Radio Britfolk Folk-singer Anne Lister announces Radio Britfolk, a new web-radio station for British folk music.
Summer School Hey-ho, collegiate life for me. I'm at the XML Summer School at Wadham College, Oxford. A room, an Ethernet connection and colleagues like Elaine Brennan, teaching here on her way to WorldCon in Glasgow. After a candlelit dinner in the 17th-century dining hall, long conversations in the bar about SF writer Chip Delany, poet Marilyn Hacker (whose recent collection Desesperanto I have by my bedside here) and XML namespaces. It's not just the C5 cable organiser Kerry Poulter found for me: sometimes my world feels very tightly connected.
This morning Candace Partridge is helping me learn to use XLST to transform XML trees and Peter Flynn promises to show me more of XML and typesetting. Just where I should be.
Bang bang This morning, the long-awaited explosions in London. No, Miki and I are fine. Thanks for the txt inquiries.
If anyone remains unclear that we invaded Iraq 2 years ago but failed to occupy and subdue the country, go to the back of the class now and study the map. If anyone has worked out what we’re doing in Iraq and what success there would look like, (see Ed Harriman’s article in the LRB for what failure looks like) please come to the front of the class and explain it to the rest of us.
» Tariq Ali in The Guardian on The Price of Occupation
Monet that matters The London Review of Books carried this poem by T.J. Clark on 31 March, in which all outstanding problems of art history are resolved to everyone's satisfaction
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In which all outstanding problems of art history are settled to everyone's satisfaction.
What mattered more for Manet and Monet,
That Manet had money or Monet had manners?
Mattered to what, pray? Mattered to whom?
To Monet’s manner, or just Manet’s mother?
And what do you mean by that bad-mannered ‘just’?
What matters more to a man than his mother?
What matters more to a manner than money?
We know Monet’s manner was dependent on Manet,
Maybe even his manners; and his manners meant marriage,
And money for Manets and many things more.
So did Manet matter more to Monet than mother?
(I mean Monet’s mother, though Manet’s might do.)
It depends, does it not, on the meaning of ’matter’
And what money meant to a man without means.
We know Madame Monet was once painted by Manet
(The Madame I mean was the first Monet married,
The one without money; the one that died young);
She was shown with her son on the grass in the garden,
The proud mother of Monets, as Monet looked on;
And the picture was done in a manner like Monet’s,
Or a manner his mother would not have thought Manet’s,
A manner, indeed, she might have thought mad
(I mean Manet’s mother, though Monet’s might do).
Maybe maternity always is manifold,
And manners are matters that mothers decree,
In which case this painting’s not Manet’s or Monet’s,
But Madame’s or mother’s. (And what matters more
Than putting an end to that mad either/or?)
Better say simply he did it for Monet
(Though the market that moment had moved Monet’s way).
Marx would have said these are all money matters,
Freud would have said it depends what that means.
There is never an end to the meanings of money,
The madness of matter, the meanness of mothers,
Otherwise why would man ‘A’ be a Manet,
And man ‘B’ be a Monet, manner and all?
Manet and Monet may be nothing but manners,
But what manners! What Monets! What need there be more?
What’s money? What’s Manet? It’s Manets that matter:
The way that their matter is made to have meaning,
Manually, maddeningly, matter-of-factly.
What matters is manner. It’s manner that means.
T.J. Clark
Sexual politics Bumper sticker behind the bar in the Bowery Poetry Club, NYC:
Make love, not war
LICK BUSH in ’04