Waiting for dinner
Cote d’Azur, 2010.
Quote of the Day
”The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. “
- Bertrand Russell
Thanks to John Seeley for spotting it.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Kathleen Ferrier (Contralto) | What is life? | Orfeo ed Euridice | Gluck
This is a remastering of a 1946 recording of Gluck’s Orpheo that stopped me in my tracks one dark November day in 1977 in the Netherlands. I was living there on my own and working at home for the afternoon when I suddenly heard an announcement on the national radio station that it was about to broadcast a long-lost recording of a 1946 recording of the opera with Ferrier singing the title role. Never having heard the opera, I stopped — and did no further work that afternoon. What I didn’t know until later was that many other people in Holland had done the same, because Ferrier had been extraordinarily popular in the country in the post-war years. The audio quality of the original recording was pretty poor, so this remastered version is an improvement, but you can still hear that it’s a vintage performance.
Long Read of the Day
To Be or Not to Be
Sobering blog post by Timothy Snyder about the prospect facing Ukraine.
“To be or not to be.” President Zelens’kyi of Ukraine once told me that “everything is in Shakespeare.” Early in the war he quoted that famous line from Hamlet to the British parliament. It is certainly a propos right now. It applies, in different ways, to his administration and to that of Joe Biden. Will Ukraine win and survive? And will the Biden team assist and be remembered?
Ukrainians and Americans both want peace. Indeed, no one can possibly want peace more than the Ukrainians. For the past two weeks, Ukrainian leaders have tried to persuade American journalists and the Biden administration of how this can come about, tried to convey a simple strategic truth: Russia will make peace only when Putin believes that Russia is losing. They are now presenting what they call a victory plan to try to get into that position.
This is realism. Using the word “negotiations” in any other sense is misleading, since the Russians themselves have made clear, over and over, that their goal is the humiliation and the destruction of Ukraine as a first step towards a world order in which such actions are normal. There is a thought which one hears outside of Ukraine to the effect that one can simply choose negotiations at any point without appropriately altering the power position. This is not realism. It is wishful thinking…
You cannot choose to negotiate with a power that openly seeks to bring about the end of your nation and state.
Yep. Which is why what happens in the US on November 5 really matters. And not just for Ukraine. Because if that falls to Putin, then Poland will be next. Europe’s holiday from history will be over.
Snyder is a good historian and has been spending a lot of time in Ukraine, which is a good reason for taking him seriously.
Books, etc.
In the shack with Robert Caro
Nice piece by Austin Kleon about Robert Caro, the remarkable biographer of Robert Moses and LBJ, about where he writes, and with what.
He bought the prefab shack, he says, from a place in Riverhead for $2,300, after a contractor quoted him a comically overstuffed Hamptons price to build one. “Thirty years, and it’s never leaked,” he says. This particular shed was a floor sample, bought because he wanted it delivered right away. The business’s owner demurred. “So I said the following thing, which is always the magic words with people who work: ‘I can’t lose the days.’ She gets up, sort of pads back around the corner, and I hear her calling someone … and she comes back and she says, ‘You can have it tomorrow.’”
Caro is a truly amazing writer, endowed with a work ethic and a doggedness that’s, well, superhuman.
My commonplace booklet
How power corrupts
If you still believe that British politics is relatively free from corruption then you clearly don’t read Private Eye or subscribe to Open Democracy and Peter Geoghegan’s journalism. And now there’s Simon Kuper’s new book. So, as an added treat, here’s a transcript of a conversation between Peter and him.
Sample:
Peter: What surprised you most when you were researching the book?
Simon: The degree and the shamelessness with which politicians and especially the Tory party were taking money from autocracies, or people with links to autocracies – and then the impunity of it. I realised that the UK has almost no laws about political corruption. I’d research all this material and think, “What?! Another Russian spy donating to the Tories?” or “Boris Johnson really flew to the former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev’s Italian villa while foreign minister without any aides present? He made Lebedev Junior a Lord? Cameron lobbies for Chinese interests? Blair lobbies for everyone? And this is just allowed?” It was the gap between all the stuff that was happening and the absence of any sanction that kept astounding me.
Linkblog
Things I encounter when drinking from the Internet firehose.
- McDonald’s touchscreen kiosks were feared as job killers. Instead, something surprising happened. An interesting sidelight on the automation vs employment debate. Link
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