Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 30

How far should revolutionary thinking be allowed to go? E...

How far should revolutionary thinking be allowed to go? Everything Luxemburg touched she pushed to an extreme – jusqu'à outrance, 'to the outer limit', to use her own phrase, the slogan she proposed to her lover Leo Jogiches. 'We live in turbulent times,' she wrote in 1906 to Luise and her husband, Karl Kautsky, also from prison, this time in Warsaw, convicted of aiming to overthrow the tsarist government. 'All that exists deserves to perish,' she wrote, quoting Goethe's Faust. It is of course the whole point of a revolution that you cannot know what, if anything, can or should survive. For Luxemburg the danger was as real as it was inspiring. 'The revolution is magnificent,' she wrote, again in 1906. 'Everything else is bilge' (the German quark, which has since made its way into English, literally means 'soft white cheese'). But whatever the conditions in which she found herself – in Warsaw, she was one of 14 political prisoners crammed into a single cell – she never lost her fervour: her joy, as she put it, amid the horrors of the world. 'My inner mood,' she wrote after listing the indignities of her captivity, 'is, as always, superb.' 'Enthusiasm combined with critical thought,' she wrote in one of her last letters, 'what more could we want of ourselves!' She had the relish and courage of her convictions (although 'conviction' might turn out to be not quite the right word). There is no one, I will risk saying, who better captures the spirit – the promise and the risk – of revolution than Rosa Luxemburg.

...


This isn't anarchy – Luxemburg is very precisely calling for elections and representative parliamentary forms. Her demands were specific: freedom of the press, right of association and assembly (which had been banned for opponents of the regime). Anything less, she insisted, would lead inevitably to the 'brutalisation' of public life. For her, politics was a form of education: in many ways its supreme, if not only true, form. As she had argued in relation to women's suffrage in 1902, the well-tried argument that people are not mature enough to exercise the right to vote is fatuous: 'As if there were some other school of political maturity … than simply exercising those rights!' Not even the revolutionary party in Russia at the time of the mass strike could be said to have 'made' the Revolution: it had had 'to learn its law from the course itself'.

...

How could you possibly believe that a revolution can or should be mastered or known in advance if you are in touch with those parts of the mind which the mind itself cannot master and which do not even know themselves? 'There is nothing more changeable than human psychology,' she wrote to Mathilde Wurm from Wronke prison in 1917: 'That's especially because the psyche of the masses, like Thalatta, the eternal sea, always bears within it every latent possibility … they are always on the verge of b, ecoming something totally different from what they seem to be.' Thirteen years earlier she wrote to her friend Henriette Holst: 'Don't believe it' – she has just allowed herself a rare moment of melancholy – 'don't believe me in general, I'm different at every moment, and life is made up only of moments.' The shifting sands of the revolution and of the psyche are more or less the same thing.

Jacqueline Rose in the LRB - for subscribers, so I'm being bad, very bad. I'm reminded, as I am every two weeks, that the money I pay for a subscription is the best bet I've made all year -- which contributes, after all, to the payment of people I want to read.  It seems selfish, though, to have kept the subscription to myself; I should have taken out 20 subs and bestowed them on deserving cafés. Or something.  Do YOU have a café you frequent, which would be improved by provision of the LRB?  Too cash-strapped to provide?  Drop me a line.

Seriously.

I've been a professional writer for a mere 15 years. I've been a reader since the age of 2. I wish I wish I wish I wish I wish bien pensants somewhere somehow had colluded to get the things I should have been reading to me somehow.

1986 was not the year I discovered Roland Barthes. That h...

1986 was not the year I discovered Roland Barthes. That had been at least a year earlier, and (allowing for the tricks of memory) possibly two. I'd come to Barthes in the pages of the British music and style press. There was a brief period in the 1980s – anybody now in their forties who was paying attention will treasure or regret the phase – when the New Musical Express, The Face and Blitz were filled with references, gauchely but passionately deployed, to modish French critics and philosophers whose works, at least in that milieu, had not yet acquired the academic label of Theory. In fact, there appeared to be a seamless continuum between the smart journalistic references from the 1970s – Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and the jittery eloquence then possessed by Clive James – and the new (though they were not really new) continental thinkers: Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard.

 ...

But it was not so much the thought that seduced me, or the profusion of new names (Artaud, Lévi-Strauss, Kristeva), as Barthes's style, which seemed to reside mainly in his punctuation. Barthes, I'd later learn, has been well served by his English translators (notably, the poet Richard Howard), and they have tended to retain the hedging of parentheses, the sidelong views calmly opened and closed by em-dashes, the colons like stiles that invite one to clamber on over the thought, sometimes two or three in the same sentence. Rapt in this style, I was still not sure I knew what he was doing: I know now that I really didn't know: but I had found (as Barthes liked to put it) my critic, my thinker, my writer.

Ruins of the 20th Century

Noam Lupu and Jonas Pontussen (PDF) have a piece on the r...

Noam Lupu and Jonas Pontussen (PDF) have a piece on the relationship between inequality and distribution in the new American Political Science Review. There is a lot of debate about whether the level of economic inequality in society leads to greater or lesser distribution – what Lupu and Pontussen suggest is that the structure of inequality (that is – the more particular relationships between different segments in the income distribution, rather than some summary index) is more important. More particularly they argue that if one tries to hold racial and ethnic cleavages constant, the key factor determining redistribution is the income gap between middle income voters and lower income voters. Where this gap is low, middle class people feel some degree of solidarity with the poor and exhibit what Lupu and Pontussen describe as "parochial altruism." That is, they are more likely to support income redistribution because they feel that the poor are in some sense, 'like them.' When the gap is high, middle class people will have a much weaker sense of solidarity with the poor, and hence be less supportive of redistribution. Lupu and Pontussen suggest that the US is an outlier, with weaker solidarity than the structure of US inequality would suggest. They argue that the explanation for this is straightforward – "it is clearly attributable to the high-concentration of racial-ethnic minorities in the bottom of the income distribution." More bluntly put – middle class Americans feel less solidarity with the very poor because the very poor are more likely to be black.

hat tip Marginal Revolution

There have been genuinely religious Abrahamists, but only...

There have been genuinely religious Abrahamists, but only because they've somehow maintained the forms of personal-God religions while having in fact abandoned any such belief. Some people think that men like St Paul and St Augustine are exemplary instances of what it is to possess the religious temperament. It's easy enough to see why they have this reputation as long as we stick to the sociological understanding of religion: both were brilliant monsters of egotism, and almost all religious belief, considered as a sociological phenomenon, is about self.

This connects to a phenomenon that at first glance seems curious. If we take the term 'morally worse' as purely descriptive, denoting people whose characters generally appear to be morally worse than average, and if we restrict our attention to those who have had some non-negligible degree of education, we find that people who have religious convictions are on the whole morally worse than people who lack them. Are the religious worse because they're religious, or are they religious because they're worse? The first direction of causation is well known, but it's the second that is more prominent in everyday life. The religious (sociologically speaking) tend to be religious because religious belief provides them with a framework in which they can handle certain unattractive elements in themselves. In converts – those who take up religion without having been brought up in it, or without having previously taken it seriously – the correlation between religious belief and relative moral badness in the strictly descriptive sense (which is not incompatible with charm) is particularly striking.

Galen Strawson in the LRB on Mark Johnson's Saving God: Religion After Idolatry and Surviving Death

It's not just lexical. You can walk — or run, crawl, scur...

It's not just lexical. You can walk — or run, crawl, scurry, roll, etc. — out the gate, out the back, out the exit, etc. You can look — or stare, peer, gaze, squint, etc. — out the window, out the porthole, out the viewport, out the sunroof, etc.
But you can't (standardly) walk out the house, or out the plaza, or out the village, or whatever — all of those need "of". Nor can you (standardly) peer out the box, or stare out the car, or shoot out the bushes — though you can perfectly well shoot at someone out of the bushes, etc.
Apparently out as a transitive preposition has something to do with transiting from within an enclosed space through a limited aperture of some kind.

Mark Liberman at Language Log 

Conversely, out of has to do with exiting an enclosure or container.
It seems to me that you walk or come out of X for those X values where you can't be in X in the sense of inside X or fully within X." You can be in the bushes, in the house, in the water, in the blue, and in the car, all of which are containers of sorts (or of you), so you walk or come out of those things. You cannot be inside the door or the window, so you come out those things (without of).

commenter Steve Kass, ibid.

that clinking clanking sound

Ownership of your Egg Card account
4627XXXXXXXX3061 has been transferred to Barclays Bank PLC.

Dear Dr Dewitt

As you may be aware, on 1 March 2011 we announced Egg credit cards were to be sold to Barclays Bank PLC. As a result of this, the ownership of your Egg Card account transferred to Barclays on 29 April 2011. The sale involves the assignment of all Egg Banking PLC's rights as the lender to Barclays Bank PLC, who have agreed to perform the obligations of Egg Banking PLC under the terms and conditions of your Egg Card Agreement. Barclays will manage your account through their credit card operation, Barclaycard. From 29 April 2011, references to 'we', 'us', 'our' and 'Egg' in your Egg Card conditions became references to Barclays Bank PLC and references to 'Group' will mean Barclays and each Barclays Affiliate including but not limited to Barclays Bank PLC and Barclaycard.

If you have any other products with Egg, such as Egg Savings, Egg Insurance, Egg Mortgages or Egg Loans, they are not affected by this announcement and will continue to be provided by Egg Banking PLC.

How you use and service your credit card account will not change immediately. You'll continue to be able to service your account online at www.egg.com in the usual way and use your Egg Card as normal. Any Direct Debits you may have set up with Egg will be collected as usual, so there's no need for you to change anything.

You can still make the most of all the benefits your Egg Card has to offer.



Um.

Why do I find this terrifying?

no more fried ants jokes

the age of an individual is not measured chronologically in Amondawa culture, which lacks a numerical system able to enumerate above four. Rather, individuals are categorized in terms of stages or periods of the lifespan, based upon social status and role, and position in family birth order. As we have also noted, each Amondawa individual changes their name during the course of their life, and the rules governing these name changes form a strict onomastic system.

Courtesy Language Hat, Stan Carey on "When Time is not Space: The social and linguistic construction of time intervals and temporal event relations in an Amazonian culture," a paper by Chris Sinha et al. in Language and Cognition.

Andrew Gelman draws attention to a terrific paper by Mark...

Andrew Gelman draws attention to a terrific paper by Mark Chaves on the religious congruence fallacy.

Religious congruence refers to consistency among an individual's religious beliefs and attitudes, consistency between religious ideas and behavior, and religious ideas, identities, or schemas that are chronically salient and accessible to individuals across contexts and situations. Decades of anthropological, sociological, and psychological research establish that religious congruence is rare, but much thinking about religion presumes that it is common. The religious congruence fallacy [emphasis added] occurs when interpretations or explanations unjustifiably presume religious congruence.

I'll bet they read xkcd

A commenter has pointed out that it is no longer possible to ride around and around and around on the Circle Line. Since 2009 (always the last to know), the line has been reconfigured: trains now go in a clockwise direction to Hammersmith, then loop back counterclockwise.

 

Paul Waugh tells the full story here.

¿K?

Always the last to know.

From to time to time people ask whether The Last Samurai is available as an e-book, to which I reply, Not to my knowledge, jinsai. (Roughly.)

I've just been checking out Amazon.co.uk to see whether they have relented and agreed to stock new copies of the book.  (They have not stocked it for the last 5 years or so.  It is in fact available, new, from the Random House website, but the average punter has better things to do than scour publishers' websites on the off-chance that a more expensive version of the book might be available.) 

To the best of my knowledge, the physical book can still not be bought new off Amazon.co.uk -- but it turns out there is a Kindle edition. Available only in the UK. I can't buy it from Germany. If you're reading this in the US or Canada, my guess is you can't buy it there. If you happen to live in the UK, you lucky devil, you can in fact get an e-version of the book.  I THINK.

The link is here.

When I view this page, I am told that pricing information is not available, and that Kindle titles cannot be sold to residents of my country off Amazon.co.uk.  I surmise that a resident of the UK would have better luck.  It's entirely possible, though, that a UK Kindle version does exist but cannot actually be bought.  (UK resident readers of pp can check out the link and report back, if so inclined.)

[Since you ask, no, no Kindle version is offered on Amazon.com. Bastards. BASTARDS.]