This week I have been

Reading

The 2011 Tour de France race guide.

Watching

An Idiot Abroad

Listening to

The xx

Discovering

(Or rediscovering) Hamlet - Nicki Greenberg's beautiful new version, thanks to the fabulous Snarkattack, who invited me along to see Nicki talk about the creative process behind the book.

Eating

  • An enormous serve of bangers'n'mash and a nourishing pint of Kilkenny at the Town Hall one dismal Tuesday evening.
  • A "Chachi" - chianina meatball sandwich - another brioche donut and some amazing chocolate tart at Beatrix, which Essjay has reviewed.
  • A lazy Sunday lunch at The Crimean. The Polish hunter's stew (bigos) was just the thing to revive me after a chilly bike ride.
  • Generous piles of fried food with oodles of chillies and sichuan peppercorns at Sichuan House
  • Succulent suckling pig at Liberteene.
  • An array of bright, zesty flavours at Chin Chin, where the only problem was having to choose only some of the items from what looks to be a menu that is all hits, no filler.

Links

Why America’s culture war is bad for everybody

By injera, on October 9th, 2008%

As I posted earlier, the “culture wars” seem to consist of conservatives labelling things they don’t like as “liberal”, safe in the belief that “liberal” equals “evil” and “dangerous”.  Whenever I see the phrase “culture wars” used in an editorial, it’s usually a conservative writer leading up to a diatribe on the dangers of recognising same-sex relationships, or the evils of enabling women to make decisions about their fertility, or some other issue designed to attract emotional responses and divert attention to the reeking mess of the world that has been wrought by … conservatives.

Anyway, in his Guardian column, Timothy Garton Ash presents a far more articulate explanation of why the “culture wars” are dangerous than I am able to do.

Leave a comment   politics, or the sad state of things    

Culture wars

By injera, on September 22nd, 2008%

From the NY Times:

Acknowledging that 20 years and millions of dollars spent loudly and bitterly attacking the liberal leanings of American campuses have failed to make much of a dent in the way undergraduates are educated, some conservatives have decided to try a new strategy. … Their goal is to restore what conservative and other critics see as leading casualties of the campus culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s: the teaching of Western culture and a triumphal interpretation of American history.

The thing that amazes me about the “culture wars” is that they are, if not a conservative construct, a conservative obsession. Why aren’t conservatives satisfied with having the bulk of the money and the political power?  Why do they have to rule the culture?  Anyway, I would have thought that if a group was going to invent a “war”, they’d invent one they’d be capable of winning.

What really bothers me about this is the idea that the teaching of American history should follow a “triumphal interpretation”.  How would that paradigm be at all useful to students and scholars?  Fortunately, this is an idea that will probably fail, particularly since there appears to be a certain level of tone-deafness to the current times.  This cannot be the best time for a group to launch “programs and centers … concentrating on American democratic and capitalist institutions” if they are planning to work a “triumphal” interpretation into their programs.

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