Blogging on and off since 2003
I’ve posted a selection of photos from last week’s trip to England. Among the highlights:
Enjoy.
I’m at the Heathrow RCC waiting for them to call my flight. I’ll be back in Brookline by midnight, and in the office tomorrow.
It’s been a good trip. Good work-related meetings, a chance to walk the streets of London (a favourite pastime), spending time with my mother and brother, and a delightful couple of hours with an old friend of the family last night . (We sank a couple of pints at the Founders Arms on the South Bank, which lubricated a wide-ranging conversation.)
Apart from a brief snow flurry, I’ve dodged bad weather until today. Right now I’m watching planes taking off on runway 09R, and as each aircraft lifts off it’s squeezing great clouds out of the 100% humidity. Spectacular, especially the 747s and MD11s.
They’ve just called the flight (UA925). Time to go…
I’m blogging this from the top deck of the Oxford Tube, an express bus to London. It’s 7:30, and we should arrive soon after 9. This gives me time to dig in to the book of the moment: “Conversations on Consciousness” by Susan Blackmore.. (She of the multicolored hair!) It consists of lightly-edited conversations that she recorded with 21 philosophers and neuroscience researchers, from Dennett and the Churchlands to Koch, Penrose and Crick. I picked it up at Blackwells on Thursday, and I’m really enjoying it. The conversations are arranged alphabetically, and so far I’m up to Susan Greenfield. (OK, so not all of the pieces are equally enjoyable!!) Recommended.
I’m spending today at Sun’s Guillemont Park facility over here in the UK, meeting with a number of colleagues. Travel was uneventful: the flight from Boston to Dulles was about an hour late, but I still had time to hang out in the RCC. The London flight was about 65% full; I had a window seat with no-one next to me. Smooth flight, had to hold at Ockham but still arrived 5 minutes early. I got to Oxford around noon. After the usual greetings, I had lunch and a short nap; then I decided to take a quick walk up the hill to clear my head and get some fresh air. I started out in sunshine with a blue sky and a few fluffy clouds above; 10 minutes later I was in the middle of an intense snow shower. The weather here is quite cold and definitely volatile….
HuffPo has just posted a piece by John Zogby about a new poll of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. So do they know why they’re fighting in Iraq?
The wide-ranging poll also shows that 58% of those serving in country say the U.S. mission in Iraq is clear in their minds, while 42% said it is either somewhat or very unclear to them, that they have no understanding of it at all, or are unsure.
OK, so what’s the mission?
Nearly nine of every 10 – 85% – said the U.S. mission is “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks,” while 77% said they believe the main or a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.”
So how do you tell someone that s/he’s fighting for a lie?
Mind you, they don’t want to stay. When do the troops themselves think that they should be withdrawn?
That seems pretty clear.
The actor Dennis Weaver died last Friday. I’ll always remember him for one performance: his wonderful depiction of the confused and terrified driver in Spielberg’s 1971 masterpiece Duel. It’s quite brilliant – one of my personal top ten films, I think.
PS Interesting… I just looked up Duel in the IMDB, and I see that it was made for television: it was nominated for a Golden Globe for best TV movie. I’d always assumed that it had a theatrical release. I think I first saw it on TV in about 1982, soon after we’d moved to the USA. For some reason I’ve always associated it with another film that I encountered at about the same time: Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running. (I tried to think of a possible connection, but the results were depressingly pretentious!)
Here’s an interesting perspective from the BBC’s John Simpson:
Looking back on the events of the past year, it is clear that the three different popular votes which were held in Iraq, two elections and one referendum, played a big part in whipping up the violence.
People who had tended to regard themselves primarily as Iraqis were suddenly forced to focus on the fact that they belonged to a particular group: Sunni, Shia, Kurdish, Christian or whatever.
The act of voting was as divisive as it was empowering, and the fact that it happened three times in 11 months added to the intensity of the problem.
Just returned from the Members’ Opening of the David Hockney Portraits exhibition at the Boston MFA. Although the works in the exhibition go all the way back to his teenage years, and represent all of his major periods and styles, I was startled by just how many of the pictures were less than a year old. (In fact Hockney did a set of six large portraits especially for this event.)
This is only the second Hockney show I’ve seen at the MFA: the first was a small collection of recent English landscapes about 10(?) years ago. This is very different: it’s a huge exhibition, with many previously undisplayed pictures from the artist’s own collection. If there is a weakness, it is perhaps that there is too much here: the exhibition might be better if more thematically focussed. But that’s a nit: it’s a wonderful show. The portraits are extremely revealing of Hockney, as an artist and as a person in relation to others. Highly recommended.
There’s a bias in these lists towards stuff I haven’t played in recent weeks. For example, I just picked up the Arctic Monkeys’ excellent new album, and since that’s currently in heavy rotation, it won’t show up here for a while. With that said, here’s today’s random 10 from iTunes:
Majikthise has posted a couple of pieces here and here providing useful links to discussions of Dan Dennett’s book and Wieseltier’s execrable review. She quotes from an email from Dennett to a physicist who had written to him about the review:
Look at it this way: I am running an experiment. The question is: can thoughtful religious people read my book without losing it? Some can; some can’t. That’s something worth knowing. I’m sure there will be many more data points in the coming months. It will be interesting to see what the pattern is. Ugly? Yes, but experimenters often have to endure gross things in order to get the evidence they need.
UPDATE: In reading through some of the blogs comenting on the Wieseltier review, I came across this letter to the editor of the NYTBR by the philosopher Owen Flanagan. Beautifully concise and crystal clear.