The language of wit, not of hate

So This Is Depravity and Other Observations by Russell Baker

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It was in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election that I first, all unwitting, encountered the phenomenon of American political commentary in all its ugly reality. My image of the American political commentator was based largely on The West Wing and on Alistair Cooke, that doyen of reasoned and courteous intelligence. There was no clear presidential winner; so, fed up with the ignorance of the British media on the subject, I started to visit American websites for enlightenment. A media industry that had picked Jed Bartlet as their fictional President would be bound to have something profound and insightful to say on the situation… right?

Of communities and things in common

I’ve read two posts in the last few days which have got me thinking about the c-word.

The first was by the always thought-provoking Tessy Britton on collaboration versus conflict in the shaping of community outcomes.  She talks about her own early experience in community activism, and raises the perennial question about who really represents a local community – the Council or the local interest groups.

I for one feel the need to balance and season my own experience in local government with the insight of people like Tessy, who have brought some rigour and discipline to the question of how we make decisions in society.  Tessy’s post offers a great deal of food for thought, including some very scary things about radical activism (the Alinsky conflict-based model; she’s just this morning posted her alternative to Alinsky); it deserves to be read extremely carefully by – well, by anyone with an interest in what is happening outside their own front door.  In fact, stop reading this now, click the link, read her original post, read today’s post, and then come back here.

Right, done that?

“All Englishes are equal”

I had the pleasure, some months ago, of meeting some of the English Project’s Trustees at an event in the run-up to English Language Day.  We got talking about the Project’s scope and aims – admirable but ambitious – and the fact that it observes and records, rather than taking sides in, the various debates about the language.

So far so good.  But I confess that I cocked an eyebrow when one of the Trustees told me:  “Our position is that all Englishes are equal.”

All Englishes are equal.  Discuss.

The Project has, I entirely accept, good reasons not to take sides.  But one of its roles is to provide a platform where these discussions can take place.  So, having dwelt upon this rather astonishing statement for some six months or so, I am ready to discuss.

Information sharing in the Big Society

In one of my past lives I ran an information and mapping business – Land Management Information Service (LaMIS) – which took a new approach to public information.  I think my experience may have some application to the idea of the Big Society.

The idea was this.  Government (and its agencies and local authorities) hold massive quantities of spatial data – data which has

• a significant value to them in discharging their functions;
• a certain amount of value to the wider public (in the interests of openness and accountability);
• a commercial value to some business sectors;
• and a specific, quite different, non-monetary value to the people who own, manage and make their living from the land to which the data relates.

I set up LaMIS for the last of these groups in particular.  We offered a simple mapping software product, including aerial photography, OS mapping, environmental data and measurement and recording tools.  (These were the days just before Google Earth, and many of my farming customers still only had dialup broadband access.)

Intellectual property, enterprise and public good

Intellectual property, enterprise and public good

A discussion paper by Ben Bennetts FRSA, Managing Director, LaMIS, written between October 2005 and September 2007. This paper represents my personal views and not those of my employers, past or present.

LaMIS ceased trading in November 2007, but I have been asked to reproduce this paper as a contribution to ongoing debate in a number of areas.  A separate post, of current date, explores some of these ideas further.

This paper was originally written as a response to the launch of the RSA Adelphi Charter in October 2005, in the context of the issues faced by the Land Management Information Service (LaMIS). It also covers some wider issues beyond those which directly affect the business – and some which have been raised at other recent RSA events which go beyond the intellectual property debate. The paper is a work in progress and I will be using it to take several different discussions forward in various arenas.

Arguably the greatest detective novel of all time

The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This, the ninth of Sayers’s eleven full length Wimsey novels, is the one that lifts her above the category of twentieth-century female detective novelist, and places her among the literary greats.

It is a thoroughly satisfying mystery – sophisticated, complex, intellectually challenging. Everything in the plot is there for a reason; and the final explanation is ingenious and unexpected.

A poignant, thought-provoking study of religious warfare

Magdeburg by Heather Richardson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

To far too many English readers, the Thirty Years’ War is a hazy shadow in the middle distance of history. We are aware of its presence but it has no direct significance or importance. And yet it shaped the balance of power in Europe for the following three hundred years, and was as critical a juncture for the continent as the Napoleonic Wars or the rise and fall of the Iron Curtain. It is against this momentous backdrop that Heather Richardson sets her novel.

The book opens as Magdeburg, proud bastion of Lutheran faith, is under siege by the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor. Richardson draws a painstaking portrait of the domestic, commercial and spiritual life of a prosperous merchant city; of the cheerful hand-to-mouth existence of the soldier and the mercenary; of the claustrophobia of the era; of the fragility of life. It is an intimate pen-and-ink portrait on a human scale; a compassionate yet clear-sighted portrait of ordinary people, of their intelligence and determination and anxiety and fear, their courage and cowardice and venery.

Sesquisuperlative

Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Early in this book, Lymond is cornered in the streets of Lyon by various people intent on murdering him. With his companion Philippa Somerville he embarks on a high-speed chase through the streets and over the rooftops, involving extreme physical danger, courage, agility and a healthy measure of quick-witted verbal assaults on his attackers.

It’s a throwback to a similar episode in “Queens’ Play”, but it’s also a fair metaphor for the whole Lymond series. As a reader, I spent much of my time feeling rather like Philippa – pitchforked into situations of which I had no experience; forced to keep up by finding a mental toughness and agility I didn’t know I possessed.

This is the epitome of great historical fiction. Dunnett doesn’t stop to explain anything; she makes few concessions to a modern readership’s sensibilities; but she invites us into the sparkling, complex, contradictory world of the mid-sixteenth century, and shows us exactly what made that world tick. And in the process, she shows us a lot about what we too are capable of achieving.

I tend to read this book when I need to walk taller, when I need to achieve the impossible.

Read M.M. Bennetts on Dorothy Dunnett

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Challenging; harrowing; satisfying

The Company of Fellows by Dan Holloway
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It begins so quietly, this novel. So unostentatiously. Granted, there are two corpses in Chapter 1 – it is a murder mystery, after all – but there is little, at first, to indicate that The Company of Fellows is anything other than just another detective story set in Oxford, following in the well-worn footprints of Morse.

The writing is a good deal better than Colin Dexter’s, which is to be expected. But in other respects the early chapters came as a surprise. For Dan Holloway is a tireless and selfless champion of alternative, edgy, indie writing (some of it, it must be said, a long way removed from his own literary calibre). Yet here he seems to be embarking on something more mainstream – an honest to goodness murder mystery, a thumping good read which manages to remain thought-provoking, told with flair, panache and insight.

It isn’t that simple, of course.

A book not to be judged by its cover

Burden of Desire by Robert MacNeil
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is a complete surprise. Its title is at once misleading and accurate: one might easily expect Burden of Desire to be third-rate lightweight romantic escapism for a predominantly female readership. The only reason I read it was that I was urged to do so by a friend whose judgement I trust.

It is, in fact, an historical novel of depth, complexity and insight, which starts from a single event – the explosion of a munitions ship in Halifax harbour, Nova Scotia, in 1917 – and traces the aftershock of that disaster through the lives of three main protagonists, a woman and two men. In examining the psychology of the sexual repression and liberation of a post-Victorian era, it provides a detailed, almost clinical analysis of – yes, you’ve guessed it – the burden of desire.

It is above all a study of conflict: the Freudian tension between sexual repression and liberation, certainly, but also the conflict between the entrenched hierarchical certainties of the past and the fluid uncertainties and passionate experimentalism of the present.