Author: Harry

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Menu drollery

Post author By Harry
Post date 4 May 2006
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An Indian takeaway menu put through my door had this:

Biryanis
This elaborate form of cooking involves baking layers of meat or vegetables such that the flavours and aromas enthuse the rice; enhanced with saffron and spices.

Which reminded me of a couple of phonetic attempts at English from a menu in Spain. Since I can speak, read or write no languages other than my own, I always feel a bit embarrassed finding amusement in other people’s broken English, but these are just fabulous:

Fraid in bredcams praws

Could mits

Tags food and drink, Spain

Nature Other

Brilliant BBC fact-checking

Post author By Harry
Post date 2 May 2006
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BBC London, reporting on some building developments which are being held up by protests from English Nature, announced that the three key bird species were ‘Dartmouth Warbler’ (actually Dartford Warbler), Woodlark and Nightjar. But the really amusing bit was that the Nightjar was illustrated with film of some Wigeons. It’s always slightly unnerving when journalists report on a subject which you know something about; it makes you realise how much crap they must be talking the rest of the time.

Tags birds, journalism, media, news

Culture Other

‘Gothic Nightmares’ at the Tate

Post author By Harry
Post date 2 May 2006
No Comments on ‘Gothic Nightmares’ at the Tate

I went to Tate Britain at the weekend to see Gothic Nightmares – Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination (which finished yesterday). It was mainly an exhibition of Henry Fuseli, with a few pictures by his imitators and contemporaries, including William Blake. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a large exhibition devoted to such a bad painter. This one, the snappily-titled Percival Delivering Belisane from the Enchantment of Urma, from 1783, gives you the idea; contorted, rather inaccurately drawn figures, overwrought, melodramatic treatment, and obscure medieval subject matter (another of his paintings has the title Wolfram Introducing Bertrand of Navarre to the Place where he had Confined his Wife with the Skeleton of her Lover).

It’s not just that the subject matter and mood aren’t to my taste; the actual painting is clumsy. To be fair, he did do some that were both technically better and more sophisticated than that. The Shepherd’s Dream, for example. But even at the time, his reputation was based on his imagination and sensationalism rather than technical excellence, and while I can believe that the work was exciting at the time, it looks pretty tame now.

I found the most interesting thing was the context it provided for Blake’s work. The painting above may not look particularly Blake-y, but the exhibition made the connection obvious. For that matter, we know that Blake was a great admirer of Fuseli’s work. I preferred Blake’s pictures, on the whole. He wasn’t a great painter, any more than Fuseli, but he had a couple of things going for him, I think. The first is sincerity. Fuseli, you feel, relished the strange and sensational in the same way people relish a horror movie; Blake was a full-on visionary who believed in some kind of truth to his paintings and prints of angels and spirits. The fact that Blake’s work is much more stylised is also a help. Fuseli’s work is fundamentally representaional and narrative, and if the subject matter doesn’t do much for you, there isn’t much left. Blake’s work is just more visually interesting, on the whole. I was particularly struck by a couple of densely painted works in tempera I haven’t seen before. This is one of them, The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan:

Make of that what you will.

The other appealing thing was the Gillray cartoons that used imagery drawn from the paintings. Gillray is always good value, of course. Check out the portrayal of Charles Fox in The Covent Garden Night Mare on this page.

Having been rather negative about the exhibition, I do think it was interesting and I’m glad I went. It shed some light on a particularly moment of British artistic history, which is a good thing for Tate Britain to be doing; I just didn’t rate most of the work very highly.

Tags art, exhibitions, Henry Fuseli, James Gillray, London, museums and galleries, Tate Britain, William Blake

Other

Evil Empire II – the sequel

Post author By Harry
Post date 29 April 2006
4 Comments on Evil Empire II – the sequel

Alan Sullivan says:

Robert Spencer has written a book to challenge conventional views of Islam. He contends that the jihadists have interpreted their tradition correctly. It is the ‘religion of peace’ apologists who promulgate a heresy. The Islam of Osama bin Laden is quite authentic. I wonder if the American President realizes this, but attempts to conjure a milder version of Islam by promoting a fraud, or whether he’s simply clueless. The latter, I fear.

I have various problems with this. Firstly I have a general uneasiness about people who proffer opinions about the ‘correct’ form of religions which they themselves are not members of. This isn’t out of some kind of cultural relativism; I just think it’s dishonest for George Bush, or Tony Blair, or, I assume, Robert Spencer, to claim to identify the true nature of Islam when they presumably believe that Muhammed was a false prophet and that all forms of Islam are, fundamentally, false. I certainly feel that for myself; as an atheist I’m not about to offer an opinion about the ‘true’ version of Christianity, or Islam, or Hinduism – what the hell would it mean?

Islamic cultures have varied considerably from place to place and over the 1400 years of its existence. Theological interpretations have also varied. I have strong opinions about some kinds of society and behaviour being preferable to others, and for that reason I would look favourably on any strands of Islam that tend to fit with my views; but I’m not about argue the case in terms of Islamic theology. It would be intellectually dishonest and, I should think, counter-productive. If you can persuade people of the moral case, they’ll find ways to adapt the religion to fit. That’s what Christianity has always done.

I’m especially uneasy with the use of terms like ‘heresy’. I can see no reason at all to start using the language of fundamentalists and arguing on their terms.

I also don’t see what the advantage is of branding Islam as some kind of evil ideology fundamentally opposed to the Western way of life. It’s not a polticial system like Nazism, with a single leader and administration that can be conquered, or even a broader ideology like communism which is the product of a recent historical moment and which can easily(!) be replaced by a new political structure; it’s a centuries-old religion which is a deeply-held part of the identity of what, 1.5 billion people? What are you going to do to combat that – invest in missionaries? As far as I can tell, the only advantage to be gained by demonising Islam is that, by dehumanising Muslims, you make it easier to blow them up. But again, are you going to blow up all 1.5 billion, in an attempt to exterminate the religion from the surface of the earth? Obviously you can start with the most threatening states, like Iran, and pick off the Islamic world one country at a time, but I can’t help feeling that all the other Islamic countries would start getting pretty peeved pretty quickly, and you might find it rapidly got harder to keep the situation under control.