The Virtual Stoa

Winterval greetings to all Virtual Stoa readers out there (assuming there are any left — I quite understand).

For those who are even more interested in the Winterval than I am, there’s what looks like the pretty definitive history over here, complete with 55-page appendix!

Traditional imagery via the Brick Testament, obviously.

I read in the directory bit at the end of the 2010/2011 Total Politics Guide to Political Blogging that the Virtual Stoa is a Portuguese blog. How exciting! And this, from the same people who in 2009 declared this blog both the 67th and the 86th top Labour blog…

Pissup. Brewery.

This just in, via Josh:

The kind of difficulty both cases exemplify arises when something we encounter defeats our ordinary capacity to get our minds around reality, that is, our capacity to capture reality in language. That dislodges us from comfortably inhabiting our nature as speaking animals, animals who can make sense of things in the way the capacity to speak enables us to. The special kind of animal life we lead comes into question. It is as if a beaver found dam building beyond its powers.

That’s from John McDowell, “Comment on Stanley Cavell’s ‘Companionable Thinking’” in Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond, p. 302.

There’s also a new Mel Gibson film called The Beaver coming soon. “A troubled husband and executive adopts a beaver hand-puppet as his sole means of communicating”, apparently. The trailer is here. My brother Michael wrote to me to draw my attention to it, commenting that, “This looks as though it could conceivably be one of the worst films ever made.”

And, as a tribute to the late, lamented Leslie Nielsen, here‘s a link to the beaver joke from one of the Naked Gun films.

The Scottish beavers seem to be doing well. The latest news is here, and this story from a couple of weeks ago will also be of interest.

I think that’s about all for now. As you were.

One of the things I’ve been finishing off this Summer is the book project that’s been kicking around for far too long, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and the Politics of Self-Love from Lipsius to Rousseau.

And for entertainment and instruction, here’s a slightly-squished Wordle of the full manuscript, so you can see what it’s about. (Click on it for the full-sized, less-squished version.) I like Wordles.

Despite barely posting here over the last year or so, I learn that the Virtual Stoa is now the 43rd “top Labour blog” in the latest meaningless blog poll awards thingummy.

On the one hand, this is my highest placing in this particular contest. On the other hand, last year I was both 67th and 86th, whereas this year I seem only to have just the one ranking, which I think is a setback of sorts.

UPDATE: Jamie K has had the rather good idea that those of us who find themselves on this silly list might want to acknowledge it by linking to Tim Ireland’s recent Dale-themed post here.

From the New York Times Magazine‘s long piece about News of the World phone hacking:

A draft of the paper’s unpublished article about [chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association Gordon] Taylor’s alleged affair indicated it was based on a voice mail message he had received from his assistant. Lewis [ = Taylor's lawyer] said the message went: “Thank you for yesterday. You were great.” The paper assumed “she was talking about shagging,” Lewis explained. In reality, she was referring to a speech Taylor gave at her father’s funeral.

Over the last three days, I’ve been reading Tony Blair’s memoir, A Journey, and tweeting.

Twitterfeeds can be fiddly creatures, especially since things appear in reverse order, so, for easy reading, I’ve reproduced the results below the fold in a more sensible format.

Enjoy!

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Stoa-reader JW tells me to look in the 31 August 1861 edition of the British Medical Journal, p. 241:

THE REGENT’S PARK BEAVER. This beaver seems perpetually happy. He has constructed his own abode with materials thrown over into his enclosure, and goes on thus reconstructing and altering it for ever. The superintendent communicates it to first gentleman, who retails it to second, and so on, that this beaver is so fond of his house, that though he managed on one occasion to get out of his enclosure and down to the banks of the neighbouring canal in the dead of the night, he was yet found next morning back in his legitimate domain, and working away at his “improvements” as hard as ever. He is a lively chap at night, and was not the least disconcerted by the presence of the party gathered round him; but was, on the contrary, so tremendously busy in doing nothing, and then undoing it again, still keeping his eye upon the four gentlemen who had come to see him, that third gentleman was heard at last to remark to fourth gentleman that he “looked upon this animal as an impostor, and believed he was doing it all for effect.” (Dickens’s All the Year Round.)

Thing #1: “But he did not take into account that the best of men, free from all wickedness, would join together the better to accomplish their goal, just as birds flock together the better to travel in company. Or as beavers congregate by the hundreds to construct great dams, which could not be achieved by a small number of them… That is the foundation of society amongst social animals, and not fear of their kind, which hardly occurs among the beasts.” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays, III, 1. (He clearly forgot to add the words, “visible from outer space” after the hyperlink.)

Thing #2: Even more exciting than Leibniz’s thoughts about beavers, the first beaver kits (=baby beavers) for a very, very long time indeed have been born in the wild in Britain! Over here; with slideshow pics here.

What’s the deal with the Lib Dems and the A34? I ended up in a car going from Southampton back to Oxford today, and it’s just one well-known Lib Dem constituency after another — Eastleigh (Chris Huhne), Winchester (until recently, Mark Oaten), Newbury (until a little less recently, David Rendel), then OxWAb (until recently, Evan Harris)? Are there other roads like this that I ought to know about?

Go on, then: what are you all reading this Summer, and what do you recommend?

My goodness. Cambridge gave Harrison Birtwistle an honorary degree. Laudatio follows; translation over the fold.

artifex quondam ingenio fabrae artis celeberrimus carcerem inextricabilem aedificauit in quo reginae taurique progenies absconderetur. Daedalus, ut ait poeta,

ponit opus turbatque notas et lumina flexa
ducit in errorem uariarum ambage uiarum.

nunc adstat Daedalus alter musicus, qui labyrinthum fecit non ut in latebris ageret Minotaurus, sed ut in scaenam produceretur. nunc adstat alter Naso, qui cuiusque aetatis fabellas enarrat: en prodit nunc gibber ille parricida cui nomen non minus quam nasum dedit pullus gallinaceus; iam temporis flumine refluente Orphea miramur iterum iterumque perire; iam cothurnis indutis regem magnum simiarum puellae alterius amore uix feliciore flagrare. operibus ingeniose factis ingeniose nomina imponit; et quis nostrum molis Cretensis non reminiscitur cum ille sua describit, aut cum audimus modos immutatos iterari duplicarique,

haud secus ac plateas necnon fora lata uiator
ambiguis lustrat gradibus repetitque petitque
cursus et cunctam peragrat pedis inscius urbem,
et nunc ad tectum, nunc ad loca uisa reuersus
illa recognoscit quae iam nouisse putabat.

quod omnibus artificiis utatur quae recentioris aetatis ingenia produxerint, sunt qui uerum artis musicae iudicium sibi solis adrogantibus ea quae facit opera faciem haud minus immanem quam taurum Cnosium praebere iudicent. audire modo uellent! sed nec tamen qui Panos thorubo acclamabant eum exsibilare poterant, neque umquam haec uox singularis scit conticescere: ‘id quod possum facio,’ inquit. ‘nil est ultra.’

dignissime domine, Domine Cancellarie, et tota academia, praesento uobis Equitem Auratum inter Comites Honoratissimos adscriptum, Musices Regiae Academiae Sodalem, Collegi Regalis apud Londinienses in nomine Henrici Purcell Modos Faciendi Professorem Emeritum, HARRISON BIRTWISTLE, ut honoris causa habeat titulum gradus Doctoris in Musica.

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In matters of football
The fault of the Dutch
Is scoring too little
And fouling too much.

– With apologies to George Canning.

Is it a problem that both John Prescott and Bhikhu Parekh are Baron INSERT NAME HERE of Kingston-upon-Hull? Or does it make the crucial difference that I always see hyphens in the news reports for Prescott (Kingston-upon-Hull) but not for Parekh (Kingston upon Hull)? Ought they to have a fight, or something, to settle the matter of who is going to receive loyalty oaths from local vassals, or have the Kingston-upon-Hull serf population work from time to time on their estates? (I am reasonably confident that Prescott would win that fight.) Are there other examples of places with multiple peers attached? And do the locals mind this kind of duplication? Questions, questions.

This year’s UK Eurovision entry was so forgettable that I have — less than 48 hours later — entirely forgotten it. It was sung by someone called Josh — I remember that bit — but I couldn’t tell you what it was called, or anything at all about how it went.

The Virtual Stoa, nine years old today.