Hope for humanities!

My colleague Zoot Horn sends me this optimistic cartoon about life as an English literature graduate.

I'll balance it with this quotation from Jeanette Winterson's abusive adoptive mother, justifying banning books from the house:

"The trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it until it's too late,"

I find it rather movingly profound. It's why I read for pleasure and profession. A book might make you cry, laugh, howl or groan. It might soften or stiffen your brain (or other organs). Most of the time, a book is a portal to a richer, more interesting world - sad, I know, but often true.

So hurrah for Mrs. Winterson, however evil she was towards little Jeanette.

Talking of high culture, I watched some of She's The Man last night, in which a teenage girl disguises herself as her brother to prove to the world that she's a top-class football player, moving into his boarding school, falling in love with her/his room-mate and having other girls fall in love with him/her.



There was rather too much prurient interest in teenage girls' bodies for comfort, but it did have the huge bonus of Vinnie Jones's presence as the soccer coach. His acting was so bad that this English footballer's English accent sounded like a bad American imitation - almost as bad as Daphne's brother in Frasier (who appears to be a fake Cockney worse than Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins despite the family supposedly hailing from Manchester). The film was interesting because all the humour was based on the potentiality of gender disguise removing essentialist qualities, there was plenty of bawdy humour and yet the film was paranoid about closing down the possibility of viable same-sex relationships - having its very conservative cake and eating it too.

She's The Man is of course a retelling of Twelfth Night. Poor old Shakespeare.

Guerilla typefaces

You all know that I'm an old-fashioned statist (though one with syndicalist leanings), and a fan of typography. So you won't be surprised that I'm impressed and touched by this magnificent synthesis.

The Russian currency (rouble) never had a symbol as the $, £ and € do. The government announced a design competition, but the designers couldn't be arsed with the kind of mimsy bureaucratic stuff, so they just got together and came up with a winner.

There's no law enforcing it, no official approval - but it's being used everywhere.

And that, my friends, is why syndicalism, workers' collectives and anarcho-communism is far better than Stalinist state capitalism any day. If you don't believe me, read Ken MacLeod's Scottish-Trotskyist-Libertarian science fiction novels.

Talking of novels, nothing in the post today except some strike leaflets and a Felt compilation, but I did read two yesterday: Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Woman (I've cancelled the surgery after reading this book) and Mary Poppins Opens The Door. Moran's book is a breezy bit of fun, with some local interest - she's from The Dark Place, and I'd recommend it to any bright but blinkered 18yr-old. She's not as funny and clever as she thinks she is, but she is quite funny and clever. Recommended.

The Mary Poppins is much more interesting. Cast aside your Disney glasses: the literary Mary is a capricious, often cold, forbidding and untrustworthy individual, and there are some very interesting mystical interludes which have very little to do with the rest of the work. Absolutely fascinating.

Well, that's me done for the week. I'm off to my Olympics interview tomorrow - which sadly means I'll miss Paul Uppal appearing at a Climate Change meeting in the Civic Centre at 2. Won't someone go and report back on his pearls of wisdom?

O David! A spoonful of sugar will help the medicine go down

The big story this weekend was multimillionaire Treasury Minister David Laws being caught claiming rent money from the taxpayer and giving it to his long-term secret partner: MPs are forbidden from renting from partners to avoid the sense that they're scamming us.

Coincidentally, I watched Mary Poppins yesterday. The whole thing. Despite Dick Van Dyke's awful, awful accent, it's a fascinating film, covering imperialism, masculinity, childhood, suffrage (OK for the upper classes, not OK for the serving classes), class and high finance - Mr Banks's bank collapses because young Michael's tuppence is grabbed by the greedy directors and he demands it back, leading to a run.

Ironically, Michael Banks and David Laws are rather similar:

 

Despite Mr. Banks's protestations that banks are reliable, ration, friendly and well-run, this song reveals the ugly, vampiric truth. There's a glorious irony in most of the words, especially this: 'prudently, fruitfully, frugally invested…' - presumably not in CDOs, CDSs, derivatives and all the rest of the modern banking world's attempts at alchemy: