Dreaming of Provence

We’re determined (well,hoping) to make it back there this summer.

Quote of the Day

”A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.”

• Samuel Johnson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chet Atkins | Black Mountain Rag

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Long Read of the Day

What Will It Take to Resuscitate American Democracy?

This essay by Stephen Marche is really a Long Read for a whole weekend!

Any American who can read knows that democracy is in crisis. The US government increasingly struggles to fulfil its most basic tasks, like guaranteeing the debt, passing budgets or confirming the diplomatic corps. Meanwhile armed groups of insurrectionists, like the one that stormed the US Capitol just over a year ago, spread incoherence. Think tanks on the right and universities on the left still debate policies like the tax rate or parental leave but they’re playacting by this point, whether they know it or not. They distract themselves with antiquities while the temple collapses around their shoulders. The questions have become much more basic than abstruse policy. Will democracy survive? How to keep America’s institutions alive?

Future historians will see a great irony in the intellectual history of our moment. Supposedly, we live in an era of wokeness. The misnomer could hardly be more total. The United States is sleepwalking to its end.

Marche is a novelist, essayist, commentator and the author of half a dozen books, including The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth About Men and Women in the Twenty-First Century (2016) and The Hunger of the Wolf (2015). He’s currently working on a book about the possibility of a second civil war in the US which will be published by Simon and Schuster so — not surprisingly — the tone of the piece is a bit apocalyptic. Maybe that comes from being a novelist. At times the piece reminded me of the directness of Kim Stanley Robinson’s approach to the climate crisis. Here’s the outline of his argument:

1. For conservative intellectuals, “the slip into dreams came over a decade ago, in 2008. The reason behind their collapse was simple. They were wrong about everything”.
2. The failures of left-wing thinkers “are more severe than the failures on the right. The also started in 2008 and “much of the left doesn’t know it’s failed”.

Hope you find it as striking as I did.

What the Canadian Truckers Want

If you’re puzzled by the truckers’ protest, then this is illuminating. I haven’t been paying much attention to it, and have therefore been ingesting the mainstream media’s reporting of it. This is a piece by a reporter who took the trouble to talk to some of the protesters.

Virginia Woolf: cook?

My observation in Tuesday’s edition that

the obvious explanation for Woolf’s ignorance [about beouf en daube], of course, is that she never appears to have done any cooking herself. At any rate her diaries are full of exasperated entries about the difficulties she has with her cook(s)

attracted the attention of Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve), from whom Nothing is Hidden. She pointed me to Rachel Cooke’s 2014 Guardian review of The Bloomsbury Cookbook  by Jans Ondaatje Rolls, a compendium of recipes and food-related paintings, prose and gossip starring Woolf and all the rest of the Bloomsbury crowd.

This contains fragments of maddening information, such as that Woolf “once mistakenly baked her wedding ring into a suet pudding”, and that “Woolf was a keen baker; she was also devoted to bottling and pickling”.

But the bit that really caught my eye was this:

We are what we eat. When Clive Bell’s waistcoat button flew across the room during a society piano recital in 1923, it was a sign he’d been enjoying the work of his wife Vanessa’s cook, Grace Huggens, just a little too much. But his real appetite, you gather, was for life; the humiliation, as Virginia Woolf put it, “brushed him only slightly”, and his spirits remained “superb” even as his waistband groaned.

Intrigued by this, I dug out my copy of VW’s Diaries for the relevant year (in the Penguin edition edited by Julian Bell) but could find no reference to this intriguing event (though Clive figures extensively in the year’s entries), and the index contains no mention of Grace Huggens). Which of course makes me wonder where this story comes from. But it also, dammit, caused me to spend (waste?) a couple of hours re-reading the diary, which I’ve always found addictive. Sigh.

My commonplace booklet

• Geomagnetic Storm Destroys 40 New SpaceX Satellites in Orbit

Over the past three years, SpaceX has deployed thousands of satellites into low-Earth orbit as part of its business to beam high-speed internet service from space. But the company’s latest deployment of 49 new satellites after a Feb. 3 launch did not go as planned.

As a consequence of a geomagnetic storm triggered by a recent outburst of the sun, up to 40 of 49 newly launched Starlink satellites have been knocked out of commission. They are in the process of re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, where they will be incinerated.

Hmmm… Divine intervention? SpaceX is Elon Musk’s company. Perhaps the Almighty is pissed off by his fatuous claims about the imminence of Full Self Driving.

Thanks to Alina Utrata for the Link.

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The Holy Wall?

Quote of the Day

“The battlefield of Cold War 2 extends far beyond the realm of missiles and ships. At its core, this is a struggle not over control of territory but over which set of institutions and ideas will guide the course of the world’s development. And on the economic, technological, cultural, and diplomatic fronts, the U.S. is somewhat asleep at the wheel.”

• Noah Smith (of Noahpinion fame)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sony Terry and Brownie McGee | Bring it on home to me

Link

I once heard them do this live. Unforgettable.

Long Read of the Day

The Big Short of Streaming

by Damon Krukowski

It’s  quite a short Long Read (for a change), but very efficient at getting its message across — which is that Spotify is a tech company trying to pass itself off as part of the music industry.

Nicely done.

Facebook is learning the painful lesson it taught print journalism

Good OpEd by Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. The lesson: never build your house on someone else’s land. Which is what mainstream media learned when they decided that they had to be on Facebook.

In 2015, some professors at Virginia’s Sweet Briar College faced an unusual problem. Through the college, they had purchased homes on campus. The land underneath them, however, was still owned by their employer. And now the college was closing, and presumably selling the campus to someone who might want to use that land for something else.

Happily, Sweet Briar was rescued at the last minute by its alumnae. But the financial cavalry don’t always ride to the rescue just in time, so the plight of the professors nonetheless stands as a vivid example of a wise business adage: “Never build your house on someone else’s land.”

For years, Facebook has been teaching that lesson to businesses that built their strategies around the platform. And now Facebook is itself getting schooled, which is why I bring this up.

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, just had a truly horrific earnings call…

Great piece.

When, in 2012, Zuckerberg decided to do a massive pivot and orient his company totally towards the smartphone, he was widely hailed — in Silicon Valley and by the commentariat — as a genius in the Bill Gates mould. (People saw echoes from the way Gates pivoted Microsoft in the mid-1990s to focus on the Internet once he perceived the extent of the threat that Netscape represented for Microsoft.) But Facebook didn’t own the smartphone — Apple and Google did with iOS and Android, respectively. So you could interpret Zuckerberg’s new pivot to the so-called Metaverse as determination to own the next iteration of the tech world so that anyone who wants to play in it has to do so on his terms — and at their own peril).

My commonplace booklet

In case you’re wondering how Julian Assange can pay his (whopping) legal bills, here’s how, courtesy of Azeem Azhar:

AssangeDAO, a decentralised autonomous organisation set up to raise money to cover the fees and publicity campaigns towards Julian Assange’s release, collected over $20 million in three days. As of writing this, the campaign has raised 16427.8 ETH or just over $50 million. This is a fascinating act of political subversion—worth following. Source: Wikileaks

Footnote. Puzzled by the DAO idea? Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), sometimes called a decentralized autonomous corporation (DAC), is an organization represented by rules encoded as a computer program that is transparent, controlled by the organization members and not influenced by a central government. A DAO’s financial transaction record and program rules are maintained on a blockchain. The precise legal status of this type of business organization is unclear.

You bet it is.

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High-tech minimalism

Without the vehicle on the left and the logo in the distance you’d never guess this was a service centre for cars.

Quote of the Day

”“What we are creating now is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left.”

• John Von Neumann on the digital computer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bill Evans | Waltz For Debby

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Cooking with Virginia Woolf

Marvellous essay by Valerie Strivers in the Paris Review arguing that the one flaw in Virginia Woolf’s great novel To the Lighthouse is that the author knows nothing about the dish that is a (perhaps the) central preoccupation of its central character, Mrs Ramsey.

The boeuf en daube in To the Lighthouse, a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf about an English family on vacation in the Hebrides, is one of the best-known dishes in literature. Obsessed over for many chapters by the protagonist, Mrs. Ramsay, and requiring many days of preparation, it is unveiled in a scene of crucial significance. This “savory confusion of brown and yellow meats,” in its huge pot, gives off an “exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice.” It serves as a monument to the joys of family life and a celebration of fleeting moments. Thus, it is with fear and trembling that I suggest that Woolf’s boeuf en daube, from a cook’s perspective, is a travesty, and that its failures may prove instructive.

Ms Strivers even rounds off the piece with her own recipe for boeuf en daube. It looks convincing to me, and so I’m going to try making it — and, while I’m at it, also re-read the novel (which has always been one of my favourites).

En passant: The obvious explanation for Woolf’s ignorance in this matter, of course, is that she never appears to have done any cooking herself. At any rate her diaries are full of exasperated entries about the difficulties she has with her cook(s).

That’s typical of the Bloomsbury crowd, though, who (as the joke goes) “lived in squares and slept in triangles” — and, one could add, always had servants.

James Joyce’s modus operandi

(Alert: If Joyce isn’t your thing, avert gaze and skip this bit!)

There’s an interesting essay by Philip Keel Geheber in the LA Review of Books on the way Ulysses was written. It seems that Joyce was the worst nightmare of copy-editors and printers. Every time they sent him a proof, it came back much extended (as well as altered).

Joyce’s process was accretive, and he radically transformed Ulysses in 1921, while the manuscript was in proofs. During this late stage of production, he added one-third of the novel’s text in the margins of the typeset pages. But Joyce wasn’t adding text for the sake of length or difficulty, though these undeniably are effects of the additions; rather, fundamental characteristics of the novel’s episodes were bolstered at this stage. Joyce was no longer subject to deadlines and restrictions associated with serial publication. (This serialization abruptly ended following the first installment of “Oxen of the Sun” in the September–December 1920 issue of The Little Review, as the magazine suspended publication in preparation for the 1921 obscenity trial in the Southern District of New York.) With the author given time now to shape episodes in an open-ended fashion, the later sections of the book became much more complex and stylistically stranger.

Much of the book’s characteristic humor and allusiveness enters the novel in Joyce’s marginal scrawlings on the proof sheets. For instance, Bloom’s satirical commentary on the Latin Mass in “Lotus Eaters” is written at this stage…

Geheber is nothing if not thorough. He has a long analysis of the evolution of the famous 459-word rhapsodic passage in the “Ithaca” chapter on the qualities of water that Leopold Bloom admired.

“What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?” The drafted response is a short 58 words, with marginal inclusions of 36 words (indicated here between carets):

Yes, its universality ^and equality, ever seeking its own level, constant to its nature,^ its vastness in oceans ^on Mercalli’s projector^, its secrecy in springs ^such as the Hole in the Wall well by the Ashtown gate^, its healing virtues, its properties for washing, ^nourishing flowers & plants^ quenching thirst, and fire, it strength in hard hydrants, its docility in working millwheels, canals, electric power stations, ^its utility in bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills,^ the fauna and flora it gave life to, its evil in marches, faded flowers, pestilent fens, stagnant pools when the moon waned.

Joyce transferred these 94 words directly to the Rosenbach manuscript — his mostly legible manuscript draft, from which typescripts were produced — adding another 76 words in the margins and drafting a 117-word block on the facing page. To these now 283 words, Joyce added another 176 in the margins of the proofs, so that 38 percent of the water hymn’s total length was produced in the waning months of 1921.

Like I said: a copy-editor’s nightmare. But also a genius.

My commonplace booklet

How Presidents used to write to one another

From George Bush Senior to Gerald Ford…

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Quote of the Day

”Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

• Henry David Thoreau

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dire Straits | Why Worry

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This lovely song was played at Dom Mulvey’s funeral last Friday and somehow it perfectly matched the occasion.

Dom was an unforgettable young man who had been dealt a terrible hand by fate — a number of congenital physical conditions that made his life almost unbearably difficult. He sometimes also wrestled with mental illness. And yet he was the most outgoing, enthusiastic, friendly person imaginable, a regular patron of many of the nicest cafes in Cambridge — which made him, in a way, possibly the best-known figure in the town. In the way he overcame his physical disabilities, he often reminded me of Stephen Hawking, who likewise outlived all the gloomy prognoses and left a mark on everyone who knew him.

Dom had a wonderful funeral — a packed service, followed by an amazing wake attended by, I’d guess, over a hundred people from all walks of life — with tea, music (compéred by Dom’s brother Nick, himself an accomplished musician), a potluck supper, memoirs and a vast rolling slide-show of photographs taken from the social media feeds of Dom and his innumerable friends. What was remarkable about Dom was the way he managed to be outgoing and positive; faced with the cruel hand he had been dealt, most of us would have curled up and hidden in a cave. And although his funeral was, in one way, an intensely sad event, the collective vibe at his wake was joyful — an evocation of how we humans can be better at love and generosity than hate and selfishness.

May the lovely lad who inspired those feelings rest in peace.

His sister Mary has set up a JustGiving page for donations to charities that Dom cared about. It’s already exceeded its target six-fold. I’m not surprised.

Long Read of the Day

America’s Favorite Pickup Truck Goes Electric

Long New Yorker essay by John Seabrook on Ford’s electrification of its best-selling F-150 pickup truck. Seabrook seems to be a big fan of the vehicle — he even owns a petrol-fuelled one, and has put down a deposit on the EV version (branded the ‘Lightning’ with typical Ford crassness), but his essay is a thoughtful disquisition on the EV phenomenon generally, and an enjoyable read. Sample:

Electric trucks are intended, in part, to appeal to drivers like me, who feel guilty about their gas-guzzler, as well as to citizens whose concern for the common good has kept them from buying a pickup at all. (Two hundred thousand people have reserved Lightnings with Ford dealers; most of those potential customers are neither pickup drivers nor Ford owners.) But will buying a Lightning absolve me of my sins against nature? If one calculates all the nonrenewable-energy costs incurred in manufacturing an E.V. pickup, including the mining and processing of battery metals—lithium, cobalt, nickel, and manganese, among others—and the worldwide shipping of those components, along with the percentage of fossil-fuel-based energy that goes into the grid that charges E.V.s (in 2020, less than twenty per cent of the electricity generated in the U.S. came from renewables), and then compares that with the environmental cost of driving my gas F-150, might keeping my old truck be the better option for now, at least until renewable-energy sources make the grid cleaner?

According to Rahul Malik, a battery scientist who is currently working in the natural-resources department of the Canadian government, even an E.V. plugged into a highly renewable grid must be driven for more than twenty-five thousand miles before it has lower “life cycle” emissions (which include the energy used in mining and manufacturing) than a combustion vehicle. And, as William Green, a professor of chemical engineering at M.I.T., pointed out to me, “if a person sells their used car and buys an E.V., that used car doesn’t disappear, it just has a new owner, so it keeps on emitting.” Ultimately, what matters is that first-time car buyers choose electric.

Then there’s the other big issue with pickups, whether they’re gas-powered or E.V.s: their size. Since 1990, according to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the weight of the average pickup has increased by twelve hundred and fifty-six pounds—thirty-two per cent. A recent post on Vice observed that the largest pickups and S.U.V.s today are as big as Second World War-era tanks. Now pickups are going to get heavier still. The Lightning, because of its lithium-ion battery, weighs approximately sixty-five hundred pounds; in some cases the pickup can be more than two thousand pounds heavier than its gas counterpart. You’ll be capable of assaulting a mountaintop redoubt, even if you’re just driving to the store for milk.

As the owner of an EV, I have a dog in this fight, but I’ve never subscribed to the delusion that electric vehicles are the solution to our environmental crisis. Although widespread adoption will obviously reduce CO2 emissions from transport (and that’s obviously a good thing), the overall impact of EVs has to be assessed in terms of the entire environmental footprint of manufacturing and charging them. And that’s not such a good story. For the grisly details (and in relation to the cobalt and lithium that are essential for contemporary batteries they are indeed grisly) see here.

John Dizard has an interesting article on battery production in the FT at the weekend. It’s behind the paywall, but some of the detail is compelling. For one thing, the market for lithium carbonate has gone mad. In January 2021 it cost about $9,600 a tonne. At the end of January 2022 it was more than $50,000 a tonne. And, as you may have noticed, Chile (from which most lithium seems to come at the moment) has a new left-wing government which has — sensibly — decided that using virtually irreplaceable underground water to produce more lithium salts in the Atacama Desert is, to use Dizard’s judicious, FT-ish phrase, “environmentally and socially unsound”. It is.

Spotify’s attempt to use the Facebook playbook over the Joe Rogan affair won’t wash

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Two decades ago, the late and much-lamented David Bowie said something that was eerily prophetic. “Music itself,” he observed, “is going to become like running water or electricity.” His point was that in 2002 we were still carrying our music in little bottles called iPods, just as Victorian travellers in India carried bottles of drinking water because you couldn’t rely on their being a safe and sanitary public supply.

Spool forward 20 years and Spotify, the Swedish audio streaming and media services provider founded in 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, is, in Bowie’s terms, the global music authority, providing sanitised recorded music everywhere, on demand. At the moment, it has something like 406 million active monthly users, of whom more than 180 million pay for its “premium” (advertising-free) service…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

• Airstream’s new camper sips on solar and parks itself I’m not a caravan enthusiast myself, but I’ve always thought the Airstream ones are lovely, so was struck by this. Link

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Finally: the stamp of approval

In Ireland the technical term for this kind of nonsense is: codology.

Quote of the Day

Yes because a hundred years ago Sylvia Beach displayed in her Paris bookshop the first copy of a new novel she was publishing yes she was publishing “Ulysses” which is now recognised as one of the twentieth century’s greatest works of art and yes signed first edition copies can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars in auction it was written by Irishman James Joyce with its peculiar use of punctuation and yes its stream of consciousness James marked that occasion on 2 February 1922 with a muted celebration and laid out what was then the only other copy with its white letters on a blue background a nod to the colours of the Greek flag and thus to the novel’s chief inspiration Homer’s Odyssey and yes for Beach it was a risk of course supporting this experimental novel which was looked at unkindly by some like playwright George Bernard Shaw who said it was revolting and that if you imagine that any Irishman would pay 150 francs for a book you little know my countrymen

• The Economist, marking the centenary of Ulysses’s publication in the style of Molly Bloom’s celebrated soliloquy at the end of the novel.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Julie Fowlis | My Love is on the High Seas’

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Long Read of the Day

Consuming Joyce: 100 Years of Ulysses in Ireland

Terrific review by Hugh Haughton in The Literary Review of John McCourt’s marvellous (and mortifying) account of how, over a century, my fellow-countrymen moved from regarding Joyce’s novel as an “Odyssey of the sewer” to being celebrated “the great Irish book of the twentieth century”. It’s not a pretty story, but the good news is that we got there in the end.

Beautifully written review. Worth a read.

North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Internet

This is really lovely. Just over a year ago, an independent US hacker who goes by the handle P4x was himself hacked by North Korean spies. He managed to prevent them from swiping anything of value from him, but he felt unnerved by the idea of state-sponsored hackers targeting him personally — and by the lack of any visible response from his government.

So he took matters into his own hands and launched a series of very effective Denial of Service attacks on various parts of the North Korean cyber-infrastructure.

This Wired report tells the whole story, and it’s a fascinating read. But in a way, it corroborates something that I wrote years ago about the paradox of asymmetrical warfare. My argument was that the most intelligent strategy an underdog nation threatened by a superpower could adopt was not to buy conventional weapons but to invest in building an elite cadre of sophisticated computer hackers who could go after the critical infrastructure of its adversary.

Why? Two reasons: hackers are much cheaper than kinetic weapons; and secondly, the underdog can act with impunity because his lack of a critical Internet infrastructure means that he’s largely immune to devastating cyber-counter-attack. This is not the case for, say, the US vis-a-vis China or Russia, and it explains why Biden (and Obama before him) seems to have backed away from massive retaliation for Chinese and Russian cyber-espionage.

P4x’s counter-attack on North Korea was successful for various reasons — which are discussed in the article. He succeeded in temporarily shutting down critical servers and at one stage cutting North Korea off from the rest of the world. But even as he did so, his attacks probably had little effect on the daily life of the country — because it’s primarily an offline state, and therefore largely impervious to cyber offensives. The same cannot be said for those of us who live in advanced industrial societies.

My commonplace booklet

 Rotterdam bridge to be dismantled so Jeff Bezos’ yacht can pass through.

The Koningshavenbrug, known to Rotterdammers as De Hef, was renovated in 2017 and the council pledged at the time it would never be dismantled again. But that promise is now set to be broken, Rijnmond said, to let Bezos’ yacht through. The bridge, placed over the river in 1927, has had a central role in city’s history and was heavily damaged during the bombardment of Rotterdam in May 1940. The bridge is now officially protected.

Bezos’ three-masted yacht is being built by the Oceano shipyard in Alblasserdam but is too big to pass under the bridge when the central section is raised to its full height. Now Oceano and Bezos have approached the council about temporarily dismantling the bridge at their cost.

Money talks. It’s a universal language.

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Two-camera selfie

One of those silly experiments that photographers do.

I was going to call it “bicameral selfie” but then realised that wouldn’t be quite right.

Quote of the Day

“Always tell the truth, and people will never believe you”

• Ronald Knox

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Grateful Dead | I Fought The Law | Live

Link

Vivid evidence of my misspent youth. One of my favourite numbers by my second-favourite band. Note how long it takes them to get going. They were the first band to really understand tech. A colleague of mine who was the entertainments officer for the Students’ Union at his university in the 1960s managed to get the Dead to do a concert in a local football stadium. He was astonished when the 40-page contract arrived beforehand. It specified that an acoustically optimal location in the arena should be roped off for Deadheads to make bootleg recordings.

Long Read of the Day

The Mafia hires good accountants

Bracing blog post by Cory Doctorow about a strange paradox. On the one hand, journalists pay increasing attention to the giant consultancy firms, fancy law firms, economists and other elite enablers who pimp for kleptocrats and oligarchs in London and elsewhere. But on the other hand the accounting profession itself is rarely named when scandals erupt. Which is a mystery, since the keeping and auditing of financial ledgers is so key to corrupt practices. Strange, isn’t it? In fact the only accountancy firm I can remember being destroyed by a scandal is Arthur Andersen, the firm that did the Enron accounts.

Great read. I’ve often been puzzled about how partners in the big four auditing firms have escaped gaol.

Chart of the Day

Source: Axios

Crypto and capital gains tax

Interesting snippet spotted in the nearest thing the Financial Times has to an agony aunt.

 Q:I jumped on the cryptocurrency bandwagon early on for a bit of fun and without particularly high hopes. I have benefited from a price rise post-lockdown and now have a fairly high-value portfolio. I’ve used my holdings to fund some one-off purchases and exchanged between currencies. I recently received a letter from HM Revenue & Customs claiming that I may owe tax. I’m worried I’ve done something wrong. If I have never cashed in my portfolio, am I still liable for capital gains tax on the potential sterling profit on my original investment?

A: in most cases where someone has invested in crypto assets, those “assets” will be subject to capital gains tax (CGT) when sold, if the gain realised is above the £12,300 threshold.

CGT is due as a result of disposal, so if you’ve made no disposals, no CGT would be due. However, if you have exchanged crypto direct for other goods, or even to acquire new cryptocurrency, then it is likely that you will have made some disposals and potentially triggered CGT.

HMRC’s approach is to apply the same rules as for shares and equities. The tax authority has been securing data in relation to coins and tokens held by individuals from a number of crypto exchanges, and it is this information that it is largely using to identify holders of crypto and sending them letters.

So if you have cryptocurrency (I don’t) be sure to keep good records. And if you do decide to cash in, remember to set aside enough to cover the whopping tax bill!

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Ulysses @ 100

Photo credit: Geoffrey Barker under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

This is a big day for those of us who are fans of the writings of James Joyce — the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Ulysses. (Footnote: If you’re not of that persuasion, this might be the time to take the day off, and no one will think the worse of you for that. Normal service will be restored tomorrow.)

As Kevin Birmingham observes in his fascinating study, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, so much has been written about what’s exceptional within the pages of Joyce’s epic that we have lost sight of what happened to Ulysses itself. It’s a great story and Birmingham tells it well.

The book was banned as obscene, officially or unofficially, throughout most of the English-speaking world for over a decade. And the fact that it was forbidden is part of what made the novel so transformative. Ulysses, says Birmingham, “changed not only the course of literature in the century that followed, but the very definition of literature in the eyes of the law”.

Joyce wrote all of it by hand in notebooks, on loose-leaf sheets and on scraps of paper in more than a dozen apartments in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. A portion was burned in Paris while it was still only a manuscript draft, and it was convicted of obscenity in New York before it was even a book (parts of it were published in instalments by a small magazine). Joyce’s difficulties inspired Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate running a small bookstore in Paris, to publish the book when everyone else (including Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press) refused.

Government officials on both sides of the Atlantic confiscated and burned more than a thousand copies. Most of the surviving copies of the first edition came from Shakespeare & Company, Sylvia Beach’s shop, where, as one writer remembered, “Ulysses lay stacked like dynamite in a revolutionary cellar.”

Joyce was, by all accounts, an utterly exasperating man, but his contemporaries saw his genius clearly. He was perpetually broke and living on the charity of friends and supporters (while also living it up whenever he had money to burn). He also suffered from terrible bouts of iritis (a swelling of the iris), which in turn brought on bouts of acute glaucoma and often left him close to blindness, and he underwent traumatising eye-surgery without anaesthetics.

His grevious health problems and feeble eyesight, writes Birmingham,

made him heroic and pitiable, inaccessible and deeply human. The images of Joyce wearing eye patches and post surgical bandages or reading with thick spectacles and magnifying glass gave him the aura of a blind seer, a twentieth-century Homer or Milton. Illness was taking away the visible world only to give him an experience whose intensity was too deep for others to fathom. Ernest Hemingway once wrote to Joyce after his son’s fingernail lightly scratched his eye. “It hurt like hell,” Hemingway said. “For ten days I had a very little taste of how things might be with you.”

Yet he persevered. The book, Birmingham thinks,

reads like s desperate, beloved labor, a work of uncanny insight behind thick spectacles… It is the book of a man who, even in a hospital bed — even with both eyes bandaged — would reach for a notebook and trace phrases blindly with his pencil so that he could insert them into his manuscript when he could see again. It’s no wonder that Joyce’s fiction explored the interior world. Beyond his family, it was all he had.

Spot on. And there are many among us who are very glad that he persevered.

Quote of the Day

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

• Ulysses, p. 31 (Bodley Head, 1937 edition)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Il mio tesoro from Don Giovanni | Sung by John McCormack

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Joyce had a fine singing voice and came close to winning first place in the singing competition at the 1904 Feis Ceoil, an annual celebration of Irish musical talent held in Dublin. The previous year the top prize (a year-long scholarship to study in Italy) had been won by John McCormack, who was friendly with Joyce and had advised him to enter the 1904 competition. But Joyce won only the bronze medal, possibly because he didn’t stick to the rubric: he refused to sight-read a musical score. He was as cussed as hell even then.

McCormack went on to a brilliantly successful career as a Bel canto tenor, while Joyce became a great modernist writer. It’s tantalising to think that we might not have had Ulysses if he had adhered to the rubric. But he was fascinated by music all his life — as you can see if you consult Ruth Bauerle’s amazing James Joyce Songbook, an astonishing (and vast) compendium of all the music to be found in his writings.

Long Read of the Day

Heeding James Joyce

Nice essay by Chris Hedges in Counterpunch.

One hundred years ago this week, Sylvia Beach, who ran the bookstore Shakespeare and Company on 12 rue de l’Odéon in Paris and nurtured a community of expatriate writers that included Richard Wright, T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Thornton Wilder, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, placed in the bookstore’s front window a 732-page novel she had published, “Ulysses” by James Joyce…

Read on.

Karl Jung’s letter to Joyce on finishing the novel

Dear Sir,

Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.

Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I’m profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don’t know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn’t help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil’s grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn’t.

Well I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.

With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,

Yours faithfully,

C.G. Jung

The 11 things missing from Sue Gray’s report on ‘Partygate’

Nice commentary in openDemocracy.

TL;DR version: basically, everything that’s important is missing.

The only question is whether (as I mentioned yesterday) the Met’s investigation is capable of leading to criminal charges.

I always suspected that the report would be a damp squib — partly because the Westminster bubble (and its associated media obsession) was making so much of it.

Only time will tell if that hunch was correct. In the meantime, Johnson is safe until the May elections.

In trying to wriggle out of its responsibilities, Spotify is making a category mistake

The company’s CEO Daniel Ek vowed to provide greater transparency around Spotify’s content rules and said he wanted to support “expression while balancing it with the safety of our users.” And just like Facebook, Spotify will be labelling content with warnings and directing users to a Covid-19 information hub with input from scientists and world health experts.

There are two things wrong with this:

1. As various people have pointed out, attaching warning messages to content (dodgy or otherwise) about controversial matters effectively gives all messages equal status, and often merely boosts the bad stuff.

2. More importantly, by borrowing ideas from the Facebook playbook, Ek is making a category error. Spotify, as a Sarah Frier points out on Bloomberg’s Fully Charged, is not Facebook. “The objectionable content at issue comes not from a video or politician that happened to go viral, but from The Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast Spotify paid for the privilege of distributing exclusively on its service, in a licensing deal worth about $100 million”.

Moreover, as Frier goes on to observe,

Spotify executives are not shocked at the nature of Rogan’s pandemic content; the podcast deal was inked in May 2020, when Rogan was already a highly controversial figure. And critically: Spotify isn’t a user-generated content company, it’s a curator and publisher of selected media. Rogan is the cornerstone of its podcasting business.

(Emphasis added.)

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

My commonplace booklet

• Celebrate the publication centennial of James Joyce’s Ulysses in a two-day conference at The Huntington.  Hmmm… Reading the blurb suggests that it’s above my pay grade. For example: “Joyce’s Ulysses uses Dublin as map as well as palimpsest upon which to inscribe his vision of worlds past and present. This conference will explore approaches to literary study that make clearer the verbal and nonverbal coordinates of Joyce’s literary terrain and their global expressions. Topics will range from forms of visualization (schemas, maps, charts, word indexes) to decolonization, intertexts and intermedia, mapping as metaphor and places as texts, in an effort to open up new ways of reading.”

• Teenager seeks $50k from Elon Musk to delete Twitter bot tracking private jet Link And now the lad is going after the private jets of other billionaires. One’s heart bleeds for the poor dears.

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