Tag Archives: Culture

Quinquireme of Nineveh

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Globalisation, of course, isn’t a new phenomenon. Those who have been following my demographic material will not be surprised that the role of migration in human history is a topic which fascinates me. Well, Juan Cole has a very ‘informed’ post today about a piece of genetic research which claims to show that half of the inhabitants of Madagascar come from Borneo, while the other half derive from East Africa.

Those who want to learn more about all this could do worse than try some Cavalli_Sforza. ‘Luigi’ is undoubtedly the ‘grand-father’ of the current attempts to fuse archaelogy, linguistics and genetics. Many of the papers on site at his Stanford based Human Population Genetics Laboratory make very interesting reading.

Full disclosure: reading C-S was one of the things which really started me off thinking about all those ‘demographic issues’.

Andorre, null point, or…

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Monaco is voting!

We were going to write something inevitably snarky about the Eurovision song contest (Hello from Minsk!) but Manolo’s Shoe Blog has pictures that are worth many, (Three points for Malta!) many, many thousands of words. (Good evening Amsterdam! Hello Kiev! This is the Netherlands calling!)

They’re here (Our twelve points go to … Turkey!)

here (Good evening Rejkyavik!)

and here (Latvia three points!).

Good thing it only happens (Moldova eight points!) once a year.

(Bon soir Bruxelles!)

(Thank you Finland!!)

UPDATE: Greece is the word.

UPDATE 2: Yushchenko presents the award. Even a cheesy show can have a cool moment. Thank goodness he wasn’t wearing an orange tuxedo.

The new Doctor Who

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Anybody else been watching the new Doctor Who?

I was always a bit lukewarm towards the show when I was a kid – it seemed slow moving and awfully cheesy by 80’s standards – but I’m really starting to like the new version. So far, it’s lampooned the rush to war in Iraq only a couple weeks before the election – “massive weapons of destruction” indeed – and now has gone on to attack 24-hour cable news in last night’s episode. I don’t remember the old Doctor having such political content.

The Dalek episode, though, was pure fan service.
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Very Old Europe

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New work by Sophocles? Hesiod? Lucian? Euripides? A precursor to the Illiad?

All coming up, thanks to satellitte imaging technology and a century-old trove of manuscripts brought to Britain from Egypt.

In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament. …

Oxford academics have been working alongside infra-red specialists from Brigham Young University, Utah. Their operation is likely to increase the number of great literary works fully or partially surviving from the ancient Greek world by up to a fifth. It could easily double the surviving body of lesser work – the pulp fiction and sitcoms of the day.

Exciting time to be a classicist, no?

As Trains Go By

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The New Republic has published a long review of three novels by Georges Simenon. The thesis is that they are “are superb and polished works of art masquerading as pulp fiction.” Simenon wrote more than 400 novels, under his own name and various pseudonyms.

One of them, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, was published in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung’s set of great novels from the twentieth century. It’s apparently of a piece with the three reviewed by the New Republic — the reviewer called it “insouciantly gruesome” — and will soon be republished by New York Review Books.

I’ll agree with the insoucance and the gruesomeness, but I’m not sold on the greatness. Each chapter has an odd and cryptic heading — “On the difficulty of getting rid of old newspapers, and the usefulness of a fountain pen and a wristwatch” or “Kees Popinga experiences a remarkable Christmas Eve and, towards morning, selects an automobile.” I had the sense that Simenon wrote the twelve headings and then put the novel together to tie one to the next.

TNR’s reviewer sees books “more philosophically profound than any of the fiction of Camus or Sartre, and far less self-conscious. This is existentialism with a backbone of tempered steel.” Maybe it’s a sign of how both existentialism and Simenon have aged; I just saw a quickie mystery.