buy this record
Tariq Ali's
postscript to his full
article in the
LRB:Six hours before she was executed, in 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots wrote to her brother-in-law, Henry III of France: ‘As for my son, I commend him to you in so far as he deserves, for I cannot answer for him.’ On 30 December 2007, a conclave of feudal potentates gathered in the home of the slain Benazir Bhutto to hear her last will and testament being read out and its contents announced to the world media. Where Mary was tentative, her modern-day equivalent left no room for doubt. She could certainly answer for her son.
A triumvirate consisting of her husband, Asif Zardari (one of the most venal and discredited politicians in the country and still facing corruption charges in three European courts), and two ciphers will run the party until Benazir’s 19-year-old son, Bilawal, comes of age. He will then become chairperson-for-life and, no doubt, pass the post on to his children. The fact that this is now official does not make it any less grotesque. The Pakistan People’s Party is being treated as a family heirloom, a property to be disposed of at the will of its leader. Both Pakistan and the People’s Party deserve better than this medieval charade [...]
Labels: LRB
Spoil 1.95
Not to be silenced by the grandeur of the institution or its famous members, [Housman] did not conceal his contempt for the scholarship of the great Benjamin Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek and master of Balliol, calling his Plato ‘the best translation of a Greek philosopher which has ever been executed by a person who understood neither philosophy nor Greek’. [...]
The days could be given to Manilius, the evenings to extensive reading or to such avocations as research into Latin obscenities. He had a private lavatory and, declaring himself to be a philosophical hedonist, refused on principle to allow his less fortunate neighbour, Wittgenstein, to use it.
F. Kermode, 'Nothing for Ever and Ever',
LRB 29:13 July 5 2007.
Labels: LRB
File 1.83
(Someone has probably made a study of berries in the German imagination but, if not, it is a subject worthy of attention. I can think of no culture in which the words, Erdbeeren, Himbeeren, Brombeeren, Stachelbeeren, as well as the fruits, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, have so deep a resonance and are more closely associated with place, memory and longing.)
Thomas Laqeur, "Lectures about heaven,
LRB 29:11, 7 June 2007.
Labels: LRB
Boil 1.25
Also see Terry Castle's exorcism/ summoning of Susan Sontag's ghost in her
LRB article. The title 'Desperately seeking Susan' is a little gratuitous, considering that Madonna is still alive. And kabbalistic. But these mix-ups happen even to us English professors -when at a snooty dinner party (replete with Laurie 'Angel' Anderson's and Lou 'Arrrgh' Reed's attendance) Sontag introduces Castle "with the soul-destroying words, ‘Terry is an English professor’". No harm done.
Labels: LRB
