There is an interesting exercise in compare and contrast in reading two of the obituary essays on Edward Said: one by Christopher Hitchens and the other by Alexander Cockburn. Hitchens’ is profoundly admiring, affectionate, grieved, as well as carefully honest about Said’s faults. Cockburn’s is unequivocally admiring and affectionate, but he is oddly enthusiastic about Said’s thin skin. Both Hitchens and Cockburn mention the subject, but only Hitchens expresses reservations as well as admiration:

Edward had a slight tendency to self-pity, and the same chord was struck even in the best of his literary work, which often expressed a too-highly developed sense of injury and victimhood…Yet he was famously thin-skinned and irascible, as I have good reason to remember, if

And then fashion, chapter two. (You’ll think I’m obsessed. But then, it’s so important, isn’t it. We could label almost anything fashion. We learn from each other, we teach each other, and the more we learn and teach the better, yet it’s possible to call any of that teaching and learning ‘fashion’.) There is a very interesting interview with Terry Eagleton in the Independent, in which fashion plays a large though not quite explicit part.

But isn’t this a trend of his own making? The elusive pleasures of Barthes, Derrida, Foucault et al would surely have remained safely obscured from the masses if Eagleton’s passionate primer hadn’t burst on to student bookshelves and into their brains. “Well, I don’t think

This column by David Aaronovitch raises a lot of perennially interesting and chronically unanswerable questions. What is fashion? Who is fashionable? According to whom? In what circles? Who gets to decide? Does it matter?

This question comes up a lot on B&W, not surprisingly. Well it would, wouldn’t it, since we take ourselves (self-flatteringly enough) to be fighting fashionable nonsense, and since we have a fashionable dictionary. Clearly we think we have some idea of what’s fashionable. But equally clearly we’re using the word in a pretty narrow sense, or at least to apply to a pretty narrow population. We’re not talking about runways and models fashion, nor about best-seller list, this week’s top-grossing movie, Top Forty, hit tv show-fashion. … Read the rest

One can see from this story how hopeless it is to try to reconcile worries about injustice, torture, inequity, barbaric punishments, misogyny, and just outright cruelty and brutality and bloody awful ugliness, with worries about being tolerant and broad-minded and not colonialist or cultural imperialist or Eurocentric.

Prosecutors argued Ms Lawal’s child was living proof she committed a crime under Sharia. However, defence lawyers countered that under some interpretations of Sharia, babies can remain in gestation in a mother’s womb for five years, raising the possibility that her ex-husband could have fathered the child.

That’s interesting. What if there were no such interpretations of Sharia? What if every possible interpetation of Sharia that anyone could find anywhere held that a … Read the rest

I’m reading Mark Crispin Miller’s The Bush Dyslexicon, a witty but deadly serious analysis of Bush’s real as opposed to advertised nature, and what the election of such an ignorant, unqualified, spiteful man says about US politics and media. Miller makes, for example, one point that doesn’t get made nearly often enough or loudly enough – that Bush and his propagandists succeed by conflating ignorance with poverty – intellectual poverty with literal, financial poverty.

However, the comparison with Andrew Jackson is, to put it mildly, problematic. That military hero was, of course, a fiery democrat…When ‘the laws’ are used ‘to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful,’ Jackson wrote in 1832, ‘the humble members of society –