Category: Culture

The future of ancient places


On the island of Gometra, looking toward the island of Ulva. Photo from my visit to the islands in 2019. Click here for high resolution version.

The Scottish islands have been on my mind lately for a couple of reasons. The first is that Ken is working on an article for the New York Times on the community buyout of the island of Ulva, which he and I visited in 2019. The second reason is that I broke my vow not to buy any more Harris tweed jackets.

As part of his research for the article, Ken was reading a history of the community buyout of the island of Eigg, which was completed in 1997. The book is Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power, by Alastair McIntosh, published in 2004. McIntosh was born in 1955, and the book starts with his reflections on growing up on the island of Lewis and Harris. The book gives a complete history of the Eigg buyout. But it also describes how the island of Harris narrowly evaded the construction of an enormous and incredibly destructive “super quarry” in the 1990s.

Land reform in Scotland has a long and depressing history. Vast amounts of land in Scotland’s highlands and islands is still owned by rich absentee landlords, who continue to do everything they can to keep as much land as possible in the hands of as few (very rich) people as possible. See Absentee owners buying up Scottish estates in secret sales, in the Guardian, April 2022. The secret sales are intended to keep local people from bidding on the land.

McIntosh’s book has a good deal to say about Harris tweed, but much has changed since the book was published in 2004. Probably the best source on the economics of Harris tweed is the Stornaway Gazette. If you search the Gazette for the word “tweed” you’ll find that the island’s tweed industry was in a deep crisis in 2007, when a foolish Yorkshire entrepreneur bought a major mill in Stornaway and immediately set out to wreck the industry. See The tweed crisis that became an opportunity. A man named Ian Angus Mackenzie is credited with almost single-handedly stepping in to save the Harris tweed industry. According to Wikipedia, production of Harris tweed more than doubled between 2009 and 2012.

As for my new jacket, I violated my oath not to buy any more Harris tweed jackets because this one was a color I had never seen before — burgundy. There also is no pattern in the tweed. It’s a uniform burgundy. I ordered this jacket on eBay from the U.K. (as usual) and when it arrived was surprised to see that it’s almost certainly new old stock. The pockets were still stitched closed, and there was a packet of spare buttons in an inside pocket. Based on what appears to be a date on a hidden label (I’m not certain), I strongly suspect that the jacket was made in 2015, when tweed production was increasing. The jacket was made in Egypt for Marks & Spencer, a British retailer. The tailoring is excellent. In the U.K. — at least once upon a time — one could buy something off the rack and still have a tailored look. I have found, though, that any Harris tweed jacket is likely to be well made. To afford the handmade fabric is also to afford some good cutting and sewing.

I’m eager to see what Ken will have to say about the Ulva buyout. My impression is that things have not gone as well on Ulva as on Eigg. It’s always the economics, and in Scotland’s highlands and islands I think I can imagine how difficult it is to balance a remote and sustainable lifestyle with the necessity of tourism. The islands’ situation is a microcosm of the global conflict that is the story of our era: Is the world a playground for the super-rich who want to be lords of the earth? Or is the world for the rest of us?

The same way they treat San Francisco


Anne Hidalgo, the socialist mayor of Paris

Apologies… This post contains some coarse language.

The Paris Olympics went just fine. Right-wingers had predicted that it would go very badly. They said that Paris was a cesspool, and that the level of crime would be terrible. According to the Associated Press, 30,000 social media bots in 13 languages were spreading ugly memes about Paris. For example: “Paris, Paris, 1-2-3, go to Seine and make a pee.”

What the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said about this won’t be distributed by 30,000 bots on social media. But you can read about it in Le Monde (though the full text of the article is available only to subscribers).

The Times of London (behind a paywall) also wrote about Hidalgo’s interview with Le Monde:

“Fuck reactionaries, fuck the extreme right, fuck all those who want to shut us in a war with everyone against everyone.”

To quote from the Times of London:

Hidalgo told Le Monde that criticism of her was orchestrated by “a reactionary and extreme-right planet” which nourished a “hatred” for Paris because it was the city “of all freedoms, the refuge for LGBTQI+, … a city that has a left-wing woman mayor, and what is more of foreign origin and with dual nationality and an ecologist and feminist to boot.” (Hidalgo was born in Spain.)

This is the same treatment that San Francisco, where I lived for 18 years, has always gotten from right-wingers. Let them say what they want. Let them eat cake, and let them live in Texas.

Berlin Philharmonic 2024-2025 season


Last concert of the 2023-2024 season, outdoors at the Waldbühne in Berlin. Click here for high-resolution version.

I’ve mentioned before how a subscription to the Berlin Philharmonic’s streaming service is such good medicine for the cultural isolation of the woods here in the Blue Ridge foothills. A few days ago I received a brochure for the season that begins on August 23. As usual, it’s brilliant programming. September 24 will be the 200th anniversary of the birth of Anton Bruckner, so the orchestra will be doing six of Bruckner’s symphonies. Other symphonies include Charles Ives’ 4th, Brahms’ 4th, Haydn’s 44th and 54th, Dvořák’s 7th, Mozart’s 20th, Mahler’s 1st and 9th, Beethoven’s 6th, Schubert’s 8th and Tchaikovsky’s 5th. On June 14, Saint-Saëns’ organ symphony is on the program. If you’ve seen the movie Babe, then the organ symphony will be familiar. In the concerto category are piano (Shostakovich, Busoni, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Rachmaninov) as well as violin concertos and a cello concerto. Choral music includes a concert performance of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. John Williams will return to conduct his movie music! The final concert, outdoors at the Waldbühne, will be a Leonard Bernstein concert, including music from West Side Story.

You can download the program here.

A season subscription to the streaming service is not exactly cheap — €169, on sale until August 23 for €152.10. It is, however, some of the best-produced television I’ve ever seen. The video and audio are perfect. Even when recording under a shell at the Waldbühne, the quality of the video and audio are just as good. By the way, those outdoors concerts sell out. The Waldbühne, which can seat 22,000 people, is packed. This year’s end-of-season concert ended with a performance of Berlioz’s “Bolero,” a piece that we’re all familiar with but which I have never heard played quite so brilliantly. The camera zooms in on the faces of the musicians, as always. They kept throwing little smiles at each other, unaware, of course, that the camera caught it. Was it an inside joke of some sort? It’s impossible to know, but I suspect it’s just that they were having such a good time.

All the concerts can be streamed live. They usually start at 7 p.m. Berlin time. You can watch them live, of course. A couple of weeks after each concert, it’s added to the archive. The archive is included with subscriptions. The archive, some of which goes back for 60 years with more than 800 concerts, is an incredible resource.

These concerts are best watched on a big television screen, either with good headphones or a good sound system.

Envying the U.K.


Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

It felt a little like Christmas morning to wake up today to the news that Britain’s Labour Party has swept the Conservative Party out of power, reducing the number of Tory seats in Parliament to its lowest number ever. At last, the ghost of Margaret Thatcher has been exorcized. Though there have been two Labour governments in the U.K. since Thatcher, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Thatcher’s neoliberalism has been the governing philosophy since 1979.

Here in the U.S., President Biden has done much to lay neoliberalism to rest, though our foolish political media, interested only in political conflict rather than government, have had very little to say about it. Biden’s accomplishments are particularly notable in light of a Congress nearly paralyzed by a right wing desperate to take the U.S. back to the days of the Confederacy.

Though most of the political work of reversing neoliberalism and Thatcherism remains to be done, the intellectual work is solid. I am reading Joseph Stiglitz’s new book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, and will write about it later. Stiglitz drives a stake into the zombie heart of neoliberal dogma. It’s a book that I hope policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic are reading. Now is a good time to become familiar with the thinking (and proposals) of progressive economists, the better to judge what Britain’s Labour Party does now that they have pretty much unchallengeable power, with 412 seats in Parliament compared with the Conservative Party’s ever-so-humiliating 112.

In Scotland, the Scottish National Party lost 38 seats and retains only nine seats in the British Parliament. And in France, it’s looking like the French are going to have to learn about right-wing governments the hard way, like the United Kingdom did. And here in the U.S., we are now in a state of complete chaos and unpredictability until the Democratic Party decides what to do about President Biden. At least in Britain people can sleep easier now.

Not exactly the High Hay


The entrance into the woods in the abbey’s front yard. The deer use it as a doorway. Click here for high-resolution version.

One of the most memorable bits of landscape in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is The Hedge, or “High Hay,” that protected the Hobbits of Buckland from the scary creatures of the Old Forest. The Hedge was very dense, and to get into the forest there was a tunnel lined with brick under the hedge, blocked with iron bars.

Fifteen years ago, I made a rough trail into the woods that leads to a huge rock that overhangs a small stream — a picturesque and magical spot where a huge beech tree grows amongst the other hardwoods, with its roots near the stream and its upper branches at the top of the canopy. I planted small arbor vitae trees on either side of the opening to decorate the trailhead, though the arbor vitaes are now being overcome by woodsy things.

The woods that adjoin the abbey are very dark, dense, moist, and cool, a place where hardly a single photon of sunlight goes to waste. Where there’s light, a leaf will grow to try to catch it. I’ve learned that, left alone, the edges of a woods are a special kind of ecosystem. At the edges of a woods, light comes from the side as well as above, so growth is exuberant. There are certain species of trees that particularly like to grow at the edge of a woods, wild persimmon trees in particular … not to mention poison oak. The edge of a woods can be very dense. Birds love it there. Here at the abbey, the deer have a door into the woods in the backyard as well as the front.

We Americans need the Guardian now

The U.S. edition of the Guardian has been a part of my daily news-reading rounds for years. I probably should have subscribed long ago. Today I did it.

The reasons for subscribing to the Guardian have continued to add up. I will list them, because I think the reasons are important to all Americans in these times, not just me.

Loss of confidence in the Washington Post

Whether you read the Washington Post or not, the Post’s problems are important, because the Post’s influence is huge in setting the agenda for the American media. The Washington Post has been losing money. To try to stop the bleeding, the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (who also owns Amazon) has brought in a bunch of British Tories who used to work for Rupert Murdoch’s news and propaganda operation. Not only that, the Washington Post knew about Samuel Alito’s right-wing MAGA flags more than three years ago, but decided not to write about it until the New York Times broke the story recently. The Post’s response to being caught in such a MAGA-friendly catch-and-kill was slimy, as was the Post’s reaction to a near rebellion in its newsroom about the recent changes in management. If you’d like to know more about the implosion at the Washington Post, I recommend two articles, both from Dan Froomkin’s Press Watch: “Beware the Tory Takeover of the Washington Post,” and “Will Lewis must go. The Washington Post publisher’s actions cast doubt on his newsroom’s credibility.” Dan Froomkin, by the way, is an old colleague of mine. We both got our start in newspapers at the same newspaper forty years ago.

Loss of confidence in the American mainstream media

I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago, “All the news that’s profit-friendly.” Once again, Dan Froomkin does a fine job of shredding the New York Times’ political coverage: “New York Times editor Joe Kahn says defending democracy is a partisan act and he won’t do it.” I will continue to read and subscribe to the New York Times, as well as the Washington Post. The important thing is to keep in mind that both newspapers go way too far in treating right-wing gaslighting as though it’s something to be taken seriously. They claim, of course, that that’s what the principles of journalism require. I say horsewash. It’s what corporate management requires. Truth is the standard of journalism, not both-sides “balance.”

Europe is more important to Americans than ever

Yesterday, members of the European Union voted for members of the European parliament. This provided the best picture yet of the political situation in Europe post-Brexit and post-Ukraine. (Britain, of course, withdrew from the European Union in 2020, but all of Europe is dealing with the regressive forces that led to Brexit.) The same political winds that blow in Europe also blow here in the United States. Sometimes Britain and the U.S. move in the same direction. Think Thatcher/Reagan, and Blair/Clinton. Britain will have a parliamentary election on July 4. The Tories are expected to get their asses handed to them for 14 years of misrule. Wouldn’t it be nice if there’s something predictive there for the fate of the American Republican Party in November?

Europe: A quick comparison

The mainstream media, as I have regularly complained, is always quick to flatter right-wing power and terrify liberals. Consider this headline in the New York Times today: “Conservative Dominance and Other Takeaways from the E.U. Elections.” There is more nuance if you read on. But the Guardian, by contrast, emphasizes that the situation is complicated and doesn’t play the fear card to scare liberals. The Guardian doesn’t downplay the fact that Denmark, Hungary, and Poland did not move to the right. I don’t know enough to try to analyze what the vote means in smaller E.U. countries that get little attention — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Malta. I do think it’s safe to say, though, that countries that have experienced right-wing, anti-democratic, authoritarian governments learn some lessons that other countries might have to relearn — France and Germany, for example.

Three editions of the Guardian

The Guardian has a U.S. edition, a U.K. edition, and a European edition, all three of which are of great interest and all three of which are included in a subscription. (There also are Australia and International editions.) American publications don’t cover Europe very well. Where coverage overlaps, comparison is always revealing. I have access to the Times of London through Apple News, but I’m even more skeptical of the super-Tory Times of London’s political coverage than that of the New York Times. The Times of London’s coverage of Scotland is incredibly snarky and condescending. Again, comparison is always revealing. I should not neglect to mention that you can get full access to the Guardian by merely registering, but there will be ads and a promotion for subscriptions on every page. Paid subscribers bypass that. Not to mention that the Guardian deserves all the support it can get. The Wikipedia article on the Guardian describes how the Guardian pays for itself. Hint: It’s not owned by a billionaire.

Information isn’t free

I’m becoming increasingly resigned to the cost of information. I’ve complained that, at my stage of life, the biggest expenses now are insurance and property maintenance. What I pay for books and subscriptions seems to get higher every year, but I’ll deal with it.

Update

For what it’s worth, it’s interesting to take note of what financial markets thought of this election. Share prices in most European countries fell. The stock of two big French banks was down more than 5 percent. Britain’s pound rose to its highest level against the euro in almost two years. The U.S. dollar rose to almost 93 euro cents. French and German bonds weakened. None of these changes are exactly dramatic, but it would appear that the rich don’t think that the prospect of more right-wingery will make them richer.

Ken is now on Substack

Video of an oldie — Ken on The Tonight Show in 2013, after his first book was published

Ken Ilgunas is now on Substack. He’s also in the process of deciding whether to also start a podcast, but I suspect he will do that.

You can sign up for his Substack articles here. Some articles will be free, and others will require a subscription.

In his first Substack post, “My bizarre relationship with money,” he explains why he has taken a new approach to managing his career as a writer.

Longtime readers of this blog know Ken well. He lived here on and off for a number of years, starting in 2010. In 2013, he published his first book, Walden on Wheels. His second book, Trespassing Across America, was in 2017, and This Land is Our Land was in 2018. Though he wandered in those years, Acorn Abbey was his home base for seven years. Ken now lives in Scotland with his wife and young daughter. Ken is one of those lucky people with a dual citizenship. His dad was born in Scotland.

For the record, Ken and I email each other regularly and visit when we can. We continue to be literary confederates.

In many ways, Ken is like a time traveler from the future — a better future, from which he comes back to point the way. Whatever Ken is thinking — and his thoughts roam wide over many subjects — always points the way forward. I am 35 years older than Ken. I won’t live in as much of that future as younger people will. But through Ken we older folks can glimpse what that future will look like, as long as good ideas can prevail over all the bad ones.


Ken and me in Edinburgh, September 2019. The dog is Greyfriars Bobby.

C.J. Sansom’s Dissolution

I was not aware of C.J. Sansom until I read his obituary in the New York Times. I immediately ordered his first novel, Dissolution, and read it pretty fast, because it was quite good. There are seven novels in the Shardlake series. Matthew Shardlake is a kind of Tudor-era detective and lawyer who (at least in the first book of the series) works for Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is in the process of dissolving England’s monasteries for King Henry VIII. The Shardlake character is one of Cromwell’s “commissioners” who go out to the monasteries and do Cromwell’s legal work (and dirty work).

Sansom died just a few days before a television series named “Shardlake” started streaming. According to every source I’ve seen, the series was made by Disney+, but I can’t for the life of me find it on Disney+. I did find it, though, on Hulu.

After the first few chapters of Dissolution I was a bit disappointed, because Sansom doesn’t write the snappiest dialogue in the history of fiction. But by the end of the novel I was impressed. The novel is beautifully constructed. Sansom, who was also a lawyer, had a Ph.D. in history. I am highly inclined to trust Sansom’s take on the history of the dissolution of the English monasteries under Henry VIII. In a historical note at the end of the book, Sansom comments on the scarcity of studies on the dissolution of the monasteries. He pretty much dismisses two fairly recent books — 1992 (Yale) and 1993 (Oxford) — and says that the last major study of the dissolution was published in 1959 — The Religious Orders in England: The Tudor Age, David Knowles, Cambridge University Press, 1959. I have ordered a copy of the 1959 Knowles book on eBay and will probably write about it here later on. I am not the least interested in Catholicism in England, but as an unrepentant heathen I am very interested in the erasure of Catholicism in England.

So far I have watched only the first episode of the “Shardlake” television series. The television series is not, not, not faithful to Sansom’s novel. The television series removes one of Sansom’s key characters (Mark Poer) and replaces him with a character named Jack Barak. I do not, not, not approve. The writer of the TV series, Stephen Butchard, says that Sansom’s Mark Poer was too submissive for television and that a character was needed who would do more head-butting with Shardlake. That really irks me, because the television character is a snarky contemporary smart-ass like any number of cookie-cutter male characters that you’ll find on HBO or Netflix. Sansom’s Mark Poer character never snarks at Shardlake, but he certainly was man enough to think his own thoughts and go his own way. I also am skeptical of the television version of the Shardlake character, who sometimes seems mean and heartless in a way that Sansom’s Shardlake never was. It makes me wonder whether the actors have even read the books, the same way I have wondered whether the cast of the 2015 television version of Winston Graham’s Poldark had ever read the books, because they got their characters all wrong.

In any case, if you think you might be interested in C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake novels, I’d highly recommend reading the books first.

As for the dissolution of the monasteries, I hope to have a more informed view after I’ve read The Religious Orders in England: The Tudor Age. But based on what (admittedly little) I know at present, I have to wonder if the history of Western civilization wouldn’t be very different if Henry VIII had never shut down the monasteries (and reallocated the monasteries’ money and land). If Rome had continued to keep England barefoot and domesticated for five hundred more years, could Elizabeth I or the British Empire ever have happened? If not for the religious turmoil that so changed the church and transferred so much power downward from the pope and the bishops to literate commoners, could Edinburgh ever have led the Enlightenment? Could the American colonists have thrown off both a king and a pope?


Anthony Boyle as Jack Barak

The magical threads from nowhere to somewhere


From a live stream from Heathrow Airport, Monday, April 29, 2024

When Charles Dickens was a young man, he would sit on London Bridge and watch the traffic — the people on the bridge, the ships on the river. Though London was a somewhere rather than a nowhere, it’s easy to imagine that Dickens thought of the faraway places to which the ships were bound, or from which they were coming. In David Copperfield, Dickens’ young hero does the same thing:

“[B]ut I know that I was often up at six o’clock, and that my favourite lounging-place in the interval was old London Bridge, where I was wont to sit in one of the stone recesses, watching the people going by, or to look over the balustrades at the sun shining in the water, and lighting up the golden flame on the top of the Monument. The Orfling met me here sometimes, to be told some astonishing fictions respecting the wharves and the Tower; of which I can say no more than that I hope I believed them myself.”

A common theme in literature is stories that start nowhere but take the reader somewhere as the plot unfolds. Often the stories return to nowhere at the end (because there’s no place like home). One of the reasons we read is to escape the nowhere in which most of us live for a vicarious look at somewhere.

Through the miracle of the global network that we call the Internet, there are new ways of sitting in the stone recesses of London Bridge and watching the world go by. When I discovered the YouTube live stream from London’s Heathrow Airport, I spent an embarrassing amount of time, as though mesmerized, just watching the planes land, one after another, about a minute apart. The chat window identifies the plane and says where it came from — Buenos Aires, maybe, after a long flight, or Edinburgh after a short one — sometimes places I have never been, sometimes places I remember, and sometimes places that I still would like to go.

Then I realized that planes fly over my little piece of nowhere all the time. I also realized that there are apps that can identify those planes as they fly over and reveal where they came from and where they are going. It happens that a great many planes in and out of Atlanta fly right over me on the way to Europe and beyond. In no time at all, I saw (in the app) a plane on its way to Paris that was headed my way. I went out to see if I could see it. My eyes never found it, but I heard it pass over. Paris! Until Notre Dame caught fire, I had not planned to ever go to Paris again. Now I want to see Notre Dame after it has been repaired. Then there was a flight to Rome, a big Airbus that made so much noise that I could hear it through my bedroom window.

The YouTube streaming service from Heathrow is Flight Focus 365. The URL changes a couple of times a day, so you’ll need to select the live stream from the list of videos.

The app, for iPhone and Android, is Plane Finder.


⬆︎ Source: Wikimedia Commons. A square-rigged ship is to previous centuries as an Airbus 380 is today. They’re equally romantic and beautiful, if you think about it in a certain way.

⬇︎ The red airplane icon is Delta flight 66 from Atlanta to Rome. The blue dot is my location.

Update:

As long as we’re talking about Heathrow Airport, I should mention Windsor Castle. Planes approaching Heathrow from the east pass right over Windsor when they’re about six miles from Heathrow. The altitude is low, a little more than 2,000 feet, so if you’ve got a window seat you’ll get a very good look at Windsor Castle. There are stories that Queen Elizabeth II was so accustomed to the sound of airplanes overhead that she could identify airplanes from their sound.

I should also mention Slough, which is visible in the map below. I had wondered how “Slough” is pronounced. The train toward Paddington Station stops at Slough about 25 minutes before Paddington Station. According to the automated voice that calls out the stops, “Slough” rhymes with “how.”