Too pale a hue

June? June?
Oh well – I’m back, probably.
What’s been happening? Looking back at the last two posts, both those papers got rejected; in one case it was more of a “revise and resubmit”, so I’m not particularly distressed. The other was more of a “hit the back wall without bouncing” rejection, which did stop me in [...]

Don’t let freedom fade

Belatedly, a bit more Bingham. (Updated 30/11.) And a question: what, exactly, was Martin Kettle saying in this column?
What’s most remarkable about the column is that Kettle doesn’t actually contest the argument Bingham put forward. Instead, there’s a steady drip-feed of insinuations that Bingham’s speech shouldn’t be taken seriously, whatever it was he actually said [...]

I crossed off next week yesterday

Not a lot of blogging around here lately. There are a number of reasons for that, not all of which I’m entirely aware of, but one factor has got to be work.
Which reminds me, indirectly, of Jonathan Coe’s second novel, A touch of love. Two extracts:
Friday 4th July, 1986
‘Some years ago – I don’t know [...]

…in other people’s misery

My worldview was formed in the 1970s, when (it seemed to me) there was no such thing as lifestyle: to say that personal choices mattered, were worthy of attention, was to say that the personal was political, which in turn connected those choices to a whole range of broader commitments. Because it all was connected, [...]

Thousands or more

In comments, Rob wrote:
I remember when I was at school there was much polemic in the pages of Folk Review from the likes of Dick Gaughan and Pete Bellamy about whether one could truly call singer-songwriters “folk” at all: specifically about the extent to which they were likely to be writing songs that would become [...]

Young bones groan

Just recently, I’ve got heavily into traditional music – specifically, traditional English, Scottish and Irish music. One of the effects has been to make me feel a bit ambivalent about the local folk club – which is ironic, as it’s going to the folk club that exposed me to traditional music in the first place.
I [...]

A system and a theory

WorldbyStorm:
Once Blair et al dreamed of a hegemonic project that would dominate the centre left for decades. At this rate they’ll be lucky to salvage anything from the wreckage.
Which reminded me of something I wrote for Casablanca (anyone else remember Casablanca?) in October 1994. To set the scene, John Major’s Conservative government had been re-elected [...]

Skates on, mate

Something from the Italian press, following on from Liam. This is taken from a column by Curzio Maltese in today’s Repubblica. ‘Il Caimano’ – ‘the caiman‘ – is a popular and well-deserved nickname for Berlusconi.
It’s a bit naive – no, extremely naive – to profess to be astonished that Berlusconi the statesman has turned back [...]

In the hot sun

Obsolete has an excellent, if inevitably depressing, analysis of the latest from Louise Casey. I was particularly struck by one line in particular: apparently Casey thinks it’s important
to get the public more engaged in tackling crime and to stop the erosion of community spirit.
Oh-oh – Broken Windows alert. Criminologists have spent years of their lives [...]

Somewhere in the corner

Postdoctoral fellowship application, June 2006
12 months, to write and place two papers developing my doctoral thesis (analysing the Italian protest movements in the 1970s through contemporary press coverage) and submit an application for funding for a follow-up project (looking at British protest movements in the 1990s).
Rejected. Critical feedback.
Research grant application, January 2007
24 months, to analyse [...]

Open up the nicks

An Italian postscript. Here’s a post which originally appeared eighteen months ago (23/11/06) at the recently-revived Sharpener. I think it stands up pretty well: I got the importance of fragmenting the old Christian Democrat bloc, Prodi’s skill in knitting together ex-Christian Democrats and ex-Communists, and the lamentable importance of Clemente Mastella. (Who didn’t even stand [...]

All the peacemakers

Socialist Unity has a notice for what looks like an interesting and important meeting:
Creating the Climate of Fear: Counter-Terrorism and Punishment without Trial
Friday March 14; 6.30-9.00 p.m, London Muslim Centre, 46 Whitechapel Road
Organised by Campaign Against Criminalising Communities, Centre for the Study of Terrorism
It’s a meeting about the proposed Counter-Terrorism Bill (the ‘42 days’ bill, [...]

Writing frightening verse

The papers have been all over Will Reader’s presentation at the British Association Festival of Science; the Guardian alone has run two separate stories by James Randerson, headed “Social networking sites don’t deepen friendships” and, more bluntly, “Warning: you can’t make real friends online”.
I’ve been socialising online for over ten years now, and I’m pretty [...]

Anyway, I hate divorces

I turned 47 recently. Yes, that is quite old. Lines from Krapp’s Last Tape come to mind, as they do from time to time.
I’ve never linked to the Metro before, and never expected to. But this made me laugh out loud:
At this weekend’s Bestival, a three-day music event on the Isle of Wight, the Government [...]

To live in

I’ve been going through my non-fiction and turning out a lot of stuff that I’ve never read or never want to read again. There goes a biography of Herzl, one of Philip K. Dick and two biographies of Ezra Pound (what was I thinking?); there goes a book on Yugoslavia called “The Improbable Survivor” (of [...]

And start again

From the ‘found while looking for something else’ file.
In May 2003 the Iraq invasion had just been declared complete; nobody knew quite how bad things were going to get. So the chances are that Danish academic Per Mouritsen wasn’t thinking about Iraq when he wrote this:
Peasants of Piemonte or Bretagne did not begin to accept [...]

Ten years dead

First, have a look at this table; it represents some highlights from the voting records of two MPs in the 2001-5 parliament. Neither of them’s particularly far to the Left or Right – they both voted for the Iraq war and for a lower age of consent for gays, for example. But there are some [...]

Better call up the cops

My academic background is in sociology, sort of – you could also call it politics, or contemporary history, or European studies. One thing it wasn’t is criminology. So I have a lot of sympathy with the academics cited here, lamenting the decline of sociology at the expense of criminology. (I met one of them – [...]

Feels like 1974

I haven’t said a lot about Labour or the Left here lately, mainly because I’ve been saying it all at Dave’s place (another example of the essential superiority of Usenet over blogging). Here’s a slightly edited version of my comments on recent threads.
Dave argues that this government’s left-wing achievements have been localised and timid (Blair [...]

Great big bodies

I think the thing that really irritates me about the Long Tail is just how basic the statistical techniques underlying it are. If you’ve got all that data, why on earth wouldn’t you do something more interesting and more informative with it? It’s really not hard. (In fact it’s so easy that I can’t help [...]