Oxford University Press's Blog, page 176

Slavoj Žižek on what really makes him mad

What really makes me mad when I read critical (and even some favorable) reactions to my work is the recurring characterization of me as a postmodern cultural critic – the one thing I don’t want to be. I consider myself a philosopher dealing with fundamental ontological questions, and, furthermore, a philosopher in the traditional vein of German Idealism.

Everyone who has seen Hitchcock’s Vertigo remembers the mysterious scene in the sequoia park where Madeleine walks over to a redwood cross-section of an over-thousand-year-old trunk showing its growth history by date, points to two circular lines close to the outer edge and says: “Here I was born . . . and here I died.” In a similar way, we can imagine a philosophy muse in front of a timeline of European history, pointing to two date markers close to each other and saying: “Here I was born . . . and here I died.” The first marker designates 1781, the publication date of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and the second one 1831, the year of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s death.

For me, in some sense, all of philosophy happened in these fifty years: the vast development prior to it was just a preparation for the rise of the notion of the transcendental, and in the post-Hegelian development, philosophy returns in the guise of the common Judy, i.e., the vulgar nineteenth-century empiricism. For me, all four great German idealists — Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel — articulated a distance towards idealist subjectivity and gained a non-metaphysical insight into the essence of history and the alienation of our existence. They struggled with how to break out of the horizon of absolute subjectivity without regressing to pre-transcendental realism.

But which Hegel am I referring to here? Where am I speaking from? To simplify it to the utmost, the triad that defines my philosophical stance is that of Baruch Spinoza, Kant and Hegel. Spinoza is arguably the pinnacle of realist ontology: there is substantial reality out there, and we can get to know it through our reason, dispelling the veil of illusions. Kant’s transcendental turn introduces a radical gap here: we cannot ever gain access to the way things are in themselves, our reason is constricted to the domain of phenomena, and if we try to reach beyond phenomena to the totality of being, our mind gets caught in necessary antinomies and inconsistencies. What Hegel does here is to posit that there is no reality in-itself beyond phenomena, which does not mean that all that there is is the interplay of phenomena. The phenomenal world is marked by the bar of impossibility, but beyond this bar there is nothing, no other world, no positive reality, so we are not returning to pre-Kantian realism; it is just that what for Kant is the limitation of our knowledge, the impossibility to reach the thing-in-itself, is inscribed into this thing itself.

Furthermore, Hegel is NOT a critical thinker: his basic stance is that of reconciliation – not reconciliation as a long-term goal but reconciliation as a fact which confronts us with the unexpected bitter truth of the actualized Ideal. If there is a Hegelian motto, it is something like: find a truth in how things turn wrong! The message of Hegel is not “the spirit of trust” (the title of Robert Brandom’s latest book on Hegel’s Phenomenology) but rather the spirit of distrust – his premise is that every large human project turns wrong and only in this way attests to its truth. The French Revolution wanted universal freedom and climaxed in terror, Communism wanted global emancipation and gave birth to Stalinist terror… Hegel’s lesson is thus a new version of Big Brother’s famous slogan from George Orwell’s 1984 ”freedom is slavery”: when we try to enforce freedom directly, the result is slavery. So whatever Hegel is, he is decidedly not a thinker of a perfect ideal that we approach infinitely.

Heinrich Heine (who was Hegel’s student in the philosopher’s last years) propagated the story that he once told Hegel he cannot endorse Hegel’s formula “all that is actual is rational,” and that Hegel looked carefully around and told his student not too loudly: “Perhaps, I should say: all that is actual should be rational.” Even if factually true, this anecdote is philosophically a lie – if not an outright invention of Heine, it represents Hegel’s attempt to cover up from his student the painful message or truth of his thinking.

Such a Hegel is the central point of reference of my entire work.

Image courtesy of Kasman via Pixabay

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Despite Brexit, there is still plenty to learn from government successes

For those who follow the news, it is all too easy to form the impression that governments are incompetent, slow, inefficient, unresponsive to ordinary citizens’ needs, and prone to overreach and underdeliver. Easy, since Brexit is currently the public’s main measure of the competence of government. And yet across many public policy domains, for most of the time, the bulk of public projects, programmes and services perform not so badly at all. And in some instances they do spectacularly well. Sadly, these rarely receive attention. We tend to look only at the negative, and that doesn’t always help us understand what is possible in the future, either in policy making and even as citizens – we hone in on failure, not on the possibilities that lie ahead, and we don’t value learning from success. Instead, the media, political and academic discourse is saturated with accounts of public policy shortcomings and failures.

There is a considerable risk that this institutionalised focus on endemic failure produces a learned myopia in how we observe, debate, and assess our systems of governance. As public policy researchers, we need to shift the focus. We need to transform how we teach, research and discuss policy making – by seeking to learn as much from positive outcomes as we do from failures. A few great examples of public policy successes include:

Brazil’s Bolsa Família

Brazil built the world’s largest conditional cash transfer scheme to lift millions out of extreme poverty.

Norway’s Petroleum Fund

Norway’s policymakers purposefully dodged the resource curse bullet and channelled its oil revenues into what has become the world’s biggest national pension fund.

The Montreal Protocol

The world managed to negotiate and implement a global regulatory regime that helped the ozone layer recover from the damage caused by decades’ worth of ozone-depleting substances.

The transformation of UK tobacco control  

The UK designed and implemented innovative policies that framed tobacco as a health concern in order to build support for the initially unpopular tobacco ban.

Studying cases of failure can help us diagnose the causes of policy shortcomings. The lessons learned from such work can – hopefully – be used to avoid similar disappointments or crises in the future. Studying great policy achievements, on the other hand, allows us to identify the circumstances conducive to success.One key lesson is that pacing the work of change is a fine art. In many cases, there was extensive consultation, bargaining, and negotiation, over many years. For example, Copenhagen’s now highly successful urban planning regime has evolved over half a century. The revitalisation of Melbourne took shape over two decades. These were iterative processes.

Secondly, strategic politicisation and top-down leadership can help – sometimes. Tony Blair’s public commitment and personal resolve to reduce NHS waiting times is an example of the politicisation of the status quo in a policy domain providing momentum for change. But top-down political willpower isn’t always enough. Faced with an existential challenge – how to ensure there is still a country left to inhabit if sea levels rise and the rivers swell – the Dutch government turned depoliticisation into an art form. It empowered a studiously apolitical authority to tap local knowledge and forge broad support for smart and pragmatic solutions.

Thirdly, many cases were marked by judicious use of inclusive and exclusive participation strategies. In consensual democracies such as Denmark and the Netherlands, inclusive consultation, deliberation and codesign is second nature to policymakers and offers a reliable solution to what could easily become political deadlock. But even in less consultative political systems, such as Australia’s, it was the incorporation of grassroots voices and initiatives into the Melbourne regeneration policy mix that enriched its substance and broadened its support base. By contrast, New Zealand’s remarkable economic turnaround in the mid-1980s and early 1990s was engineered by a relatively closed circle of politicians and Treasury bureaucrats, working in what was a strictly majoritarian and unicameral political system.

How can we improve the odds of public policy success? There are some who claim to have on universal answer to this question, advocating one-size-fits-all recipes such as evidence-based policy, behavioural economics, or codesign. They should think again. There are many different pathways to successful public policy, including: a confluence of seemingly disparate initiatives across different domains; alliances between strange bedfellows; or knowing when to push forward and when to wait. The challenge is to sort out what combinations of design practices, political strategies and institutional arrangements are both effective and appropriate in the context at hand – because we’ve seen that there is no best way to achieve policy success. Talking about what went wrong and dressing up evidence about what will work better is appealing and even vote-winning, but it is rarely a good idea.

Image credit: Houses of Parliament by luxstorm via  Pixabay

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Originality in Arabic music

How artists express individual style and creativity within the context of a cultural tradition is one of the central questions of Aesthetics. This is applicable to an extraordinary range of artistic practices across different cultures, although its answers and solutions differ widely. Our views on the problem can be easily distorted by the particular solution adopted in Europe and America in the modern period: to abandon traditions as much as possible and strive for total originality. The aesthetic frame shifts considerably with this solution: instead of being evaluated or appreciated by how much she has mastered/responds to a tradition, an artist’s genius manifests in the invention of entirely new artistic languages and approaches, by how much her work is new, rather than derivative, and, often, by shock value. The ubiquity of this aesthetics of total originality, in contemporary global media and culture, obscures the fact of its historical newness and cultural contingency.

The traditional music of the Arab world – which I practice – carries a different conception of what makes an individual artist stand out (within the last century that older aesthetic frame has co-existed with a new aesthetic of modernization and innovation, leading to new hybrids and fusions). The traditional aesthetic could be summed up as follows: a master musician is expected to memorize an enormous repertory of songs, musical phrases, ornamental techniques, etc., while at the same time, never perform the same song the same way twice. Individuality and originality is crucial – but it is only comprehensible to the extent that it draws from and extends inherited knowledge.

This dynamic plays out most overtly in improvisation. Improvisation in Arabic music is not a free-for-all. It must express a particular musical mode (known as maqam), which means much more than playing in a particular scale; each maqam has a rich vocabulary of idiomatic melodic phrases and ornaments that the musician must master. In addition, there are expected modulations (changes in mood and scale), and expected opening and concluding melodies, for any improvisation in a particular maqam.

This body of aural knowledge (taking decades to master) may resemble a confining brace to an outsider, but it is no stricter than being confined to the words of English for this essay. The problem lies in our (mis)conception of musical structure: melody doesn’t operate on the level of individual notes, but on a larger structural level, combining learned melodic phrases and sequences. Although there is a finite body of those, they can be recombined in potentially infinite ways. A musician doesn’t invent entirely new note sequences, but builds those learned from oral tradition into longer, original utterances. That this fact remains controversial in academic music theory doesn’t change its palpable, discrete reality for musicians rooted in oral traditions around the world.

Another level of individuality and originality comes to the foreground once we accept that much of the content is inherited: expressiveness and surprise. The improvisor chooses to dwell on particular notes or phrases, to elongate or elide, and has a lot of room to play with volume, timbre, and ornamentation to make even the tritest melody seem completely new. The musician also plays a great deal with listeners’ expectations. Traditional listeners also absorb an enormous body of melodic vocabulary and songs (as I learned firsthand as a student in Aleppo, Syria, where the taxi drivers and fabric merchants could sing hundreds of elaborate traditional songs from memory). Listeners expect particular phrases and particular modulations, and musicians exploit that fact, alternately thwarting and fulfilling expectations to build suspense, surprise, and exhilaration over large-scale melodic arcs. The virtuosity of a particular musician in executing these moves, while retaining the attention of the audience, is what sets her apart. And by “her” I mean Umm Kulthum, the 20th century Egyptian superstar, who could repeat the same melody 20 times in a row, with very subtle variations each time, and thereby bring an audience of 3,000 into an uproar.

This is all eerily similar to descriptions of 18th century European musicians and listeners given by music theorist and scholar Robert O. Gjerdingen in his 2007 book Music in the Galant Style:

After listening to these many examples of the galant Romanesca, you may have now acquired a ‘refined ear’ and the ability to judge whether a particular presentation of it possesses a “superior gracefulness”… Eighteenth century courtiers with a taste for music must have heard thousands of instances of the Romanesca-Prinner pairing, and I presume that the aural recognition of these and other schemata would have been a matter of course. The musical paths at court were very well-worn, and as soon as one perceived which path had been chosen, attention could shift toward appreciating the nuances of presentation. A Prinner in response to a Romanesca was no more surprising than a curtsy in response to a bow. It was the manner or style of presentation that mattered as the real object of aesthetic attention.

Substitute “habitual melodic phrases” for “schemata” and “A hijaz melody in response to a rast melody” (hijaz and rast are names for two different maqams) for “A Prinner in response to a Romanesca,” and Gjerdingen could be discussing Arabic music.

Featured image credit: Hans Reniers @hansreniers – CCO via  Unsplash

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How the prime minister can suspend Parliament

On 28 August, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson officially notified Parliament and the public of his decision to prorogue (i.e., suspend or end) the session by mid-September. Proroguing is the term for ending a legislative session of parliament. All sessions are technically prorogued and most in recent memory have happened without much ado.

What makes Johnson’s decision to suspend Parliament extraordinary today is that it was an attempt to curtail Parliament’s influence on how Britain will leave the European Union. According to Johnson, the suspension would allow him to bring forth his own legislation to ensure Britain leaves the Union by 31 October. It appeared that, upon suspension, the current Brexit legislation in Parliament would automatically fail and Johnson would have his way unless Parliament otherwise acted before it was closed.

But on 4 September the Commons did just that. Members of Parliament coordinated to pass legislation to prevent Johnson’s attempts to circumvent its authority.  It introduced and quickly passed a bill explicitly preventing a no-deal Brexit and requiring parliamentary approval for any Brexit plan. The bill, proposed by Labour MP Hilary Benn, was approved by the Lords and received the royal assent before Parliament was suspended on 10 September. While the legislative efforts happened quickly, the coordination required several Tory Members of Parliament to vote against the prime minister to allow the legislation to proceed. Once the necessary votes were garnered, the bill passed all stages of the house in one day.

The 2019 parliamentary prorogation has given us a crash course in parliamentary procedure and norms of the British government to understand its working. It has us reaching for the answers from the past: when has this happened? What were the strategies or concerns of the government? The political use of suspensions by the executive (the monarch or the prime minister) has a long history in England and Britain. MPs sought to prevent suspensions under Charles I, who ruled from 1625 to 1649, and is known for his attempts at ruling without a parliament. (He famously lost his head at the Banqueting House. One of his last sights, ironically, was a grand portrait of his father as a symbol of the divine right of the monarchs to rule). Political suspensions occurred during the Victorian era and in recent memory (1948 and 1997).

Johnson’s political motive for Parliamentary suspension shares a number of similarities to those of Charles II (son of the decapitated Charles I). Charles II frequently suspended Parliament to interfere with or influence bills on major fiscal and constitutional issues of the day. The suspensions are also similar because they both aimed to end a legislative session prematurely (before Parliament expects it). In the 17th century, this would in turn have unintended legislative costs by causing bills unrelated to the constitutional issues to fail. We do not yet know what bills will fail because of Johnson’s suspension.

There is a key difference in how Johnson implemented the suspension compared to Charles II. Charles II’s political suspensions were often unannounced and happened by surprise. A constitutional crisis of the period, in which parliament sought to alter the succession of the monarchy (known as the Exclusion Crisis), led to the Black Rod’s “ominous tap at the door.” The Usher of the Black Rod was, as it is today, an official of the House of Lords who is sent from the Lords to the Commons to summon the House to hear the monarch’s speech at the closing of a session. It is tradition dating to the mid-17th century for the Black Rod to knock on the Commons’ door and for the door to be “slammed in Black Rod’s face to symbolise the Commons independence.” During the late-17th century, the Black Rod’s knock was not only part of the ceremony of closing a session, but a manifestation of the political conflict of the period. The knock interrupted the proceedings and immediately ended the session. On 10 September, emblematic of the political conflict of the day, MPs shouted “no” when asked to attend the Lords for the ceremony in protest to the current suspension.

While Johnson’s plan to suspend the current session earlier than usual may have been conceived weeks ago, it was announced for mid-September and still gave members of Parliament time to legislate on its priorities. The priority of most members of Parliament is to prevent a no-deal Brexit. They maneuvered to prevent this by doing what Parliament does: legislate. Johnson’s attempt to do without Parliament and assert his own agenda has quickly led to ensuring Parliamentary authority over Brexit negotiations through an Act of Parliament (Benn’s bill).

In the 17th century, the monarch’s attempts at circumventing or interfering in Parliament raised constitutional concerns about its rights. The Glorious Revolution of 1688, which made William and Mary new monarchs, better protected these rights. Parliament met regularly and without interference via prorogation from the monarch. It also established Parliament’s position as the locus of decision-making in the government and as a primarily legislative body. Its authority in policy-making was enshrined in Acts of Parliament.

Johnson, as indicated in his letter relaying his intention to prorogue the current session, will introduce his own legislative programme seeking parliamentary authority on how to leave the Union when Parliament meets again on 14 October. Echoing Brexit negotiations the past several years, how Johnson balances his own agenda with a divided set of interests in parliament, who must approve his measure, is the set to be the next round of legislative politics. In addition to negotiating specific measures in the legislation, snap elections, and, we’d now be remiss to not take into account, prorogation may play a role in the negotiations come 14 October.

Featured image credit: Architecture-Britain-Building via Pixabay.

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John Duns Scotus – The ‘Subtle Doctor’ – Philosopher of the Month

John Duns Scotus (b. c. 1265/1266–d. 1308) was one of the most significant Christian philosophers and theologians of the medieval period. Scotus made important and influential contributions in metaphysics, ethics, and natural theology. Little was known of his life but he was born in Scotland, became a Franciscan monk, spent his learning and professional life at Oxford and Paris, and died in Cologne. He was also the first theologian to defend the theory of Immaculate Conception. The doctrine of Immaculate Conception holds that God preserved the Virgin Mary from the taint of original sin from the moment she was conceived. Although Aristotle’s ideas were prevalent during the turn of the 13th century, he belonged to Franciscan tradition which, as opposed to Aristotle, emphasised the power of faith and will. He was also much influenced by Arabic philosophers, especially Avicenna, with their emphasis on Being as the metaphysical object.

Scotus’s approach to philosophy was characterised by rigorous philosophical analysis, meticulous exposition of arguments and its use of technical concepts. Because of his nuanced and technical reasoning, he was referred to as the “subtle doctor.” Notably, Scotus made a distinctive contribution to natural theology in his proofs of God’s existence and the attributes of God. His arguments are both original and highly complex, establishing God as an efficient cause, an ultimate final cause, and a most eminent being, and finally as an “infinite being.” He took up some aspects of Aquinas’s arguments that all our knowledge about God starts from creatures but also presented his own arguments as modifications. Scotus’s univocal concept of being – the idea that words describing the nature of God mean the same thing as they apply to creatures and people – is also arguably his most famous position in this respect. He argued that we can apply certain predicates univocally to God and creatures with exactly the same meaning. This is in opposition to Aquinas who thought that this was not possible and that we can only use analogical predication to describe God’s attributes. His concept of God as infinite being was particularly important to him as he considered that it is the best available concept available to us for describing God, as it “virtually contains” all the infinite perfections associated with God.

Scotus is also considered a realist on the core issue of the universal. He believed there are universal realities (concepts or things that exist outside the mind), endorsing the Arabic philosopher Avicenna’s theory of the “common nature,” according to which essences or nature have their existence and priority in the mind or singular outside it. But he also believed that they only exist in the particular things that they exemplify once they are contracted (made individual) with the haeccity (thisness) of the things to create the individual.

He also developed distinctive theories on the human intellect and will. In his view, we are capable of attaining our knowledge of the truth by the exercise of the power of our intellect or our natural capacities without any special divine help. He opposed scepticism which denied any possibility of certain knowledge, and also a view by Henry of Ghent which held that we need a special divine illumination to help grasp the truth. His voluntarist theory of will for self-determination and as a rational power is a radical departure from the intellectualistic account of view à la Thomas Aquinas. He considered will as a higher and greater power than the intellect since it is a free power by which human beings choose or rejects the things that the intellect presents to them. He however did not accept Aquinas’s conception of will as a desire for happiness and his eudaimonistic conception of morality which was defined in terms of human happiness. Scotus believed the will has a second affection for justice. The will’s inclination/affection for justice plays an important role in enabling us towards our libertarian freedom and fulfilment.

Scotus’s masterpieces were the revised commentary on the writings of the Italian theologian Peter Lombard’s Sentences, known as the Ordinatio, the 12th-century compilation of authoritative passages that theologians had to comment on before qualifying as masters, and his questions on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, considered his most difficult work. Due to his early death, he was unable to carry out a final revision of most of his important works. His influence on later generations of thinkers was considerable and extended beyond the Middle ages.

Featured Image: photo by Rainier Ridao on Unsplash.

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Hispanic American heritage in the arts [slideshow]

Hispanic Americans are a core demographic of the United States, making up roughly 18% of the population. This highly diverse group includes recent immigrants and families whose US roots extend back many generations, with some ancestors originating from areas in southern US states that belonged to Mexico prior to the Mexican-American War (1846-48).

To celebrate the achievements of Hispanic Americans from history during Hispanic Heritage Month, here are six key figures from across the arts, spanning fields from painting to writing and music.

George Santayana (1863-1952)

George Santayana was a philosopher and writer born in Spain, popularly known for aphorisms, who moved to Boston at the age of nine.

Santayana presented a remarkable synthesis of European and American thought. His Hispanic heritage, shaded by his sense of being an outsider in America, captured much of the apprehension and concern that are apparent as Americans find their social environment fragmented by the country’s increasing diversity.

Image credit: George Santayana by Samuel Johnson Woolf, TIME magazine. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Sophia Gregoria Hayden (1868-1953)

Born in Chile, Sophia Hayden was an architect and the first woman to enrol in the architecture program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating with honours in 1890.

In 1891, at the age of 22, Hayden responded to an announcement relating to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition called “An Unusual Opportunity for Women Architects” and was ultimately commissioned to design the Woman’s Building for the Exposition in Chicago. A controversial structure (as many women objected to having their work placed in a separate location), the building brought Hayden, a reserved young woman, sudden, albeit brief, national fame.

Image credit: Sophia G Hayden by Harper’s magazine. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

Born to a Puerto Rican mother and British father, William Carlos Williams was trilingual, speaking Spanish, French, and English. Williams was talented not only in languages but also professionally, working both as an author and a physician.

Few writers had a more intense understanding of what being American meant than Williams, who loved his country with the fascination of the partly disenfranchised. The death of his father in 1918 may have intensified his quest for place and belonging. His country remained poised just outside his possession, and his love of America became a pervasive theme in both his poetry and the fiction he began to write in the 1920s.

Image credit: William Carlos Williams by Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Alberto Vargas (1896-1982)

Born in Peru, Alberto Vargas was an artist who became known for painting Varga Girls, a concept that became synonymous with the phrase “pin-up girl”.

Both the nature and quality of Vargas’s work have caused controversy: feminists assert that his work reflects a sexist culture, while admirers maintain that Vargas has been wrongly labelled as a simple pinup artist, when he in fact was a painter who specialized in nudes. Ultimately, it was Vargas’s interpretation of female beauty that made his work, particularly the Varga Girls, significant. As the original wholesome nude, the Varga Girl became an American icon.

Image credit: Marlene Dietrich (1941) by Alberto Vargas. Public domain via Flickr.

Machito (1908?-1984)

Machito was a Cuban bandleader, singer, and maraca player, born in Florida. His family moved to Havana when he was an infant. Although he was already a professional musician when he returned to the United States in 1937, his musical maturity and influence date from 1940. By the mid-1940s Machito’s band – the Afro-Cubans – had performed at concerts with Stan Kenton’s big band, and had recorded or played with most of the leading bop musicians, giving rise to a fusion style known as Afro-Cuban jazz or cubop.

Machito’s band was featured at the first Latin jazz concert, given at Town Hall in New York on 24 January 1947. He began recording with guest jazz soloists, and went on to tour internationally with his band in the 1960s, the popularisation of salsa in the 1970s bringing him to the attention of a wider and younger audience, for whom he became one of the style’s elder statesmen.

Image credit: Portrait of Machito (centre), Jose Mangual (left), and Carlos Vidal (right) by the Library of Congress. Public domain via Flickr.

Jerry Garcia (1942-1995)

Born in San Francisco and raised in a house filled with Spanish relatives and music, Jerry Garcia ran away from home at the age of 13 and learned to play the piano. He idolized the music of Chuck Berry and in 1957 bought a guitar and a small amplifier upon which he learned to play rhythm and blues.

Garcia eventually formed the Grateful Dead, a rock band in which he took on the role of lead guitarist and primary songwriter. Garcia’s nonconformist, utopian vision of total independence and freedom (in mind and body) appealed to hippies and other young people who denounced the Vietnam war, monogamy, parental or authoritarian guidance, formal education, and conformist jobs.

Image credit: The Grateful Dead by Warner Bros. Records. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Featured image: Multicolored Abstract Painting by Steve Johnson. Public domain via Pexels .

 

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Continuing Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon

Unfinished works tease us. They come with baggage.  They cling to their authors whose lives, in turn, weigh heavy upon them. Why were they broken off? How might they be continued? With Sanditon, unlike The Watsons and Kitty, or the Bower, two other unfinished Austen fictions, the why is obvious: only months after beginning the new novel, Jane Austen died. The how is far less certain.

Austen left so little of Sanditon to work from—not quite 12 chapters—and that little appears so unlike her usual fictions. Since it was first published, as late as 1925, critics have been divided: is this last work a freak and a failure, distorted out of shape by the wasting disease destroying its author, or is it a bold new experiment, upsetting expectations by design? How to build on such a puzzling beginning? Should it be patched up and brought into line with conventional Austen or are there enough clues to create something startlingly different?

Andrew Davies, doyen of Austen screen adaptation, is known for sexing up, with large helpings of Regency naughtiness, what Austen hints at in the margins of her polite fictions. More than twenty years ago he reinvented her for screen, adding whole scenes to eroticize Mr. Darcy in his BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice. His latest venture, the Sanditon-inspired series for Red Planet Pictures/ITV takes far greater licence. This is, after all, Austen on holiday at the seaside, out of sight of her landlocked country villages with their stifling social codes. The year is 1817, a drawn-out Europe-wide war is finally over. A new world is dawning.  The mood is not just optimistic; it’s frenetic. In Sanditon, visitors in search of pleasure outnumber residents who, scenting fortunes to be made, are gambling all they have by investing in leisure.  Everyone hides a secret or nurtures a scheme.

Sanditon was made for film: all the more surprising, then, that Davies’s continuation is the first to go into full production. Indeed, the oddest of the many odd features of Austen’s final fragment is its ready cinematic style—its breezy seascapes; its panoramas of the South Downs, criss-crossed by walkers and carriages moving between village, beach, and new town; its use of fragmented vision and discontinuity.

Davies’s Sanditon is full of surprises: from hinted incest to skinny dipping, bare-knuckle fighting, and the requisite ball, held in a Sanditon House whose décor is more suggestive of Caligula’s parlour than the residence of the local great lady of East Sussex. Award-winning production designer, Grant Montgomery (he of Peaky Blinders and the 2019 film Tolkien), has created remarkable sets: the imperial opulence of Sanditon House; the gothic decadence of Denham Place; the John-Soanes inspired clutter of Trafalgar House, Mr. Parker’s home; and the half-built modern town itself. Fantasy sets, they are windows into the souls of their owners. And Grant, an Austen fan, has hidden throughout the production various Easter eggs, surprise tributes and visual references for other fans to spot.

This is all extravagant stuff. But is it too extravagant? Even in Austen’s fragment, we sense that several of the characters have interesting back stories to be brought into the light: the exotic Miss Lambe, the impoverished Clara Brereton, one of Lady Denham’s family of “politic and lucky cousins, who seemed always to have a spy on her.” Among continuations of the fragment, and there are fewer for Sanditon than for other Austen fictions, those that risk most come off best; those that deepen the air of mystery and danger that clings to this world of eccentrics cavorting by the sea.

The first to take up the challenge was Anna Lefroy, Austen’s niece, who would claim the novel originated in their joint discussions. Anna injects colour and social contrast, exploring the sinister potential in Austen’s comic tale. As a dark foil to the proto-hero Sidney Parker, she introduced Mr. Tracy, a political agent, who has been of service some years previously to Sir Edward Denham. Clara Brereton, made “cold, calculating, and selfish” by poverty, is revealed as a scheming fortune hunter with a plan to relieve Lady Denham of her money. In a reversal of Austen’s narrative, Sir Edward is to become her victim and not she his. But Lefroy’s nerve failed her and she abandoned her continuation. Only published in 1983, it is not widely known.

In A Cure for All Diseases (2008) (titled The Price of Butcher’s Meat in the United States and Canada), dedicated “to Janeites everywhere,” Reginald Hill burnished those elements of mystery and even crime that the fragment’s earliest readers (Anna Lefroy among them) detected beneath its surface. Hill’s novel features his regular police duo Dalziel and Pascoe. Superintendent Andy Dalziel is recuperating in the old-fashioned Yorkshire resort of Sandytown, “Home of the Healthy Holiday.” Charlotte Heywood is a psychologist with a skeptical and scientific research interest in alternative therapies. Mr. Parker and his business partner, the much-married Lady Daphne Denham, have plans to refurbish the town and local Avalon Clinic. Meanwhile, Lady Denham’s heirs circle greedily and hopefully.  Murder (to be precise, strangling and roasting) is not far away.

With precedents like these, can Davies really go too far?

Featured image credit: Women swimming in the sea at Brighton. Coloured etching by W. Heath. CC BY 4.0 via Wellcome Collection. 

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Sweet (and sour)

The post on the origin of the word smell (August 21, 2019) has been read by more people than any other in recent months. On the wave of this unexpected popularity, I decided to write an essay or two on related themes. If they arouse enough interest, I may continue in the same vein. The future will show to what extent see, hear, feel, touch, and a few other verbs belonging to this sphere are worthy of our attention. In principle, I tend to avoid the words whose origin is known and noncontroversial. Anyone can look them up in a good dictionary, and nowadays the Internet provides lots of reliable information, so that there is no need to beat a willing horse. (It has always amused me that to beat a willing horse and to beat a dead horse mean the same. However, the reason is quite obvious.)

I would like to begin with the adjective sweet. The word is Common Germanic, though it does not occur in the fourth-century translation of the Gospels from Greek into Gothic (the reason is clear: sweet and sweetness are very rare words in the Bible). Yet it surely existed in the language of the Goths. The Old English for sweet was swēte (with a long vowel in the root, as, for instance, in Modern German Peter). The original Germanic form must have sounded approximately as swōti. Some languages lost w in the root, as seen in Modern Dutch zoot, German süß, and Icelandic sætur. In English, the adjective sweet broadened its meaning and became a vague synonym for “pleasant, lovable, enjoyable.”

Whatever you may say, a rose smells sweeter when it is called a rose. Image by abeer alabdullah from Pixabay.

This broadening is especially noticeable in Shakespeare. We all remember that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. But sweet is probably the most frequent epithet in the sonnets. Before and after the familiar when in the session of sweet silent thought (Sonnet 30), the word occurs again and again. As noted, Gothic must have had a word for the taste of honey, but by chance it has not been recorded. However, in that language (and apparently, only in it, as far as Germanic is concerned) an adjective for “pleasing” existed. It was used to translate épieikēs, which in Classical Greek displayed a great variety of senses, all of them positive: “proper; sufficient; correct; gifted; virtuous,” and the like.

The session of sweet silent thought. Daydreaming by Jaka Ostrovršnik, CC-by-2.0 via Flickr.

In the Gothic text, it occurs in 1 Timothy 3:3, in the chapter on the qualities needed for the office of a bishop. In the King James Bible, the verse sounds so: “Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy, of good behavior, given to hospitality, apt to teach.” Thus, “no striker” (hence the English gloss “gentle, yielding” in our Gothic dictionaries and manuals). The noun un-suti (with a negative prefix) also turned up and meant “uproar, tumult.” The Gothic adjective’s comparative form corresponds to “more tolerable” in M XI:24 of the English text. Whether the Gothic word is related to sweet and whether the vowel in its root was short or long remains a matter of dispute, but rather probably they are indeed related, while the phonetic niceties are in our case irrelevant.

Not a striker. From “Military and religious life in the Middle Ages and at the period of the Renaissance.” Public domain via Internet Archive Book Images on Flickr.

The root of sweet is easy to trace to the rest of Indo-European. In Latin, suāvis “pleasant, delectable” corresponds to it. Via Old French it reached English; hence suave. The verb suādēre meant “to advise” (apparently, from “to make something pleasant to the one being advised”); after some travels over Europe, it ended up in English as per-suade. We also know it from the opposite, namely dis-suade. Dissuaders are, arguably, not suave. I’ll skip the details about the Greek digamma and the change of initial s in Classical Greek to h, and state dogmatically that Greek hēdús “sweet” is a good congener of sweet; it meant “tasty, smelling delicious.” From the Greek noun of that root English acquired hedonism, etc. Sanskrit also preserved svādú- “sweet.”

The ancient Indo-European protoform must have sounded approximately like swād-. In Germanic, final d changed to t by the First Consonant Shift, also known as Grimm’s Law. The most probable development was from “sweet” (that is, tasting like some natural product) to “pleasurable.” What was that product, or what was the initial meaning of the phonetic complex swād?

In dealing with this Indo-European root, we find references not only to things tasting sweet but also to condiments, salt (!), and even vinegar (!!). This fact should not baffle us, because words with a broad general meaning (in this case, such as refer to taste) often narrow that initial meaning. A classic parallel is Russian sladkii, for solódkii “sweet” (the other Slavic forms are similar). Solódkii goes back to sólod “malt.” Although Lithuanian saldùs and its Latvian cognate also mean ”sweet,” the original meaning of the adjective was, it appears, “salty, tasty, spicy,” and the word is thus related to salt. Consequently, reference to “sweet” is a late development of a much more general or a much vaguer concept.

One expects a word like sweet to have a transparent etymology. Thus, bitter, most probably, means “biting.” A still easier case is salty, that is, “having the taste of salt.” According to what we have seen, Russian sladkii should be understood as “having the taste of solod ‘malt’.” Yet the situation is not always so clear. For example, Engl. tart is obscure, and so is Russian gorkii “bitter,” known to most from Maxim Gorky’s name or at least from Gorky Park.

Not all juices are sweet. Photo by Marco Verch, CC-by-2.0 via Flickr.

The only remote etymology of sweet, that is, of swōt, has been offered by the German scholar Elmar Seebold, whom I often mention in connection with the latest edition of Kluge’s German etymological dictionary (Kluge-Seebold). He suggested (first in 1984) that swōt is a sum of two roots: swō and t. The second of them (t) is said to go back to the Indo-European word for “give,” as in Latin da-re. As for swō-, Seebold associated it with the West Germanic noun for “juice,” as in Old Engl. sēaw “juice, sap; moisture” (the Old English adjective ge-sēaw meant “succulent”) and Old High German sou (the same meaning; see the obsolete word sew in the OED). He glossed this putative compound as “producing (having) the taste of juice.”

This ingenious reconstruction raises a few questions. We are not told which juice is meant. The primary sense of Old High German sou and its cognates elsewhere was “moisture,” rather than “juice,” while the continuation of sou in the Middle period denoted not only “moisture” but also “food” and “poison.” Finally, the entire structure looks a bit bulky, and experience shows that complicated etymologies are seldom correct. But Seebold had a “hidden agenda”: he set out to show that sweet and sour go back to the same root, which, in principle, is quite possible (see the story of Russian sladkii). Whether this agenda holds water will become clear some time later.

Feature image credit: From “Breeder and sportsman.” Public domain via Internet Archive Book Images on Flickr.

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Understanding the Multi-functional Nature of the Countryside

It is tempting to see the countryside through a haze of a pink washed nostalgia as somewhere where life continues with a perceived simplicity in tandem with the seasons and inherited practises. However, just as urban areas change and evolve, so does the countryside. With this, comes a more complex wordscape that combines the traditional language of farming and the countryside with new and adapted terms. The country-dweller, or visitor, of history would still recognise the language and life of rural areas in many ways. A plough may still be used to cultivate the land, and this land may itself be scattered with the same veteran trees that were there hundreds of years ago. People still go about living and working in rural areas, some engaging in traditional crafts, like coppicing, whilst others might live in the buildings that were occupied by their forebears. These buildings, themselves, might now form part of the built heritage of the countryside, and may, perhaps, be protected by some form of planning designation.

However, the countryside does evolve, and technology has brought about an increasing and continuing change; the plough has evolved from a simple piece of equipment pulled by oxen or horses, to a more complex example of machine-driven engineering. The role of the horse has altered in many countries, from being a crucial source of power on the farm to an animal more often kept for recreation. New plant and animal breeding approaches have resulted in new varieties of crops being produced, alongside livestock with improved characteristics for food production. Technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS) are also increasingly being incorporated into agriculture and these sit alongside other, more controversial, developments such as genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

The evolution of the countryside does not happen in isolation from wider societal developments, global issues, and pressures. By its nature, the countryside is multi-functional and faces many potentially competing demands. Whilst it is tempting to think of rural areas as merely providing food and other resources such as timber or minerals, the role of the countryside has always been more complex than that, and arguably becomes ever more so. How the land is managed affects our water quality and availability, the biodiversity that co-exist in our rural areas, and the intrinsic beauty of our landscapes. The countryside provides spaces for recreation and tourism, jobs for people, and homes for them to live in. Many rural areas exist as centres of economic activity – not just traditional farming and forestry businesses – but increasingly with the development of technology, for a range of other forms of commerce, for example, internet-based homeworking, or as a location for distribution centres. Many farmers, themselves, are driving this broadening of economic activity through diversification of their own businesses into new areas such as renewable energy production, leisure and tourism, or equine enterprises. These developments are not, though, without their tensions; the need to balance the protection of landscapes, habitats, and high quality food-producing land is often not easily compatible with the provision of what may be much needed new infrastructure or affordable housing. Increasing world population numbers also make this an ever more difficult conundrum to solve. Efforts to try to encapsulate some of the broad range of services provided by rural areas have, in recent years, led to the development of a series of new terms, each with their own nuances. Such terms include ecosystem services which aim to describe those services provided to us by nature, for example water purification and carbon sequestration, through to other expressions which have a more economic focus to them, such as natural capital and public goods.

The countryside has long been subject to significant government interest. With government involvement comes specific terminology such as that evolving from the Common Agricultural Policy or the World Trade Organization. Arguably this involvement has, historically, been driven by the countryside’s vital role in producing food; however, in more modern times, it also reflects the complexity of demands that society makes of rural areas. Alongside this has come an increasing international awareness of issues like climate change, loss of biodiversity, and soil degradation and an enhanced focus on balancing environmental, economic, and social needs through the framework of sustainable development. This has translated into the mainstreaming of socially-, environmentally-, and conservation-conscious approaches into rural policies in many countries, thereby bringing with it a new language of mechanisms such as agri-environment schemes, and cross-compliance, and with some farmers adopting approaches such as integrated farm management (IFM) or organic farming. Against this background, concerns about the potentially negative environmental impacts that poor land management can generate are increasingly balanced by recognition that appropriate land management can also deliver positives such as carbon sequestration, natural resource protection, and flood alleviation.

The rural wordscape is therefore as complex, multi-faceted, and ever evolving, as the wider countryside. Just as our forebears may have recognised at first sight many of the physical characteristics of today’s countryside, they would also have understood much of its language. However, on looking, and listening, more carefully, they would soon have become aware that, just as the multi-functional nature of the countryside has built and evolved over time, so have the words used to describe and discuss it.

Photo by Federico Respini via Unsplash

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Seven things you don’t know about Johnny Hodges

Over the course of four decades, Cornelius “Johnny” Hodges became the most famous soloist in the Duke Ellington orchestra, and the highest-paid. His pure tone on the alto saxophone was his calling card, and he used it both on lush, romantic ballads and on bluesier numbers that kept the band grounded in the music of dancehalls even as Ellington strove to produce symphonic works of the highest order in an American idiom.

Hodges has faded into relative obscurity, eclipsed by the genius of Charlie Parker, the father of bebop who—unfortunately for Hodges—not only created an entire new school of jazz, but played the same instrument as he did.

Hodges was, his own worst enemy when it came to preserving his legacy. He rarely agreed to interviews and usually cut them short when he did, rising and saying “Young man, I’ve got to go” to frustrated reporters. Here are seven things that you probably don’t know about Johnny Hodges, who was at one time one of the three most famous saxophone players in the world:

1. The name “Johnny” doesn’t appear on his birth certificate; his given name “Cornelius” doesn’t appear on his death certificate.

Like many boys named “Cornelius” (I am one) he probably found it a playground burden and adopted his father’s name.

2. He married his second wife, Edith “Cue” Hodges, in two separate ceremonies twenty-four years apart.

The first, in 1944, was a civil ceremony in Chicago, where the waiting period was only twenty-four hours; the second, in 1968, was a Catholic ceremony in New York. The latter renewal of vows was no doubt done at his wife’s insistence; Johnny doesn’t seem to have been religious, and his funeral was held at the Harlem Masonic Lodge, where the rule is that members don’t discuss politics or religion.

3. He played in burlesque houses in Boston’s original “Combat Zone,” the now-demolished Scollay Square area. 

The area, and its successor to the south, was referred to as a “combat zone” because of the number of soldiers and sailors who would flock there for risqué entertainment. Hodges had a daughter by a dancer he met there while still in his teens, but never married the girl’s mother.

Johnny Hodge’s birthplace in Cambridge, Massachusetts, courtesy of the author.

4. When he first started playing tea dances professionally in Boston, he was so young he needed to be accompanied by a guardian in order to comply with legal requirements.

“Tea dance” was frequently a euphemism; often liquor was served at such affairs despite their genteel name.

5. When he first arrived in New York he played in dancing schools, which in some cases were pretexts for more intimate encounters than the fox trot.

As fellow sax player Benny Waters put it, “Every dancing school had its girls. There was no law

against a beautiful girl taking someone out after work. A guy could certainly date a woman in a dancing school for after work.”

6. He was on the road so much he missed the wedding of his daughter Lornar, a failure that the daughter (by his second wife) understandably resented.

He had a closer relationship with his son John, who played drums and sometimes substituted when a regular drummer didn’t show at a gig due to missed travel connections.

7. He used at least four pseudonyms to avoid contractual restrictions and earn money on the side by performing on other musician’s albums.

He was known by seven different nicknames, including “Rabbit,” “Jeep,” and “Squatty Roo.” He was a short man, only about 5’ 5”, and perhaps as a result became the object of the affectionate put-down that an enduring nickname provides.

Hodges was a musical man of mystery, but he could be instantly identified by that most ephemeral of things; a single musical note, one of the few musicians in the history of jazz about whom that could be said as anything other than sheer hyperbole.

Featured image credit : photograph by William Gottlieb – via  Library of Congress

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