Protective tabus

I'm a bit torn today between support for James Randi, who does a terrific job debunking quackery and unreason, and my affection for folk tradition. He has an item A strong fairies' union? on his online newsletter, Swift, about the people of St. Fillans, Perthshire, managing to save a local landmark from property developers by appealing, straight-faced, to the local tradition that it was the habitation of fairies. Which seems to me a very proper use of local history and tradition, really. Funnily enough, there's an article in this week's New Scientist Tibet's mountain gods have a way of preserving nature, which shows that places preserved as sacred in Tibet are full of rare plants. I think these are rather benign cases of people's susceptibility to superstition being exploited.

Hello Britain, you can stop beating yourselves up now

What a sweetie Dr John Sentamu is. The new Archbishop of York. Normally wouldn't care what goes on in the Church of England, but this man has given England a message, as reported in The Times that must go for Scotland too. More or less: "Okay, you've beaten yourselves up enough about the Empire; you can stop now."

Sometimes there's a historic moment that just takes your breath away. And this wonderful warm southern blast of forgiveness is such a moment.

It has taken black commentators to say it - Trevor Philips and now Mr Sweetie. It's all right to be proud of being English (read Scottish, etc.). So can we have Scottish history and culture taught in Scottish schools now, please, without the Labour Party recoiling in horror at the reactionariness of it all, and the politically correct biting their nails over whether they shouldn't be giving equal time to Eskimos.

The Lady and the Highwayman

Well, I'll be dipped in dogshit - as Fat Freddy always used to say in the cartoons - Tesco has got The Lady and the Highwayman on DVD for97p. They have a load of old rubbish in minimal packaging, mainly children's cartoons, and one or two grown-up films. Maybe the person who gave my new second-hand video to the junk shop had got themselves the DVD. Or maybe it's just coincidence.

Long live backlists

What wonderful times these are for film-lovers. There are so many old films coming out on DVD. It must be twenty years ago that Channel 4 had a season of Mae West and Rudolph Valentino, and I've been waiting years to see them again. The Mae West box set is stashed away for Xmas - Male Parent doesn't do Xmas shopping, on account of disability - at least I always get what I want. I got two Rudolph Valentino DVD's in Stirling, in one of those remaindered book shops, for £2 each, £3 the pair. Couldn't believe it. I've waited years! The Eagle and Blood and Sand. Despite all the melodrama, the old b&w films are so close to ordinary lives - the characters are people who've known hardship, weariness and cold, hunger, indignity, heart-scorching distress. But the best of them retain their humanity, decency and sense of purpose, and all but the very worst honour the bonds of family and friendship.

And talking of melodrama, I found an old video in a charity shop at the weekend: The Lady and the Highwayman of 1989, with a very young-looking Hugh Grant as the dashing hero, looking 'sad' in the Middle English meaning of the word - very serious and high-minded. Oh, he does it so well. It's so camp, and he looks so gorgeous in lace.

Heimat

I had occasion today to look for background on the word Heimat, the German word for ‘home, one’s native place’, with untranslatable connotations of the countryside, village life, childhood and community. I suspect that for younger people the main association to the word is the well-known film - which is also very prominent in Google results. For me, being older, the echoes of German romanticism have to be double-checked. And indeed I found that political ideologies polarise around the concept of Heimat. At Eric Zuelow's excellent Nationalism Project, I found a review by Tom Donahue of Bernhard Schlink, Heimat als Utopie (Frankfurt am Maine, 2002), from which I learnt that Heimat is embraced by romanticism and nationalism, but also over-shadowed by its exploitation by Nazism. Marxism and existentialism, which reject the idea of the individual’s identity being tied to a place, see national, regional and ethnic sentiment as reactionary.

So we still find, in the modern politics of the left, that people are able to embrace multiculturalism, and accept the integrity of ethnic sensibilities in non-western cultures, but display an instinctive distrust of the same phenomena lingering in western society.

So much the worse for local, and even national, cultures within the UK, which never seem to find any support on the left. For so many years, we've struggled to get any money or support for the Scots language from government. The hopes raised by the creation of the Scottish Parliament have come to nothing. As I recall, even before the first election the Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum, as it then was, self-censored a report advocating a place for Scottish culture in the school curriculum, in anticipation of the expected Labour majority.

In Northern Ireland, on the other hand, the linkage of Ulster Scots to right-wing populism (the Protestant interest) has produced the Ulster-Scots Agency. Unfortunately, the state of political culture over there is such that little money has been spent on projects and much on junketing and bureaucrat's salaries.

P.J.O'Rourke's defence of civilisation

When democracy is discussed, I always think of P.J.O'Rourke's defence of the West:

<< Civilisation is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof. No reasonable person who has had a look at the East Bloc … can countenance the barbarities of the Left. … So-called Western Civilisation, as practiced [sic] in half of Europe, some of Asia and a few parts of North America, is better than anything else available. Western Civilisation not only provides a bit of life, a pinch of liberty and the occasional pursuance of happiness, it's also the only thing that's ever tried to. Our civilisation is the first in history to show even the slightest concern for average, undistinguished, none-too-commendable people like us.

We are fools when we fail to defend civilisation. The ancient Romans might as well have said, "Oh, the Germanic tribes have valid nationalistic and cultural aspirations. Let's pull the legions off the Rhine, submit our differences to a multilateral peace conference chaired by the Pathan Empire and start a Vandal Studies program at the Academy in Athens.">> (P.J. O'Rourke Holidays in Hell, 1988, New York: Vintage, 1992: 3-4 - from his summary of everything he has learned about trouble).

The Portugese for Orpheus

Thinking about the film title, Orfeu Negro, of course, there must be a Portugese word for Orpheus, but why isn't it just Orpheus? A little stroll to http://www.behindthename.com/ produces only the original Greek Orpheus and the Italian Orfeo. But evidently the name had some currency also in Portugese at some time. Mike Cambell's site has an excellent links section, which includes one for Portugese names, http://www.significadonomes.com/, but no joy with Orfeu. Personal names aren't as well documented as ordinary vocabulary or even place-names. What I need here is the equivalent of a dictionary of roots, tracing them FORWARD (from Greek into Portugese in this case) rather than backwards.

Limericks

There was a young lady from Dyce
Who thought she would like to keep mice.
She said to her Dad,
"I know I've been bad,
"But if you agree, I'll be nice."

There was an old wife with wide hips
Who said, "I just love eating chips.
"They really taste good -
I don't think that I should,
"But it's great feeling grease on my lips."

Favourite song: Lord Franklin

Lord Franklin

Twas homeward bound one night on the deep
Swinging in my hammock I fell asleep
I dreamed a dream and I thought it true
Concerning Franklin and his gallant crew.

With a hundred seamen he sailed away
To the frozen ocean in the month of May
To seek a passage around the pole
Where we poor sailors do sometimes go.

Through cruel hardships they vainly strove
Their ships on mountains of ice was drove
Only the Eskimo in his skin canoe
Was the only one that ever came through

To Baffin Bay where the whale fishes blow.
The fate of Franklin no man may know
The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell
Or Franklin alone where his seamen do dwell.

And now my burden it gives me pain
For long lost Franklin I would sail the main
Ten thousand pounds would I freely give
To say on earth that my Franklin do live.

[The 'burden' is, of course, the lyric of the song, 'carried' by the melody.]

There are versions of the (traditional) lyrics at various places on the web. Russell Potter's Lord Franklin is close to the words above, as I recall them, sung by John Renbourn (on A Maid in Bedlam?), which is the definitive rendering for me. For the melody, there's a Lord Franklin midi at The Great Canadian Tunebook.

Lord John Franklin led an ill-fated expedition in 1845 with two ships to find a North-West Passage through the Canadian Arctic. The expedition became locked in the ice, some of the crew surviving for three years. The search for the lost expedition, organised by Franklin's wife, Jane, was legendary. The traces that were found told a story of horrors. But the folk tradition lingers instead on the moment of hope, the longing and waiting for the news that never came, of Franklin and his crew perhaps alive amongst the Esquimaux.

There's a great generosity of spirit in the song – it's not forgotten that so many ordinary seamen were lost too. I love the way it blends the sailors' point of view with that of Jane Franklin. It's not homoerotic, to my mind. Jane Franklin had accompanied her husband on an earlier expedition (to Tasmania or Van Dieman's Land), so she can naturally be portrayed speaking with a crewman's voice. It's about her love, but the strange and defamiliarising thing is that her love becomes the type of men's devotion to a leader.

Channel 4 did a decent (though, as always with TV, needlessly spun out) documentary on the search for the North-West Passage not long ago, and they have an excellent North-West Passage website. There's a biography of Lady Jane Franklin at the Archives Hub (UK college and university archives).

Orfeu Negro released on DVD

Orfeu Negro

Very excited to see that the British Film Institute has released a new print of Marcel Camus' Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus) of 1959. Amidst the driving sambas of the Brazilian Carnival, Breno Mello plays Orpheus as a happy-go-lucky, popular guy stunned into silence by a transcendent love. Charon, you idiot, don't send her in there!

Lotr parody

Gil Williamson, Tales from the Prancing Pony

This is a hilarious Lord of the Rings parody that I found courtesy of http://del.icio.us. It's old, but all the better for pre-dating the films, and not being influenced by their visualisations. The narrator of the supposed travelogue is a wonderfully dry Victorian traveller.

Humanism and meritocracy

Thought-provoking article in last month's Prospect magazine (read in the tea room, but also available free online: Michael Lind, The meritocratic mandarinate and its humanist culture cushioned mass democracy from the excesses feared by 19th-century liberals. Now the mandarins are in retreat will the nightmare of mobocracy come true?

In the late Victorian vision that created the meritocracy: "In addition to providing the education of the mandarins, the university, liberated from religion, would be the home of a secular but traditional pan-western high culture that would replace the Christian religion as the shared civilisation of Europe and its offshoots. In constitutional politics, the meritocratic mandarinate would moderate tendencies toward demagogy, plutocracy and special-interest corruption by supplying the leaders of the career services within government and the informal establishment outside of it."

The deil's awa

The Wee Yin's homework last night was a comprehension about Rabbie Burns - and it's not even January! The pleasure was rather taken out of this unusual excursion by the teacher's (Miss Trying-not-to-laugh's) egregious mistakes. Funny fact: Scottish people (we're in a major Scottish city here, folks) - Scottish people celebrate Burn's [sic] death [sic] with a special supper of haggis and whisky. Managed to convince Wee Yin that we celebrate his birthday, and (taking down the Dorling Kindersly Chronicle of the World) that he died in July. At eight, she is able to appreciate that the printed word has more authority than Miss Trying-not-to-laugh. In fact, went to some trouble to re-establish authority of Miss Trying-not-to-laugh - I hope she will take Wee Yin's attempts to put her right in the correct spirit, i.e. (as threaped to Wee Yin by Female Parent), if you don't acknowledge that you've made a mistake, you lose the chance to correct it.

Male Parent pointed out, apropos of homework, that no actual examples of Burns' (or Burns's - he's a pedant and can't understand that usage is changing on this point - resulting in him confusing Wee Yin, I think, about the Burn's [sic] situation) - no actual examples of Burns' work. So I had a rummage around and found a CD of an Ayrshire lass singing some Burns favourites, not very well, and with some ghastly pronunciation mistakes (expect rant some other time). I must splash out and try to get the definitive Jean Redpath collection of Burns' songs. The only one I've been able to get (second hand) has mostly bawdy stuff on it - "Can you labour lea?" has a certain resonance. So resorted to couthy Ayrshire lass. Bored Wee Yin a bit, but the poor wee soul is always happy to see any sign of marital harmony between Female Parent and Male Parent, so she entered into the spirit of things, and consented to read the lyrics while we listened and sang along. For me, Burns song is folksong, and the Bard was the only educated person who could ever touch it without ruining it. But looking for midi's of our favourites on the Internet turned up a diverse range of sites that identify with Burns song: Scottish Radiance (an American magazine) The deil's awa wi th'exciseman, Contemplations from the Marianas Trench (a Canadian folksong site) Ye banks and braes o bonnie Doon, the International Federation for Choral Music (France) The Lea Rig, and Classical Midi with Words hosted by the REC Foundation (another individual USA site) John Anderson my jo

Wee Yin gamely fended off attempts to translate for her, needing only the odd word, which was nice. Apparently she was the only one in her class who could give the meaning of Scots words. (Miss Trying-not-to-laugh thought ee'in might mean 'eating', with a glottal stop presumably.) Female Parent is very relieved about this, as good intentions about passing on linguistic heritage seem to have disappeared off the bottom of the priority list somehow. What they were using in class appears to have been Susan Rennie's Animal ABC: A Scots Alphabet. So for that, good on the school, and the teacher, I say.