Category: Culture

Categories
Culture Other

cricket poetry

A couple of people have found this blog by googling ‘cricket poetry’. Well, I have one poem of my own that features cricket, and I wandered across this (very bad) poem on th’internet, but I can’t immediately think of any others except for this one, written about 1900, which I know is very well-known in the UK but any Americans reading may not have encountered before:

Vitaï Lampada
by Sir Henry Newbolt

There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night –
Ten to make and the match to win –
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,
But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”

The sand of the desert is sodden red, –
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; –
The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of schoolboy rallies the ranks,
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”

This is the word that year by year
While in her place the School is set
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind –
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”

How strange and creepy is that? Everything about it seems like a parody of Boy’s Own Britishness, down to the classical tag for a title (which translates as ‘light of life’, apparently), but it’s completely unironic. And, as unsettling as the poem is, it’s actually pretty well-written. Orwell, in his essay on Kipling, described him as ‘the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language’ [i.e. East is East, and West is West. The white man’s burden. What do they know of England who only England know? The female of the species is more deadly than the male]. Newbolt has some of that same vigorous phrase-making quality. The first four lines of Vitaï Lampada have been quoted a few times in the newspapers during the Ashes because they capture the tension of a close cricket match. The first four lines of S2 tend to be avoided, but actually they have the same vivid immediacy. Compared to Newbolt, or Kipling, or The Charge of the Light Brigade, Billy Collins starts to look pretty high-falutin’. He may write a somewhat watery version, but it’s still recognisably literary poetry. Vitaï Lampada is *real* populist poetry. Scary, innit?

Categories
Culture Nature

‘The Ancestor’s Tale’ by Richard Dawkins

I’ve just read The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins. The book traces back human descent to the earliest forms of life as a ‘pilgimage’, marking the points where other branches of our family tree ‘join’ us; the first rendezvous is with the chimps, then the other apes, then the rest of the primates and so on back to the simplest forms of life. At each rendezvous, Dawkins picks out one or two species from those who have joined, and tells their Tale, which is used to illustrate some point about natural selection – the Peacock’s Tale is used as an occasion to talk about sexual selection, for example. Some of these points are theoretical, others deal with practical issues like the difficulties of dating some of the points on the tree, or interpreting fossil evidence.

The approach allows him to touch on all sorts of different aspects of biology and build up an overview of evolutionary science, while also maintaining a kind of narrative structure. If you’ve read some of his other books, many of the preoccupations and some of the examples are familiar, but there are always enough surprising bits of information to keep you interested (in many plants, the thread-like roots are actually created by a symbiotic fungus). The family tree is interesting in itself; I was surprised to learn that we are more closely related to sea urchins than to snails and bees, for example. Or if that relationship is a bit distant: We are more closely to trout than trout are to sharks. That is, we share a common ancestor with trout which is more recent than the common ancestor of the trout and the shark. We and the trout both have bony skeletons; the shark is cartilaginous.

It’s a big fat book, and occasionally it drags a bit, but on the whole I found it absorbing and Dawkins’s prose is (nearly) clear as ever. So I’d recommend it.

Categories
Culture

‘Cosmicomics’ by Italo Calvino

I finally got round to reading Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino. Amazon.com’s editorial review describes it as

An enchanting series of stories about the evolution of the universe. Calvino makes characters out of mathematical formulae and simple cellular structures. They disport themselves amongst galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms — and have time for a love life.

which is pretty fair, though it possibly makes it sound even frothier than it is. Key words would be – surreal, whimsical, intellectually playful, that kind of thing. Which I found wore thin pretty quickly. It’s clever, it’s well-written, it’s often funny, if not belly-laugh funny; but in the end it just seemed a bit silly. Rather than engage with the science in a really interesting way, it just used semi-digested fragments as a kicking-off point.

Categories
Culture

Mask of the Week

From the Duke of York Islands (via Australia’s Cultural Gifts Program)

mask from the Duke of York Islands

Categories
Culture Other

‘Forgotten Empire: the world of ancient Persia’

Forgotten Empire is an exhibition at the British Museum of artefacts from ancient Persia. They’ve got together with the National Museum of Iran, the Persepolis Museum and the Louvre, so it’s a rare opportunity to see a lot of the objects. The title and a lot of the hype emphasise how little most of us know about the Persians compared to their contemporaries in Greece; and by implication the exhibition is supposed to act as a corrective. The period covered is about 500-300 BC; i.e. about between the golden age of Athens and the conquest of Persia by Alexander.

I was certainly persuaded that the Persian empire was impressively rich and powerful. The palace at Persepolis had columns 20m tall, apparently. That’s about the height of a seven-storey building. But the stuff in the exhibition was all relentlessly about power and wealth. It was all decorated in macho emblems – bulls, lions, sphinxes, war chariots. All the palaces seem to have been covered in endless friezes of people bringing tributes to the Persian king; everything was ostentatious, in your face. Not an easy culture to warm to, even if individual objects were attractive.

The implied comparison with Greece didn’t really work in the Persian’s favour. I wouldn’t want to buy whole-heartedly into the Greeks’ assessment that they were civilised and the Persians were barbarians; even I know enough about Greek history to know they were capable of being aggressive, ruthless, power-hungry and greedy themselves. But I look at the Greek civilisation and my idea of it is tinted by Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Sappho and Sophocles. No doubt there were great ancient Persian poets and thinkers, but I don’t know about them, and without that knowledge all I can see is the physical evidence of a megalomaniac culture. And in fact, aesthetically the classical stuff is more pleasing. The Persian figures are all very stylised and stiff, repetitive in the way Egyptian or Assyrian figures are, and wandering from the exhibition to the Parthenon sculptures, I was struck anew by how much more naturalistic and varied and fluid they are. Classical sculpture has become a bit of a visual cliché over the past two thousand years, but it looks pretty remarkable compared to a lot of the earlier traditions.

I wouldn’t want to suggest that my lack of enthusiasm is purely based on an idea of the Persians as imperialist megalomaniacs compared to the (somewhat) democratic Greeks. I’ve been very impressed by work from other cultures which seem equally megalomaniac, like the Egyptians and the Aztecs. The Persians just seem to lack visual pizazz, somehow.

Categories
Culture Other

Bob Denver & Americana

Bob Denver, the star of Gilligan’s Island, has died. Gilligan’s Island is one of those bits of Americana which feel familiar but I actually know entirely via hearsay. It’s one of the most frequently used pop culture references in other US pop culture – they mentioned it on House just last night – but I’ve never actually seen an episode because I don’t think it’s been shown on British TV in my lifetime (ever?).

Similarly, when I went to the US I felt it was very important to eat a Twinkie, to try and find out what it was about this confectionary that made it iconic. Answer – well, it’s certainly different. Bizarrely artificial and liable to send you into diabetic shock. The O. J. Simpson trial was odd, too. The whole thing was covered in detail in the UK news, partially because they tend to follow big US news stories anyway, and partially because the moment he was chased down the freeway on TV, it was a great story. But somehow, the whole point of the thing was missing; the premise of the story was that a Very Famous Man was accused of murdering his wife – but in a country where few people care about American football, he wasn’t actually famous before the trial. He’s famous now, but famous for being accused of murder.