Okay, we need a little amusement to cheer us up after hearing the news about the pope. Although some people are pointing out that it’s good news really: that it’s the Vatican shooting itself in the foot, that now people will realize how authoritarian it is after all. But I don’t know – I’m never very convinced by that kind of thing. Partly because it never seems to happen. People seem so happy to say ‘Oh how sweet, a nice authoritarian pope again.’

So we could do with a laugh. I know I could. I’m wrestling with revisions, and I’m finding this patch a struggle. Paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word, I’m having to drag them out … Read the rest

I listened to last week’s ‘Start the Week’ yesterday. (I always listen to it late, for some reason.) I like Andrew Marr, but I didn’t realize how much I like him until I heard Sue MacGregor filling in for him. Dang, she made a mess of it. She kept interrupting – no doubt it’s the presenter’s job to keep things moving along and on track, but Marr manages to do that without constantly cutting people off in the middle of a sentence. And worse than that, she kept getting everything wrong, misunderstanding the guests’ books and what they said to her, and saying the silliest thing she could think of. She contemptuously told Jeffrey Sachs, who’s just written a book … Read the rest

Just a couple of comments on Katha Pollitt’s excellent article on Andrea Dworkin. One to quibble, the other not.

The antipornography feminism Dworkin did so much to promote seems impossibly quaint today, when Paris Hilton can parlay an embarrassing sex video into mainstream celebrity and the porn star Jenna Jameson rides the New York Times bestseller list. But even in its heyday it was a blind alley. Not just because porn, like pot, is here to stay, not just because the Bible and the Koran–to say nothing of fashion, advertising and Britney Spears–do far more harm to women…

Not to quibble with Pollitt’s basic disagreement with Dworkin. But – ‘to say nothing of fashion, advertising and Britney Spears’ – … Read the rest

Hurrah for Ian Jack. Hurrah for Polly Toynbee and now for Ian Jack. I love this comment on the Guardian’s popification – I feel like flapping my hands and saying ‘that is so true‘ like a Valley Girl. (I am a Valley Girl at heart, actually. I just cover it up well. But underneath the cynicism, the sneers, the bad language, the bloodshot eyes, the duelling scar – underneath all that I’m basically just a San Fernando valley high school sophomore who wouldn’t hurt a fly.)

The Pope — this is a crude and prejudiced paraphrase of the coverage — had ended the Cold War, brought down the Berlin Wall, and defended the world’s poor against the depredations of

That discussion of literary theory I mentioned a couple of days ago was in large part about the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics and whether it is a conservative organization and if it is who cares and if people do care why do they care. Kind of a ‘you have unfashionable trousers’ argument, as Chris Williams described it in a comment on ‘Not Either Silly.’ Bizarrely irrelevant. This is certainly not the first time I’ve heard the assumption, but it sounds just as fatuous the 500th time as it did the first. Henry makes the point in his post at CT.

Cultural Revolution then goes on to attack the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics for using such retrograde