paulkincaid

Oh go on, put words in my mouth ... https://jonathanstrahan.podbean.com/e/episode-678-nearly-15-years-of-rambling/

In response to Roseanna Pendlebury's post following up on her review of Colourfields, I've done my own post about the books that shaped my taste in sf. https://ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2025/05/09/the-books-that-made-me/

A story that feels too close to be comfortable, too wonderful to be ignored. And it is from a collection I urge everyone to read. ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2025/04/22/the-heights-of-sleep/

It is still early, but I have a feeling that A Granite Silence by Nina Allan is easily going to be the best book of the year. My review: https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/04/11/shattering-the-illusion-of-normality-review-of-nina-allans-a-granite-silence/

A few weeks ago I wrote a review in which I spent a fair bit of time criticising the author for his excessive use of academic jargon at the expense of clarity. I now read a lot of academic criticism, and familiarity breeds at least a measure of content: I know what they are saying, or trying to say, but invariably I think there are simpler, clearer, and more precise ways of saying it. The jargon often comes across as being intended to confuse the issue rather than clarify it. This is something that has long annoyed me, it crops up several times in COLOURFIELDS also. Today I came across a piece by Perry Anderson in which he attacked the academic Left for the "baneful effects" of "peer-group fixation, index-of-citations mania, gratuitous apparatuses, pretentious jargons, guild conceit." (This is from a 2000 editorial for the New Left Review) I am not alone: I feel seen!

Still trying to work out Dreamwidth. Today I wanted to post a photograph to mark what would have been Maureen's 66th birthday, but I can't work out how to do it. The "Insert Image" tag only seems to work if you are inserting an image from the web and so have an html address for it, I can't seem to just copy one of the photographs stored on my hard drive. I tried Help, and it was no help whatsoever. Any ideas?

When I am out for a walk I have my music on shuffle so what music I am listening to is quite random. But today, through one of those odd coincidences, the two great songs about the Kent State shootings came up one after the other. First there was Pete Atkins with "Driving Through Mythical America", followed immediately by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young with "Ohio". And it struck me, hearing them together like this, how much they have to tell us about the state of America today.

I remember when the Kent State shootings happened; everyone of my generation was, of course, appalled. How could such a thing happen in what was supposed to be a modern, civilised state? But we forget, with time, that that wasn't the most common response. When Neil Young puts in the line: "Should have been done long ago", he is giving voice to most Americans of my parent's generation. These long-haired, draft-dodging hippies had it coming to them. And when something similar happens in Trump's America - and I have no doubt it will - that will be the majority response again.

Why? Well, that's where Clive James's lyrics for "Driving Through Mythical America" come in. Because James equates the inevitability of what faces those four students with the myth of America inculcated through Hollywood film. When Elon said the other day that empathy was a bad thing he was only saying something that American film had insisted on over and over again. The hero is the loner, the one detached from society. The hero is the one who can shoot faster and with greater brutality than the villain. The hero is the one who ignores the rules for some greater good, and is always justified in the end. If that is your model for how America is supposed to work, how can your response to the Kent State shootings, or to any modern day equivalent, be anything other than "Should have been done long ago"?

America's myth of itself justified the Kent State shootings, and it created Trump. And that's why, whatever happens in the next year or two, we know that most people in America will shrug and carry on looking after themselves. Empathy, as Elon told us, is unAmerican.

Reading Stefan Collini's review of a 2005 biography of the very conservative historian Sir Arthur Bryant, and Collini notes Bryant's repeated claims that "an 'intellectual elite' was attempting to undermine 'ordinary people's' inherited religious and moral beliefs in order to impose a 'progressive agenda' that was alien to English traditions." Bryant would go on to argue that "(conservative) beliefs were natural and timeless, whereas his opponents' (radical) beliefs were the programmatic outcomes of 'system' and 'theory'." Consequently, Bryant's history "told 'the national story', which in turn revealed adherence to these traditional values to be the core of patriotism."

You can see exactly that process in the Brexit arguments of a few years ago ("we don't need no stinking experts"), and again in the Reform programme today. But it is not confined to England (Bryant tended to write about England rather than Britain), you see the same thing recurring across the world. The story has a familiar structure: emphasis on the great and noble past, particularly military heroics; the mythologising of defeats that somehow became a cause for celebration (Dunkirk, Valley Forge); the concentration on "Great Men" who of course just happened to look the same as us. You see this today in Netanyahu's Israel, in Orban's Hungary, and particularly vividly in Trump's America (though I suspect they might struggle with words like "programmatic"). Surely we on the left need to find a new way of telling the national story, but one that is still as vivid and attractive as the conservative version.

Yesterday I went over to Hastings for lunch with Leigh and Dev and others, a lovely day. But my train from Ashford to Hastings was cancelled. So I ended up having to catch a replacement bus service (not a very adequate one, the bus was stuffed and there were still around a dozen people who couldn't get on). The first stop after Ashford is a village called Hamstreet, which is just on the edge of the Romney Marsh, so the land round about is absolutely flat. And as we left the village I noticed a sign: "Mountain Farm". Well yes, the farmhouse was on raised ground, but the top of the rise was probably no higher above the surrounding flatness than the top of my head. I've never been called a mountain before.

I am planning a trip to Hastings this coming Saturday, so I was checking the train times. I first went to the Southeastern web site, put in my departure station, Folkestone Central, and my destination, Hastings, and the site wouldn't accept it. It kept telling me I couldn't have the same place for departure and destination. I hadn't realised Folkestone and Hastings were the same place, I'd have visited more often if I'd known.

So I went instead to the Trainline site. This, at least, realised that Folkestone and Hastings are two different places. Then I decided to check returns. If I specify the times I want to travel it was £6.10 each way, but I don't know exactly when I'll be leaving so how about a one-day return. Ah, this is £25. What?