookes, of Mullock's auctioneers in Ludlow, Shropshire, which is selling the postcards, said: "Himmler was a devout Catholic and his mother had a big influence over him in his upbringing. 

"He kept in regular contact with his elderly mother during the war and judging by these postcards he was a bit of a mummy's boy. The messages are quite short and don't go into a lot of detail but the postcards clearly show Himmler was very thoughtful towards his mother."

No surprise here- very many of the Nazis were mothers' boys. Mothers' boys typically become torturers and extremists.

Marie Louise von Frank the leading authority on mothers' boys says most SS stormtroopers were complexed and fixated on mothers, not tough at all and would almost always be reduced by British interrogators to tears by being asked - with quaver in voice - 'When did you last see your .. mother?' Homosexuals also have mother problems or complexes and it is well documented that many Nazis were homosexual.

‎"The role of a conservative thinker is to reassure the people that their prejudices are true."

Roger Scruton said this speaking to the teenage Daniel Hannan. But Scruton does not seem to me a true conservative. He opposes immigration citing defends the principle of self-determination, an idea of the French Revolution. I am not comfortable with this. There are so many better arguments from Burke and de Maistre.

Martin and the Women

Amanda Craig reviews Martin Amis: The Biography, By Richard Bradford and discovers Amis minor is to be pitied.  

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/martin-amis-the-biography-by-richard-bradford-6261274.html

Novelists tend to be forged by the experience of anguish, but the "endless cocktail party" in which the three Amis children were brought up would, in a lesser writer, fill a misery memoir. His father, the near-alcoholic Kingsley Amis had, as Richard Bradford puts it, a "limitless taste for adultery" and if his naive young wife Hilly provided their children with love, then the chaos evinced by these pages explains much about his son's fiction. Certainly by the end of this first biography, the old joke about "Mein Kampf by Martin Amis" being the least likely combination of author and title looks a bitter one.

She writes about Amis's lack of literary prizes as if this is evidence of anything which for the literary set it probably is. As if the Booker prize winners will be remembered in a century. 'Boozy male braggadocio' gives away that it is Amis's masculinity and un-feminist attitude to women that are much of the problem though they have nothing to do with whether he is a good writer anymore than Larkin's racism. Amis Minor is equally dismissive of people who vote Conservative or believe in God by the way. He is a great writer, much better than almost any of his male or female contemporaries, to their annoyance, but I never finished London Fields and haven't felt tempted to try him again. ( I bought Money the morning it came out.) But he is probably the sexiest writer since Laclos.

Amanda Craig and all the other women writers dislike Amis because they are feminists and he makes remarks like (unwisely, in an interview with Lynne Barber) 'Look at the tits on that!'


Feminism is now a very dangerous ideology. (I think all ideologies are about justifying smallish groups of of people getting power, in this case clever university educated women who are allowed to do so under the guise of victims.) I just read a disgraceful article by Mary Beard from five years ago in LRB in which she describes Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor as blokish. A war hero, chevalier sans raproche, polyglot, polymath and sublime prose stylist but blokish.

Thank God I live in Romania where feminism has not arrived but it will. Unless some miracle happens like the Angels of Ypres to turn the cultural tide flowing from the West.

Period drama

In the 80s I deplored the loss of traditional England but now it seems indistinguishable from the Edwardian age. Pretty Tory secretaries disapproved of too many women in Parliament, politicians did not live in sin, a great deal of freedom of speech still existed, habeas corpus, double jeopardy rule, nobs in the Commons, vicars were men....


How priggish not to live in ones age. The typical trick of Peter Pan or Puer Aeternus, who does not want to be bound to time or place but to float free.

Style

Style? 

"When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun, that was style. Or sometimes people give you style Joan of Arc had style John the Baptist Jesus Socrates Caesar García Lorca. I have met men in jail with style. I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail. Style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done." 

Charles Bukowski

Who has style? I suddenly realise I do!

Who else?

Raymond Chandler.


And ].... err...

Two in three Britons cannot speak a SINGLE foreign word

Headline in the Daily Mail:

Non, we no speak your lingo: Two in three Britons cannot speak a SINGLE foreign word

• A fifth don't even know what 'bonjour' means

• Revealingly, of those that can speak languages almost half knew ‘una cerveza por favor’ meant ‘a beer please’ in Spanish

I think insularity is a beautiful thing. Unfortunately we are not insular vis a vis American culture.

It would be much better to teach German to English people - we could pronounce it, the biggest stumbling block with French. But since even street cleaners in Zurich can speak English...
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2062982/Two-Britons-speak-SINGLE-foreign-word.html#ixzz1eATTavgo

Poetry is what gets lost in the translation

‎


Dr. Johnson said, "You may translate books of science exactly. You may also translate history, in so far as it is not embellished with oratory, which is poetical. Poetry, indeed, cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language, if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. but as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language."


Poetry is what gets lost in the translation is how Robert Frost put it.



Many verse translations are good poems but none are great translations.



But until a few years ago few read poems like Chapman's Homer because they are translations. Reading them always puts me in mind of walking round fine Victorian churches which no-one visits because they are not old (Victorian churches too are now given more attention than twenty years ago). The very good Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation edited by Adrian Poole is the place to start.



One of my favourites is Horace - Odes, Book 3, Verse 29: Happy the Man - translated by Dryden but the poem is all Dryden.


Happy the man, and happy he alone,

He who can call today his own:

He who, secure within, can say,

Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.



Be fair or foul or rain or shine

The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.

Not Heav'n itself upon the past has power,

But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.