Category: Media & Journalism

Klein writ large

To continue the thread. Carol King was born Carol Joan Klein. Such is the train of my thoughts: the squint of an eye to thread through another. To where does this lead, what awaits at eye’s other end? Another Klein has been on my mind.

Off the top of my head, I can’t quite remember when and where I first encountered stuff from the young Ezra Klein; but it was certainly pre-Obama, therefore before he migrated to The American Prospect at the end of 2008, and he was most certainly one of the most interesting (and youngest!) of the first generation of political bloggers. Always on my radar, through his tenure at the Washington Post to the founding (with others) of Vox, and last November brought news of his hiring by The New York Times.

And so it is that I have a new must read to add to my fluctuating (some have been known to fall out of favour!) list, and to date it has absolutely not disappointed. Already, some really excellent pieces focusing on the dangers ahead; from Covid-19 variants, for the Democrats should they rest on their laurels, should the failing political system and specifically the Senate not be reformed. Klein’s critical reflection on the problems (and liberal failings) crippling his home state of California is a highlight. Beyond the weekly opinion pieces, there is a twice weekly podcast (with full transcripts) that appear to be related and, after only a few weeks a wonderful mix of guests; including his Opinion desk colleague, Paul Krugman. Unafraid to go beyond his comfort zone, his talk with Yuval Levin about the future of the GOP is a master-class in intelligent, respectful conversation with those not of one’s own political persuasion. You may say they are peddling their wares (both have newly released, and big-time talked about books), but I could have listened all day to what Elizabeth Kolbert and Heather McGhee had to say. Only because it is the most recent, below is the conversation with the latter on Spotify, from whence the earlier episodes can be navigated to.

Ezra Klein talks with Heather McGhee on his NYT podcast

Returning to where I began, Ezra’s Typepad blog from the mid-noughties is still to be found out there on everyone’s favourite “forget nothing” machine (not to mention this foodie blog that he participated in – I even remember that!), and now I am fairly sure it was there that I began reading his earnest, geeky, political junkie commentary (and that of others – the Blogroll is like a blast from the past!), and which comes to an end in the year 2008 and Klein’s move to The American Prospect. What followed from then on seems to have been a career mostly in the ascendant. Half his luck, I say. The “good life” well earned. I’ve always found Ezra (everyone calls him Ezra!) to be an extraordinarily intelligent and thoughtful young man, and will enjoy accompanying him into his middle-age at NYT, just as I slink into the much older version. (Though I do note he doesn’t seem to stay in one place for too long!)

A stitch in time

Elsewhere I have waxed lyrical about the working of thread into fine material as a most appropriate metaphor for the creative process. A finely crafted tapestry may be the outcome. Fifty years ago another tapestry was stitched, one of word and music; fine threads with names like “Will you love me tomorrow”, “It’s too late”, “I feel the earth move”, “You’ve got a friend”; all brought together to produce a work of beauty – Carol King’s “Tapestry”. Reluctantly I give away my years, when I say how much this album meant to me as a young thing. May I say very young! And to mitigate more, perhaps my recollections are from a time just a little after its first release.

In the above linked tribute in The Guardian, beyond the artistry of the music and lyrics, Rickie Lee Jones mentions the cover (here’s a Wiki link, as the copyright on the artwork seems unclear), and I too have it etched upon my brain – barefooted, jeans clad, long locks, the direct gaze that seems to say politely but firmly “I have to get back to my work!”. A window seat seemed to me one of the higher forms of luxury. Looking at it again, the vinyl of days gone by replaced with a CD picked up along the way, I see my memory deceived just a little because for some reason I remember a guitar and not a cat. King’s cat was named Telemachus. Penelope it was who weaved and weaved as she awaited Odysseus’ return, defending with her wits and industry the honour of her son and family.

Carole King – It’s Too Late (BBC In Concert, February 10, 1971)

Carole King’s work is on Spotify and most every other platform, and here is her official website with, amongst other things, announcements around and about the anniversary – which includes the release on YouTube of videos (see above) from the BBC studio concert given shortly after “Tapestry” came out.

Caste awry

Adam Shatz talks with Hazel Carby, January 12th 2021

This podcast is an accompanying conversation to Hazel Carby’s essay in the current London Review of Books (Vol. 43 No. 2 · 21 January 2021) on Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents; published to acclaim last year. Carby’s argument, like all those that go against the grain, is provocative. Interesting, is that the critique comes from a wider, global perspective of race and the historical complexities of the greater Black diaspora; and ironic, in that it is precisely with this broader brush that Wilkerson claims to make her case in her comparisons with the Indian caste system and Nazi Germany. But, Carby argues, Wilkerson is in fact bound by, and limited by, national constraints (be they inherited or learned), and constructs her “origin” story accordingly; one that depends on a (United States of) American exceptionalism.
Carby does make at least one very persuasive argument; in that I am persuaded to add Wilkerson’s book to my reading list! Beyond that, only a reading will tell.
(I often wonder about the considerations that lead to a book title change; why and to what end – aesthetic, linguistic, marketing. In the LRB review above, “Caste: …” is (mistakenly?) subtitled as in the US, but in the UK it seems to actually have been published as Caste: The Lies that Divide Us.)

January 17 2021: As I intimated above, prior to hearing this podcast, only positive takes on Wilkerson’s book had come my way, but a newsletter that I receive regularly from Jamelle Bouie (which always has something interesting to read, think about – and sometimes to eat!) has just suggested this review by Charisse Burden-Stelly in the Boston Review, in which, similarly to Hazel Carby, she considers “caste” to be an inadequate, even misleading, terminology under which to talk about race in the United States. Their critiques may differ in emphasis, but both reviewers dismiss this (imported) system as too rigid in structure and too dependent upon popular acceptance to lend itself to the complex interplay of politics, class and resistance in a volatile, changing social construct such as that which has evolved – continues to evolve – in the U.S.

Great Lives

“Great Lives” on BBC Radio 4 is a long favourite programme, though these days I often miss the scheduled broadcast and listen to it as a podcast. It doesn’t often disappoint, and this concerning Frank Ramsey was no exception.

“Great Lives” BBC Radio 4 – Frank Ramsey

Matthew Parris, the presenter, was momentarily taken aback with David Spiegelhalter’s nomination; admitting to not having heard of Ramsey. I wouldn’t like to be the one to raise my eyebrows, for only in recent times has this short, brilliant life come to my attention, but Parris has encountered an associated other, Ludwig Wittgenstein, in both his own academic life at Cambridge; as an insurmountable hurdle, he says, and amongst previous “great lives”. And, I would have thought, any investigation into Wittgenstein’s life would have somehow thrown up Ramsey.

Re-listening to that 2011 broadcast, Ramsey is indeed not mentioned, but I guess in thirty minutes only so much can be said. I am surprised though; for as I understand it, the young Ramsey, took some time out from a heady Viennese sojourn to act as an emissary of sorts (at the behest of Maynard Keynes amongst others), to visit Wittgenstein in the provinces of Austria in 1923; spent some time with him, gained his trust (not an easy thing!), translated the Tractatus into English, and eventually played an important role in finally enticing Wittgenstein back to Cambridge in 1929.

This is by no means meant to be derogatory of either “Great Lives” or Matthew Parris, in fact I enjoy the program very much, and along the way I have discovered an extraordinary gallery of people. Granted, some have, to my mind, been grotesque – like Mussolini (a minor scandal that selection was a few months ago!), and some trivial – confusing a life to be celebrated with that of celebrity. And, in this special edition, Parris does contemplate the very subjective nature of defining adequately what exactly a “great life” is.

But generally speaking, an enlightening interlude – whether on radio or as podcast on various platforms – that may be light on answers, but very often suggests questions.

In tragic times

Further to the previous post, since earlier this year, CHS and their associated Kosmos Society has also, in conjunction with the UK’s Out of Chaos theatre collective, been presenting creative theatrical readings of many Greek tragedies. A marvellous initiative – and also available on YouTube.

Reading and discussion of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (translation by Oliver Taplin)

Above, as an example, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, which I note uses the Oliver Taplin translation that Emily Wilson spoke of here. And, Mr. Taplin is in fact a guest (approx. 22:00), and has some interesting things to say about translation and performance – in general and in respect to the Oresteia in particular.

And, while we’re with Agamemnon, here a wonderful and free (iBook, ePub) learning resource at APGRD – created by another participant in the above, Fiona Macintosh (et.al.), and in which Mr. Taplin also has a role.

Round the world in 24 hours

A reading of the Odyssey is of course never over; for me, after a concentrated yearlong effort, it is at the moment in abeyance, but surely to be returned to. For many others, their journey may just be beginning, and this recent project from Harvard’s Centre for Hellenic Studies could be an interesting starting point.

24 hour reading of the 24 books of “The Odyssey” – performed December 8-9 2020

Here is the complete YouTube play list.

Pleasure in reading

Start the week with Andrew Marr and a good listen, then read on.

“Derrida, Woolf, and the pleasure of reading”

Read Derrida, should you dare! Lighter work, for sure, to deconstruct the person. The philosopher, Julian Baggini, reviews Peter Salmon’s book An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida here.

Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader found critical acclaim and a worldwide audience, but had its detractors in Germany – not an apologist work, but, if sought, excuses for a nations fall into barbarism are too easily to be discerned. His 2018 novel Olga, just published in English, received here a fairly tepid reception – a woman’s fate through the panorama of German history from the Kaiserreich through the 20th century; and character just too good to be true? History tells us, there were many more “Hannas” (the illiterate guard of The Reader) than there were “Olgas”.

Enjoyed very much (hardly a surprise!) Alexandra Harris’s perceptive commentary on Virginia Woolf’s reading habits and expectations. In Virginia Woolf’s own words, “How Should One Read a Book” from The Common Reader, Second Series. Woolf may have suggested to Schlink’s young reader (in The Reader), to keep the best of it to himself.

Reading, with all its extended connotations, may well bind them, but strange bedfellows these three. I love Andrew Marr – he can bring together disparate voices to a successful ménage à trois.

More than nostalgia

In these frenetic days, in which so much stuff, and so much more unsavoury stuff, is endlessly being thrown around, The New York Times has resorted to viral videos and the nostalgia of the urban snowball fight of yore. Not exactly today’s weapon of choice on the streets of Lyon or anywhere else I would suggest. So were my first thoughts…

Auguste & Louis Lumière: Snowball Fight (1897)

But, the author of the article, Sam Anderson, manages to retrieve his piece from my harsh verdict; both with some very nice observations and imagined narrative of the content, but more importantly with his reflections on our complicated relationship with the past and our exaggerated sense of the importance and uniqueness of our present.

…On an intellectual level, we all understand that historical people were basically just like us. […]They were anxious and unsure, bored and silly. Nothing that would happen in their lifetimes had happened yet. The ocean of time was crashing fresh waves, nonstop, against the rocks of their days. And like us they stood there, gasping in the cold spray, wondering what people of the past were like.

[…] to watch this snowball fight, to see these people so alive, is a precious gift of perspective. We are them. They are us. We, too, will disappear. […] We are not unique. We move in the historical flow. The current moment will melt away like snow crust on a moustache…

Sam Anderson, in “The New York Times Magazine“, Nov. 5 2020

The original black and white version included in the Lumière catalogue can be found here. On a technical level, the colorisation and a smoothing process makes the participants, indeed, look more like us – which of course they really did. This was something I actually thought about quite a lot a couple of years ago on seeing some excerpts from Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, a documentary film he made in remembrance of the end of the First World War, and in which he took archive footage from the time and, with all the technical wizardry available to him, transformed the subjects from blurred images of long ago to (mostly) young men who one may very well come across today – on the bus, at the pub or football, or most anywhere. I remember thinking, irrespective of the objections raised by purists, the familiar visages that were exposed with such technical finesse do create a powerful bridge between all the years of the century passed. Again – they were just like us! Beyond that of community and comradeship, there is little comparison between the respective fights on the winter streets of Lyon and on the fields and in the trenches of the Somme, but what they do share, are the threads of time that bind each inextricably with our present and all the presents to come.