Author: Ophelia Benson

Allen Esterson alerted me to and sent me the link to this bizarre item. (Did I see references to it at the time? Possibly. There might be a faint memory – but if so I didn’t follow them up.)

A study by an academic who has spent more than 30 years looking at Bach’s work claims that Anna Magdalena Bach, traditionally believed to be Bach’s musical copyist, actually wrote some of his best-loved works, including his Six Cello Suites…”I also discovered that the only complete manuscript from the time for the Cello Suites was a manuscript in the hand of Anna Magdalena, and that the original manuscript in the hand of Johann Sebastian had vanished.”

Oh well then. What more is there to be said? It couldn’t possibly be that she simply copied the manuscript (because such things have never been known; manuscripts never were copied; wives never were asked to copy their husbands’ work; original manuscripts never simply disappeared) or that the original manuscript was used to wrap the leftover strudel that Johann Christian took to school; therefore, beyond a reasonable doubt, Johann Sebastian Bach did not write the Cello Suites, his wife did.

Suppose someone found a fair copy of Emma in James Austen’s hand, or one of Wuthering Heights in Branwell Brontë’s, or one of Middlemarch in Lewes’s. Would people be rushing to claim any of them wrote the items in question? They wouldn’t you know. And rightly so. Suppose someone noticed a letter in which Frederick Douglass thanked Thoreau in the warmest terms for his help and inspiration – would people fall over themselves in the stampede to say that Thoreau wrote A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass? Suppose someone found a Christmas shopping list on which Toni Morrisson planned to buy a typewriter for someone named George Smithers – would everyone decide George Smithers had written Beloved? Suppose some alert scholar noticed that a contemporary of Emily Dickinson’s named Albert Innacan wrote poetry for the Amherst Gazette and that his poetry featured a lot of dashes – would new books pour off the presses claiming that Albert Innacan wrote Emily Dickinson’s poetry?

I don’t think so. So why do people swallow this kind of nonsense when it goes in the other direction? Can’t they see how pathetic and shaming it is? And if they can’t, why can’t they? Why will they insist on being so silly?

I leave it to your wisdom to determine.

Prompted by an interesting comment on an earlier post about putative rights I did a little Googling about freedom of association. Something I need to know more about. Found this useful page on the subject.

The phrase “freedom of association” does not appear in the Constitution (although the First Amendment protects the right to peaceably assemble). Nonetheless, the Court has recognized to separate types of association that are constitutionally protected: (1) intimate association (protected as an aspect of the right of privacy) and (2) expressive association (protected as as an aspect of the First Amendment’s protection of free speech). Freedom of association cases are interesting in that they bring into conflict two competing views of the world: rights-oriented liberalism that holds that a person’s identity comes from individual choices (and that government ought to create a framework of laws that remove barriers to choice) and communitarianism, that holds that a person’s identity comes from the communities of which an individual is a part (and that communities are an important buffer between the government and the individual).

Well that’s very interesting, because I’ve been thinking of these issues as being about competing ideas of rights rather than about rights competing with communitarianism. I’m sharply aware that I much prefer rights and rights-oriented liberalism to communitarianism – so I’m being consistent here.

I’m tempted to copy in the whole left-hand column of the page, but that would be silly (and perhaps a copyright violation); just read it; it’s interesting.

Conflicting ideas of rights, chapter 793.

It’s normal to feel nostalgic for cherished practices once treasured and now disgraced. Sometimes, being forced to give them up is a violation of rights. At other times, it means retracting a privilege that should never have been extended in the first place. Some Southern whites spent the 1960s pining for the old days, when they could lynch whom they pleased; few today would portray that as a right transgressed! Today, conservative Christians behold society falling from their faith’s exclusive grip and, like their Southern racist predecessors, sigh, “There goes my everything.”

Just so. Sometimes, being forced to give up a privilege that should never have been extended in the first place feels to the forcee like a violation of rights, which is why we are so often treated to petulant arias on the violation of various rights that aren’t rights. That, plus of course it’s a highly useful tactic, always likely to convince a few unwary observers. Don’t let this happen to you.

Hitchens takes down Coulter in his own special way.

She has emerged as a persona because she has mastered the politics of resentment, and because she can combine the ideology of Human Events (the obscure ‘Joe McCarthy was right’ magazine) with the demand of the chat-show bookers for a tall blonde with a very rapid delivery on a wide range of subjects.

Ah yes the very rapid delivery thing. (I’ve never seen Coulter in action, but I’ve seen others.) I’ve never seen the appeal. I prefer the effete languid drawl of a Vidal or Hitchens that nails you without breaking a sweat. Much more amusing, also humiliating. Anyone can jabber; it’s those relaxed, casual, effortless bastards who can really make the blowhards look like fools. As Hitchens proceeds to do.

Here is another instance of the sheer incoherence that results from a mixture of feigned rage and low sarcasm…[T]he abject confusion, with its resounding non sequitur of a concluding sentence, impels her to the negation of her own supposed “argument”. These are the pitfalls that are set by spite and by haste, and Coulter topples leggily into them every time…So, slice it as you will, Coulter finds herself inventing new ways in which to be wrong. As it goes on, the book begins to seem more like typing than writing, and its demonstration of the relationship between poor language and crude ideas becomes more overt.

See what I mean? No need to say that quickly. No need for haste. Easy does it. Steady as she goes. Whack!

If it matters, I am with her on the tepid climate of moral and political relativism which, while it wants all children to do equally well at exam time, also regards the United States as no worse than the Taliban and thus, by an unspoken logic, as no better. But a polemic against this mentality cannot really be written by a McCarthyite.

Or by someone who’s not very good at writing or thinking clearly, or by someone who invents new ways to be wrong. Not useful talents for that particular job.

In a world where the true enemies of civilization are much, much more godly than the blonde goddess of the hard Right, Coulter is reduced to a blitzing of soft civilian targets – one redeemed only by its built-in tendency to fall so wide of the mark.

That’s how it’s done.

Conflicting ideas of rights, chapter 792. I have a right to equal treatment. No no, comes the reply, I have a right to treat you unequally, provided I don’t actually assault you or break into your house and eat your lunch.

Religious groups are outraged that, from next April, it will be illegal to discriminate against homosexuals or transsexuals when providing goods and services. The clash between religion and secular liberalism is stirring high passions and has even brought threats of civil disobedience…Religious groups have been emboldened by their successes in forcing British Airways to drop its ban on a worker wearing a cross, and in getting the Government to backtrack on its threat to faith schools. Andrea Williams, of the Lawyers Christian Fellowship, which has led the campaign against the gay law, said: “This is truly a clash of fundamental human rights. It would seem that, when these rights clash, the homosexual person’s rights trump the religious person’s rights.”

The religious person’s rights…to what? To deny a commercial service to a homosexual person on the grounds that the homosexual person is a homosexual person? Is that a fundamental human right? Is there a fundamental human right to enter the public sphere in order to sell a product or service for public money but still reserve the ‘right’ to reject customers on irrelevant grounds? Is that a fundamental human right? Or is it just a bit of yukkism dressed up in fundamental human rights clothes?

The Guardian thinks it’s the latter. It makes a change, to agree with the Guardian.

The Anglican Bishop of Rochester, the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali, warned that church-based charities would be forced to close their doors if the government insisted they let in gay people. ‘It is the poor and disadvantaged who will be the losers,’ he said…That is a tendentious argument. ‘The poor and disadvantaged’ would only lose out if the churches choose to hate homosexuality more than they like good works. Their objection to the new law is not, as they like to see it, self-defence against a meddling government. It is a threat by powerful institutions to withhold their charity out of prejudice. Churches are free to preach that homosexuality is a sin and their followers are free to believe it in private. But the elected government of Britain does not share that view and has rightly sought to give gay citizens the same public rights as everyone else. Or at least it has done thus far. On this latest measure the cabinet is divided. Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly, a devout Catholic, is the minister responsible for the new law and is sympathetic to the idea of exempting churches. The Prime Minister is also thought to be amenable to religious petitioning.

No comment. Comment superfluous.

Conflicting ideas of freedom come into play too, of course.

Lord Mackay of Clashfern, a former lord chancellor during the Thatcher era, is the patron of the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship (LCF), part of a coalition of religious groups opposed to the new rules which they say will ride roughshod over their beliefs. The new rules, which ban those offering goods and services from discriminating against gays and lesbians, will force them to act against their consciences, they say. The rules aim to stop, for example, gay couples being turned away from hotels. But faith groups believe there should be an opt-out clause in situations where it goes against their religious beliefs. Lord Mackay said: “People of faith are having their freedom to live according to their beliefs taken away from them.”

Their freedom to live according to their beliefs – ‘live’ in the sense of being able to reject customers on arbitrary yuk-based grounds. That’s a rather broad definition of ‘live,’ it seems to me. Granted, if you have a very small restaurant or b-and-b, you do in some sense live with your customers – but surely that is precisely the condition you accept when you undertake such an endeavour. Surely you realize it would be unworkable to include in your advertising and on the signs the stipulation, ‘for Discerning People That I Happen to Like.’ Bobbi Sue’s Flapjack House for Nice Straight People Who Are Pat Boone Fans would make the sign bigger than the flapjack house and would also risk narrowing the customer base to the point that Bobbi Sue has to declare bankruptcy four days after she opens the bidness. Or to put it another way, tough. That’s the free market for you. If you don’t like it, just stick with being a vicar.