Month: July 2005

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straws to clutch at

England are a better side than we saw at Lord’s. On another day, the top order will bat better, Hoggard and Jones will be more consistent, and the fielders will hold some catches. Australia will not always be as good. Even by Glenn McGrath’s standards, that was an exceptional bowling performance. He can’t possibly bowl that well for the whole series, and if he does – he’ll win them the Ashes and they’ll deserve it. If the right combination of circumstances comes together (England playing better, Australia playing worse, and a bit of luck), England could still have a good win in the next Test. Then the whole psychological balance could change, and I think the teams will suddenly seem a lot more closely matched.

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Australia win the first test

I think that can only be described as a thrashing.

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Culture

The New Hampshire Review

Seth Abramson has a post at his blog explaining the aesthetic basis for the new online poetry journal, The New Hampshire Review.

Specifically, he thinks that too many online publications are too gimmicky, too self-consciously ‘web’ and have lost touch with the qualities that make a good print journal. So no advertising, no Flash, no wacky layouts or un-navigable sitemap. The NHR is designed to showcase the content, not the ingenuity of the designers.

All those ambitions are admirable – although it’s worth pointing out that they are the ambitions of any good web designer. I don’t think its necessary to invoke the idea of ‘a print journal on the web’ to see the merits of clean design, a clear layout and an emphasis on the content.

More seriously, for me, the emphasis on ‘print’ virtues has lead them to produce a site which not only looks like a print journal but looks like an old-fashioned one. The painting on the front, the typeface of the title and the general look of the thing all make it seem decades out of date. It doesn’t need to be bleeding-edge design, but it could certainly afford to be a bit sharper, a bit less stodgy-looking.

I nearly posted a comment to that effect on his blog, but it seemed like rather tactless timing.

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shot man not a terrorist

Apparently he was Brazilian and unconnected to the bombings. I appreciate the difficult position of the police, but this is why we didn’t have armed police in the first place. I don’t know what to say.

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Inter Milan cancel tour to England

Inter Milan have cancelled their pre-season tour to England, citing security fears. How’s this for weasel words: “The club has decided to cancel the team tour in England so as not to further stretch the already severely occupied security services”. Fuck ’em.

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Culture

eclecticism

I’ve been following the discussions about eclecticism (of taste, of anthologies) among the poblogs.

My initial reaction was that it was being intentionally divisive – in the Silliman mode of needing to denigrate the competition to justify yourself. But I just remembered how true it seemed when I once heard someone say “I just don’t understand how you can like both the Pre-Raphaelites and Vermeer”.

That’s a pair that means more to me than the ones KSM has come up with, which either involve poets whose work I don’t know very well, or jazz musicians. It would be an interesting game making up similar pairs, although I’m still uncertain whether people’s taste is as coherent and predictable as that.

A different question is whether one should embrace these divisions as an inevitable truth, or try and cultivate a broad appreciation of different work. You don’t want to be so open-minded that you blunt your critical faculties, but an insistence on the impossibility of eclecticism is likely to be self-fulfilling.