bring back the Luddites!

I'm not quite sure what to make of this. I used to think I could understand most modern English prose. I also used to think that the University of Cambridge was immune to the excesses of garbled postmodern opacity. Alas, not. Here is the abstract of a paper delivered to the Literary Theory Seminar yesterday evening. My provisional verdict on it is "complete twaddle". It's not just a pointless piece of abstract musing or antiquarian interest (I found plenty of examples of those as a student, and might even have been responsible for some), it's truly, madly, deeply incomprehensible.

This essay explores how to find a way of being in the world at a time when
common meanings become scarcer and the gauntness of unmediated objective
existence starker. A recent study of the poetics of place in modern French
writing (by Steven Winspur) stresses the irreducibility of ontic presence
as itself revelatory. I argue that the way humans encounter objects and
places is more problematic, not because "absolute contingency" (Curry 1999)
is not a given but because the "way" along which it is given offers a
threshold of relation which is hyperbolic. The conditions for
re-enchantment do exist, but as part of a poverty of dependent response
making itself "less" in order to "greet" the object as sacrally given, but
in a way which does not disperse the enigmatic commonality of that
givenness.

The mute presence of the non-modernist spear-grass in Wordsworth's Ruined
Cottage is at once chastened and in excess of the naturalistic. What
exceeds the naturalistic is a givenness not reducible to the conditions of
description of the object. Here a plenitude of existence is already
diminished but retains its role as gift amid the scarcity of its own
reception. This section involves some debate with Paul H Fry's radically
ontic reading of Wordsworth's poetics.

The second part of the essay reflects on some fragmentary remarks in
Merleau Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible, Jean Luc Marion's notion of
the "adonné" and the themes of call and response in Jean Louis Chretien,
before adducing William Desmond's sense of the "between" further developed
in John Milbank's writing on diagonals. The between is not a mediation but
the sheerly disjunctive porosity of being, whereby nothingness is itself
open to divine invitation.

Any ethics of responsiveness (Wheeler, 2008) should include a response to
the inaffordance of origin, not as a negative idealism, but as the apex of
what it is to live in relation to existence under the radical poverty of
gift. My argument concludes that the scarcity of origin finds itself rooted
in the hyperbolic, ie in an earth offered sacral horizons, not just
frugally from within but as an active (festive) poverty before, which
generates ritual and art.

I then began to read the paper itself, just in case it got any clearer...

perceptive question?

"Is Darwin your king?"

asked a Saudi student at Central Language School last week.

Whether that tells us more about the educational provision in Saudi Arabia or about the cultured propaganada plastered around Cambridge at the moment is anyone's guess.

Dawkins again

Wandering through Jesus College Chapel (a very odd building) a few weeks ago, we came across a little booklet by the Rev'd Dr Timothy Jenkins, Dean of Chapel, called "Closer to Dan Brown than to Gregor Mendel: on Dawkins' The God Delusion", which is a very elegant discussion of how TGD is a kind of popular theodicy, and Dawkins a sort of populariser of quasi-scientific bits and pieces.

Fascinating, erudite, well-written, occasionally pulling its punches (perhaps out of politeness) but an effective and oblique demolition nonetheless. Say what you like about those liberal Anglicans, they know a bit about why atheism is pants and are (sometimes) not afraid to say so.

History site bid for CB1 area scrapped

The headline jumped out at me as I was wrapping up some potato peelings the other day.

Basically, local property firm Ashwells are trying to make a killing out of souping up the moribund area about the railway station (and who can blame them?) and to sweeten friends in high places (is that too cynical?) were working with the County Council on a plan to turn an ugly but distinctive old flour silo and mill into a "Historical Resource and Cultural Centre" that would combine various local history records, archives, archaeological displays and the like. A serious public benefit, had it been carried out...

Never renowned for its speed, the local authority moved slowly on this (preliminary ideas for a heritage centre on various sites around the city have been floating around for about a decade, if not longer, and it would seem unfair to blame this on the heritage functions of the Council, who might well be expected to be a bit dusty, since there is cash sloshing around for project management and bringing across other expertise should the political will be there) and presumably the developer, fustrated by the failure of its initial (and grossly overambitious) planning application to the City Council (last year), realised that time is money and so this loss of time (and the recent deflations in the housing market) have led said developer to try to get more money by turning that spot into more offices it can let out. As the local councillor was quoted as saying (in the Cambridge Crier, March 21st, 2008), "It is very sad that the developer appears to have raised the stakes..." Very sad indeed.

There doesn't seem to be a formal statement about the breakdown of the plans beyond what was reported in the local rags. (The exuberant 2005 press release about the plans now makes for rather dismal reading.) And the Council's website has not yet caught up with this - the library and information service pages are still looking forward to a new Heritage Centre on Station Road. There is a certain irony that this information is found with local history information...

The future

In 2008 the Cambridgeshire Collection back into the Central Library on a temporary basis.

A new heritage resource centre is planned to open in or soon after 2009, combining the Cambridgeshire Collection and the County Record Office, Cambridge, on one site in Station Road, Cambridge. This is an exciting development, which will bring complementary collections together and improve and extend public facilities.

Further information about these plans will be made available in due course

It would be too tempting to paint a picture of a delightful and well-meaning but unsophisticated and un-savvy corner of the local authority relying far too much on the goodwill of developers so I leave that to the readers' imagination.

Full disclosure: I worked for several months on a tiny part of this project about two years ago, and am sad (though not entirely surprised) to see even my meagre contribution wasted.

bus subsidies

bring out the best in people...

The Cambridge Crier (Feb 1, 2008,page 7) carries a story about how Cambridge residents will have to pay an extra £440,000 per year in Council tax [not actually such a huge amount per taxpayer, it has to be said!] because of a shortfall in money allocated for funding free bus travel for pensioners. This is a national scheme so it doesn't seem unreasonable for Whitehall to cough up [leave aside for a moment hesitations about state subsidies], especially from the perspective of a county with an unrepresentatively old and ageing population.

The city council has already forked out £943,000 to make the scheme work after the Government bungled the introduction of district-wide free travel which left thousands of Cambridgeshire pensioners stranded or forced to pay more to get into towns and cities.

Get past the Local Journalese and it does seem as though someone in London didn't do the math.

The Government claims it has given "sufficient fundin" for te scheme to work but that it did not "take explicit account of authorities' own views about the likely cost impact of the new concession".

Even allowing for the odd placement of the Local Journalese speech marks, that strikes me as a bit odd. Is the Government saying "There is enough money - we know that because we didn't listen to local authorities, and if local authorities don't have enough money it must be their fault"?

Hmm.