The Tablet reviews how China steered global overreaction to covid-19.
September 19th; Sunday.
Another International Talk Like a Pirate Day slips by the gunnel, me hearties. Why do I keep missing
this important festival?
September 18th; Saturday. I finish
'The Big Four',
the 1970s reprint of a 1920s Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot mystery I bought yesterday.
(Here's some slightly older
cover art.) I don't recall reading this as a child,
and I think I can see why. My mother had an austere taste for detective novels about character & intuition,
and she disliked Hercule Poirot. Even more she detested his predecessors, Christie's short-lived
Bright Young Thing detective duo Tommy & Tuppence - I recall reading one during the holiday in the fixed
caravan in Anglesey when I was 8 and it rained every day. Mother was muttering in the background, as I read
that book, about how appallingly characterised the
Tommy & Tuppence flappers were, how dated and twee they were, etc. I suppose she was very much a
child of the 1930s, hugely irritated by the 1920s.
Neither intuition nor character drives the 'The Big Four' plot. Indeed, it's
hardly a plot and it isn't really a detective story. It's in
fact Christie - in 1927 - having a go at muscling in on the then hugely popular
Fu
Manchu franchise of
wily Oriental villains with long fingernails and silken robes controlling vast, shadowy networks of
international crime. The name 'The Big Four' sounds hilarious now, and puts some of us in mind
of the four major accountancy firms Arthur Anderson, KPMG, Price Waterhouse Coopers, and Deloitte, Ernst &
Young (albeit so recently a Big Five and a Big Six). Poirot must use his usual "little grey cells"
to deduce his way to the heart of the mystery. Yet
neither he nor Christie (hardly out of her first decade of writing detective books, the decade that also
invented the crossword puzzle - another passion of my mother's) had yet settled on the suburban milieu of
Miss Marple. This book has poison gas and locked cellars and sinister Limehouse streets that Holmes &
Watson (not to mention Bulldog Drummond or Richard Hannay) would have recognised. Some of the puzzle
steps or plot twists are smart if a bit unconvincing to newer, more cynical readers. Except - one of the
funnier effects of events since 2000 is that we now realise that the crassest of popular thriller tropes
were a better guide to what was really going on the 20th century than the official histories. It's only just
emerging now that Ian Fleming's Bond villains on tropical islands and the supernatural shenanigans of Dennis
Wheatley novels gave a truer picture than the Cold War narrative. Then along came 2020 with an elaborate
global disease scare playing to a script of Chinese-infiltrated media outlets and UN bodies to show us that
the Fu Manchu books were, however luridly, describing a real danger, not a fantasy bogeyman. Nothing is too
laughable or hackneyed to be true, it seems, and our smug bourgeois complacency wasn't so clever after all.
September 17th; Friday. Today
picked up this book,
'The Struggle for a Human Future', by Jeremy
Naydler, and read it later in the
evening. On the way there, I also bought a second-hand paperback that has been staring at me
from a nearby bookshop display window for a couple of weeks, an old Agatha Christie. That shop's
"covid" opening hours are three hours on three days, that is 10 to 1, on Monday, Wednesday, and
Friday. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose. The Christie cover portrays a sinister
Chinese-looking chess piece with serpent coils in the background, in one of the 1970s
or late 60s Fontana reprints I saw a lot of when my mother was encouraging me to read through Christie's
detective novels.
Oddly, the Naydler book which had arrived for me at a bookshop across town, which
I also pick up today, also has serpent coils in the cover design, a William Blake image. This is a
curious book in which the philosopher of religion and gardener with a special interest in Rudolf Steiner
compiles five of his articles about the computerisation of our world and our lives. There is an article
about 5G, for example, the ongoing project to bathe almost every corner of the globe in
various frequencies to ensure internet ubiquity. Another essay or chapter discusses light as it's
regarded within the post-17th-century reductionist materialist research programme, and contrasts it
with sacred views of visible light, and Rudolf Steiner's ideas about the meaning of light in particular.
Naydler suggests that computers are damaging how people view the act of thinking, and are getting us
into the habit of not experiencing the world directly. They are also making us, as in Heidegger's
prophetic warning, view nature in an instrumentalist way, instead of our older attitude of reverence
& mystery. This 2020 book gets me curious to read Naydler's 2018 book
'In the Shadow of the Machine', about the "prehistory of computing".
September 16th; Thursday.
What a dismal intro it seems now:
Van
der
Valk.
My memory made it better, though I recall being puzzled as a small boy by
a detective series in which Amsterdam police officers lived their lives entirely in English.
The TV nostalgia sites call it 'gritty', and I can remember there were lots of storylines
about corruption & local politics. I wonder how Dutch people felt about a British
crime show offshoring bent-copper dramas to mainland Holland?
September 15th; Wednesday.
More details emerge of US
funding of coronavirus research in Wuhan.
September 14th; Tuesday.
Another claim from a doctor (a tropical pathologist) that covid-19-vaccinated people are the ones
who are dangerous to others.
September 13th; Monday. A
plausible motive for the curious new push to - quite unnecessarily -
vaccinate children.
Enjoyed several thoughtful articles in the copy of
'European Conservative' that I
got given at last week's debate where
Jeff
Sessions spoke here in the Castle District. The magazine is much
better than I expected, as were the darling little savoury pogacsas (mini-scones) on plates at the event.
September 12th; Sunday.
Last night, visible to one side from Robin's balcony, crowds holding candles were slowly walking up
Andrassy avenue towards Heroes' Square. This was while choirs sang. This morning I wake late to find Robin
in the room adjoining the balcony, the room full of art ingredients,
listening to more church music, more choirs singing uplifting hymns
outside on the street. Another Catholic friend told me a few days ago quite mildly that Francis "did
something very bad" in his youth that caused another priest to serve some time in prison. He said it
as if perhaps it had been a valuable chance for the future pope to learn humility and repentance.
One of
our
contributors, none other than
Tyler Durden,
writes about Mr Fauci's involvement in the coronavirus scandal, lying when he called Senator Rand Paul a liar.
Meanwhile, the British Heart Foundation describes how the spike protein in the covid-19
virus & vaccines causes changes to cells in heart tissue and elsewhere, migrating through
the blood stream.
September 11th; Saturday.
Barely 30 yards from Robin's front door, much of Andrassy avenue is shut down with parked police vans,
newly mounted overhead display screens, lines of chemical loos, metal crowd fences, and long white
ribbons marked 'Rendorseg - Police' in blue. This is all for tomorrow's visit by Francis the GloboPope,
as a waitress outside the downstairs bar explained with sneering contempt, in reply to my query,
two days ago. A Catholic friend told me a
few months back that the Jesuits swore on their foundation never to let one of their own become
pope (perhaps explaining why there has been no Jesuit pope until now).
Our Man in Bucharest judiciously celebrates
Taliban victory.
September 10th; Friday.
A good Salisbury Review article about
history teaching. Not one of mine, I hasten to add.
September 9th; Thursday.
Are white feminists evil? A nice Unherd piece. Small birthday party in the science cave for Tam, with Annette, Dag,
Alja, and her sweet but jittery dog. Interesting how the pale shirt with pink and light blue checks, on
being in the bucket of dilute bleach I put it in some hours a few weeks ago, stubbornly keeps the off-yellow
background hue that makes it look not-quite-washed, but lost much of the dye meaning the checks
fade in and out of white. In places the blue lines have gone altogether yet the white's failed to become
clean-looking. You'd think that after a century and a half of bleaching and dyeing chemistry they might
have worked this stuff out by now.
September 8th; Wednesday.
A picture of Venetians larking around on the ice during the 1709 winter, a winter cold enough for
the lagoon to freeze solid.
I visit Annette in the science cave for my first colloidal silver consultation.
September 7th; Tuesday.
This morning woke out of a vivid success dream where I was, with some companions, in a large rambling
building, part country house, part luxury hotel in some old city. One suite of rooms was haunted and
filled with disturbing magical power, which was not so much frightening as thrilling. To get there I got
into a lift which went vertically some floors and then horizontally down corridors and through rooms and
walls very quickly, rather like a cable car. Then vertically some more - these "sideways lifts" feature
in my dreams every few years, I notice. The suite of rooms was in some kind of tower overlooking from
high windows a forest in winter, and I found myself triumphant, empowered, raised to more
than health - "better than well" as the Americans say - as I clicked into
rest-refreshed wakefulness. Later in the day, finished reading a copy of
'Ideas of
the Great Philosophers', published half a century ago oddly enough by
Barnes & Noble, a chain of American bookshops. I suppose booksellers branching into publishing was quite
common once. The book uses a nice approach. Instead of touring in order through philosophers and centuries,
or looking at specific debates, it does both. Each chapter is a topic (such as free will versus
determinism), and the chapter starts with ancient thinkers, briskly touring through the Greeks, Late
Antiquity, the Mediaevals, Renaissance thinkers, Early Modern, German Enlightenment and up to the
late-19th/early-20th century figures (Russell and/or Pragmatists like Dewey in most chapters). Rather
refreshingly for this reader, I don't recall seeing Wittgenstein, nor any of the Existentialists
mentioned even once. The trick of making each philosopher italic on first mention in each chapter is
very helpful, and some thinkers who tend to get left out of historical overviews, such as
Herbart,
Schleiermacher, or
Anaxagoras, are here.
Herbert Spencer gets
quite a lot of mentions, and it's nice to see philosophers like
Hobbes
mentioned in non-political debates, not just in his classic discussion of the state.
There's a proper effort to separate out Fichte and
Schelling.
This is an excellent book, but there
are some strange slip-ups. A couple of thinkers, such as
William of Champeaux and
Roscelin, get italicised, full-status mentions in the body of the text, but are
missing from the detailed biographical notes at the back, which include almost everyone else.
September 6th; Monday.
A dog who apparently has learned to press buttons each with a word on is, her owners think,
possibly becoming self-aware. Confusingly named 'Bunny', this affable hound is starting to
press sequences of buttons like
"dog / what / dog / is?" Not
quite enough to convince me, but certainly interesting.
September 5th; Sunday. Read
'Perspectiva:
A Nuremburg Renaissance Casket for the Marquesses of Lothian', which is a lavishly illustrated exhibition
catalogue, lusher than most books, that Robin got at some art show or auction house. The web has a lot of
excerpted
images of this casket, and other treasure boxes made by its maker, known simply
as The Master of Perspective, who had a workshop in Nuremburg during the 1560s. The period of the German
wunderkammer or cabinet of wonders was, it seems, exemplified by boxes to house valuables, themselves
richly worked and decorated, sometimes containing jewellery, sometimes scientific wonders such as
geological/biological/fossil curiosities. Pre-figuring Baconian science - the line was blurred between
collecting natural oddities and displaying decorative wealth. Containing wonders and each cabinet itself
sometimes constituting a wonder. The boxes made by the workshop in
Nuremburg appear to have had a very distinctive style, surfaces in and out decorated by inlaid marquetry,
mother-of-pearl and so on, almost invariably displaying what we might call
wireframe
polyhedra
shown in perspective (hence the master's name) along with scenes from well-known classical stories such as
Phyllis
humiliating Aristotle, an episode Nietzsche & Lou Salome might have been referring to in their
famous cart-pulling photograph.
September 4th; Saturday.
This site opposes "covid passports" being pushed (clearly planned in advance) as
de facto ID cards.
September 3rd; Friday.
Up late, chatting with Robin. This
Leo Strauss book looks like something worth reading as soon as I can.
Strauss plausibly argues philosophers have always written in an 'esoteric'
code, partly disguising their message so as not to challenge political & moral assumptions of
their time head on.
September 2nd; Thursday.
'The crypto revolution is failing'.
September 1st; Wednesday.
'Afghanistan is where ideologies
go to die'.
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
markgriffith at yahoo.com
