Month: January 2021

At the start of this year, my aunt died.  A couple of months previously she had celebrated her one hundredth birthday.  I did not know her well because she lived most of her life in the Canadian Province of Saskatchewan.  I first met her in my mid-teens when she returned to the Britain for a visit, her first trip back in thirty years.  In her seventies and eighties, she returned a few times to see old friends and to visit her sister, who is my mother.  I remember her sense of humour, for example, asking advice of my daughter, then in her early teens, on whether she should get a navel-piercing or a tattoo to celebrate her ninetieth birthday.  She told us some entertaining stories about her escapades in London in the 1930s.  It turns out that young women in her day used similar tricks to charm their way into bars and get drinks bought for them when underage as they do nowadays.  In the early 1940s she met, fell in love with, and married a Canadian soldier, who was later injured fighting in Italy.  At the end of the war, she emigrated from her home in South London to Canada, disembarking the boat at Halifax and moving to Rouleau and later Moose Jaw, where she spent most of her life, and finally, five years ago, to a retirement home in Medicine Hat.

Last week, as I was walking along the main road that runs south from Borough Market, I saw a blue plaque fixed to the wall, memorialising the birthplace of John Harvard.  Like my aunt, he travelled from Southwark to North America, although he went three hundred years before her, and not as a war-bride but as a minister of religion.  Unlike my aunt, he died young, aged thirty-one and is mostly remembered now because in his will he left some books and a few pounds to establish a small college in Massachusetts. 

Continue reading “Migrative”

According to Alfred North Whitehead, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”  

When I was a student, I thought this to be a harsh verdict on Aristotle and every other major philosopher who came after him, as if precedence in time implied precedence in rank.  I also found it to be an unintentional but nevertheless amusing parody of many philosophy books and papers that I read, in which the amount of space devoted to footnotes or endnotes appeared almost equal to that allocated to the main text.   Some philosophers seemed content to be the authors of series of footnotes.   Later, I came across the sentence which immediately follows that quoted above, where Whitehead continues, “I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them”.   Now the remark made more sense: it is the richness and variety of Plato’s philosophical interests which impresses, more than his proposed solutions to the many puzzles that he, through the voice of Socrates, draws our attention to.

Continue reading “Doing philosophy down in the docks”

The Buggles probably defined my life, although I didn’t know it at the time. They are, of course, famous for “Video Killed the Radio Star”, which was a minor electronic Brit Pop hit in 1979 but became known much more for being the first music video played on MTV back when it went on-air in 1981. My parents were definitely worried about the corrosive influence of MTV in the early 80s, and despite being early adopters of cable in southern Maine, instructed my sister and me in no uncertain terms that we were not to watch such nonsense. This meant, of course, that we watched more MTV than we actually probably wanted to, and I saw the Buggles video – they were a one-hit wonder – many times, along with other masterpieces such as “Life in a Northern Town” by Dream Academy and much more of the solo career videos of the members of Fleetwood Mac than I now care to admit.

Continue reading “Video kills”

January 6 is a big night for my family. Every year since I was born (and I think maybe before, but I can’t attest to it), my parents have hosted a get together – sometimes big, sometimes small – to celebrate Epiphany. It’s a lovely word and a lovely holiday, although as I’ve grown older I’ve realised it’s a kind of sacred-secular mishmash of sorts. January 6 was the actual day of Christmas when the Julian calendar was superceded by the Gregorian calendar in most of the Christian world – the lack of skipped leap years in the old school Roman version over the centuries had led to a bit of creep from a holiday which was always supposed to be on December 25, or roughly a few days after the winter solstice – and eastern Catholic churches didn’t really want to make the adjustment to the holiday calendar because it meant that Easter, which was based on a lunar calendar, would suddenly be much further away from Christmas, and so winter would seem to stretch into infinity.

Continue reading “Epiphany”

I have been listening to John Coltrane.  More particularly, I have been watching a studio performance by his Quintet from 1961, of his interpretation of the song, “My Favorite Things”, written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein a couple of years earlier. There is much to admire in this old black and white archive recording, including a delightful piano solo by McCoy Tyner, who died last month, and some under-stated yet compelling percussion by Elvin Jones.  Then there is Coltrane himself, the great saxophonist, finding ample scope for virtuosic improvisation within the formal structure of the verses, drawing out many shades of colour and contrast around the melodic line that – seemingly – he alone knew might be hiding there.  Listening to him play is better than eating schnitzel with noodles. 

Continue reading “Arodnap”