Is Marx more diminished than enhanced by Terry Eagleton’s defence of him?This article titled “Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton – review” was written by Tristram Hunt, for The Observer on Sunday 29th May 2011 01.30 UTCAs the IMF dishes out its medicine in Lisbon, Dublin and Athens, and the limitations of neo-liberalism become more apparent, the moment is surely right for a compelling account of Karl Marx’s relevance to the modern world. And in campus conferences, continuing sales of Das Kapital, and even the words of Pope Benedict XVI (moved to praise Marx’s “great analytical skill”), there is a growing appreciation for Marx’s predictions of globalisation, rampant capitalism, and the instability of international finance. As the Times put in the middle of the 2008 crash: “He’s back!”But Marx also remains the target of any number of lazy slurs. The easiest way to kill off debate about Marxism is to jump straight to the Stalin show-trials, Soviet gulags, and Khmer Rouge Year Zero. The philosophical beliefs of a mid-19th-century denizen of the British Museum are all too quickly elided with the most terrible atrocities of the 20th century as an all-purpose intellectual get-out card.So Terry Eagleton – literary critic, liberal-baiter, Marxist man of letters – has set himself the task of explaining why Marx was right. “What if all the most familiar objections to Marx’s works are mistaken?” he begins. His plan is to take on “10 of the most standard criticisms of Marx and try to refute them one by one”. He does so, he believes, at a time when capitalism is uniquely in crisis: “the system has ceased to be as natural as the air we breathe, and can be seen instead as the historically rather recent phenomenon it is”. Or as Friedrich Engels used to put it: “This time there’ll be a dies irae such as has never been seen before… all the propertied classes in the soup, complete bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, war and profligacy to the nth degree.”But for any admirer of Eagleton or Marx, the book is a disappointment. There is none of the logical precision, winning prose or intellectual ambition displayed most recently in Eagleton’s Yale lectures on faith. Part of the problem is the structure. This is a work of intellectual rebuttal, as chapter by chapter Eagleton takes on a century of misreading Marx. All of which means he is fighting on an enemy territory of dreary objections. For example, there’s a long attempt to justify the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the Leninist aftermath, as well as the East German system of childcare – not something, I imagine, Marx and Engels themselves would have bothered with.The consequence of such deviations is that there is little sense of the anger, brio and bravado of Marx and Engels; none of the humour, irony and creativity so central to the Marxian heritage. Instead, this book reads like a rapidly crammed set of notes for an American midwest college course. There’s an array of lecture-hall style jokes and fairly worthless hyperbole. In no credible sense do one in three children in Britain today “live below the breadline”.Thankfully, amid the banalities, there lurk some wonderful passages. Eagleton is right to stress the centrality of democracy to Marxian communism, as well as explain so successfully the nature of free will within Marx and Engels’s account of history. This is all very much the humanist, Paris Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.Eagleton also stresses the modernity of Marx’s thinking and how, for example, he saw the nature of social class shifting with the progress of capitalism. “As long ago as the mid-19th century, he is to be found writing of the ‘constantly growing number of the middle-classes’ … men and women ‘situated midway between the workers on the one side and the capitalists on the other.’” This is a long way from the hackneyed dichotomy of proletarian and bourgeois.There is also a touch of the old Eagleton when he deploys Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure to explore the interaction of culture and materialism. When it comes to Jude Fawley, we need to appreciate that “Oxford University is the ‘superstructure’ to Jericho’s ‘base’.”However, Eagleton’s touch is less sure when it comes to the human condition under communism. In trying to rebut claims of utopianism, he goes too far in suggesting that “Marxism holds out no promise of human perfection” and “envy, aggression, domination, possessiveness and competition would still exist”. Engels, though, was clear that the ascent from socialism to communism entailed a metaphysical change. Under the leadership of the proletariat, humanity achieves true freedom liberated from its animal instincts: “It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.”Here was the quasi-theological endpoint of Marxism and it would have been more rewarding if Eagleton, such an intriguing catholic thinker, had expanded upon the Judaeo-Christian assumptions underpinning much of Marx’s heaven on earth. But perhaps that was too close to the bone.In the end, this is another worthy volume in the rarely scintillating Marx-Engels interpretative canon. Useful for undergraduates at the University of Notre Dame, but not for anyone else interested in the drama, insights, and majesty of Marxism. Marx might well have been right about an awful lot, but sadly Eagleton fails to make you care very much. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogWhy Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton – reviewRelated posts:Karl Marx, part 6: The economics of powerThe Wizard of Oz – reviewThe latest word on globalisation
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Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton – review
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/29/why-marx-was-right-by-terry-eagleton-%E2%80%93-review
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May 29 2011, 11:40am | Comments »
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Bob Dylan posts web message about China shows
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/14/bob-dylan-posts-web-message-about-china-shows
Bob Dylan on his own websites claims the authorities did not censor his setlist for the recent China concerts.
This article titled “Bob Dylan posts web message about China shows” was written by Caspar Llewellyn Smith, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 13th May 2011 18.12 UTC Confounding seasoned Bob Dylan fans, the 69-year old song and dance man has posted a message on his official website addressing the controversy surrounding his concerts in China in April. Dylan has never previously communicated with his followers in this way, but he has now refuted the suggestion that he allowed the Chinese government to censor his setlist. Several critics – if not all – questioned his motivation, including New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who wrote that Dylan “sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.” In response to such accusations, Dylan wrote on bobdylan.com that the Chinese authorities had not refused him permission to play there, and while “according to Mojo magazine the concerts were attended mostly by ex-pats”, there were not many empty seats and this was not true. “If anybody wants to check with any of the concert-goers they will see that it was mostly Chinese young people that came,” he continued. Dylan added: “The Chinese press did tout me as a 60s icon, however, and posted my picture all over the place with Joan Baez, Che Guevara, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The concert attendees probably wouldn’t have known about any of those people. Regardless, they responded enthusiastically to the songs on my last four or five records. Ask anyone who was there. They were young and my feeling was that they wouldn’t have known my early songs anyway.” In respect to the idea that the Chinese government vetted the setlist, Dylan wrote: “We played all the songs that we intended to play”. The singer turns 70 on 24 May, and with an oblique reference to the happy occasion, the sometime author and radio show host concluded this novel missive: “Everybody knows by now that there’s a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I’m encouraging anybody who’s ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them.”
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May 14 2011, 3:20pm | Comments »
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Karl Marx, part 6: The economics of power
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/09/karl-marx-part-6-the-economics-of-power
Karl Marxand Marxist economics are often accused of reducing humans to mere expendable specks of matter within the greater economic scheme of things
This article titled “Karl Marx, part 6: The economics of power” was written by Peter Thompson, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 9th May 2011 09.00 UTC Having so far concentrated on philosophy and politics we now turn to what was the major part of Marx’s output, namely the economics. But it is in the economics where his political philosophy begins to take on real form. There is not space enough here to cover the enormous range of his economics but there are a few basics which need to be dealt with in this slightly longer piece and which can be fought out below the line as usual. Alan Budd, who was an economic adviser to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s once made an interesting point about Marxist economic theory and government policy on the fight against inflation at the time:
“[People] did see that it would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes – if you like, that what was engineered there in Marxist terms was a crisis of capitalism which re-created a reserve army of labour and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since.”
Marx’s basic starting point was that in contrast to all previous historical epochs capitalism is a system of “generalised commodity production” in which the workers’ abstracted labour power itself became a commodity to be traded. In all previous epochs, human labour had been used to create a surplus product, usually subsistence farming and a surplus used for first bartering and then trading. Under the ancient mode and slavery through to feudalism, the product and the means of producing it was clear; food, clothing, the means of life. You worked for the master and you belonged to the master in one way or another. The German word for serf, for example, is Leibeigener; your body literally belongs to the master. Capitalism liberates you from that and turns you into a free agent, apparently able to enter into a free contract to sell your labour to whomsoever you see fit. You are cast out of your old existence and are set on the route to making your own. The second verse of All Things Bright and Beautiful – “the rich man in his castle/ the poor man at his gate/God made them high and lowly/ and ordered their estate” – no longer applies. Whereas before you were a bondsman, now you are a journeyman and you can set off to make your own fortune, as the fairy tales have it. In economic terms, what before was a tangible surplus product is now transformed into intangible surplus value. You enter into this apparently free contract with an employer but the wage you draw from that employment is only a part of the value you create. Just as before a portion of the cabbages and linen you made belonged to the master, now a proportion of the monetary value you make through the production process belongs to the employer and you will only be employed if a competitive rate of surplus value can be generated through your labour. This is at the root of Marx’s version of the labour theory of value. The employer will provide the machines or tools for the completion of the task (constant capital) while the worker provides the labour power (variable capital). The employer will always be trying to improve labour productivity and can do so in various ways, but all of them boil down to improving the gap between your wage and the amount of value created by your labour power. This means that for Marx the commodity labour power has a special character in that it is the only commodity which can be employed to increase value, while all the others are merely reified forms of dead human labour, useless without labour input. An advanced car-producing robot no more creates value than does a peasant’s shovel. In theory there is no difference here to previous epochs where we accept the labour theory of value because it is measured in tons of cabbages and yards of linen but now that it becomes a commodified and monetarised relationship it also becomes a quasi-mystical one, with value apparently emerging mysteriously out of all sorts of transactions and technologies and with market mechanisms and competition wiping out and obfuscating the distinction between what it costs to produce something and its price. On these threads, for example, a critique of Marx has emerged which posits a kind of paradoxical capitalist utopia in which we have reached 100% automation of production with no labour input at all anywhere by anyone. This reductio ad absurdum is of course as realistic as the world of Arnie’s Terminator or of Joh Fredersen’s Metropolis in which workers become surplus to requirements, but it does serve to illustrate a point because the further question then emerges as to how the goods produced are going to be purchased if no one is earning any wages through the productive process. Under capitalism labour productivity may improve massively, but it can never be reduced to zero because that would remove all demand for the goods produced. You would then have to distribute commodities or vouchers to the entire population based on some sort of criteria not linked to labour input and then where do we end up? Oh, of course, at communism, in which each gives according to their ability and receives according to their need. Capitalist competition over labour productivity thus not only produces its own gravediggers but also provides the shovels (or robots) to finish the job. Labour productivity can be increased in all sorts of traditional ways such as making workers work harder for less money, speeding up the production lines, extending the working day, getting people to work longer for the same or even less money, seeking out newer, cheaper labour sources through globalisation etc and, as Alan Budd points out, all of the above are regularly used, but for Marx they all only put off the dread day of collapse in which the workers realise that the harder and more productively they work, the smaller the proportion of the surplus value they create comes to them. Since the mid-1970s the common way to put this off has been through enormous levels of debt, either by the state or the private individual. It is that tendency which both brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union – which over-borrowed in order to maintain full employment as a political necessity without raising productivity – and the current crisis in the west where a debt-fuelled asset price bubble in order to artificially stimulate demand has created the greatest economic crisis in a century. But for Marx, at the root of it all is the question of how surplus value is created and distributed and, most of all, what this does to human relations and desires. The commodification of labour power also brings with it the commodification of humans and their alienation from both themselves and the products of their labour power. It is an accusation often aimed at Marx that he reduces human beings to mere expendable specks of matter within the greater economic scheme of things, but it could be argued that the opposite is the case and that the whole point of Marxist economic analysis is precisely about trying to bring about a recognition that it is generalised commodity production which has commodified people and that it doesn’t have to be like that. The final two columns in this series will go on to discuss how this process of economic alienation feeds through into religion and ideology and the means by which people manage to cope with being mere playthings of larger forces; how a sense of autonomy, faith and hope are maintained in an apparently constrained, rationalistic and futureless world. This will bring us right back to where we started: the land of Ideologiekritik.
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May 9 2011, 5:15am | Comments »
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An insider’s guide to book fairs
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/03/an-insiders-guide-to-book-fairs
If you’re not in the trade, book fairs can be confusing occasions. These are some useful pointers for novice buyers attending book fairs in the UK and abroad.
This article titled “An insider’s guide to book fairs” was written by Rick Gekoski, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 3rd May 2011 09.26 UTC Just recently home after five days displaying our stock at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, and I’m resting. You need to: it’s a peculiarly exhausting business, exacerbated by the fact that I had flown in from Sydney via London, and kept waking at 2am longing for bacon and eggs. For the first three mornings I eventually got up at 6am and went out to dinner. Worked for me. Great steaks in New York.
We do three fairs a year – California, New York, and London – and none of them are much fun. In the olden days (I feel an old fart moment coming on) fairs had a real buzz about them. During set-up (when dealers unpack their trunks and shelve the books) other dealers would crowd round, checking out each book as it emerged, picking up the occasional bargain. Set-up was why you were there, to see if you could buy something before the public got a look-in, and sell enough in that hectic first few hours to cover your costs.
No more. Things are tighter and tougher, we’ve seen each other’s books in catalogues and online, and there is no excitement during the two-day (too long!) set-up period. We sold one book for $5,000 (£3,000), which is better than five for $4,000, and pretty much in line with what I would have expected. The key to surviving a fair emotionally is to keep expectations realistic, which means low. I set our bottom line hope at sales of $40,000, though whether such a sum is profitable depends on what you have sold. Sometimes we have books on consignment at 20% to us, at others we may be selling something we own – better yet, have owned for ages – and get an entirely positive cashflow boost.
I need one. I have, alas, taken my eye off the ball this last year, with reading for the Man Booker International prize, and the effect on the business has been predictable. Even my bank manager is starting to twitch an eyelid. So it was essential both to get some money in from New York, and to generate a project or two with clients or other dealers: find a collection to buy, an archive to sell, a line to pursue.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, and it may be hard for you to envisage what I’m talking about. People in specialist trades often do this, and lose their audience in a welter of trade jargon and inappropriate assumption that one will be understood. So:
What is an antiquarian book fair, anyway? It is an arena for members of the rare book trade publicly to offer their stock, and for collectors to peruse it.
That sounds a little dull, doesn’t it? OK, then. Dealers sit in their little, lit booths, displaying their wares like girls in Amsterdam windows. A few potential customers drift by. Sometimes money is exchanged. Some pleasure is had. Usually nobody gets hurt, but many wives are not told of the transaction. Or husbands.
What sort of things might one see at the fair? Enticing ones, naturally. Hand-coloured antique maps, letters by Freud or Dickens, leatherbound sets of Jane Austen, rare books on travel, nature or military history, books illustrated by Arthur Rackham or Beatrix Potter, first editions by most of the greatest writers.
Why are first editions valuable? They’re not. Most first editions are worthless, because most books are first editions – that is, not worth reprinting. A tiny number of these first editions are desirable because they are by collected authors, and were printed in small numbers.
How can you tell if a book is a first edition? Generally, it can be assumed unless there is any evidence to the contrary.
Why are some authors collected? Most, because they deserve to be: John Milton, Jonathan Swift, John Keats, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, James Joyce, Graham Greene. Some, because whatever their deserts, people love them: Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, JK Rowling.
Does the condition of the book matter very much? Hugely, as with all collectibles. If a book looks fresh and near-as-damn-it new, it will fetch many times more than a tired and worn copy. With 20th-century books, the presence of the original dust wrapper is crucial. A first edition of Brighton Rock (1938) without the dust wrapper is worth, say, £2,000. With it? I just paid £80,000 for one, on behalf of a customer.
Isn’t that silly? Very. But the argument is that a book without its dust wrapper is as incomplete as a Chippendale chair without its legs.
Do you think that’s a fair argument? No.
How does one know if the asking price is right? There is no “right” price for a rare book, though there are certainly wrong ones. If you buy from a reputable member of the trade, and you are happy with your purchase, then the price is probably right enough.
But isn’t a book worth whatever it fetches? Certainly not. If I convince a muddle-headed plutocrat to pay me £1m for a common book, it doesn’t mean it is worth it. It means I am a crook, and he is an idiot. Books can be under- or over-priced. That’s part of the fun: trying to locate the former and avoid the latter.
When I find what I want, should I ask for a discount? Yes.
Will I get one? These days, for sure.
What advice could you give to a new collector? Only buy what you like. Always buy the best copy you can afford. Buy fewer books, at a higher level. Buy from someone you have reason to trust. Spend 30% more than you can afford.
What about buying and selling at auction? Auctioneers claim that (1) you get the best bargains if you buy at auction, and (2) you can get the best prices if you sell at auction. Both can’t be true, though it is amazing how many people believe it. But about 90% of the books at auction are sold to members of the book trade. It’s best to know what you are doing.
Can’t you get a better deal on ebay, and cut out the middleman? Every now and again you might. You are more likely to end up roasted with an apple in your mouth.
How do you explain the allure of rare books? You either feel it or you don’t. It’s a matter of taste, and inclination, and, like love, doesn’t need to be justified. I think holding a copy of the first edition of Ulysses, or Great Expectations, is thrilling, especially with a presentation inscription by the author. If you don’t feel similarly, you haven’t got the makings of a book collector. In fact, I don’t even think I would like you.
Final note: we ended up with takings of $60,000, which was not bad, and buying three or four things at reasonable prices, that will make one or two of our collectors very happy. I am now eating breakfast in the morning, and dinner in the evening. Maybe I will sleep through the night one day soon.
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May 3 2011, 5:25am | Comments »
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A misplaced May Day dream for the masses
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/29/a-misplaced-may-day-dream-for-the-masses
May Day by John Sommerfield describes a society on the edge. The parallels with today are obvious – but it’s the differences that make it worth reading.
This article titled “A misplaced May Day dream for the masses” was written by Sam Jordison, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 29th April 2011 14.15 UTC It might have associations with people in funny clothes performing arcane rites and with Oxford students getting smashed off their gourds, but most us don’t think about Tories when we think about May Day. As several union leaders have already pointed out, the party’s current desire to replace May Day with Trafalgar Day (supposedly to “lengthen the holiday season”) is not practical so much as ideological. May Day might feel like a natural part of the calendar – but it has only been marked by a bank holiday since 1978, introduced by a Labour government to mark international workers’ day. And that, of course, is why the rightwingers don’t like it. They’d like it even less if they picked up the book that I’ve just been reading: May Day by John Sommerfield. This was written in 1936, but has just been reissued, with excellent timing, by London Books. It describes a society on the edge. The rich are getting richer and the poor are paying for it. The authorities clamp down on protest with the cynical use of force. Someone on a march is killed in an “accident”. The success of a march leads someone to comment: “I don’t think there’ll be so much damned squeamish argument against arming the police.” The parallels with our current troubles are obvious – but it’s the differences that make May Day worth reading. Sommerfield describes a few days in the lives of dozens of different characters across London, showing them at work, at play, down the pub, in bed, making love, feeling regret the day after, giving birth, dying, plotting to overthrow the bosses, plotting to undermine the workers. It’s a broad, ambitious sweep, but it’s all heading in the same direction: the inevitability of a general strike and the exultant victory of the Communist point of view. By the time Sommerfield was writing, Stalin had embarked on one of the biggest murder sprees in human history, but Sommerfield pants for Soviet Britain. So much so that he frequently loses all restraint:
“Then into this sudden pool of quiet splintered an alien voice, a hoarse shout of ‘Workers, all out on May Day. Demonstrate for a free Soviet Britain!’ … This rang in a million ears. Eyes remembered the chalked slogans on walls and pavements. The slogans, the rain of leaflets, the shouts and songs of demonstrators echoed in a million minds.” He also gushes:
“The printing presses were spinning themselves dizzy. There had never been so many leaflets before. They fell like rain, they were scattered like machine gun bullets.” Sommerfield loved his leaflets. He was also absolute in his convictions. For him there are two races in the world – rich and poor and that is where all conflict will lie. “Soon a lot more people will be having to take sides,” he wrote. They did indeed – but not in the way he thought. They would be fighting against fascism, not for “Soviet Britain”. There are plenty of things to be said in the book’s favour, particularly in the ambitious way he looks into so many lives around London, explores their living conditions, and lays bare their pleasures and pains. There’s also plenty more to be said against his writing which veers from the ridiculous to the not-too-bad and never really gets close to the sublime. Yet it’s as an attempt at social realism that it is most fascinating – and most flawed. In 1984 Sommerfield wrote a new forward for the book acknowledging how few favours time had done for his “1930s Communist romanticism”, but also said he hoped the book could be read as “an historical novel – worth reading, now, I hope, in relation to our own times.” To an extent it can. But I read it more as a reflection on a lost past and an exercise in folly. Possibly, it is harsh to judge Sommerfield’s May Day, for getting things so spectacularly wrong. It’s a novel, after all. It deals in fiction, not fact. But then again, while I was reading May Day, I couldn’t help thinking of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novella with the same title. It’s just one mark of Fitzgerald’s genius that his reflections on the day – although written in 1920 – still apply. The protests he describes seem hopeless, futile, distorted by absurd mobs on both sides: “all crowds have to howl”. The rich are oblivious at best, unforgiving and condescending the rest of the time. The tragedies he depicts are universal – but also painfully personal. His lead, Gordon Sterett, is a penniless, struggling artist who has never found his feet since returning from the First World War, but who has found booze and bad company. He is drowning in the tide of history, but his problems are more individual than any Sommerfield manages to describe. He is more real. So too is the world around him. The clothes are smarter, the dancing is more formal and the drinks sound more exotic. No one has a smart phone and radicals print their views on paper. Otherwise, Fitzgerald could be writing about today – or forever. His despair and defeat for the small man rings far more true than Sommerfield’s misplaced dream for the masses. May Day is a crushed dream. It makes the Tory vendetta against the holiday seem even more than usually petty.
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April 29 2011, 9:47am | Comments »
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London walks podcast: Poetry and literature in Kensington Gardens
Sarah Crown strolls through Kensington Gardens, the Serpentine and the ponds, an enduring source of inspiration for authors and poets
This article titled “London walks podcast: Poetry and literature in Kensington Gardens” was written by Presented by Sarah Crown, produced by Francesca Panetta and Lucy Greenwell, with field recordings by Pascal Wyse, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 23rd February 2011 12.08 UTC London’s parks have been a source of escape and inspiration for centuries. Kensington Gardens has seen the likes of JM Barrie, Matthew Arnold and Ezra Pound scribbling lines in pads of paper as they sit on the park’s black benches. Sarah Crown explores the city sanctuary with Nick Lane, the park’s education and community engagement officer. They set off from the ornate Italian Gardens where the fountains play their own sort of music. To test the old adage, “inspiration doesn’t come by appointment”, poet, and Costa Book of the Year winner Jo Shapcott takes a parallel journey on her own through the gardens – with notebook in hand – to get her creative juices flowing. Sarah and Nick meander along the Serpentine towards the statue of Peter Pan, worn down over the decades by the hands of little children. JM Barrie erected the statue in the dead of night as a surprise for the park’s young visitors, to remind them that Peter Pan was dreamt up here, under the bows of the huge plane trees. Author William Boyd values the escape that London’s parks offer and explains why parks are so important to urban writers like him. Ever since he was a child, and especially after his wife died, poet Dannie Abse has sought sanctuary in London’s parks, and reads a poem that reminds him of his own park life. The bridge over the Serpentine is a good spot to survey the Lido, where the Serpentine Swimming Club members plunge into the waters every morning of the year, even if they have to bash through the ice first. Sarah stops by the Serpentine Gallery and then onto the Round Pond, where Paul Cavel, circle-walking meditation expert, takes us round and round the pond as a means of calming our minds, and healing our bodies. They finish in the shadow of Kensington Palace, where you can stop for a cup of tea in the Orangery. You can enjoy this documentary at home by listening here or you can download it on to your phone or mp3 player and take it out as a walking tour. Click here to download. And there is a map to go with the audio too.
Many thanks to: Nick Lane, education and community engagement officer for the park William Boyd Dannie Abse Jo Shapcott The Serpentine Swimming Club The Serpentine Gallery Paul Cavel of Circle Walking
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March 25 2011, 2:01pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Douglas Adams’s Doctor Who story to be novelised
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/24/douglas-adamss-doctor-who-story-to-be-novelised
The lost Doctor Who episodes serial by Hitchhiker’s Guide author Douglas Adams will be published sometime in March 2012
This article titled “Douglas Adams’s Doctor Who story to be novelised” was written by Benedicte Page, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 24th March 2011 14.58 UTC A novelisation of the “lost” Doctor Who serial Shada, scripted by Hitchhiker’s Guide author Douglas Adams in 1979, will be published next year. Adams wrote three series of Doctor Who in the late 1970s, when he was in his twenties and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was first airing as a BBC radio comedy. Shada was intended as a six-part drama to finish off the 17th season, with Tom Baker in the role of the Doctor. The story features the Time Lord coming to Earth with assistant Romana (Lalla Ward) to visit Professor Chronotis, who has absconded from Gallifrey, the Doctor’s home planet, and now lives quietly at Cambridge college St Cedd’s. (The Doctor: “When I was on the river I heard the strange babble of inhuman voices, didn’t you, Romana?” Professor Chronotis: “Oh, probably undergraduates talking to each other, I expect.”) Chronotis has brought with him the most powerful book in the universe, The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey – which, in a typical touch of Adams bathos, turns out to have been borrowed from his study by a student. Evil scientist Skagra, an escapee from prison planet Shada, is on its trail. Large parts of the story had already been filmed on location in Cambridge before industrial action at the BBC brought production to a halt. The drama was never finished, and in the summer of 1980 Shada was abandoned – although various later projects attempted to resurrect it. Douglas Adams’s Doctor Who series are among the very few which have never been novelised, reportedly because the author wanted to do them himself but was always too busy. Gareth Roberts, a prolific Doctor Who scriptwriter, has now been given the job. Publisher BBC Books declared the book “a holy grail” for Time Lord fans. Editorial director Albert De Petrillo said: “Douglas Adams’s serials for Doctor Who are considered by many to be some of the best the show has ever produced. Shada is a funny, scary, surprising and utterly terrific story, and we’re thrilled to be publishing the first fully realised version of this Doctor Who adventure as Douglas originally conceived it.” Ed Victor, the literary agent representing the Douglas Adams estate, said: “The BBC have been asking us for years [to allow a novelisation of Shada] and the estate finally said, ‘Why not?’” Having Roberts novelise the Adams script was “like having a sketch on a canvas by Rubens, and now the studio of Rubens is completing it,” he added. The book will be published in March 2012 as a £16.99 hardback. Adams died in 2001, and a posthumous collection of his work, including the unfinished novel The Salmon of Doubt, was published the following year. A Hitchhiker’s Guide followup, And Another Thing…., written by Eoin Colfer, was published in 2010, but Victor said there were “no plans at the moment” for more such sequels.
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March 24 2011, 10:15am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
EU raids ebook publishers in price fixing investigation
Big companies trying to maximise profits by setting up price fixing cartels? Whatever next. EU story about ebook publishing
This article titled “EU raids ebook publishers in price fixing investigation” was written by Benedicte Page and Leigh Phillips in Brussels, for The Guardian on Friday 4th March 2011 19.36 UTC The European commission has launched morning raids on several publishing houses suspected of fixing the prices of ebooks, as a huge battle for the future of the sector is fought within the publishing and technology industries. Officials in Brussels have refused to say how many or which publishers were targeted although a spokesman for Hachette, famed for its dictionaries, confirmed that it was among them. The inquiry is understood to be focused on French companies. In a statement, the commission said that it “has reason to believe that the companies concerned may have violated EU anti-trust rules that prohibit cartels and other restrictive business practices”. The EU competition spokeswoman, Amelia Torres, said: “We have suspicions of collusion to keep prices high. But if our suspicions prove to be founded, this would have an impact across the EU because ebooks are sold across borders.” She added that the firms involved face fines if the commission finds “hard evidence”. The development comes on the heels of an investigation in January by the UK’s Office of Fair Trading into whether arrangements between certain publishers and retailers over the sale of ebooks “may breach competition law”. Investigation teams have asked many of the biggest London publishing houses, including HarperCollins, Hachette and Penguin, for all records and documents relating to ebook sales. The OFT said the investigation was “at an early stage”, stressing: “It should not be assumed that the parties involved have breached competition law.” It is thought the investigation could last a year. The focus for the price-fixing investigation is understood to be what is called the agency model, which has been adopted by almost all the biggest publishers for their ebook sales. This is distinct from the traditional wholesale model, in which retailers buy the books from the publisher and can then do what they wish with them. Under the agency model, the retailer acts as an agent of the publisher, which itself sets the retail price of the ebooks, with the retailer taking a commission. Publishers see the agency model as crucial because it allows them to trade with Apple, which was already using it for iTunes, and also to control the price at which their ebooks are sold. Until the agency model was imposed, Amazon had been setting a $9.99 (£6) standard price for new bestsellers in the US and discounting the Kindle editions of some of last autumn’s UK bestsellers by as much as 72%. Amazon, the ebook pioneer that makes the Kindle reading platform, unsurprisingly dislikes the agency model. The OFT said it had received “significant” complaints but did not name the sources. Ronald Blunden, Hachette’s head of communications, denied that the company engaged in price fixing. “Emphatically no,” he said. “We are dealing with distributors who have considerable clout. “We found that in the US, electronic retailers began to apply large discounts on ebooks, driving the cost down. Steadily the spread between the price of a printed book and an ebook became so substantial that we felt it was just unacceptable.” “It’s important for the publisher to control the retail price,” Blunden continued. “We don’t want the items sold below cost, as the perceived value of books becomes damaged. Once this happens, can we expect online retailers to absorb the cost of financing the editing and publishing of books?” John Makinson, the Penguin group chief executive, argued that the “very important” agency model contributes to a competitive ebooks marketplace. “To have vibrant competitive markets, it’s important that Apple and the other digital vendors have a place in that market. The agency model made it possible to have that choice,” he said. Makinson added that he saw “a certain irony” in an OFT investigation designed to ensure competition and consumer choice. “That in our view is what the agency agreement has provided,” he said. Novelist Nick Harkaway, author of The Gone-Away World, agreed. “If the agency model is really a problem under EU law, the law is the problem, not the industry,” he said. “Otherwise you fall back into a situation where Amazon controls the market. This is not to demonise Amazon, but they are a massive portion of the physical market and if their wholesale model also dominates the digital book market, it becomes much harder to negotiate with them.” Philip Jones, deputy editor of the trade magazine The Bookseller, said control over pricing was the most single important issue facing publishers. “I don’t think they can convince consumers that ebooks themselves are worth the same as print books, therefore they effectively have to strong-arm them,” he said. “If you allow the market to decide, ebooks will become too cheap and you won’t be able to pay authors, editors, or all the infrastructure that sustains the industry.”
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March 5 2011, 4:16am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Philosophy is supposed to be difficult
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/25/philosophy-is-supposed-to-be-difficult
I look at life lıʞǝ ʇɥıs
This article titled “Philosophy is supposed to be difficult” was written by Stuart Walton, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 25th February 2011 12.01 UTC A piece by Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn in the current issue of the Society of Authors journal addresses the intractable question of whether philosophy ought to be accessible to the general reader. “The great philosophical writers of the past wrote for humanity,” Blackburn begins, enumerating Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill and even Wittgenstein. The rot set in, according to him, during the 20th century, with the academicising of the discipline, although the origins of the corruption can be traced back to Hegel and probably Kant, who had “already taught it to speak German”. As opposed to common-sense utilitarian English, perhaps (assuming we overlook the classical Greek of Blackburn’s first two heroes). It seems a reckless wager at best to portray Plato as “writing for humanity”, when the philosophers in his ideal state are to be kings – that is, not just good at what they do, but rulers over the rest in a hierarchically ordered, rigidly unified polity. If ever a thinker wrote for his own kind, it was him. And, for that matter, do the Philosophical Investigations of Wittgenstein really speak to everybody? There is nothing new in the phenomenon of theorists in any technical branch of knowledge wondering aloud about whom they are talking to, apart from each other. In the early part of the last century, something of the same conversation was happening in theoretical physics. Ernest Rutherford declared – though the quote is often misattributed to Einstein – that “it should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid”, and Einstein himself claimed that all physical theories ought to be capable of so straightforward a description that “even a child could understand them”. But is this such an obviously helpful ideal? Most people don’t expect to be able to understand other kinds of specialist discourse. The lay person would understand little or nothing of micro-electronic engineering, has no interest in doing so, and is content to leave it to the initiated. But philosophy is about the world we live in, and our lives in it, Blackburn objects, waving the flag for the enriching humanities against the sterilities of technology. Therefore everybody should be able to understand it. On this view, what differentiates philosophy from science is the fact that it poses questions about the world we live in and our perceptions of it, and even makes suggestions as to what we ought to do in our lives. Neither of those approaches is absent from theoretical science, though. What would be the point of researches into the causes of obesity or the effects of climate change if they didn’t tell us, or at least strive to tell us, what we ought to do about such matters? The point is that philosophy is as much a technical discipline as these other sciences are, and as little capable of being diluted down to words of one syllable. One of the reasons for this is that philosophy isn’t necessarily just a set of conclusions. To many of the most recent western thinkers, it is first and foremost a methodology, rather than an attempt to arrive at a fixed theory. The Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno declared, “The crux is what happens in it, not a thesis or a position… Essentially, therefore, philosophy is not expoundable. If it were, it would be superfluous; the fact that most of it can be expounded speaks against it.” Popularising philosophy became a lucrative publishing trend in the 1990s, with the likes of Alain de Botton, AC Grayling and Jostein Gaarder offering homogenised summaries of the principal thinkers, often presented chronologically as though they represented a gradual progress towards enlightenment, and mined for what they could tell us, in the era of self-help literature, about how to be content with our lives. In their bland readability, these books defeated their own avowed project of getting everybody interested in the great philosophers, by confessing how unreadable the texts of Kant and Hegel themselves must be. In a final somersault, Blackburn states that making philosophy accessible should not be a question of simplifying it but of bringing people up to its level. So the problem turns out to lie after all not with the attempt to interpret the world, but with the faculties of those who want to hear it interpreted. Always supposing the point isn’t, rather, to change it.
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February 25 2011, 6:50am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Can Scandinavian crime fiction teach socialism?
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/24/can-scandinavian-crime-fiction-teach-socialism
I don’t know if it teaches anything at all, but DI Lund and co do make compulsive viewing over 20 episodes shown in ten weeks on BBC 4. Great stuff.
This article titled “Can Scandinavian crime fiction teach socialism?” was written by Deborah Orr, for The Guardian on Thursday 24th February 2011 09.00 UTC Who killed Nanna Birk Larsen? The question grips the relatively small, but avid, band of people who are following The Killing, a Danish crime series being screened on BBC4. The Killing throws up plenty of other questions, too. One even feels a strange tug of interest in Copenhagen’s local political scene because the abduction, rape, torture and murder of a 19-year-old student seems inextricably linked to a number of people fighting a city election. Alliances between various political parties ebb and flow, as the turns of the plot hurl suspicion at different candidates. One of the many things The Killing asks is this: are political coalitions really healthy? It is no doubt coincidence that the query is so particularly pertinent in Britain right now. But there is a definite reason why a slice of Scandinavian crime fiction should be actively concerned with framing socio-political debate. It is part of what is expected of the genre in this part of the world, and has been since Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö started publishing what came to be known as the Martin Beck series, in 1965. The couple, former journalists, conceived 10 crime novels that would provide a deliberate critique of what they viewed as the degeneration of Sweden. Marxists themselves, they intended to use the crime genre to illustrate the advantages of socialistic approaches to social problems. That sounds unbearably didactic and worthy. But the tremendous thing is that the books work first and foremost as crime fiction. In fact, they are reckoned by the cognoscenti to be among the finest and most influential crime novels ever written. Essentially, the pair challenged the convention of the lone genius private detective, replacing him with a group of police officers, led by the low-key Beck, who depended on each other to solve cases – and also, as a matter of course, put up with, or worked round, colleagues who were not so gifted. Maverick individualism was out, patient and humane people management was in. Thus, the ever-shifting group ploughed through many and varied crime scenes – crime scenes that usually in some way or other questioned the permissive values espoused by the liberal left so successfully at that time. It seems to me that in the pages of these Swedish police procedurals, all those years ago, Sjöwall and Wahlöö were examining contradictions that the British left even now refuses properly to acknowledge. The socialist left and the liberal left have little in common, with Blairism a shining example of how difficult it is to “triangulate” them. Hard work and compromise is needed before social freedom and state welfare can be shackled together. Even then, perhaps, the resulting beast is an impossible chimera. Is it too much to speculate that the current huge vogue for Scandinavian crime fiction is somehow a tacit acknowledgement of the need to have this debate, and the fear of what conclusions it might draw? Henning Mankell, in his Wallander series, now televised in two versions in Britain, makes no bones about the fact that he is continuing in the Martin Beck tradition. Stieg Larsson, who meant his phenomenally successful Millennium trilogy to be a 10-part work when he first started writing it, has succeeded in igniting exactly the sort of debate, among feminists anyway, that Sjöwall and Wahlöö expected. Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbo, with 5m sales worldwide and film deals in the works, similarly uses sexual crime as an expression of the extremes of discord among men and women. This “metaphor” is somewhat unanswerable, on the face of it. But the details are quite controversial. The women who are killed in his novel The Snowman, for example, stand accused of denying men their paternal roles, and messing up their children in the process. Discuss that thesis in sexually and politically mixed company, and passions can run high quite fast. Nesbo is not a reactionary, despite the “traditional family values” cast that can be placed on his bestselling novel’s storyline. Like his peers and predecessors, he deals with problems inherent in social democracy, problems that are not that usefully divided between “left” and “right”. It is often said now that the two opposing terms have become “meaningless”, since both left and right contain a range of values from libertarian to authoritarian. In truth, the political tension is between freedom and regulation, often between whether the social realm should be regulated in order to benefit the economic realm, or the other way round. Social democracy, if it is about anything, surely, is about constantly striving to get that tricky balance right. The British are used to believing that the Scandinavians, especially the Swedes, have social democracy cracked, while Britain is far from being a socially democratic country. The truth, however, is much more nuanced. Britain shares many of the values and difficulties of the Scandinavian states, and of other European states that Britain tends to view as being much more socially democratic than we are. That was emphasised in a depressing report yesterday from risk analyst Maplecroft, which ranked Britain the 10th most likely country of 163 to undergo another economic crisis. Sweden is fourth, and Japan is the only non-European country to make it into the top 10, at nine. The shared challenges are “ageing populations, substantial levels of debt and high public spending on health and pensions”. Each of these, of course, is already high on the national agenda, the subject of raucous, sometimes hysterical debate. The logical solution – if there is a solution at all – is for everyone to live very healthy and disciplined lives, expecting to look after more vulnerable members of the family whenever necessary, and seeking only specialist or temporary help from a well-ordered state as a last resort. It is a vision that unites authoritarian left and right, but scares the bejesus out of free-marketeers and social liberals. All of these groups, however, can probably find something compelling in a chunk of Scandinavian crime fiction, which possibly owes its great popularity to its ability to offer sensationalist escape, but of a kind that is grounded all too recognisably in the real world.
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February 24 2011, 4:41am | Comments »
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