Friday Night Is Music Night: JD's Januadry

... or, hangover cure?

Is everyone recovering from the excesses of the Christmas and Hogmanay festivities?

I forgot to take part in the traditional New Year's Day dip in the North Sea. Again! That is, I think, the 39th year in a row that I have forgotten. Ah well, never mind. Here is a better method for clearing away the cobwebs from your mind - open the windows, turn up the volume and play these loud!















- with thanks to Wiggia for helping to compile this selection.
______________________
Sackerson adds:

Here's a lovely New Yorker article on the demon drink:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/26/a-few-too-many

- of which a nugget:

"... prehistorians have speculated that alcohol intoxication may have been one of the baffling phenomena, like storms, dreams, and death, that propelled early societies toward organized religion. The ancient Egyptians, who, we are told, made seventeen varieties of beer, believed that their god Osiris invented this agreeable beverage. They buried their dead with supplies of beer for use in the afterlife."

If you want to follow that up, here's a couple more links:

The tomb of an ancient Egyptian beer brewer (from The Atlantic monthly)
Beer in ancient Egypt

Midnight's Grandchildren: the history and legacy of India's partition

http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2013/07/22

Hat-tip: http://twilightstarsong.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/untold-history-always-historian-sees-as.html

Past history is never final, for perspectives change and new facts come to light. Yet sometimes, "new" facts are old ones that have been in the public domain a long time, like unexploded bombs.

Only a few years ago, The Independent reviewed the partition of India in the light of a fresh book by Jaswant Singh, who was a member of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party until 2014, and was nine years old when Partition occurred. Supposedly, the responsibility for the terrible bloodshed between Muslims and Hindus as the country tore itself in two had previously been laid at the door of the Muslim separatist Mohammad Ali Jinnah; now (2009) we were to remember the intransigence of Jawaharlal Nehru and his Congress Party.

Yet 38 years before the above-linked article, exactly the same points were made in John Masters' 1971 autobiography "Pilgrim Son". Masters, a fifth-generation Indian Army man, was working at General Headquarters in Delhi in 1946, and was passed a request from the Viceroy, Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, to draft a paper (overnight!) on "the strategic results of splitting India". Masters concluded [see pp. 33-35] that there would be serious flaws in defence capabilities:

"Would the new countries be militarily viable? It didn't look like it. Pakistan would be like the peel of an orange. It would have all the dangerous frontiers, and much of the military accommodation - but no flesh, no core of industry, manpower or finance. Everywhere the lines of defence or counterattack would be in Pakistan, the base depots to support them in India...

"Briefly, my paper declared that the partition of India was militarily possible, but unsound. For over a century military problems had been worked out on the basis of one country, its natural boundaries the Himalayas and the sea, and this unity was built into the military fabric... I concluded that partition would place a very severe strain on Pakistan, particularly. The official advice of the Defence Department therefore was: don't."

Masters immediately received many plaudits from colleagues and superiors, but politics trumped his caveats:

"As everyone knows, India was, in fact, divided, but it is not perhaps so widely appreciated that the responsibility for this tragedy lies with Mr Nehru. For when the Congress, the Muslim League, and other parties had at last been persuaded to agree to the Cabinet Committee Plan, he gave a press conference at which he stated that the Congress considered itself 'completely unfettered by agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise'. As he was the president of the Congress this could only mean that his party, once it attained the majority power promised to it under the Plan, would be free to break the terms under which the other parties had agreed. With a sigh of delight - for in accepting the plan they had been forced to give up the goal of Pakistan - Mr Jinnah and the Muslim League also reneged on their agreement and returned to the old and now unalterable demand for a separate country of their own."

Then came pressure from the British side to get it done:

"The London Government wanted to set a date for transfer of power - but to whom? The political parties in India had not agreed, so to set a date for transfer was merely to set a date for chaos. Lord Wavell stated that this would cost a great many lives, and that he would not be responsible for carrying out such a policy. As the Government in England intended to do just that, they set about finding someone to replace him, who would do what they wanted." [p. 38]

Referencing a 2007 book by Richard Mead ["Churchill's Lions"] the Wikipedia article on Wavell spins this as:

"At the end of the war, rising Indian expectations continued to be unfulfilled, and inter-communal violence increased. Eventually, in 1947, Attlee lost confidence in Wavell and replaced him with Lord Mountbatten of Burma."

Estimates of the consequent loss of life vary between 200,000 and 2 million, plus massive disruption to millions of others. Churchill foresaw something of the kind in 1931 (though he was wrong about unemployment in the UK - the devastation of WWII forced Britain to restock human labour capacity from its colonies.)

If only Nehru could have been a reasonable-compromiser; if only the new British Labour Government hadn't been so hell-bent on resolving the issue with maximum despatch; if only Gandhi had not been murdered in 1948 and so might have lived to be a moderating influence on Nehru.

But it's funny how these reinterpretations have to wait for some much later, perhaps random event to set off the explosive.

And since then, tensions between India and Pakistan, possible chess-playing by other nations looking to use one side or the other for their own purposes, and the problems of relations with neighbouring states such as Afghanistan; and the Sunni-Shia sectarianism that threatens to ravage Pakistan as much as elsewhere in the Islamic world.

Perhaps we should be writing multiple-viewpoint histories of today - e.g. on what I see as the Bush-Blair wrecking ball in the Middle East. Rather than individual historians arguing from differing standpoints, maybe modern history should be Cubist, offering many-faceted perspectives in the same composition.

Georges Braque: “Bottle and Fishes”, c. 1910–2

New Year's Eve: JD's Celtic Miscellany

JD offers a Caledonian collection to see out the Old Year and welcome in the New:

The Broons, 31-12-1944 by Dudley D. Watkins

To see large version, please click on the link below:
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQK6aH6hyphenhypheng8oAu374UQjDZC78CGc8NBK2JoxTCI40m-pWUaZ-yttp9ANmbFLc5d3Qp8XJpqb7ecTJNfOduIWc07tHeCX8U4GoIjqNo-VN-gFGiduITVcKeF6UTuyUjtk3P-ced_FaFtRAc/s1600/scan0156.jpg

______________________________________________________________________

It is New Year's Eve and the Rev IM Jolly, the BBC's hogmanay chaplain says a few words as is customary at this time, but this was his last appearance, from Hogmanay 1999. (Rikki Fulton 1924 - 2004. R.I.P.)







One of my friends was at Ibrox on 2nd January 1971 when 66 people died in a crush on one of the exit stairways. He and his father had left before the end of the game and called in to a pub for a drink on the way home. This was in the days before every pub had a TV (or even a radio) so he and his father were unaware of what had happened and were later than expected in getting home. But his mother, sitting at home, had heard the news on the radio or seen it on TV and spent an hour or so worried that her family had been caught up in the tragedy. Little things mean a lot, and that was a very sad day for Glasgow, for Scotland and for football  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Ibrox_disaster











...and a happy new year to one and all!
_____________________________

Sackerson adds: I believe the traditional good night in Scots Gaelic is "oidhche mhath!" {pr. oichhy va!}

... and for a further Scottish lesson, here is a dialogue for Hogmanay (see p. 203)

MR MACDONALD: Tha e dà uair dheug! Siud na clagan!

A H-UILE DUINE: Bliadhna Mhath Ur dhuibh!

MR MACDONALD: Dè a ghabhas sibh – fìon, no còc, no uisgebeatha?

MRS MACDONALD: Tha deoch air choreigin aig a h-uile duine a-nis.

MR MACDONALD: Glè mhath. Air ur slàinte!

A H-UILE DUINE: Slàinte mhòr

MAIRI: O, seallaibh air na rionnagan – tha tòrr dhiubh ann. Agus tha an sneachd cho brèagha – tha

e coltach ri cairt Nollaig’.

CATRIONA: Seo na caraidean againn a’ tighinn. Tha pàrtaidh anns an talla. Bidh oidhche mhòr againn!

MRS MACDONALD: Feuch nach gabh sibh an deoch!

CATRIONA: Chan eil sinn cho gòrach ri sin idir!

Which, Google-assisted-guessing [native speakers very welcome to correct!], translates as:

MR MACDONALD: It is twelve o'clock! There go the bells!

ALL: Happy New Year to you!

MR MACDONALD: What will you have - wine, or coke, or whisky?

MRS MACDONALD: Let us all have some drink now.

MR MACDONALD: Very well. Your health!

ALL: Very good health!

MARY: Oh, look at the stars - so many of them out! And the snow is so beautiful - it looks like a Christmas card!

CATHERINE: Here come our friends. There is a party in the hall. Here's to a great night!

MRS MACDONALD: Don't drink too much!

CATHERINE: We are not so foolish as that!

Friday Night Is Music Night: New Year's Eve, Scots-Style (I Love A Glassie)

JD plans a traditional Caledonian celebration...

"Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true." - Tennyson.

Yes, ...........it's hogmanay! http://www.rampantscotland.com/know/blknow12.htm











My father loved the hogmanay so I shall take a glass of The Antiquary and drink a toast to his memory -

Here's tae us
Wha's like us
Damn few,
And they're a' deid
Mair's the pity!

May those who live truly be always believed,
And those who deceive us be always deceived.
Here's to the men of all classes,
Who through lasses and glasses Will make themselves asses!

I drink to the health of another,
And the other I drink to is he
In the hope that he drinks to another,
And the other he drinks to is me!

- Happy New Year!

A curio: China, Iceland and the book trade

Icelandic Review reports that China and Iceland are marking 45 years of diplomatic relations with recognition for a prizewinning 2015 book by Einar Már Guðmundsson called Hundadagar (‘Dog Days’), named by the Chinese as one of the best foreign-language novels of the year.

Storytelling is baked into the Icelanders' culture. Readers of the thousand-year-old Icelandic sagas will be struck by how very modern they are - pithy dialogue, graphic violence. Perfect noir. And the current vogue for Nordic crime fiction includes successful Icelandic writers such as Arnaldur Indriðason, one of my wife's favourites.

This latest announcement is timed to coincide with the island's annual jólabókaflóð ("Yule book flood") - the custom of giving books as Christmas presents.

Hundadagar is a historical novel featuring Joseph Banks, the great plant-collector who accompanied Captain Cook to the South Seas. It seems Banks also collected Icelandic manuscripts.

Everything is connected to everything else.

It seems books of the right kind (pornography such as Fifty Shades is banned) may have a huge market among China's 1.3 billion people:

http://theliteraryplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/05/The_Publishing_Landscape_in_China_2015.pdf

http://publishingperspectives.com/2013/05/chinas-emerging-english-language-book-market/#.WGTKCtSLSt8

- provided you can maintain your copyright.

The market works both ways, e.g. the growth of Chinese science fiction, as the generation-long superfast economic growth of China stimulates the imagination as to what could come next:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_science_fiction

Online publication also has enormous potential, though there are issues around State control:

http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=fa85e3a8-21d4-445c-85bb-2d7b66b57262

We live in interesting times. Maybe, despite the distractions of electronic toys, authors and publishers do still have a future.

Boiling candy floss

Recently, Nick Drew of Capitalists@Work introduced us to an essay in The New Enquiry entitled "The Scapegoating Machine" (http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-scapegoating-machine/).

The writer, Geoff Shullenberger, refers to Peter Thiel, a hedge fund manager (and founder of PayPal) who is now on the executive committee of President-elect Donald Trump's transition team, and links Thiel's thinking to that of his former professor and "philosophical mentor" René Girard.

There may be some good ideas in the article but they are couched in that horrid jumble of jargon from sociology, psychology, Marxism etc that resembles a parody of mediaeval scholastic theology, bristling with unnecessary references and appeals to allegedly established authority. My reaction is typical of the Anglo-Saxon attitude to Continental theoreticians: we like our abstractions to be more concrete.

In my schooldays the way to determine whether there was any substance was to do a précis. Typically this would cut down the original word count to, say, 40%. But one can be much more radical with guffmeisters such as Russell Brand - I got him down to less than 8% (http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/kaking-sense-of-russell-brands.html)

I challenged Nick to do the same for this latest, reducing the 3,445 words of the original to no more than 250. Heroically, he has done so. I now challenge the reader to see if it could be boiled down even further, and then challenged on logic and fact!

___________________________________

Humans desire things because others desire those things, and we unconsciously mimic them. By having the object of desire, the Other makes us desire it, but also makes us resent the Other’s having it: mimetic desire and violence are inextricable. Desire is potentially a source of conflict (especially when the desire is for something intangible such as honor, status, respect, recognition) - a basic problem for human societies.

The ancient solution was substitution of the scapegoat for the rival - the original “breakthrough” moment of human progress, breaking the cyclical repetition of mimetic violence. Religion ritualized the scapegoat mechanism into sacrifices - symbolic acts that created gods, myths and hierarchies.

The rise of techno-scientific rationality and secular governance correlates with the decline of the sacred. But since religion has been the primary form of regulating violence, its displacement raises the possibility of uncontained violence and a panicked return to violent forms of religion.

The imitative basis of desire can explain the success of social media, which intensify universalized competition, feeding rivalry and ressentiment. They also create the space for new modes of scapegoating. Bullying and “forming communities” are connected: scapegoating is the cement of group identities. Voters in demographic decline turn against the Other. “The 99% vs. the 1%” is modern-day scapegoating.

Developers of technology need to accomplish something comparable to what religions did: the creation of superstructures that blunt the tendencies toward dissolution currently threatening global society.

The Mind is Flat

Nick Chater again. Many people won't like the ideas he promotes here because they cast aside traditional notions of how our minds work. I find the framework convincing enough to have spent far more time on it than just this video. Chater's framework explains too much to be fundamentally wrong.

However, it is worth pointing out that the flat mind idea is probably not convincing if one simply views Chater's experiments and rationale from a traditional outlook. The video definitely requires a willingness to change perspective, but once that is done the elegant simplicity of it becomes clear.

We are improvisers - we do not have mental depth to draw on in the traditional sense. We improvise our current behaviour, thoughts and opinions within the context of current situations and a need to be consistent with our perceived personality. One might almost say our current personality.

At first sight it all sounds too fluid and unstable to be satisfactory. Surely our personalities are more stable than Chater suggests? To sweeten the pill this approach does allow us to tie in the creative aspects of human life. To improvise is to create. We must improvise so we must create. We cannot stop. Not necessarily a good thing because we may improvise honestly or dishonestly, but worth remembering if you choose to watch the whole thing.

Here's the video introduction.

This talk presents the case that there are no hidden depths, whether evolutionary, psychological, or economic, from which the real motivations for human behaviour emerge. Motives are, indeed, astonishingly shallow, with the illusion of depth sustained by our mental projection of meaning into the actions of ourselves and other. But the illusion of depth is of crucial importance: it helps us reign in our behaviour, which would otherwise be even more capricious and inconsistent. This thesis has implications for theories in psychology, economics, and ethics which are explicitly, or implicitly, committed to "deep" motivations underpinning human life. It also provides a new framework for thinking about how to make choices, whether as individuals, in business, or in public policy.