I can’t say I’ve properly researched this, but it’s a very strong impression I have – that blog-related activity goes down at the weekend. As a general rule, to which there are exceptions, bloggers post less. Blog readers also visit less.

What does this mean, people?

(a) That the blog community – I use this term to cover both bloggers and readers – steals more time from working than from leisure hours for blog-activity?

(b) That blog-activity is work and is therefore more appropriate during the working week?

(c) That fewer people have access to computers at the weekend?

(d) Something else altogether?

Consider that on the same day, June 26 1942, the Duke Ellington (Blanton-Webster) Band recorded both ‘Main Stem’ and ‘Johnny Come lately’. And there are those who say there’s no hope for humanity.

By a rather weird coincidence Anne Cunningham, the subject of yesterday’s normblog profile, posted a link to it at One-Sided Wonder and then, later in the morning and in the immediately adjacent post, happened to refer to a passage from a novel by… Sophie Hannah. I assumed Anne must know that Sophie is my daughter, but when I emailed her to ask, it wasn’t so. Does this suggest a new – post-ish – meaning for the expression ‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’? Anyway, I’m taking it as a prompt to feature two more of Sophie’s poems.

Wells-Next-the-Sea

I came this little seaside town
And went a pub they call The Crown
Where straight away I happened see
A man who seemed quite partial me.
I proved susceptible his charms
And fell right in his open arms.
From time time, every now and then,
I hope meet up with him again.

He is Now a Country Member

He is now a country member.
The subscription rate goes down.
January to December,
If you live or work in town

You pay more. You come more often
And the fee, therefore, is high.
In a vain attempt to soften
Last year’s blow, he now drops by.

Not a word since last September.
He left town. We both know why.
He says, ‘I’m a country member.’
‘I remember,’ I reply.

From First of the Last Chances, by Sophe Hannah.

[Clive Bradley is a friend and former student of mine. He is a screenwriter and teaches screenwriting. When he sent in his entry for the movie poll, he and I got into an email discussion on aspects of film, and I invited him to write something on the topic.]

‘What’s the point in fiction?’ my student asked. ‘Non-fiction, I can see what it’s for. But why fiction?’ Another explained that he doesn’t bother reading novels because he always prefers his own endings. About half the class agreed; they do not read books.

Alarmingly, these are university students and they are studying to be writers. The guy who can’t see the point in fiction wants to write television comedy. When it was pointed out to him that he writes fiction too, his response was categorical: television is entirely different.

Part of the explanation for this hostility to the written word must lie in the ‘visual culture’ that now surrounds us, though other students rejected this: some can watch MTV and read novels. Part, perhaps, lies in failures in the teaching of English. (Hardly any of my students can punctuate.) There may, perhaps, have been an element of macho posturing too.

But I think it also reflects something about the way our culture often talks about fiction on screen, whether film or television. Especially through courses in Media or Film Studies, people learn to think and talk about film especially in terms I will call ‘director’s stuff’ – to understand it through a series of concerns which they imagine to be those of a director. In fact a good director is not concerned only with these things. But by director’s stuff I mean, crucially, the technical aspects to film making which media-savvy audiences like to commend themselves for noticing: tracking shots, wide shots, lighting, editing. Or if they’ve done Film Studies, there is an additional focus: signs, signifiers and whatnot; ‘screen language’, the ‘grammar’ of the cut, the camera as male gaze (or critiques of this concept).

It is not that director’s stuff is uninteresting or illegitimate. But narrative film (and television) works, or doesn’t, because of the underlying structure of its story-telling, the strength of its characters – because of what its story tells us about life. And these are the things which connect the drama we see on screen to the traditions of drama and story-telling which go back to the ancient Greeks, to the Sumerians who composed Gilgamesh, and beyond, surely, to the earliest human societies.

The idea that you can write television comedy without reading Aristophanes is not wrong only because a writer should have a broad knowledge and experience of life, but because comedy has its own traditions, dating back before The Office and Alan Partridge, traditions which good comic writers will strive to understand. Film-makers who know about theatre will make better films. It might not help with positioning the camera, but it will certainly help with character. A broadly literate audience, too, will get more out of what they watch.

Our culture is learning to talk about film and television as a series of technical processes, rather than the underlying human stories these processes should serve. This is the only conceivable explanation, in my view, for the praise heaped recently on Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation. This is a film with no characters. Its two central figures barely register as actual people. (She’s graduated in philosophy from Yale? Huh? And what sort of ex-star is he that gets paid two million dollars for a commercial but has no entourage and is not shown round Tokyo by his hosts?). Its secondary characters don’t register even as mannequins There are long sequences which appear to have no dramatic purpose at all, and are merely an excuse to point cameras at temples. Did we really need to hear all those songs in their entirety in the karaoke sequence? Much of the humour consists of cheap shots about the Japanese and the letter ‘r’. But somehow, abstracted from these considerations – questions a dramatist would ask – the movie is considered ‘art’.

It is, I think, this notion of film as ‘art’ (less true of television, which is assumed to be more humdrum and less of an art form anyway), independently of the human stories it tells, which may encourage a student of writing to believe he doesn’t need to read books. I don’t wish to blame Media Studies courses for the decline of civilization. But, well, maybe they’re playing their part. Indeed, the problem I am describing mainly refers to those who have studied, or taken an interest in, screen drama; for it is the stories which keep mass audiences hooked to EastEnders. Still, the over-concentration on director’s stuff has filtered through more widely.

The answer to my student’s question – what’s the point of fiction? – is that it fulfils a basic human need to account for our experiences through stories, a need as basic as music (to which there is equally no point). I am arguing for approaching screen drama on this level. How does it serve this need?

If I am right, it implies that the hostility to books expressed by my students can be redressed. Literature and drama are not outside the culture of which young people feel a part, but an enriching aspect of it. We just need to change the way we increasingly think, talk and teach about the media. (Clive Bradley)

Josh Cherniss, at Sitting on a Fence, posts a couple more great Sidney Morgenbesser jokes:

Sidney Morgenbesser’s first law of Jewish logic: ‘If P, so why not Q?’

Sidney Morgenbesser’s first law of Jewish deontic logic: ‘Can implies don’t.’

(With Josh’s kind permission. Earlier Morgenbesser instalments here and here.)

I wouldn’t be bothering to post about Jenny Tonge MP if it were just to add one more expression of criticism, disgust or what have you, to the many already out there. Several other bloggers have written about her remarks, including Oliver Kamm whose post on this I urge you to read if you haven’t already. I draw particular attention to the words Oliver quotes from Michael Walzer.

I have just one point to make which I’ve not yet seen made anywhere, and it’s this. Try using Tonge’s words about something else, not merely atrocious, as suicide bombings are, but generally recognized to be so without any known inclination towards apologia. Try this:

Many many people criticise, many many people say it is just another form of brutality, but I can understand… I think if I had to live in that situation, and I say this advisedly, I might just consider harming my children myself.

Or this:

Many many people criticise, many many people say it is just another form of brutality, but I can understand… I think if I had to live in that situation, and I say this advisedly, I might just consider physically attacking some asylum seekers (shooting a few liberals; etc.) myself.

Tonge’s words go beyond the usual ‘root causes’ hypocrisy, though not without first going through it: through the ‘understanding’ without ‘condoning’, but which precisely does condone in denying that it is doing so. It goes beyond this, however, with the language of ‘advisedly’ and ‘I might consider’. For this is a language of moral deliberation, where the standard ‘root causes’ hypocrisy most generally appeals to ‘desperation’, ‘roiling anger’ and such like, to convey that those who murder are beyond all reasoning and moral choice. But Jenny Tonge has said – and said it ‘advisedly’ – that she might ‘consider’ becoming one. One what? It seems she couldn’t bring herself to utter the word for what she would then be, and that may be a small point in her favour, betokening some residual moral anxiety.

Anne Cunningham keeps thinking she’ll move to London permanently, but somehow never does, perhaps because she doesn’t really believe she can live in a city where the subway shuts down for the night. She blogs at One-Sided Wonder.

Why do you blog? > I was having a lot of political arguments with friends of mine and I was getting frustrated that I never had time, in these discussions, to lay out the historical background to my views. I wanted a place to do that. I refer to my friends from time to time, and one friend in particular, K, has become a kind of character on my blog. She complains that she’s a straw man, but secretly she likes it. Her whole family reads my blog. In fact, I’d say her family is my core audience.

What has been your best blogging experience? > Having someone reach my site via a Google search for ‘how to be witty and charming’.

What are your favourite blogs? > They change from time to time, but right now my favourites are Au Currant, Eamonn Fitzgerald’s Rainy Day and Crooked Timber.

Who are your intellectual heroes? > I like Alain de Botton, he treats small-time concerns in a philosophical way, which is my basic mode in life. I’m also a big fan of Conor Cruise O’Brien and Christopher Hitchens.

What is the best novel you’ve ever read? > Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy was so engrossing I read all fifteen hundred pages in a week.

What is your favourite poem? > ‘Bloody Men’ by Wendy Cope. (‘Bloody men are like bloody buses / You wait for about a year / And as soon as one approaches your stop / Two or three others appear.’)

What is your favourite movie? > A Kind of Loving. I feel that movie belongs to me, because it seems like a portrait of my parents’ marriage. My father looked exactly like Alan Bates at that age, my mother looked just like June Ritchie.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you’ve ever changed your mind? > I’m rethinking a lot of issues right now. The death penalty, for instance. I used to think I objected to it in principle, but now I think it’s more a question of practice. It’s the fact that there are miscarriages of justice that bothers me, not the sentence itself. I suppose it amounts to the same thing in the vast majority of cases, but it seems an important distinction to me.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > The Chomsky/Pilger blame-America-first line.

Who are your political heroes? > Edmund Burke and Winston Churchill. Burke is particularly fascinating to me at the moment, given his split with his more radical friends over the French Revolution.

What is your favourite piece of political wisdom? > Always pee when you get the chance. Didn’t Margaret Thatcher say that?

What would you do with the UN? > Right at the moment I’d like to use it to diffuse the tension with Sistani. I suppose the organization does have a role to play, both as a forum and in nation-building, but we have to be honest about its failures and weaknesses, which are legion.

What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? > Islamic extremists and their Western apologists.

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > Have low expectations so you’ll either be confirmed in your views or pleasantly surprised.

Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own? > Different, yes; radically different, no. I could date someone a few degrees to the left or right of me, but not a member of the Democratic Underground or a Christian fundamentalist.

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > Steadfastness.

What personal fault do you most dislike? > Lack of self-knowledge.

In what circumstances would you be willing to lie? > I’m a big believer in the tactful omission or diplomatic white lie. I think a lot of people who advocate honesty in all situations are ultimately unwilling to take responsibility for their decisions, or for other people’s feelings.

What is your favourite proverb? > It is impossible to love and be wise.

What, if anything, do you worry about? > Seeing things as they are, rather than how I want them to be. I’m constantly trying to adjust my prescription to see things in proper perspective.

If you were to relive your life to this point, is there anything you’d do differently? > I would have tried to make a better impression during my date with ‘the Indian Mr Darcy’. I could be answering these questions from my house in the Hamptons if I hadn’t messed that one up.

What would your ideal holiday be? > Sailing around the Aegean, visiting sites of historical interest.

What is your most treasured possession? > A ceramic apothecary box for a Victorian-era quack remedy called ‘The Egyptian Salve’.

If you had to change your first name, what would you change it to? > Xaviera.

What talent would you most like to have? > Artistic. I have a strong aesthetic sense – and a particular appreciation for the decorative arts – but no ability whatsoever to draw or paint or make things.

What would be your ideal choice of alternative profession or job? > I’d like to be a radio announcer or the voice of books on tape. I love reading things aloud.

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > Eddie Izzard. (‘Coffee is code for sex. Unless you’re having coffee with the President of Burundi. Then it’s probably just coffee.’)

Who are your sporting heroes? > I like Swedish tennis players from the 80s, particularly Mats Wilander and Stefan Edberg. They were very gentlemanly.

Which English Premiership football team do you support? > I should support Leeds, since that’s where my English family is concentrated. But I’ve always been drawn to Liverpool. I’m very contrary.

If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be? > Oscar Wilde, and, so Oscar and I would have some eye candy to admire while we chat, Nolan Hemmings and Orlando Bloom.

[Previous profiles: Ophelia Benson (Nov 7); Chris Bertram (Sep 26); Alan Brain (Oct 10); Chris Brooke (Jan 2); Francois Brutsch (Dec 5); Jackie D (Oct 17); Brad DeLong (Jan 16); Harry Hatchet (Oct 24); Saddam Hussein (Nov 14); Jeff Jarvis (Dec 26); Oliver Kamm (Nov 21); Sheila O’Malley (Dec 19); Glenn Reynolds (Jan 9); Natalie Solent (Nov 28); Roger L. Simon (Oct 31); Michael J. Totten (Oct 3); Brian Weatherson (Dec 12). The normblog profile is a weekly Friday morning feature.]

> The Mail & Guardian reports:

You can’t keep a good newspaper down. Zimbabwe’s Daily News published its first edition on Thursday since being forced to stop printing in September last year.

The paper – a fierce critic of President Robert Mugabe’s government – was forcibly shut down by armed police in September after the Supreme Court ruled it was operating illegally because it was not registered with a state-appointed media commission.

Editor of the Daily News Nqobile Nyathi (31) said it had been a very frustrating, and a very difficult time for her staff.

The report goes on to describe some of the difficulties the paper is operating under. (Via Southern Cross.)

> Andrew Meldrum writes:

For many Zimbabwean fans and players, the likely cancellation of England’s [cricket] tour is welcome. Few, however, are willing to say so openly for fear of retribution from Robert Mugabe’s regime.

“That is very good news for us here in Zimbabwe,” said a former leading Zimbabwe player yesterday. “To have England come to Zimbabwe now would be terrible. The tour would be used by the Mugabe regime as a great publicity coup to say that things are fine in Zimbabwe. Things are not fine in Zimbabwe and cricket shouldn’t let itself be used to cover up the oppression and abuses that are rampant here.”

The former player said the Zimbabwe Cricket Union remained “in the pocket” of Mugabe, its patron, and that the team had been cleansed of any player who would criticise the government.

More strategic analysis up at Stratfor (but as a sample and so not for long). A core element of this latest offering is this:

[T]he United States must, at some point, liquidate the remnants of al Qaeda in the Afghan-Pakistani theater of operations. Ideally, the Pakistani army will bear the burden of moving into the tribal areas in the northwest and will do the job for the United States. In reality, it is extremely unlikely that the Pakistani military will have the ability or motivation to undertake that mission. Therefore, it is likely that the United States will try to close out the war with a final offensive into northwestern Pakistan, preferably with the approval of a stable Pakistani government, but if that is impossible, then on its own.

We would be very surprised if the United States launched this offensive prior to its elections. The administration has no appetite for another military campaign until the election is finished. Therefore, we would expect the United States to be in a defensive mode until November 2004.
…..
The fundamental issue now is what al Qaeda and its Islamist allies can achieve between now and November. This is their open window and the period in which they must reverse the direction the war has taken. If the current trend continues, and the Saudi and Pakistani regimes survive, the United States will attack in Pakistan; Al Qaeda, an organization that took a decade to create, will be shattered. The Islamist movement will become a widely held sentiment rather than an effective politico-military force. Contrary to popular opinion, it is not really that easy to construct a group such as al Qaeda, which is effective and resistant to intelligence.

Therefore, the United States has had an extremely good few months. It has recovered from its imbalance in Iraq — and although the resistance has not been destroyed, it is in the process of being contained. The U.S. strategic position has improved markedly, to the point that it is actually possible to begin glimpsing the end game. But between the glimpse of the end game and the end, there is al Qaeda, which must move vigorously now to reverse its losses and regain the initiative.

(Hat tip: John Abeles.)

In a long book review in The Nation, Brian Klug writes about The Myth of the New Anti-Semitism. There are a number of features of his review that are open to criticism in my opinion, but I shall focus this comment on what strikes me as its main problem. Klug doesn’t, on the face of it, mean to deny that there are grounds for worry. As he writes:

There is certainly reason to be concerned about a climate of hostility to Jews, including vicious physical attacks. On one Saturday this past November, for example, two synagogues in Istanbul were truck-bombed during Sabbath services, while an Orthodox Jewish school in a Paris suburb was largely destroyed by arson. Some researchers report a 60 percent worldwide increase in the number of assaults on Jews (or persons perceived to be Jewish) in 2002, compared with the previous year. At the same time, something is rotten in the state of public discourse. Anti-Jewish slogans and graphics have appeared on marches opposing the invasion of Iraq. Jewish conspiracy theories have been revived, such as the widely circulated “urban legend” that Jews were warned in advance to stay away from the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. And recently, certain public figures on both the right and the left have made negative generalizations about Jews and “Jewish influence.”

All of this seems clear enough. However, Klug wants to argue that it doesn’t add up to convincing evidence of a new anti-Semitism – understood, this, as a new kind of anti-Semitism, rather than as a new growth, or outbreak, of the old anti-Semitism. And the remainder of the piece is then devoted to putting in question the claim for a new kind of anti-Semitism, the central organizing principle of which Klug defines as the linking of anti-Semitism to anti-Zionism.

The general method of his argument is to go through variations on the theme that anti-Zionist criticism, or feeling, isn’t necessarily anti-Semitic, while allowing that though the one isn’t necessarily the other it isn’t necessarily not the other either. But overall the first kind of ‘isn’t necessarily’ prevails. Thus:

There is a long and ignoble history of “Zionist” being used as a code word for “Jew”…

But:

[A]nti-Zionism is one thing, anti-Semitism another. They are separate. To say they are separate is not to say that they are never connected.

Again:

But the underlying hostility toward it [Israel] in the region is not hostility toward the state as Jewish but as a European interloper or as an American client or as a non-Arab and non-Muslim entity; moreover, as an oppressive occupying force. Some people see this disposition toward Israel as anti-imperialist or anticolonialist, others as chauvinist or xenophobic. But in and of itself, it is not anti-Semitic.

Which is not to deny that anti-Semitism enters the mix. But it is one ingredient in a complex situation, not the engine that drives anti-Zionism.

And also this:

In the Arab and Muslim world today… [t]he political conflict is what comes first and goes deep, while anti-Semitism is a secondary formation, a byproduct of aspirations and grievances that have nothing to do with a priori prejudice against Jews (although such prejudice was hardly absent from the Muslim world before the creation of Israel).

And this:

But the evidence suggests that the perpetrators of the anti-Jewish attacks in France were animated by political outrage, not bigotry.

Two things bother me about it all. One of them I have argued at some length before, so will just reformulate within the context of the present post. How does Brian Klug know? I mean, given that he keeps allowing that it may be but isn’t necessarily, how does he know that, when, or how much, the ‘isn’t’ rather than the ‘may be’ is at work? He never says. He just veers towards that side, his own acknowledgement of all the worrying developments notwithstanding.

More seriously disturbing, though, is his very careful picking at the question of whether this anti-Semitism is a new kind of anti-Semitism, rather than its being just a new anti-Semitism in the more straightforward sense of being a recrudescence of something which there had been reason to think, during some few decades after the Judeocide in Europe, had been all but marginalized. For as Roger Simon, who has also blogged this, has said, who cares? To me Klug’s article has a strange, misdirected feel to it. A bit like a doctor going to great and pedantic lengths to explain to a patient that her worry that she might have contracted a certain terrible disease was needless (well, probably needless), while not taking any time to think about whether in fact she had a different terrible disease – of which she bore many symptoms.

(Thanks to Chris Bertram for drawing my attention to Klug’s article.)