It being summer, and an Ashes summer at that, I have been spending a bit of time lately with my large collection of cricket books. Yesterday I happened to pull out an old anthology The Light Side of Cricket, edited by E.B.V. Christian and published in 1898 by James Bowden of 10 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. The cover of the book looks like this, and from the day I found the copy of it that is now mine in a secondhand bookshop in Manchester, it has intrigued me that its original owner was one F.D. Gaddum of Adria House, Didsbury. The front endpaper bears his signature of ownership, followed by the address ‘Adria House, Didsbury’ and the date ‘6th Sept. 1898’. Why it has intrigued me is that two of the streets in Didsbury that I often walked past taking my daughters to, or fetching them from, their primary school in Beaver Road are, precisely, Gaddum Road and Adria Road. Yet until yesterday I never thought to look into the connection further.

It turns out that F.D. Gaddum was a cricketer and played a few games for Cambridge University between 1880 and 1882 and then once for Lancashire in 1884. He died rather young, at the age of 40, ‘as a result of a bicycling accident‘. Gaddum’s modest stats in first-class cricket can be found here.

The volume in my possession, which I have had for more than 20 years, I can now regard as an association copy.

I must say that in the way of bizarre arguments here’s one I find particularly remarkable. The context of it is as follows: there are towns in Germany that ‘still have Adolf Hitler on the rolls as an honorary citizen’. Where that has been discovered to be so, a common way of dealing with it was to remove the honour. But there are those who argue it shouldn’t be done. It shouldn’t be done because that would be ‘an attempt to whitewash something that can’t be whitewashed‘.

The removal of the honour, however, in no way dictates any effort to deny the fact that it was once awarded, or to cover up the whole murderous history of which it was a part. One can tear down the statues of a tyrant, who in his day had a mass following, and still try to teach people about his crimes, through other types of memorial, museum and what have you. Otherwise what? You have to keep the statues?

In a previous post on normblog I featured Frank Dikötter’s book Mao’s Great Famine and the human catastrophe it described. A piece in today’s Times by Leo Lewis gives a brief account of Dikötter’s follow-up volume (£), The Tragedy of Liberation:

At the height of China’s Great Terror, provincial leaders were set onerous execution targets to meet. Mao Zedong fiercely denounced those who let him down.

In the ancient city of Kaifeng, the executioners were having problems. Shooting their victims in the head turned out to be too messy, so they aimed instead for the heart. This sometimes failed to kill, which meant they needed a second bullet to silence the screams of agony. As Frank Dikötter, now well into his stride as a meticulous chronicler of China’s greatest miseries, notes: “Killing demanded skills that came only with practice.”

The Tragedy of Liberation is a tightly-written narrative of the twelve most pivotal years in modern Chinese history; 1945 to 1957 were a near unbearable catalogue of slaughter, ideological betrayal and violence. The book is also a dispassionate study of the way nations can pervert optimism and descend into lunacy by steady increments. Possibly too dispassionate[,] Dikötter does not over-analyse how you move from joyous crowds in Tiananmen Square to a man killing himself because his persecutors were accusing him of murdering eight people when he was a one-year-old baby.

We encounter men numbed from shooting unarmed villagers who continue firing. We have a county official declaring the need to shoot someone at every public meeting. We find leaders casually sending cables reporting that of 40,000 people recently executed, “one third may or may not have deserved death”. That drama may now be over, but its stage directions are indelibly written into the lore of the Communist Party.

Hard to believe that back in the day there were Western Maoists. Maybe there still are some. (See also the related post here.)

Tim Soutphommasane is an Australian political philosopher. He is about to take up the position of Race Discrimination Commissioner in the Australian Human Rights Commission. It is good to note that Tim understands certain key points that are sometimes overlooked by people writing about anti-Semitism. Thus, instances of racism don’t have to involve overt, self-conscious hatred. Tim writes:

[R]acism isn’t always violent. And it doesn’t have to be motivated by fear or hate. Quite often, the harm caused by prejudice comes from casual racism.

As he also recognizes, racism isn’t always intentional. It’s an elementary point but worth repeating since it’s so often overlooked.

In the tradition of the Momma ‘n’ Daddy song, among the values that are in there, alongside love and home and hard work and respect, you expect to find obedience to the parental word. But it’s not always so, as you can see from J.J. Cale’s ‘Mama Don’t’, which goes like this:

Now, Mama don’t allow no guitar playing round here
Now, Mama don’t allow no guitar playing round here
Hey, I don’t care what my mama don’t allow
I’m gonna play my guitar anyhow
Mama don’t allow no guitar playing round here

You know, Mama don’t allow no bass in this place
Now, Mama don’t allow no bass in this place
Hey, I don’t care what my mama don’t allow
I’m gonna allow this bass player in here anyhow
Mama don’t allow no bass in this place

Now, Mama don’t allow no drummin’ goin’ on
Now, Mama don’t allow no drummin’ goin’ on
Hey, I don’t care what my mama don’t allow
I’m gonna play dem drums anyhow
Mama don’t allow no drummin’ goin’ on…

And there’s more that Mama don’t allow. Find out what:

It’s a rich tradition.

[The Momma ‘n’ Daddy Archive, containing all the details of the series, is here.]

In today’s Guardian Review Colin Robinson, publisher, laments the never-ending production of the written word. Most writers, he says, think their words merit an audience but the majority of them are mistaken. And, with one estimate from Google putting the number of books in existence at 130 million, the proportion of writers to readers is getting ever more out of desirable balance. Possibly mindful of this being the silly season, Colin offers the following suggestion:

I would like to propose a writers’ moratorium. What if everyone could be persuaded to stop scribbling for a period of, say, 12 months? Of course we would lose some marvellous work during The Year of Not Writing, and that’s not to be taken lightly. But look at the compensations: we could all kick back, take stock, and get off the spinning carousel of keeping up with the latest offerings. Just think what could be done with the free time: books we’ve loved could be revisited; philosophy or poetry could be afforded the time they demand; tomes of previously forbidding length could be tackled with languorous leisure.

I’m here to tell Colin that, except for readers anxious to keep up with the very latest thing, his proposal wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference. According to a calculation I did in 2009, even if you read four books a week, and so more than 200 books a year, throughout 70 years, you could only get through 0.008324477724 per cent of the total number of volumes in existence. A publishing moratorium of a single year isn’t going to affect that significantly. So kick off your shoes and read just what you want to without worrying about the shortfall. You’re doomed to miss most of what’s there, whatever you do.

I don’t know what significance is to be assigned to the statistical oversights of others, but I’ll point one out to you and let you decide what weight to give it. If you go here you will find a discussion between Andy Zaltzman and S. Rajesh of the number 118 in cricket. The discussion occupies nearly 20 minutes, and from it you can learn that Ian Botham scored 118 in the Old Trafford Test of 1981; that Graham Gooch played in 118 Tests; that the very first batsman to score 118 in a Test was the Hon. F.S. Jackson; that Alistair Cook has twice been out for 118 in a Test match; and that Johnny Briggs took 118 Test wickets.

And the oversight? Well, Zaltzman mentions that at Edgbaston in 1997 England bowled Australia out for a total of 118. This is true but the fact on its own is poor and lonely if you miss – as Zaltzman does – the larger numerical fabric of which it is an integral part. In that same Test England’s target in the fourth innings to win the game was also 118. Then, four years later on the same ground, there was a clear reference back to the past since Australia won by an innings and 118 runs. Indeed, I noted the coincidence in my book on the 2001 Ashes series, Men of Waugh. There I wrote:

It immediately struck me that the result – Australia by an innings and 118 runs – strangely echoed the game at Edgbaston in 1997 when in the final innings England needed 118 to win, the exact amount of Australia’s first innings total then. Moreover, as I learned from the Channel 4 highlights on my return home, an innings and 118 runs had been precisely England’s winning margin over Australia at Edgbaston in 1985. [Link added]

I don’t know what your reaction will have been, but imagine my own disappoinment at finding that Zaltzman and Rajesh overlooked this rich set of connections in the matter of 118. (Thanks: RB.)

Tony Abbott, leader of the Liberal Party of Australia, is also confused about certain meanings. Just imagine you could get hold of a suppository like that. People would be more attentive to your every utterance.

Such, at any rate, is one possible supposition.

A few weeks ago, when the Egyptian military staged a coup to get rid of the government of Mohamed Morsi, a number of commentators became confused about the meaning of the expression ‘military coup’, denying that it was one. The thought process behind this strange denial seemed to be that as the coup had some sort of legitimacy in their eyes, it couldn’t really be a coup; military coups aren’t the sort of thing we (good people) approve of. It would be interesting to know if any of these same people now hesitate before the idea that what the Egyptian military and security apparatus have just carried out is a massacre. It could be this is a term whose meaning is less open to confusion.

I don’t mean knowing it after you wake up; I mean knowing within the dream that it’s a dream.

With me it typically happens with anxiety dreams. Like last night. Even 10 years on from retirement I’m still having the following sort of anxiety dream: I was down to do the Modern Political Thought lectures, and come the day I haven’t prepared either course outline or reading list. The first lecture is on Hegel and I have this ready – oh yes I have. But I’ve left the damn thing at the corner of a field, and now I can’t find it there.

And then, in the dream, I think: this is too bad to be happening to me; I would never have let it happen. And I reassure myself that it’s only a dream, and wake up.