Author: Mark Hannam

The first week of the new year provided me the opportunity to visit an exhibition of paintings by Winslow Homer, at London’s National Gallery.  His work is surprisingly under-appreciated on this side of the Atlantic: according to the catalogue, this is only the second exhibition ever held in Britain devoted to his work; furthermore, and shockingly, there is not a single work by Homer held in any UK public art collection, despite him spending over a year living and painting in England, near Tynemouth in 1881-2. 

The image used to advertise the exhibition –- The Gulf Stream, 1899 – was a poor choice as it borders on cliché.  A black man lies on the deck of a small boat, staring impassively to the horizon.  The mast is broken, and a storm is fast approaching, yet he appears unconcerned.  He is surrounded by symbols: a handful of loose sugar canes lie on the deck to remind us of the importance of the sugar trade and the slave economy that maintained it, although it is unclear why the sailor would have need sugar on this fishing trip; on the distant horizon there is a bigger sailing ship, another symbol of global trade, but probably too far away and too busy to come to his assistance; his damaged vessel is circled by three grey sharks, coloured to match the uniforms of the soldiers of The Confederacy; the sea is tinted with splashes of dark red, perhaps the blood of previous victims of sharks, or perhaps a sly reference to the poetry of the artist’s namesake, whose heroes once sailed over “wine-dark seas” of the Mediterranean.  The nonchalance of this man in the face of nature’s threats divests the picture of emotional power.  It presents a puzzle for the mind to decode rather than a pleasure for the eye to linger over.

Continue reading “Homer’s yule seas”

It’s that time of the year.  Before the time for the giving of gifts comes the time for the making of lists.  What were the best twenty books of the year, the best ten tv shows, the best five art exhibitions, and the top three recordings of baroque music on period instruments.  I try to avoid spending time reading through such lists, although as I write this sentence it occurs to me that perhaps I should pay more attention, allowing me to compile my own list of the Best Lists of the Year.

Part of the problem is the calendar.  The advent of the year’s end seems to provoke within us the desire to review the current and then to make resolutions for the next.  The prevalence of this desire should not blind us to its oddness.  For most of human history the “year” that mattered was the crop-cycle for basic food supply.  In Europe these cycles are annual, with a season for planting seeds, a season for tending the growing plants, a season for harvesting crops, and a season when it is too cold for arable farming, during which the preservation of stored food supplies is paramount.  In other, warmer climates there are two or three crop-cycles each year, but these countries had little influence on the development of the Western model of annual thought. 

Continue reading “Slow Train”

When it started, seventeen days ago, there were thirty-two teams drawn from all over the world: four from Latin America; four from North, Central America, and the Caribbean; five from Africa; six from Asia (which includes the Middle East and Oceania); and thirteen from Europe.  The playing styles and levels of experience on show were highly diverse, the fans uniformly raucous, and there was plenty of early entertainment blended with a few surprise results. 

Now, we are down to the final eight teams, and it is evident that FIFA’s world rankings are reliable predictors of World Cup success.  Six of the remaining eight teams are ranked in FIFA’s top ten: these are Brazil (1), Argentina (3), France (4), England (5), Netherlands (8) and Portugal (9).  They are joined by Croatia (12) and Morocco (22). 

Of the five teams ranked above Croatia that are not contesting this year’s quarter finals, Belgium (2), knocked-out in the group stage after losing to Morocco, were weakened by several of their “golden generation” carrying recent injuries and one or two others looking slightly past their prime.  Italy (6) very surprisingly failed to qualify for the tournament finals, coming second in their qualifying group behind Switzerland (15) and then losing to North Macedonia (65) in the semi-final of the second-round tournament for second place group teams (the North Macedonians losing to Portugal in the final).  Denmark (10) failed to progress beyond the group stage after losing to Australia (38), as did Germany (11) who lost to Japan (24).   Spain (6) made it through the group stages but lost their last-sixteen game to Morocco, who are the surprise package of the tournament. 

Despite these upsets during the qualifying process and the group stages, the composition of the last eight suggests that FIFA rankings are good indicators of success in tournament football, where consistency matters, along with the ability to take penalties (as Japan and Spain have found to their cost).  International football is basically predictable, which does not mean that it is not exciting.  Over ninety minutes, quality trumps effort and secures its reward.  The delight of the games for the fans is provided by the way that the top teams find the route to victory.  There is nothing dull about watching the best players in the best teams, searching for glory on the biggest sporting stage.

Continue reading “Pieces of eight”

For a long time, I have enjoyed reading the work of Marcel Proust, who died one hundred years ago this week, in November 1922.

Proust’s most famous book, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu was initially translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past and then later as In Search of Lost Time, and both titles describe something important about the content of the work, that it is concerned with the operation of memory and that we experience the passage of time as loss, although neither English title quite captures the ambiguity and élan of the original French, and which tells of the perpetual struggle to keep fixed in one’s mind that which is forever fading away, and the paradoxical truth that as we grow older we have more experience of life to draw upon but we have also more that is forgotten, either partially or wholly, and this personal experience of the accumulation of knowledge that is never fully accessible to us – and, as Swann was to discover and Marcel was to repeat, such knowledge often takes the form of wisdom after the event – is also replicated in society at large, where we are surrounded by evidence of previous eras, accumulated over many generations, in the form of church spires, the names of towns, the great aristocratic families with their distinctive lineages and estates, the famous artworks of earlier periods hung in galleries or frescoed onto walls, and the culinary customs passed down within families that specify how asparagus should be cooked or that madeleines might permissibly be dipped into the tisanes with which they are served, all this social and cultural history both grows and fades at the same time, indubitably present in shaping our lives while often bereft of the values that once attached to it, simultaneously in and out of our conscious reach, and that consequently both our individual and our collective lives are conducted in a world that is saturated with meanings many of which we are no longer aware of, unless or until some accidental moment or event – unintended and involuntary – jolts our memory and brings back to our recollection something from our past that casts light upon the present, and suddenly – miraculously – we gain or regain insight into the true meaning of our lives.  

Continue reading “Marcel”

There is a familiar storyline in classic European novels, in which a young man from a wealthy family wastes his inheritance through foolish behaviour.  In Russian examples this generally involves running up massive losses at gambling tables, whereas in the most famous German example – Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks – it occurs when the northern virtues of diligent labour and prudent trading are abandoned in favour of the southern vices of impulse and the cultivation of an artistic temperament.  The reckless squandering of great wealth that had been carefully accumulated by one’s ancestors is presented to the reader as an evident sign of personal irresponsibility and, more widely, social decline.  It is far less common to read of older people of modest means, whose ethical failing consists in indebting their great grandchildren.  I find this surprising, since duties, presumably, should run in both directions, up and down the family tree.

One of the many achievements of the welfare state, which became the dominant socio-economic model in the Western world in the second half of the twentieth century, was that it replaced the lottery of family inheritance with a safety net that guarantees a minimum of goods and services to all citizens, regardless of what might be passed down by their families.  Irrespective of what kin supplied, kith ensured a decent standard of living for all.  That was the basic idea.  Lately, as the cost of goods and services continues to rise – due in part to a steady expansion of expectation as to what might be included in the baseline package – and widespread resistance to higher taxation grows, Western societies have all – to a greater or lesser extent – decided that their welfare state should be partly funded by future citizens.

Public debt is deferred taxation; spend now, pay later.  There are all sorts of reasons for thinking that this a sensible way of managing the mismatch between the appetite for services and the willingness to pay for them through the tax system.  Spreading costs over time has long been understood as a good strategy for individuals – using mortgage payments to buy a house, or insurance premiums to cover the risk of having to replace a major item that might be lost – and using borrowing to fund investments that will improve future profitability is well understood as a rationale for corporate leverage – the increased productivity achieved by upgrading machinery or premises, or the improving sales that follow from a large marketing campaign –  so it should come as no surprise that a similar approach has been adopted by governments.  The national debt exists, so it is said, not to burden future generations but to increase their inheritance: it should not be thought of as a liability that we pass on, but as a mechanism for increasing the size of the legacy we leave behind.  Well, maybe.

Continue reading “No taxation without representation”