Category: Culture

The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club

As an amateur scholar of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, I’m very interested in non-amateur Sir Walter Scott scholarship. As far as I can tell, though, not all that many people pursue an academic interest in Sir Walter Scott. Scott has fallen out of fashion. As I’ve argued before, we’re overdue for a Walter Scott revival.

From Googling, many months ago I discovered the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club. They are very serious. I’ve watched some of their YouTube lectures. They know who today’s Sir Walter Scott scholars are, and they bring ’em in for lectures. The median age of the group seems to be pretty high. That doesn’t surprise me. I don’t expect younger people to take an interest in Scott until somebody — somebody please! — makes a beautiful movie from, say, The Heart of Mid-Lothian.

The club is 130 years old. Princess Anne attended their dinner on their 100th anniversary.

It happens that, when I’m in Scotland next month, there will be a lecture based on a novel about Scott. Ken has secured tickets for us.

The lecture is at the New Club, Edinburgh, Edinburgh’s oldest social club, which I suppose is why there is a dress code for the lecture. Fine. That will be a reason (if I even needed another one) for me to take a couple of my Harris tweed jackets back to their homeland for a wee visit.

Highland Cathedral: What you need to know

Wait for the bagpipe! It starts at 0:32.

I’ll be in Scotland for a couple of weeks in late November. I’ll have more about that when the time comes. I’m planning to write some blog posts from Scotland. For now, I’ve been looking for interesting things to do in Edinburgh.

If I could have my choice of musical events, I’d want to hear the Scottish Fiddle Orchestra. But they apparently do only three or so concerts a year, and there’s nothing in November. I’m leaning toward the Royal Scottish National Orchestra at Usher Hall in Edinburgh. A Beethoven piano concerto and a suite from Swan Lake are on the program. Still, I’d like to find something more Scottish.

“Highland Cathedral” is a piece that sounds ancient. But actually it was written in 1982 by some German musicians, for a highland games in Germany. It has become so popular that many people would like to see it become the Scottish national anthem. Here are three versions of it on YouTube. Given that the piece was written in Germany, I don’t think I need to apologize for leading with a performance by the Johann Strauss Orchestra in Maastricht. It’s the most polished version. But…

⬆︎ This version by the Edinburgh Military Tattoo is very good. It takes a really good band to play in tune, especially with as many instruments as there are here. The Edinburgh Military Tattoo has superb, and superbly disciplined, musicians. The bagpipe players are true professionals. I believe that’s Princess Anne in the audience at 3:10.

⬆︎ And here is the Scottish Fiddle Orchesta at Usher Hall in Edinburgh, along with the hall’s organ. This is the least polished performance, yet still very good.

There is an otherworldly magic in the sound of bagpipes. I don’t think you have to be Scottish to fall under the spell.

Pumpkins rule! Well, some pumpkins.


In today’s nomenclature, the two pumpkins in the back are “pie pumpkins.” The pumpkin in the front would be an “heirloom” pumpkin.

What is the world coming to? What once upon a time we would have called a pumpkin is now called an heirloom pumpkin. True pumpkins were in danger of being displaced by the large, ugly, inedible pumpkin-like objects that people (for some reason) buy for Halloween. I’m all for jack-o-lanterns, especially if they’re made from proper fairy-tale pumpkins. But the real purpose of pumpkins is to make them into pie. I’ll stop there, because regular readers are no doubt tired of my annual rant about how hard it can be to find proper pumpkins.

I’m about 14 miles from the nearest pumpkin farm. I stopped by the pumpkin farm this morning to get my first fix of fall pumpkins. The lady at the pumpkin farm told me that it was only four years ago that they started growing “heirloom pumpkins.” They sell out, so I assume that sanity is returning to the pumpkin market. People were hauling away pumpkins in little garden wagons and loading six or eight of them into their SUV’s. My guess is that 99.9 percent of those pumpkins will decorate front porches and will never have the honor of being made into pie.

When there are pumpkins in the field, there are acorns in the woods. The acorn crop this year seems to be good. That’s good news for the squirrels and the deer.


⬆︎ “Heirloom pumpkins” on the left, and ugly pumpkin-like objects on the right.


⬆︎ The iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max are the first iPhones to be able to shoot close-ups, or “macro” shots. The lens will focus as close as 1 inch.

The Night Manager


Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pine and Elizabeth Debicki as Jed Marshall

It’s shocking how much time I spend (and waste) scrolling through the streaming apps on my Apple TV looking for something fit to watch. How does so much junk get made? Who watches it? One of the most useful categories, actually, are the “trending” categories, or “Top 10 This Week.” If something is “trending,” I move on. It’s pretty much guaranteed that I won’t like anything that’s “trending.” Please pardon my snobbery, but I’m a refugee from popular culture, not a consumer of it.

And then a few days ago I came across a rare jewel on Amazon Prime Video. It’s the six-part BBC series “The Night Manager.” It’s a spy thriller, based on a novel by John le Carré, that was first shown on BBC One in 2016. I have no idea when it came to Amazon Prime Video.

The screenplay is flawless. The cast is superb, especially Olivia Colman as a not-so-posh Foreign Office manager with a north-of-England accent who just won’t quit, no matter what those above her (with accents much more posh, a kind of class struggle) do to try to stop her. Tom Hiddleston’s effortless sophistication (is that a requirement in a British spy thriller?) is fascinating to a provincial American like me. He came by his sophistication and his accent naturally, though. He was born in the Westminster district of London and has Eton and Cambridge on his résumé.

There are six one-hour episodes in the series. A season two is now being filmed (I was not able to find a release date), and I believe that a third season has been approved as well. The second and third seasons will go beyond the book by Le Carré, but the screenwriters of “The Night Manager” are so good that I’m confident that they’ll pull it off.


Olivia Colman as Angela Burr

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.