MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark ...

... all the sweet green icing flowing down ---
Someone left the cake out in the rain ---
I don't think that I can take it,
Because it took so long to bake it,
And I'll never have that recipe agaaaaaaain ....

[ahem]

Yes, I know it should be MacArthur Park, but who am I to argue with the original Richard Harris recording? All seven-and-a-half minutes of it?

The song is forty years old this month^*. It is cheeseball, overblown, sentimental, and preposterous: and still, there's a part of me that loves it. Harris was not exactly the best singer in the world, but he was an excellent performer, and this recording is a great performance. If the song is an epic: go epic.

UPDATE (28th May): It appears that Chris Noth, a.k.a. Big a.k.a. Mike Logan, is a big fan of Harris' recording.

^* [I've had trouble establishing a date for the album, A Tramp Shining, looking around in the web. April 1968 is the best I've managed, based on this website on the Dunhill label.]

The Pentagon's hidden hand

If you are interested in the media response to (and responsibility for) the progress of the war in Iraq, may I recommend an article in today's New York Times, "Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand". It's the more devastating for being sober in its tone.

The standard of investigative journalism in this paper --- supported by the exemplary American Freedom of Information regime --- is excellent. It's in signal contrast to the partisanship of papers in (say) the UK, and the self-importance and shallowness of papers in my own country.

One year on

This blog is a year old: I wish the occasion were a happier one. By the way of a good-news story, though, let me point you to an effort to remember students and faculty through relief work in poor parts of Virginia.

The following posts have been popular:

All together now! (30-Jul-07)
Blinded by the light (05-Jan-08)
Easter for grownups (27-Mar-08)
The end of the affair (01-Jul-07)
Four reactions to an apology (17-Feb-08)
A German beer trail (22-May-07)
Kermode on Vermes on the Resurrection (23-Mar-08)
The love that dare not speak its name (25-Jun-07)
Midgley on rights and social ethics (14-Sep-07)
Miserere mei, Deus (18-Nov-07)
Of giants and crockery (17-Oct-07)
Perks? (19-Apr-07)
Pheasant Plucking (24-Jun-07)
She is a very bad girl (12-Jul-07)
sushi and sashimi (23-Dec-07)
Talk is cheap (24-Oct-07)
Tambourines and elephants (16-Dec-07)
Tangled up in (quantum) blue (05-Oct-07)

Let me also put in a shameless plug for Silver on the Tree (30-Mar-08) and Europa Rising (08-May-07)

If seeing is believing ...

If seeing is believing, then we better be damn careful about what we show people, including ourselves – because, regardless of what it is – we are likely to uncritically believe it.

It's sentiment I endorse, but I'd be a bit suspicious of it coming from me, or from someone likewise conservative. In fact the author is Errol Morris, writing in his blog at the New York Times. As a documentary film-maker who himself uses dramatic re-enactment as a tool, I'd say he can speak with some authority on this question.

The article is a little long, but well worth reading: on re-enactment generally, and on some fascinating individual cases. And (somewhat off-topic), if you haven't seen Morris' documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara, then truly, you must.

The NYT deep-sixes Ice Nine

In recent days my friends --- including several physicists --- have been tormenting me with the news about the court case in Hawaii attempting to stop the turn-on of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. I would like to think that I have a sense of humour about my work, but I do not have a sense of humour about relentless focus on the spectacular (as opposed to the central, or the important); nor do I have much time for the current conviction that crackpots and obsessives, for some mysterious reason, deserve to be given cultural space.

Ahem.

I was pleased to see an editorial in the New York Times today, dismissing the concern while having fun with it at the same time. I may not have a sense of humour in this matter, but at least I can appreciate it in other people.

[I have previously posted on the LHC, and on the ATLAS experiment, which I am joining this year.]

Silver on the Tree

He accepted everything that came into his mind, without thought or question, as if he were moving through a dream. But a deeper part of him knew that he was not dreaming. He was crystal-clear awake, in a Midwinter Day that had been waiting for him to wake into it since the day he had been born, and, he somehow knew, for centuries before that.

Thus Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising: Will Stanton has woken into a dream, with all of the sudden shifts of place and inexplicable certainties that a dream has, but a dream that is more real --- closer to the truth, about the world and about himself --- than what he has taken to be his waking life.

For it is Will's eleventh birthday, and he is finally, truly awake: seventh son of a seventh son, he has woken into his powers as an Old One, an immortal warrior of the Light, fated by birth to take his part in the Law-bound struggle with the Dark. He is the last of the Old Ones, completing the Circle, and is bound to play the central role in the final struggle between the powers: the Dark, seeking to swallow up human agency by means of its own weakness; and the Light, fighting to preserve the world free, and at last give it back to man. It is a frozen, oddly static kind of struggle --- no-one gets killed, at least not directly --- but the stakes are high, the Dark truly terrible, and the Law and the High Magic within which all is bound are merciless; and even the Light can be cruel. "This is a cold battle we are in", says Merriman Lyon, Will's mentor, first of the Old Ones, the historical Merlin, "and in it we must sometimes do cold things."

It is a humourless vision of the world: not lacking in joy, perhaps, but excluding all play. "In this our magic," Merriman scolds Will after a heedless act, "every smallest word has a weight and a meaning. Every word that I say to you --- or that any other Old One may say." From that point onwards, Will accepts his responsibility without complaint, and (for the most part) without regret. It's a measure of the writing's power that you still believe him as a pre-teen boy: a boy with normal tastes and habits who can nonetheless step, at a moment's notice, into a vast timeless struggle where everything is freighted with significance. The contrast with the Earthsea books, written around the same time and themselves pretty serious, is signal: "a mage", Le Guin says, "is a trickster", and the (original three) books are full of delight in the lesser enchantments. The exultation and danger of the great spells, and the concern with Equilibrium, are visibly continuous with the ordinary pleasures and risks of life. But, of course, the mages of Earthsea are mortal men. It's to Cooper's credit that she doesn't just tell us, she shows us that Will and Merriman and the others are "not properly human".

The Old Ones are a triumph; Will's compatriots Simon, Jane, and Barney are another matter. They are drawn well enough, and believable in their way, but there is something Enid Blyton-ish about the Drew children, and it jars with the high seriousness of the books. You really do not miss them in The Grey King; in Silver on the Tree they are a positive intrusion. And in the Trewissick scenes, where they are joined by the (otherwise unexceptionable) red setter Rufus, the dread spectre of Timmy the Dog does rather haunt the proceedings.

The books have other flaws. They are quest stories: searches for a grail (Over Sea, Under Stone), for six Signs of Power (The Dark is Rising), and for a vital, lost piece of parchment (Greenwitch); the winning of a harp, to wake immortal warriors (The Grey King); and a vertiginous race across space and time to final confrontation with the Dark (Silver on the Tree). Few real decisions are ever made, although one scarcely notices this, as one event follows another, fulfilling old prophecies in the long waking dream. Our real world intrudes --- and it does feel like an intrusion --- in the final book; and the ending is rushed. (Let the reader understand: why did there have to be a boat? Why, why, why?) As with any story where the characters slip about in time, there are plot holes through which one could drive a truck. And so on; and so forth.

They are children's books. Written for older, serious, literate children, who can cope with long sentences and complex clause structures. They are Celtic. They are pagan, although pleasingly free of anti-Christian posturing. And they are assured: what sells them in the end is their almost-unfailing assurance of tone, their conviction that the dream is real. One of the few times that assurance slips, the narrator makes a defensive comment on the childishness of the two prophetic rhymes that summarize the action. She need not have bothered, for here is the last verse of the simpler poem, which is surely effective enough:

Fire on the mountain shall find the harp of gold;
Played to wake the Sleepers, oldest of the old;
Power from the green witch, lost beneath the sea;
All shall find the light at last, silver on the tree.

Easter for grownups ...

... courtesy of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury: here's his sermon for Easter Day. On facing the inevitability of death:

Maturity lies in accepting the truth - and then making the most of every moment of sensation so that our response is as deep and wholehearted as may be. 'This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well which thou must leave ere long', as Shakespeare has it at the end of one of his most memorable sonnets (no.73).

Yet here comes the Easter gospel, apparently determined to upset this stoical maturity and to promise us just that eternal life we are urged to leave behind as a childish fantasy. Death will be 'overcome', 'swallowed up in victory'. (I Cor 15.54) Is the Christian gospel just a version of that popular but problematic passage sometimes read at funerals, beginning 'Death is nothing at all' and talking of it as just 'slipping into the next room'?

That's not quite the tone of what St Paul or any of the other New Testament writers is saying - nor of some of the ancient hymns and prayers of the Church in this season ...

Kermode on Vermes on the Resurrection

In the current London Review of Books, just in time for Easter, the critic Frank Kermode reviews Geza Vermes' book "The Resurrection". Sadly, it's not in the publicly-accessible section, so if you're a non-subscriber you'll need to content yourself with snippets, or shell out for the full article. (Or maybe just subscribe: the LRB is an excellent read.) The article, and apparently the book, is an example of informed, reasonable scepticism concerning Christian claims: the sort of thing local author John Dickson was calling for in Friday's Herald.

Of course, one has always been able to find literate discussions in journals like the LRB ... but popular discourse lately has been dire. When I was an undergraduate, one ran into lots of on-campus criticism of Christianity that was complacently ignorant: rather like on-campus talk on some other subjects. One expects people to grow out of such posturing, but it seems some folk never did; and in recent years it has become acceptable, for whatever reason, to dismiss the Christian faith in ill-informed and wholesale terms.

By contrast to this, both Vermes and Kermode are concerned to take the New Testament seriously; this is not to say that they "agree" with it, or with Christianity more generally. Vermes, writes Kermode, is interested in

the inconsistencies, the flaws in testimony, the narrative faults, of the New Testament record, treated as evidence, however flawed, of something that happened. As he remarks, he feels his responsibility to be judicial in character; his main business will be to see whether the stories told by the witnesses stand up in court [... for the] Christian creeds emphasise the presence in their accounts of an undoubtedly historical character, Pontius Pilate [... whereas in] a different sort of narrative he might not have a proper name but be simply the Governor, the Procurator or the like, and we should not need to be told as much as we are about him ...

They go on to disagree on what to make of the Pilate material in John's Gospel, as well one might.

Christian scholarship and advocacy should likewise know what it is talking about, acknowledge other competent interpreters, and avoid claiming too much. For a Herald article, Dickson's piece was very good in this way, and was even willing to take some small swings at his own side. Too often in this town, there seems instead to be a "not in front of the children" attitude about public statements: an idea that one must avoid saying anything that might dismay or confuse the humble believer; an anxiety about always staying on-message. Statements and articles of this kind (some of which can be found on the Sydney Anglican website) either leave me cold, or leave me infuriated ... and since I'm conservative enough that I believe the Nicene Creed, it's not as though this is a question of orthodoxy.

So if Dickson's piece reflects a renewed willingness for conservative Christians here to talk on something other than our own, zealously guarded home turf --- a willingness to communicate --- then three cheers for it.

[Thanks to The Blogging Parson for pointing out the Dickson article.]

(2) the o-furo

Number 2 of "Ten things I love about Japan".

Taking a bath in Japan is a pretty big deal. As you might expect in a country blessed with hot springs, there is a whole culture and way of bathing, and in ordinary (and entirely modern) homes you will find a bath quite unlike the ones we use in the West: short, very deep --- one can sit in the o-furo immersed up to the neck --- and with a recirculator that can maintain or modify the temperature of the water for as long as you please. Think of a hot spa, without bubbles, built for one person ... or for two people who know each other very, very well.

Let's get something straight: the bath is not for washing in. No, no, no, no, no. When you get into the bath, you should already be clean. (A shower is supplied for this purpose, perhaps with a small stool to sit on if you prefer: the Japanese use the European-style showers where the head is attached to a long flexible hose.) The bath is for taking your ease; it is a small version of the onsen, the public baths (artificial, or at hot springs) for social soaking. Foreigners tend to think the Japanese are uptight, but this is at best a partial picture: the Japanese take relaxation very, very seriously.

Soap may be out of the question, but beer is another story. So are snack foods. I myself am partial to a certain kind of prawn chip, common in Japan, shaped like a twist of rope the size of a child's finger. Colleagues offered me a plate of these chips at a party once, asking if I liked them; I praised them as the ideal accompaniment for beer, when sitting in the o-furo and drinking. The younger Japanese standing around smiled, nodded, and broke out into polite applause: in this taste, if in nothing else, I had gone native.

Saturday. Adelaide. Pärt. Miserere. ABC.

For those in Australia, or with access to ABC Classic FM on the web:

A programme by the Adelaide Chamber Singers will be broadcast live from St Peter's Cathedral in Adelaide, as part of the Adelaide Festival, this Saturday from 11:00 pm Sydney time. The first work is Arvo Pärt's extraordinary setting of the Miserere, previously discussed on this blog.

Fish, on a fish out of water

In the NYT opinion section there's a post from Stanley Fish that tries to distinguish good and bad reasons for opposing a controversial university appointment: thoughtful as always. For example, here's a striking portrait of the plight of the outsider in certain special kinds of community:

he or she will lack the internalized understanding that renders the features of the enterprise intelligible, and in the absence of that understanding, the wanderer in a strange land will see only anomalies and mistakes that should be corrected. Items in a practice are not known piecemeal; you don’t learn them by listing them. You learn them by being so embedded in the practice that everything that happens within it has a significance you don’t have to strain for because it is perspicuous without any mental effort at all ...

Teenage boys are human after all ...

... according to a survey discussed in the NYT on the weekend. This reads like another of those studies that gets over-interpreted because its results are striking on their face, but the discussion in the article is interesting. A sample: after noting that the survey results --- which showed that boys were motivated by things other than sex --- had been greeted with derision by male bloggers, it's stated that

skepticism about boys in their teens isn’t surprising ... but it reveals more about what’s going on in the minds of adults, than of teenagers.

“Grown men often deny how dependent they are on women,” said Michael G. Thompson, a psychologist specializing in children and families and co-author of the book “Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys.” “The idea that you could pine for a girl, and be devastated by a girl makes an adult man uncomfortable. It reminds them of how profoundly attached they get to women.”