Sad state of British pound
The British pound sterling has recently taken some serious beating, its value losing ground against pretty much every other major currency in the world. This sad ordeal is further manifested in the fact that today I found a t-shirt at Harvey Nichols which cost, I kid you not, £695. Of course, there have always been collector items and curios, one of a kind articles and shoes with diamonds on their soles that fetch astronomical prices, but hey, this was just a t-shirt on a rack, sold in a department store.
Luckily, rest of the prices in London haven’t quite caught up with t-shirts so generally it is pretty nice to spend your time and money (should you happen to have any of either) here at the moment. I just saw on TV that Gordon Ramsay is offering £15 set lunches, so if you blow your 700 quid on a t-shirt you can at least go and dine in style and recoup some of that damage.
For better or worse, I am here for just a day and tomorrow morning my flight leaves for Malta. I think I will drop my old winter coat to some dumpster en route to Gatwick – let’s hope I won’t get caught in a blizzard on my way back.
Leaving Albion
A few days ago I moved to another B&B that is both cheaper and closer to the library. So now I stay with a lovely, slightly Roald Dahl-ish old couple whose fake smiles display their sets of false teeth. Mantelpieces and shelves are filled with assorted bric-a-brac, tea sets and silverware and the whole place has a bit spooky air to it.
Meanwhile , I have been making very good progress at the library and am therefore pretty much done with what I came here to do, and that led me to think of moving on. So yesterday I booked a flight to Valletta on Sunday where, if to believe weather reports, next week should be sunny and with temperatures up to 19°C – in short, perfect conditions for reflecting upon ten days spent along piles of books.
Speaking of books – I am finishing a thriller by Paco Ignacio Taibo II called “Four Hands” that has, despite the title, quite single-handedly rehabilitated the whole genre for me. PIT is to Robert Ludlum what Gabriel García Márquez is to Paulo Coelho and the book has been a true delight to read – comes highly recommended to everybody who has had even a passing interest in crime novels or political thrillers. I will dump a whole stack of books to the capable hands of Royal Mail sometime tomorrow and mail them back home – so if anyone has something from CUP that they would like to get, now is the time to let me know.
…and he rested on the seventh day…
On Sundays the library is closed and so I got my day of rest – which I honestly didn’t really know what to do with, but it is nevertheless nice to have a short break from books. I’ve been going through them at a rate of about 5-6 per day, plus a few more that I just open, leaf through and find out that they’re not particularly relevant.
Speaking of books, the annual Cambridge University Press’ sale is on and the only thing that’s been holding me back from going completely berserk is the fact that I would end up lugging all those books along with me for quite a while. In principle, they’re selling off their damaged inventories but I’d say that in most of the cases the damage is really minor to the point of nonexistent – I have leafed through a few books with some attention and failed to find anything wrong with them. At the same time, prices are mostly between £2 and £7 per book, which in some cases can be up to ten times less than in the store next door. There’s a big sign on the wall that says “No more than 20 books per person per day” – that should give you some idea of what’s going on in there. In fact, apparently the professors and grad students are somewhat annoyed over the fact that CUP postponed the sale from traditional early January to now, when most of the students are again in residence – otherwise they could have had the whole place for themselves.
Tomorrow morning I will head to the library once again, for another six days among bookstacks.
O tempora, o mores
Cambridge University is celebrating its 800 year anniversary with zest. There are all kinds of happenings, exhibitions, performances and lectures, both public and private, all around the town. An anniversary booklet proudly lists different visionaries and otherwise famous people who have studied here, such as Charles Darwin, Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson and … Ali G, who even has his picture featured in a leaflet. I guess this is actually true that Ali G has both higher recognition rate as well as brand value among the potential new students than Darwin, and in a way Ali G’s anthropological fieldwork has revealed such levels of gullibility and plain stupidity in our collective gene pool that, believing Darwin, one can only wonder how did the humankind survive thus far. So, not only have we an African American president leading the United States, but we also have a man as an ambassador of the Cambridge University who has been quoted saying “So, if this show teach you anything, it should teach you how to respek everyone: animals, children, bitches, spazmos, mingers, lezzers, fatty boombahs, and even gaylords. So, to all you lot watching this, but mainly to the normal people, respek. West side.”
Maybe there is hope, after all.
Voodoo people
Here is an interesting article on recent financial market troubles concerning Citi that looks at a curious situation where we have banks that are not only too big to fail but also, at the same time, too big to succeed. The article suggests that by not allowing nine major financial institutions to fail (probably quite rightly, as the cost of that failure would have been unacceptably high for the whole society), the US government may have doomed them to a kind of a zombie existance.
Citi supposedly has a plan to split itself in two – to a “good bank” and a “bad bank”, kind of a “spirit” and “corpse”. Only that the corpse is really not dead – otherwise they might just write that stuff off, instead of creating another, lesser zombie. This is a kind of a financial voodoo that Paul Krugman is rightly sceptical about – after all what we have been through over last half a year or so we, amazingly, still seem to have plenty of people who think that it would be a good idea to try and structure ourselves out of the present mess, that some potent financial magic can still create value out of nothing – if we only get it right this time.
I actually think that the split is a good idea, in fact it is in all likelihood inevitable – but not along the lines of good and bad assets. The financial system that we have now has grown out of something that was intended to solve a radically different problem. Initially the banks were meant to serve the needs of business (and an odd monarchy) – to extend loans, manage financial assets that were not immediately needed, process transactions, provide insurance and certainty in trade finance, etc. This was, by and large, true all the way from 15th century to up until some fifty years ago. It was in connection with the rise of a relatively wealthy middle class that the banking gradually went retail on any significant scale.
This, however, created a new and very different situation. No more was the banking system simply an expendable service provider – it slowly became a part of the infrastructure that we rely on in leading our everyday lives, a utility just like those that provide us with electricity, drinking water, or transportation. Unlike what is usual with utility companies, banking system was not a government-run or -regulated monopoly anywhere in the West, rather than a competitive industry with several providers. That was supposed to give us assurance that not only is the cost of service as low as possible (which of course is very much doubtful and has been also challenged both in case of banks and credit card companies) but also that we’re shielded from the failure of any single provider.
What we weren’t shielded from, of course, was the case where all the providers failed together. However, this is pretty much what has happened now and as they collectively form a crucial part of our everyday infrastructure, governments all across the world simply can’t let them. This of course creates a thorny situation that has often been referred to and that was recently ironically summed up by Mikhail Gorbachev as “Communism for the rich and capitalism for the poor”.
So, this would lead one to think that if the financial system, or at least a part of it, is of such fundamental importance to a society it would be quite justified to treat it in a similar way to a water utility, a railway or a national energy company. But those are not merely regulated – they are pretty much government controlled, if not owned and operated. This obviously also has its downsides – but we’re happy to live knowing that there is not as much innovation going on in our utility companies as there might be would they be traditional competitive industries, as long as we know that they are around, good times or bad.
Arriving to Cambridge
After a brief encounter with smoked-out British proletariat aboard the easyJet flight (my first ever – flight, not encounter) I landed at Stansted one hour later, making up the time lost inflight by hopping a time zone. Flight attendants had accents straight out of a Guy Richie movie, so I could barely understand what was being said. It was a pleasant 30 minute drive to Cambridge so around noon I was already at my B&B where it turned out that my reservation was no good. I did manage to get a double room with £15 markup at the same place, so I just took this for tonight and will try to sort myself out tomorrow.
I had a short walk in the afternoon to get my bearings. Cambridge is a pretty impressive place – more so than Oxford where the colleges seem to be more dispersed. Here they are all pretty much together, forming a true university town. I’ve only seen something similar in Coimbra, Portugal. Picked up a new sim-card today (my new number is +44 7854637440 now, should anyone have something urgent to tell me), tomorrow I will try to get myself a library card, find a place to stay for next few weeks and try to open a local bank account – we’ll see how it goes.
Vihmasest Amsterdamist
Jäin täna hommikusöögile hiljaks ning pidin seetõttu minema köögist oma kaerahelvestele piima peale küsima – mis tõi liibanonlasest köögitöölise poolt kaasa kergelt etteheitva kuid siiski resigneerunud pilgu seinal rippuvale suurele kellale. Sõin oma kausitäie kiirelt tühjaks ning jätsin kohvi edasise halvakspanu ärahoidmise huvides võtmata, pistsin toas läpaka ja paar raamatut kotti ning jalutasin kesklinna.
Täna on päev vihmane – inimesed kõnnivad kiirel sammul majaseinte lähedal, pead õlgade vahele tõmmatud ja käed sügaval taskus. Pleksikaasist katustega kanalipaadid, mis nädala sees sildade all tühjadena loksusid, on täna täis hallipäiseid abielupaare, kes sooja saamiseks teineteise lähedale nihkuvad, prouade ohtrate sõrmustega sõrmed härrade siniste soontega kätesse surutud.
Ka raamatupoodides on silmnähtavalt rohkem rahvast kui varasematel päevadel. Mulle väga meeldib käia ingliskeelse kirjanduse lettidelt otsimas lühilugude kogumikke, kelle autoritest ma midagi kuulnud ei ole, võtta siis nende raamat kuskilt keskelt lahti ja lugeda paar lugu ning seejärel raamat oma kohale tagasi panna. Samal ajal on tore vaadata teisi poekülastajaid riiuleid silmitsemas ning püüda salamisi ära arvata täpselt millise raamatu järgi nad hetke pärast käe sirutavad. Täna lugesin niimoodi Dan Rhodese kogumikku “Anthropology” ja ühe Ameerika naiskirjaniku raamatut mille pealkirja ma juba ära unustasin. Nagu ka kirjaniku nime. Aga mõlemad raamatud olid väga toredad.
Peale raamatupoodi läksin ühte pisikesse kohvikusse mille omaniku koer mind suure rõõmuga peale kaht päeva endiselt ära tundis, sõin ühe salati ning lõpetasin ära ühe ammu lubatud artikli. Traadita internetiga on Amsterdamis muide lood üsna kehvakesed – erinevalt Tallinnast kohvikutel seda reeglina ei paista olevat ning seega on ainus lootus jahtida erinevaid “linksys” ja “SpeedTouch298379834D4″ võrke mille lahked omanikud on ruuterit installeerides lahti jätnud. Kui artikkel valmis püüdsin taaskord edutult oma €500 rahatähega kaheteist-eurost arvet maksta ning pidin kokkuvõttes tegema lühikese jalutuskäigu lähima panga-automaadini ja tagasi.
Nüüd istun üles eile leitud kanaliäärses kohvikus, piraadin kellegi kodust püsiühendust ja püüan viimase paari päeva lugemata artiklitega järje peale jõuda. Väljas on vahepeal vihm järele jäänud ning mu arvuti aku hakkab vaikselt tühjaks saama – nii et ilmselt on aeg varsti arve võtta ja vahetada see kohvik mõne teise ning MacBook päris-raamatu vastu.
The age of stamp collectors
So the conference is over. First half of today was pretty heavy on literary theory. Apart from presentations on Flann O’Brien’s Third Policeman (a book I confess being awfully partial to) and another one on Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida and post-mortem photography, the rest of the lectures were somewhat tedious to sit through. It’s not that they weren’t clever and filled with “wonderful insights” and “interesting observations” – as they were invariably praised by other participants prior to asking similarly insightful and clever questions – they were probably a bit too clever for their own good. This reminded me of a scene in Fight Club where Jack makes a remark on single-serving friends:
TYLER: Oh, I get it. It’s very clever.
JACK: Thank you.
TYLER: How’s that working out for you?
JACK: What?
TYLER: Being clever.
JACK (thrown): Great.
TYLER: Keep it up then. Right up.
I also found myself thinking of an essay by George Steiner that I read yesterday in order to survive one particularly painful and obscure presentation that simply went on and on with no end in sight. In the essay, Steiner lamented that although literacy rates are at the highest levels they have ever been everywhere one looks in the world, our ability to actually READ is on the wane. “Short bits of text”, he remarks “now lead precarious lives on great stilts of footnotes”. We have became unable to read anything but the most trivial things without the support of commentaries, foot- and endnotes. Now, literary theory puts forth an implicit claim to deal with texts in an informed, disciplined and thorough manner. It is much preoccupied with extending the texts it deals with, trying to dissect and categorise them in ever more inventive ways, analyse in minute details how they stick together and how their meaning eludes any precise definition or fixing.
It appears to me that what Steiner has in mind when he says that we have to “learn to read again” is something quite different. It is of course all fine to learn about deconstruction and postcolonialism, new historicism or marxist criticism, but this really only deals with the tekhnê of how the meaning is created and extracted – and it is of very little use if we do not recognise the building blocks that it consists of. This technical craftmanship does not, indeed, cannot replace direct contact with the origins, sources of inspiration and layers of meaning that have accumulated over almost three millennia. In that sense, Steiner wants us to go back rather than forward. He wants us to go and read the Bible, Homer, Aesychlos, Dante and Goethe, Milton and Molière, and not only to read them but also to engrave them into our memories.
This all may sound an awful lot of work and beg the obvious question: what for? And this is where Steiner quotes Kafka:
If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skulls, then why do we read it? Good God, we also would be happy if we had no books and such books that make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. What we must have are those books that come on us like ill fortune, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
Not surprisingly, Steiner has not been very popular in the circles of literary theory. “Among stamp collectors,” he wrote in 1992, “letter-writers are not always welcome.” And indeed, it seems that we could do with a few more letter-writers in this age of stamp collectors.
Scary stuff
First of all I must say that Amsterdam can be a very pleasant place midweek in January. Streets are not at all crowded, the weather is fine (sunny and I’d say around 8°C) and canal-side cafes have unoccupied window-side tables. In short – a perfect day for slipping a few books into your bag and going for a walk.
I am here for a conference though, so I had to get up at 7:30, grab a coffee and something to eat and then head on to UvA library. The title of the conference is “Specters, Hauntings and Archives” – which is of course a reference to Jacques Derrida, and more precisely to his two books “Specters of Marx” and “Archive Fever”. In the light of this it was actually a bit surprising that Derrida only got a scant mention today, but there was a lot of talk about different kind of ghosts, specters, spirits and zombies. It is amazing what kind of things can be a subject for a scholarly study at the beginning of 21st century, isn’t it? However, taking into account the kind of a proverbial glass house that my own dissertation topic is, I really should think twice before throwing stones in that regard..
Anyway, the first day of the conference was a bit of a mixed bag. Some stuff was really interesting (a 45 minute sweep of a ghost story genre from its victorian origins all the way to the present, an anthropological view of zombie culture and its history), while some other presentations bored me silly. Luckily I had some reading with me. Tomorrow seems to be a similar affair – a few lectures that I am very much interested in and a bunch of things (mostly related to art) that I will probably simply skip. The conference will conclude with a rather grand spirit-disco with plenty of spooky stuff in store – not the least of which is to see some 40 academics dance to the haunted tunes.
So on Sunday it will be on to Cambridge – although now that they fixed the heating in my hotel room I could well stay for a few days more.
Soul searching for Gaza
I am a big fan of Stephen Sackur, the host of BBC’s HardTalk program. He’s an intelligent interviewer who does his homework. And while he is not hellbent on completely humiliating and destroying anyone who tries to give a bullshit answer to a straight question the way Jeremy Paxman is, Sackur really doesn’t let his guests get away either with any tricks or evasive tactics.
In the latest episode of HardTalk, the guest is Israeli ambassador to London, Ron Prosor. It is another great interview, and can be found on the BBC’s website. After somewhat benign start the interview really kicks into the gear at the beginning of part 2 and then touches upon some very important issues indeed. First of all I should say that, given the circumstances, it wasn’t a bad performance by Ron Prosor at all. He was about as straightforward and honest as could be expected that a top level Israeli diplomat can be when discussing the matters that he did. In some cases, he was actually VERY straightforward – and those are the places that in my opinion merit a very close attention.
Although I do agree that it is important to take a stand in the current conflict and demand for killing the civilians to stop, in terms of helping the Palestinian population of Gaza or ensuring that such things wouldn’t happen again, I am afraid that this is only marginally helpful. When asked about how does Israel feel about the mounting public pressure and the fact that pretty much every other government apart from the US has demanded them to stop shooting now, ambassador Prosor responds: ‘This is not a “how we look”, it’s a question of a country, and a nation, standing up and saying /…/: “enough is enough”.’
I actually agree that Israel cannot stand idle – over the last seven years they have faced certainly thousands, if not tens of thousands (depending on what you count as a separate incident) attacks on their civilian population. The question is how do they react. And this is where Stephen Sackur’s question on whether he ambassador is confident that Israel is not at odds with what the International War Crimes Tribunal has defined as war crimes, specifically with the article 3 of Tribunal’s statutes that reads: ‘attack, or bombardment, by whatever means, of undefended towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings’, led to what I believe is the key part of the whole interview. While Ron Prosor agreed (after being pushed by Sackur) that Israeli government is to be held to higher standards than (a supposedly terrorist organisation) Hamas in how it conducts itself with respect of civilians, he plainly pointed out that they should NOT be held to any higher standards than the armies of countries such as the UK and United States. Also, when responding to a question why doesn’t Israel allow foreign journalists to enter the war zone – with the official reason voiced by the head of Israel’s government press office, Danny Seaman, being that ‘Foreign journalists are “unprofessional” and take “questionable reports at face value without checking”‘ – ambassador Prosor again pointed on the fact that journalists’ access was similarly limited in Iraq, Afghanistan and Faulklands conflict.
And then comes the final harrowing point. When Sackur asks about whether Israel will allow, once the shooting stops, a full independent investigation into the actions of the Israel’s army during the conflict, ambassador Prosor, while avoiding the direct answer, leaves no doubt that this will not be forthcoming, pointing again at how the killing of 30,000 Taleban militants with less than 200 UK military casualties in Afghanistan didn’t merit an investigation.
And this is where the buck stops. Given that it takes weeks if not months of political and diplomatic process to reach an agreement – and this is especially true in case of Israel that enjoys de facto military and diplomatic shield of the United States – and even more before any Western country is able to actually intervene, it is all pretty useless for people caught up in the conflict. As Rwanda showed, you can kill almost a million people with matchetes within a couple of weeks, so for any modern army a week or two that it takes for the public opinion and political pressure to build up is plenty of time to do whatever they want to do. And like ambassador Prosor plainly said, they are not overly concerned how do they look. The only way to deter people shooting at schools with tanks is to make it sure that those taking decisions will know that they will be held accountable for whatever they decide. As long as there remain some people who will not, there will remain people who are liable getting hit by an artillery shell in their home. And unfortunately this means that we will first have to apply the same rules to ourselves.
If we don’t do that, we don’t really care about Palestine.
