24 December 2008 – 8:46 pm
Answer me this: after receiving gifts on Christmas Day, what is it that children proverbially do with them within 24 hours? Do they (a) break them or (b) give them away?
Fairly straightforward, I think you’ll agree. Now let me put to you a second and superficially unrelated question. When a man loves a woman, as [...]
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 [...]
Anothere meme (I’ll get back to proper blogging soon, honest) – via. Books this time, and a tie-in of sorts with the BBC’s Big Read (although I can’t find a BBC page with this list on). Viral boilerplate follows:
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books [...]
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 [...]
Counting films on TV & video, the last five films I’ve seen (from most recent) are
The Spiderwick Chronicles
Pride and Prejudice
High School Musical 2
High School Musical
Vantage Point
You may sense a theme emerging. Spiderwick is certainly a film I wouldn’t have seen if I weren’t a parent, but as such it was much better than I’d expected [...]
19 September 2007 – 5:40 pm
Cohenwatch left this alone, possibly because the numbers are solid and the argument seems pretty reasonable. Slightly shorter Nick:
The murder of Rhys Jones told you next to nothing about modern Britain, he [Ed Balls] told the Guardian. In the Sixties, people worried about mods and rockers ‘beating each other up with their bike chains’. In [...]
4 September 2007 – 11:00 pm
“There’s only one thing worse than a folk singer, and that’s a Stalinist folk singer.” – Ian Birchall
Hmm.
Several years ago I was enthusiastically involved in getting Red Pepper to publish a piece by Steve Higginson (of the estimable Soulpool), demolishing the myth of progressive, national-popular folk music.
When we look at the various collectors, mediators and [...]
Time for a bit more Potter. (Past time, in fact – my Rowling-rereading-and-reviewing schedule is way out. I blame life.)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, like its precursor, was big but not that big, a success but not yet a phenomenon. While we’re aware now of the continuing and repeated elements in successive books [...]
Ellis:
[Podhoretz]also barks:
As with Finlandization, Islamization extends to the domestic realm, too. In one recent illustration of this process, as reported in the British press, “schools in England are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils . . . whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.” (ellipses in original)
Now when you use apostrophes like [...]
As a genre, fantasy has something in common with utopian fiction. Utopias begin with a challenge – Let’s say that everyone’s happy – and then set about answering the questions that challenge provokes. The interest of a utopia is precisely which questions the author believes need to be answered: is it “Who will do the [...]
Jamie:
Back in the eighties when China was inviting “foreign friends” over, mainly to teach, as a means of preparing the locals for the forthcoming golden horde of businesspeople they weren’t too scrupulous about checking credentials. There was an absolute infestation of evangelicals, often in posts at fairly prestigious universities for which they had no qualifications [...]
David, of all people, points to a fascinating lecture by Rowan Williams. Who writes, among much else:
Take Scripture out of this context of the invitation to sit at table with Jesus and to be incorporated into his labour and suffering for the Kingdom, and you will be treating Scripture as either simply an inspired supernatural [...]
It became apparent that most of them hadn’t heard of Twitter.
Tim Bray misjudges his audience. What’s interesting is that the audience in question was at something called Web Design World. This leads Tim to wonder just how small the ‘Internet in-crowd’ really is – and, conversely, if it is that small, how come it makes [...]
Ellis links to an excellent appreciation of Raymond Williams. I’ve got nothing to add to it, except that I’d forgotten just how well he wrote – it’s an odd tone of voice, with a kind of patiently strenuous quality, but it’s very powerful and rather beautiful, once you tune in to it. I can’t think [...]
I haven’t got much of a comments policy. Any spam that makes it through the filters will be deleted, that’s a given. Apart from that, there are a few types of comment that I don’t like – people commenting for the sake of plugging their own blogs (human spam); anonymous comments; ad hominem attacks; anonymous [...]
The estimable Unity – who well deserves the title him- or herself – has nominated me as a ‘thinking blogger’, so I guess I’d better pass on the baton. I’ll take the easy way out and say that my blogroll is full of ’em, and I’d especially recommend you check out… well, any blog on [...]
12 February 2007 – 9:41 pm
Inconsequentially: it occurred to me the other day that I’m firmly convinced that some kinds of food and drink are good for you. In most cases this belief doesn’t appear to have any rational basis – although in some cases it’s probably based on experience, which is almost as good. Anyone else have a similar [...]
2 February 2007 – 10:10 pm
About twenty years ago there was a Radio 4 sketch show called Son of Cliché, scripted by the not-yet-celebrated Rob Grant and Dave Naylor. Nick Wilton was one of the regulars (what’s he doing these days, I wondered when I remembered this; the answer’s “panto, mainly“). The music was by Peter Brewis, including one of [...]
11 December 2006 – 10:50 pm
Newsflash…. General Augusto Pinochet of Chile has just died. His condition is described as ’satisfactory’.(Thanks, Rob.)Like Rob (and Ellis), my thoughts turned to Victor Jara, the Chilean Communist singer whose brutal murder would be enough in itself to damn Pinochet, even if Jara hadn’t been one of 3,000. Jara’s writing is vivid, poetic, charged with [...]
29 November 2006 – 1:28 pm
I’m posting from work, because this is (unusually) a work-related question. And I do mean ‘question’: I will be expecting comments. Look sharp.
I’m formulating a research proposal, building on the work I’ve done on what went on in Italy between 1966 and 1980. Basically, you have two successive waves of protest: one which starts in [...]
