Snake in the grass?
Which British populist politician does this image bring to mind?
Quote of the Day
On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
- H. L. Mencken
It took a while, but the Americans got there in the end.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Nina Simone | Bye Bye Blackbird (1962)
Wonderfully atmospheric recording. Like being in the room.
Long Read of the Day
The Bully In His Pulpit
Andrew Sullivan, reflecting on Trump’s address to both houses of Congress.
The night before, you see, I’d watched the president’s address to the Congress. Yes, yes, I know I recently pledged not to respond to every provocation from the troller-in-chief and focus on policies and long-term results. But to understand the moment we are in — and the policies that will follow — we simply cannot look away from what Tuesday night revealed about the state of our republic. I know I’m repeating myself, and have been since early 2016, but part of Trump’s psychological abuse is wearing down opponents so they stop repeating themselves, and give in to the lies. I will not be worn down. Truth matters.
Here it is: We have a sociopathic president in total command of a cult-like party; a Congress that, as long as the GOP controls it, is a rubber-stamp version of the Russian Duma under Putin; a court balanced precariously between a modest defense of the unitary executive and an Alito wing bent on empowering an American Caesar; and a Justice Department openly planning persecution of the president’s political opponents.
The speech itself, mind you, was masterful. He’s at the top of his game and clearly loving every second of it…
Read on. It’s not fun, but it’s insightful.
Skype got shouted down by Microsoft Teams. But it gave us free telephony
Yesterday’s Observer column…
The design of Arpanet’s successor, the internet we use today, started in the early 1970s and it was first switched on in January 1983.
The designers of the network were, from the outset, determined to avoid the limitations of earlier communication systems, particularly the analogue telephone network, which was optimised for voice, hopeless for digital signals and owned by corporations which resisted innovations that they themselves had not originated. So the new network would not have an owner or be optimised for any particular medium, and would therefore be more permissive than any earlier network. Anyone could access it, and create services that ran upon it, so long as their computers conformed to the protocols of the network.
The result was the explosion of creativity – good and bad – that we are still living with today. What the internet’s designers had built was what a scholar later called “an architecture for permissionless innovation”; or, put another way, a global platform for springing surprises.
The world wide web, created by Tim Berners-Lee in the late 1980s, was one of those surprises. But so too was something called VoIP (voice over internet protocol)…
My commonplace booklet
If you’re in the UK and have access to the iPlayer I recommend Mrs Dalloway the film adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s pathbreaking novel. It’s set in London in 1923 and tells the story of a single day in which Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional upper-class socialite (exquisitely played by Vanessa Redgrave), walks around London musing about the big party she is hosting in the evening, and the way that prospect is overshadowed by the unexpected return of an old suitor (played by Michael Kitchen) she had known thirty-three years earlier.
I’ve always been interested in the novel because of its similarities to Joyce’ Ulysses. The action in both takes place over a single day. Each focusses on the perambulations of a single individual (Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, Clarissa in Mrs Dalloway). And both authors make use of the stream-of-consciousness technique which explore the inner lives of their two central figures.
The parallels interested me because Woolf had been scathing about Joyce’s novel when it came out in 1922. But because everybody had been talking about it, the bought a copy (for £4, a lot of money in those days) and embarked on it, reluctantly. And apparently wasn’t impressed. “Never did I read such tosh”, she wrote to Lytton Strachey.
As for the first 2 chapters we will let them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th–merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges. Of course genius may blaze out on page 652 but I have my doubts. And this is what
[T.S.]Eliot worships …
But even as she wrote that she had herself been wrestling with the problem that Joyce had solved — how to convey the inner thought-processes of a character — in composing what eventually became Mrs Dalloway. So, I had concluded, her vituperative response to Ulysses was simply a petulant expression of iteration that a vulgar Irish upstart had beaten her to it.
As it happens, that was an unduly simplistic interpretation — as James Heffernan points out. Woolf’s response to Ulysses suggests that she was scratching an itch that was really bugging her. As Heffernan puts it:
Summing up Woolf’s response to Joyce and Ulysses, therefore, is no easy matter. To tread the long trail of her comments on them in her letters, diaries, reading notes, lectures, and essays is to find bits of evidence for two conflicting inferences: on one hand, she disdained both the book and its author; on the other hand, she saw Joyce–in Henke’s words–as her “male ally in the modernist battle for psychological realism.” But the whole truth of her response to Joyce lies, I think, not so much between these extremes as beneath them. While her “spasms of wonder and discovery” suggest that reading Joyce gave her something like an orgasmic thrill, she never mentions these spasms while reading him; they are masked by her stubborn aversion to his indecency, which she can never forget. Together, this aversion and her sense of boredom–or the boring effect of his indecency–furnish a bulwark against his intimidating success in the portrayal of consciousness: doing the very thing that she is trying to do, only better. She could not acknowledge him as her ally in the battle for psychological realism without giving up her place in its front ranks. To do her own work, and especially to write Mrs. Dalloway, she had to pretend to forget what Joyce had done–even as she absorbed all she could of his influence.
The script for the film was written by the actor Eileen Atkins, and the BBC ran an intriguing interview with her after the screening on iPlayer. She revealed that when the film was being made there were serious disputes with the director about the extent to which voiceovers (to convey the streams of consciousness) should be used.
If you’re interested, the film is currently available on the iPlayer for three more months.
Feedback
In Friday’s edition I reported on what emerged when I asked ChatGPT to “Draw me a cartoon showing President Trump in a grass skirt”. After giving a good summary of what such a drawing might include, the machine concluded that perhaps I should “hire a cartoonist or use digital drawing tools to bring this idea to life!”
In fact I did neither; but Euan Williamson (Whom God Preserve) generously rose to the challenge. Here’s the result!
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