Under the banner of the financial crisis, recent months have seen management threaten departments and jobs in post-92 and Russell group universities alike. Although no clear national pattern of cuts has emerged, philosophy has been singled out by several institutions. Threats to philosophy at Liverpool and King's College London were greeted with international outcry and management retreat. Recent news that philosophy recruitment at both undergraduate and postgraduate level at Middlesex University will be terminated is a particularly terrible blow, both to the standing of philosophy in the UK and to the future of critical thought in our universities as a whole.

Nina Power of Infinite Thought at the Guardian Comment is Free, the rest here

KCH

The most interesting thing I’ve ever read on the subject of linguistic diversity has nothing to do with immigration; it’s in the late historian Eugen Weber’s 1976 book “Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914.” There, Weber (who died in 2007) cited France’s catastrophic defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 as a key factor in its modernization. Weber sketches a nineteenth-century France where dozens of regional patois were spoken in lieu of French—as a result of which, soldiers in the same outfit couldn’t communicate with each other; in which illiteracy was rampant—as a result of which, soldiers couldn’t read maps or manuals; in which most general education was religion-centered—as a result of which, France’s military technology was vastly inferior to Germany’s. As a result, France’s new postwar regime, the Third Republic (which lasted until Germany’s 1940 invasion), instated a policy of free, mandatory, secular education in the French language, by means of a unified national educational bureaucracy that prevails to this day

Richard Brody at the New Yorker

While staying with my mother I watched all 5 seasons of The Wire: to begin with I got my mother a 3-DVD subscription, but she wasn't enjoying some of the things I ordered so I took out an extra subscription of my own. We watched the first few episodes of The Wire together, but she didn't like it much. She found the dialogue of some of the black characters hard to follow and was depressed by the poor ungrammatical English. I talked about the political history of standardization of languages/legitimacy of one form of a language following centralization of power / unification (with reference to Britain, France, Germany, Italy), the pedagogical enforcement of a particular form as legitimate obliterating the means by which the categories of standard and nonstandard have arisen.

(King Charles' Head. Yes.)

I've had people shrug at what they saw as trivial disagreements over the copy-editing of The Last Samurai. For better or worse, my approach to the text came after a lot of thought on purity of language. I think I can understand a wider range of Englishes than many people - I have British friends who find American regional dialects hard to follow, American friends who can't understand British regional dialects, I've never had a problem with any spoken English I can remember hearing. N. F. Blake, Non-Standard Language in English Literature makes an obvious point: the conventions of standard written English are not an accurate representation (phonetic, syntactic, other) of the way English-speakers of some approved category actually speak. That is, it's not the case that, as it might be, properly educated speakers generate spoken language of which this standard written English is simply a transcription. This is a fiction which literary representation of dialect encourages: nonstandard versions are spelled phonetically, standard English is spelled conventionally. Similarly, an acceptably nonstandard writer - a small child who can't be expected to have mastered the conventions - can be allowed to write unconventionally, while an educated adult, it seems, must have even scribbled notes cleaned up before they go into print. I don't like that convention, and I tried in writing the book to be closer to what felt right. (That is, you don't wait to make written language closer to speech or thought until you have need to mark a character as a nonstandard user of English.) I can see that to someone who hasn't thought about it details of commas, italics, capitalization and so on might look trivial, but that was roughly why it mattered.

(King Charles' Head.)

If there were three simultaneous vacancies on the Supreme Court, Washington would be a war zone, and the volume of direct mail would solve the post office's financial problems. Not so with the Federal Reserve. When the Fed is discussed in a political context, the talk normally comes from the fringe (as in the Ron Paul fan club's chants of "End the Fed"). Yet its decisions powerfully affect everyday life in a way that's rare for a court decision. ...

For all that elected officials talk about how their policies will create jobs or their opponents' policies will destroy them, in normal times it's the Fed -- not the White House, not Congress -- that determines the pace of job creation. (Its dual mandate from Congress, after all, is to promote stable prices with maximum employment.) When the Fed's Open Market Committee wants the economy to grow faster, it reduces interest rates. When it wants to slow things down, it raises them. The committee's willingness to cut rates to historically low levels in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks and the dot-com bust helped avoid a severe recession -- but many also think that its willingness to hold them so low for so long fueled the credit boom that led to our current bust.

Matthew Yglesias via Ezra Klein

Save Middlesex Philosophy

I've just learned that Middlesex University has decided to close its philosophy department. Those familiar with the distinction of the department will, I know, be as horrified as I am. A campaign to save the department is underway (successful campaigns have already saved philosophy departments at King's and Liverpool, so public outcry may work where the department's mere demonstration of excellence has not); the petition can be signed here.

code like a girl

Mooching around online as one does (reculer pour mieux sauter) I find

a) a somewhat unfocused piece on the PEN website on a recent conference session, originally entitled Women, Sex, Fiction, renamed Gender, Translation, Diversity, contemplating the fact that women are 80% of readers of fiction but are underrepresented in the Library of America (3%) and win fewer literary prizes.

b) a piece in the Guardian by Kira Cochran on women and depression

and

c) a piece in the Guardian by Zoe Williams on a successful class action against Birmingham County Council for pay discrimination

The tribunal's finding is this: women employees have been systematically underpaid and discriminated against by this council, for as long as the Equal Pay Act has been in force. Female staff on the same pay grade as men (cleaners versus bin men, for instance) could expect to earn much less, to start with, and go on to be paid much less in bonuses. The starkest example given was one case of a refuse collector taking home £51,000 in one year, while women on his level received less than £12,000.

Paul Doran, of the firm Stefan Cross that successfully brought this case, told me: "The bonuses were a sham, there was no monitoring, they were paid simply for men turning up to work, doing their jobs properly."

I've always been partial to the theory that depression is suppressed rage.

With regard to literary honours, the question seems to me to be not merely whether the women nominated are unfairly treated; there is a larger question relating to obstacles confronting ambitious women writers. If we look at the last three women to win the Nobel Prize, Lessing, Jelinek and Müller are all strong, angry, aggressive - and it does seem to me that ambitious work calls for a certain ruthlessness. The culture of publishing, especially American publishing, selects for niceness - this applies to men as well as women, but behaviour that is perceived as hostile and confrontational in a woman would not necessarily count against a man, and polite requests from a woman get waved aside. Loyal readers will remember the great copy-editing saga, in which the hapless author made two trips to New York to try to avert possible problems, politely reminded everyone of the terms of her contract, and had the copy-edited version reinstated behind her back...

My impression, unfortunately, is that both men and women feel more comfortable asking women to make allowances when family life interferes with work -- agents, editors, producers, directors, lawyers tell me they will take care of something, don't, then explain that they couldn't get around to it because they were having a baby, or had just had a baby, or had to do something or other with their small children, or had to go out of town on long weekends to stay with a retired parent, or, you know, just had to leave the office to take their dog for a walk. It's one of the things one has to bear in mind when one thinks of publishing an ambitious book: the more demands it makes on other people involved, the more vulnerable it will be, and the higher the requirement for niceness reserves.

wha-?

The Schöneberger Kiez is not the prettiest part of Berlin. In fact, you could say it's downright ugly. The streets are full of betting shops, all-night Köfte joints and Döner Kebab restaurants. On Kurfürstenstraße, prostitutes ply their trade day and night. Sex shops stand next to pawnshops. Outside the Turkish supermarkets, hawkers sing the praises of their produce: "Strawberries, strawberries, €1. Tasty, tasty strawberries. Ladies and gentlemen, only €1." This is the Schöneberg 'ghetto'. And right in the thick of it, on Potsdamer Straße near Bülowstraße, is IsiGym Boxsport Berlin, one of the city's most famous boxing clubs - the hangout of such renowned pros as Oktay Urkal and Cengiz Koç, and the breeding ground for a new generation of Berlin boxers.

[Robert Rigney, Exberliner, English-language magazine, not online]

Um.

PP is currently camping out at Steinmetzstraße 3, in the heart (we now learn) of the Schöneberg ghetto. We are HERE:


Um. Who writes these things, anyway?

Look. Unusually for Berlin, there are stores open 24 hours, or close to. Just around the corner, on Potsdamer Straße, is a huge (shock horror) Turkish grocery store with fruit and veg piled high on the pavement which is open (shock horror) 24 hours except on Sunday. The produce is not, admittedly, as beautiful as the fruit and veg you would find on display in Paris - but that, sadly, is Berlin. Inside are (apart from the usual grocery store offerings) 20 varieties of olive, 10 of feta, stuffed vine leaves, stuffed artichoke hearts, humus, pureed avocado, all sorts of delicacies. Outside, yes, the horror, the horror, men offering sliced watermelon and such at a knockdown price.

And yes, other places are open 24 hours or close to. Places selling, shock horror, döner kebab. Pastries. Chinese takeaway.

At 2am, if you go out for Chinese noodles, a girl in shorts and thigh-high boots may be in the queue. At other times of day, if you go under the elevated rail of the U2, a girl in shorts and boots may be standing by the road. Ye-es.

It's also maybe 5 minutes by bus up to Potsdamerplatz, with the Staatsbibliothek, the Philharmonie, the Neuenationalgalerie, the Sony Center, the Arsenal (Institute for Film and Video Art).

Now, it's not much like my mother's old neighbourhood in Chevy Chase; no. It's also not much like her new place in Leisure World. But, um, a ghetto? Or even 'ghetto'? Äaaaahmmmm...

inside out

Not a very appropriate fear for a ballerina, for whom dancing is, by definition, a conscious act of loss. A ballet dancer goes onstage on a given night, in a specific theater, in a specific ballet and executes, in a specific fraction of musical time a movement that is already past just as it appears. And it takes far more than 10,000 hours of practice and repetition to make this movement exquisite, worthy. A dancer’s entire career consists of these moments of non-existence; they are not even fleeting, they are, somehow, never there at all, a shadow in someone else’s mind at best.

Toni Bentley at NYRB blog