The optimist goes into a dark place and comes back with hope

Last night I went to see Jim Crace speak at the Birmingham Conservatoire, an event scheduled at the tail-end of this year's Birmingham Book Festival.

He was introduced by, and later entered a staged dialogue with, John Dolan (of the Museums Libraries and Archives Council - or MLA - and formerly Head of Birmingham Libraries). It's always interesting to see people in different contexts. I last saw John Dolan speak at the PLA public library conference in Glasgow a couple of weeks ago. Last night John seemed equally at home chatting to a prominent author, and it suited his relaxed style.

But the star of the show was Jim Crace, who turned out to be a very engaging speaker. It's one thing to have a local author (Jim lives in Moseley, not far from my house, and where I socialise), but it's another thing entirely to have one of international literary renown. I've read two of his novels, Quarantine and Being Dead, both of which stand out as very well-executed works of contemporary fiction. Even his speech glitters with metaphors and is perfectly composed.

There were two particular strands in his speech which interested me. Firstly, he declared himself to be the "least autobiographical author you're likely to encounter". This made me think about the nature of contemporary fiction. I daresay that George Eliot's Middlemarch was not so autobiographical either - it's hard to imagine a woman in early 19th century Britain being able to experience directly those of an up and coming doctor, such as her character Doctor Lydgate. My Dad used to say that no-one put into words the experience of being a research scientist better than George Eliot. But then 19th century writers such as Eliot, Dickens and Tolstoy were using an authorial voice, a voice that they must have been completely comfortable with. In contrast, today's writers usually write in the voice of a character. Crace spoke, unusually, about some work in progress - a novel in which he's exploring the realisation that in his own political past, he wasn't as courageous as others were. To have written about a highly courageous political activist, therefore, would have moved him away from his strength and range, and was therefore not feasible .

The second main strand of his speech was no less than the USA. His latest novel (of which I now have a signed copy following a pleasant little chat with him at the end) is called The Pesthouse. This came out of Crace's ambivalent feelings towards the States. On the one hand, he professes a love for the States, for providing a home over centuries to various groups, from the Irish escaping the potato famine of the 1840s, to the Jews arriving from the East European Schtetls. And yet, it is also strongly associated with cultural invasions - the coca cola can in the South Seas, as Crace said. So to address these feelings, Crace has, in The Pesthouse, invented a future where the USA has become a failing nation from which everyone is fleeing. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this paradox is realised in the narrative. Crace concludes this strand by suggesting that maybe the things he loves about the USA are eternal, whilst the things he hates may only be the duration of one single presidential term!

And as for the quotation from Crace in the title? Well that didn't have anything to do with either strand of the talk. It's just a good quote.

Misleading Amazon Star Ratings

I have been a member of a book group for over 5 years. There's been a few personnel changes during that time - one or two people have moved away, one person found that she couldn't find any reading time once she'd had her first baby, and we welcomed two friends, one of whom had just moved into the area, and the other approached us as she was fed up with her current book club which was little more than a dining club for middle-class mothers. But essentially we've remained constant. In May this year we celebrated our 5th birthday with a long weekend in Hay on Wye. It was lovely. Over the lifetime of the reading group, we've evolved a number of rules of engagement. First of all, we take it in turns to host the meetings, and the hostess (we're female only) has to make a meal as well as serve drinks and so on. For about the past year and a half, the hostess has additionally had to propose three books for election, the book receiving the most votes being the one that we'll all read the following month and review at the next hostess's home. You get the picture, I'm sure.

So as the beginning of September loomed, and with it my hosted meeting, my mind started turning around suitable books, and much perusing on Amazon's Listmania! ensued. I felt that it would be interesting to put a work of non-fiction for the first time, and evolved various criteria for how I would select such a book. It had to be reasonably accessible, for example. And not too long - 30o pages max. The right non-fiction refused to materialise.

Finally, I was waiting for a train one day at Birmingham New Street station, when it occurred to me that any non-fiction book for sale in a train station bookshop should be intrinsically accessible. I started browsing through the History session and my attention was drawn to "The Thames : England's River" by Jonathan Schneer. My interest in the history of London was crystallised about a year ago when I discovered that until relatively recently, the Thames was only one of a number of rivers in London, and I've always thought it a privilege to be living so close to one of the greatest cities in the world. So maybe this book on the Thames was it. This is when a further selection criteria came into play. I had decided that I would only pick a book with an average 5 star rating on.

When I got home I found Schneer's book on Amazon and browsed through the reviews. To my pleasure, I found that every single reviewer had given it a star rating, and there was a number of references to how readable it was. I had found my non-fiction book.

On Sunday September 9th, we all met at my house, and after discussing the last book (The Road by Cormac McCarthy) and eating dinner, I presented my three options. There was slight consternation at the appearance of a history book, but people had open minds and it was voted in (by a narrow margin, it has to be said, and I had to use the deciding vote which is the hostess's perogative!)

A couple of weeks later, then, I started reading The Thames. The first chapter, which went through the prehistoric era, was fascinating, but as we progressed, it started getting a bit hard going. My head was spinning with the speed of the narrative, with important eras such as the Tudors flashing by in less than a page. I experienced mounting panic as I thought of my friends struggling through this stuff, knowing it was all my fault. The narrative did settle down a bit, for example the Blitz had its own chapter, and was incredibly interesting. I did learn quite a bit, but the book was definitely faulty - it was episodic and the metaphors of the river were a bit laboured to say the least.

Last Sunday we all met up at Sally's house to discuss it. We all agreed that it was pompous, with no real narrative flow, and dubiously selected historical episodes, well those of us who had managed to read it agreed anyway. Everyone really wants to choose the book that is unanimously loved and remembered (even though these make for pretty dull discussions), and I'm no exception. Truly on the back foot, I explained that I'd made sure that it had an average 5 star recommendations on Amazon before selecting it. We all speculated about how couild this be so? The best explanation we came up with was that the recommendations might have been from Anglophile Americans. I agreed to go back and check.

So this lunchtime I've been onto Amazon to revisit those recommendations, and am disappointed to find that the 6 reviews have been written by only two people. In fact only two people, namely Kurt Messick and J Chippendale (who incidentally are both English) are responsible for all 6 reviews. Each have written one review and then posted it three times.

Are Kurt and J. friends of the author or are they working for the publisher, perhaps? I think we should be told.

Shouldn't Amazon be checking for duplicate reviews that could be (deliberately or otherwise) distorting the overall rating, perhaps? Yes definitely. The average star rating is displayed prominently with the book's description, right from the initial search results onwards. I for one, use it as a guiding factor when purchasing all sorts of stuff on Amazon, including books. Next time, I'll check the reviews a little more carefully, especially when it's not just my own enjoyment but that of other people that's at stake.

Be who you are, 100%

On Sunday, I went to the funeral of Dave Hallsworth, aged 78. He died a few weeks ago, on 30th August, but the donation of his body to medical research - his express wish - lifted the usual constraints of time and place, so we were able to celebrate his life and mourn his passing on a Sunday in the majestic surroundings of the Palace Hotel in Manchester.

Dave, like his wife Elsie who survives him, was a life-long fighter. He was entirely true to himself, ruthlessly honest with everyone he engaged with, and battled to change the world in line with his beliefs.

Dave and Elsie had two sons and some (at least two - not sure how many exactly) grandchildren. Part of Dave will undoubtedly live on, then, in future generations.

But Dave's legacy transcends the biological. Mick Hume, one of the speakers at the funeral (who also gives Dave an honourable mention in Monday's Times), described Dave as the most vehement and uncompromising atheist that he had ever known (never having met my Dad, presumably). And yet Mick expressed his hope that Dave's spirit was at work in some way in that room on Sunday.

When someone like Dave Hallsworth, one of the great men of the British 20th century imo, dies, the sadness that we feel should gradually give way to something more enduring and edifying. Whether we remember the things someone once said, using them as a tool to fashion our own thoughts and ideas, or somehow try to incorporate something of the essence of that person in the way we live, we should apply more than a narrow biological definition to Legacy. We all have a legacy to build and offer to future generations, whether we are parents or childless.

Today, as I remembered the man who was famously court-martialled for attempting to set up a trade union in the Royal Navy (!), I thought of Dave's energetic fearlessness, his tireless drive for a more just world, and I felt that the day became more intense, more purposeful, as I endeavoured to be what I am, 100%, and all of the time.

Impressions of Thailand

I got back from our three week holiday in Thailand on Sunday (19th August – same day as their referendum on the constitution). I had a great time, especially in Bangkok which is such an exciting city (though loads of people we met couldn’t get out of the place quickly enough). I remember clearly the point, in the early 1990s, at which I realised that something really dynamic and exciting was going on in South East Asia, and I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to get out there and see it for myself.

I particularly enjoyed getting to grips with a country about which I previously knew very very little. I read the Bangkok Post most days and tried to piece together some robust impressions, combining my reading with my observations whilst travelling.

Obviously the referendum was the most significant theme in the country and was on the front page of the Bangkok Post most days. It wasn’t difficult to get a sense of censorship and manipulation in the media’s treatment of the issue, and this impression was confirmed by my friend Supanza, who has been following the news avidly from her new home here in Birmingham. I look forward to discussing this in greater detail when she and her husband Mark come over to our house for dinner in a couple of weeks’ time. I’ll try to resist making one of the dishes that we learnt to make on our Thai cookery course on an organic farm just outside Chiang Mai.

I think that the most acute comment I read about the new constitution was in Bangkok Post about a week ago. It said that if a group of military chiefs can stage a coup simply on the basis of corruption and write a new constitution for the nation’s consideration, then the biggest problem that arises is one of ongoing instability. Because if one group of military chiefs can do that, then presumably in a year or so, some other group, making the same perception of corruption, can just go ahead and do the same thing all over again.

Of course, one of the most striking elements of Bangkok is the sex tourism. According to a thriller I read called Bangkok Eight, if you take the whole of the Thai female population that is reasonably physically attractive, 20% of them will prostitute themselves at some stage in their lives. And the second statistic that I found amazing, is that the West2East prostitution in Thailand, so prevalent in areas such as Sukhumvit Soi 4, represents only about 5% of the overall sex tourism of Thailand i.e. the rest is Thais serving Thais, in venues such as barber shops. That makes for one hell of a sex industry. The novel explores (in a fairly superficial sort of way) how Buddhism can accommodate prostitution to an extent. This made me remember our trip to Cuba a few years ago, where there was unquestionably more social tension around prostitution than is the case in Thailand – and I see that as a combination of the Catholic Church and the Revolution (which justified itself partly on the basis of eradicating exploitation of Cubans by Americans).

Another interesting discovery I made in the Bangkok Post was that the “happiness level” of Thailand (the so-called Land of Smiles) is actually quite low. The article attributed this mainly to economic factors, specifically to job insecurity (fear of low labour costs in China) and the credit boom which is engendering high stress levels over debt payment.
Maybe one of the effects of the Thai credit boom is the impressive retail sector of Bangkok. I’ve honestly never experienced anything like it. The most recent shopping mall to spring up is called the Siam Paragon (see image above), and it’s wonderful. Highlights for me were the Ferrari showroom (on the second floor!!), the amazing bookshop on the fourth floor (where I bought a disappointing Thai novel called Chalida – a Thai family drama), and the cinema on the top floor (where we were initially tempted by Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 3D, but settled for The Simpsons. It was fascinating to see every single person stand up for the Thai National Anthem – I myself have only once in my life stood up for the British National Anthem, though I accept that I’m exceptional in that sense). And Siam Paragon was only one of a whole series of malls in Bangkok, many of which ran into each other, and all of which were several storeys high.

Consumerism in both Thailand and Malaysia (we stayed in Kuala Lumpur for a few days in the middle of the trip) seemed to be conducted exclusively in English language. I couldn’t help feeling that some of the impact of the branding would be lost in translation. For example, Bobby Brown’s eye-shadow colours have English names, and I wonder how many Thais will appreciate the nuances of a colour called Heather.

There are definitely pockets of poverty in Thailand, but the Economist reported last week that the rich – poor gap is not as wide in Thailand as it is in some other Asian countries.

Thankfully my enjoyment of Thailand was not confined to reading Bangkok Post. The Thai cookery course I alluded to was a fantastic day spent with a lovely international crowd, mostly childless which is always good. You can’t fail to be impressed by the ultra-modern skyline of Kuala Lumpur, and we ate wonderful food in both countries. I’m glad we tried Malayan food, which is a bit more elusive in Malaysia than Thai cuisine is in Thailand. We spent 6 days on a lovely island called Koh Chang, which is very close to Cambodia. We made friends with a really nice couple from Vienna, who were staying in a nearby resort, and we enjoyed the time we spent with them. The malls of Bangkok and also the night market of Chiang Mai are both great shopping experiences. And Thai people are really really really friendly and polite, and they’re living in one of the safest places that I’ve ever visited.

The disappointments were few and far between, but I suppose the Floating Market didn't really live up to expectations - it's little more than a tourist trap these days, elephant riding is definitely over-rated, but bamboo rafting is the experience you should avoid at all costs, as it's simply the most tedious way of spending 40 minutes that the tourist industry has yet to come up with.

Revish raises interesting branding issues around Web 2.0

My colleague Richard Wallis yesterday pointed me to a book review site www.revish.com which has been set up by Dan Champion as a serious book review, filtering out lite reviews by imposing a 250 minimum word count on each review. Intrigued, I had a look.

I spent a fair while browsing around the site, but I was more or less immediately struck by how solidly middle-brow the reviews were. As far as I can see, and I've had a good look, this seems to be quite consistent across reviews and reviewers. There were one or two heavyweights with reviews of novels such as Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby (reviewer didn't like it; I loved it, but the review was solid) and Pynchon's Gravity's rainbow (reviewer loved it; I'm scared of it, having read Pynchon's The crying of lot 49, nearly losing my sanity in the process). So what I'm saying upfront is that this isn't about me thinking that I'm too good for www.revish.com, although in passing, it's a shame that the reviews aren't really much better than Amazon's.

The really interesting thing is from a marketing perspective. If you decide to target a particular market segment, in this case serious readers, to a Web 2.0 (therefore defined around participation) site, then how to control that effectively. I'm not sure whether the measure of imposing a minimum word count was effective in differentiating www.revish.com from Amazon et al. Some reviewers just fill the space with a summary of plot, rather than engage deeply and critically with the text. You may have a particular niche in mind for a Web 2.0 site, then, but the all-important participants may have different ideas, and ultimately they will determine the natureof the site, the creator of the site merely setting up a shell for their content. If the site really takes off, and the creator wants to advertise, then how to define the audience. This point is a general issue in marketing with the "new media" but I think that participative sites such as www.revish.com raise particular issues.

Gina Owens

Gina Owens died late last night at the Macmillan Unit, Frenchay Hospital, Bristol. She had her closest friends and relatives around her.

When I visited her, two weeks ago, it was clear that beneath her dressing gown she had become thin and frail. She put her hands to her bald head whilst articulating her fear of dying.

But I will remember the Gina I knew in Manchester in the 1990s, with her clear and incisive mind, strong and healthy but never overweight physical frame, and shiny thick blonde hair. The Gina that thrived before the ravages of non-Hodgkins lymphoma and two punishing rounds of chemotherapy took hold.

Above all, I will remember that it was Gina who told me that 20th century international relations wre centred on the containment of Germany. That food production and market dynamics are fundamentally incompatible. And the biggest point of contact that I had with her when I visited her two weeks ago - when I said that everything in life was about people, and she looked at me and nodded in fierce agreement.

Collaborative fiction using the blog medium

My friend Bill and I have embarked on a really exciting adventure.

Bill set up a fictional blog back in 2005, and the narrative is basically set in a futuristic institution, where a number of imprisoned inhabitants use a blog to communicate with each other, moderated by the institution's staff. It is partly a satire about New Labour forms of authoritarianism. It is called Community Fair, which as you can see features on my blogroll.

Bill is an expert on 18th century culture, and has told me in the past about novelists at that time being far more collaborative than they would subsequently become in the 19th century when individualism truly took hold on society. When Richardson, for example, was writing his epistolary novel, Clarissa, in serial form, he would receive letters from readers when it was still incomplete and this would guide the denouement of the plot to a certain extent. Bill was hinting very heavily for such feedback on his blog, but was doomed to be disappointed for a long time.

It was only when I started this blog that I saw very clearly what form such collaboration should take.

On Sunday, I decided to put a comment on one of the postings of Community Fair. I have always been particularly intrigued by one of its characters, Roxanne, who is quite feisty, so I decided to pretend that I was a long lost friend of hers and sent a posting along the lines of "Roxanne, is that really you... where have you been all this time", without telling Bill that I was doing it.

An hour or so later I received a text message from a very excited Bill, and we began to talk about the possibilities and pitfalls of developing this fictional collaboration.

We briefly considered the idea of agreeing in advance a meta-narrative that would guide interactions between Sarah (it's funny being a real person AND a fictional character at the same time and it'll be interesting to see how that pans out) and Roxanne. But we dismissed that approach because it's been done before. It's basically the approach that Mike Leigh takes in his improvised plays and films. We want to do something truly experimental. For us it's not enough to do something that's more or less been done before but on a new medium.

So now that Roxanne has replied to Sarah, I have to look back at all Roxanne's previous postings as well as the reply, and compose a response that will move the narrative forward whilst remaining consistent with her past.

The novel has always been connected to a specific period in human development, and maybe it's a bit tired by now, so will it start to be superseded by more collaborative forms of story-telling? Only time will tell.

The Holocaust on YouTube

Yesterday, in a marathon 4 hour successful attempt at study evasion, I sat and watched almost endless videos on YouTube.

It was Holocaust Day - something I always remember because it's my brother Richard's birthday, and besides, we have a grandparent of Jewish lineage.

After watching God knows how many music videos, and a handful of entertaining home-made ones (I can certainly recommend Bride has Massive Hair Wig Out), I remembered it was Holocaust Day. Unusually there seemed nothing on the TV to commemorate it, so I searched for original footage on YouTube.

I found, without much difficulty, a series of videos called Nazi death camps : Cruel British footage of liberations. These clips each had a huge warning about the shocking nature of the material, how it was completely unedited, and this seemed to be borne out by the comments on the first page.

It's 8:45 long, longer than I'd usually tolerate on YouTube, and I prepared for some seriously shocking stuff. It showed the British liberation of Bergen-Belsen in Spring 1945. The thousands of emaciated corpses that awaited the liberators must have been shocking and unforgettable. However, 62 years on, to anyone who's ever watched a documentary or read about the Holocaust, it's nothing that hasn't been exposed thousands of times before.

[I'm running the risk of sounding jaded here, so I should emphasise that the Holocaust never ever should lose the capacity to shock, and indeed it hasn't. See the powerful novel Fugitive Pieces for further details. ]

So for me, easily the most fascinating material wasn't the video, but in fact the comments. So far, there are 144 comments on the first clip of the series alone. It was surprising how many nazi-sympathetic postings there were. Dare I say how refreshing it is to have uncensored access to these idiots? It's only by exposing this stuff to the oxygen of rationale to comments such as "Sieg HeiL, Sieg HeiL, fuck all jews!!" that these backward ideas will finally die.

But the stuff that shocks me again and again is something rather different. Am I alone in finding mundane responses to events such as (and not excluding) the Holocaust almost intolerably inappropriate? Is "How cruel" a comment more suitable for an incident of playground bullying than for one of the most barbaric episodes of human history? My friend Carolyn and I went to see the excellent film The Pianist a few years ago at the Mac, an arts centre in Birmingham. The scene where nazis throw an old man out of a first floor window in the Warsaw Ghetto was greated by tutting from a number of audience members! I struggle to think of a greater insult to the victims. Tutting is a response I would expect to receive if I dropped litter in the street.

In If this is a man, Primo Levi notes that if the Holocaust had continued, then over time a completely new vocabulary would have had to develop. Because the word "cold" doesn't really come close to describing spending a winter in Poland in the open air wearing only a thin shirt. And hunger is what we feel when we've skipped a meal, and to a concentration camp inhabitant would have been something of an enviable condition.

But enough of diversionary tactics such as genocide and mass suffering. It's time to do my marketing homework.

A blog wouldn't be a blog without some self-referentialism

This morning my friends Kevin and Kathy in Manchester sent my husband Dave an email saying "Word has reached us that your blog-hating wife has set up a blog."

Obviously, in the past few days, since setting up Traffic Light Musing amid a level of self-publicity that friends and family alike have come to expect from me, I've been reflecting upon the whole nature of blogging afresh, as an "insider", as it were.

The World in 2007, published by The Economist, contains an article on Web 2.0 entitled When the hype dies down. It predicts that in 2007, the Web 2.0 hype will abate and meanwhile "the rest of the world - people who may be hearing the words "blog" "wiki" and "podcast" for the first time - will begin to use the new media as they become simple and ubiquitous..." As an aside, the whole point of blog software is surely that it is simple in its essence - taking the complexity out of creating a web content and simplifying stuff like adding graphics and so on..

Back to the main thrust, as an outsider, I made the mistake of seeing blogging as an atomised activity, like a diary. But now that I'm a blogger myself, I see clearly how sociable blogging really is. Since starting my own blog, I'm much more likely to engage in other people's blogs such as my colleague Nadeem's. Instead of being an inward introverted activity, it's just a novel form of communication. Actually, I hardly know Nadeem, as he's fairly new at Talis, and we work on different teams. However, I have insights about his beliefs and thought processes through reading his blog that I would never have obtained from office small-talk, or more arguably, from a personal website.

So if The Economist is right, we'll soon be able to communicate routinely at a new level of depth with pretty much everyone.

Mud blood and poppycock

I've just finished reading a great book on World War One called Mud blood and poppycock. The author, Gordon Corrigan, with an entire career in the upper echelons of the armed forces behind him, sets out to destroy a number of the persistent myths of WW1 in a robustly argumentative but persuasive style.

Most memorably, he challenges the idea of there having been a "lost generation", arguing that, in fact, both German and French fatalities were significantly higher. He has a raft of statistics to support his argument, for example for every 12 men mobilised, only 1 was killed. He suggests that the reason for this perceived "lost generation" is the way that Britain mobilised troops i.e. usually by geographical location, so The Battle of The Somme, for example, will have produced a concentrated number of casualties in specific communities.

This really surprised me. But not so much as his contention that it was not the generals who were to blame for unnecessary bloodshed. Rather, the meddling politicians of the era, especially Lloyd George, had more blood on their hands than history admits. The most memorable scene from Blackadder Goes Forth, for me, was the scene on the eve of the battle, where a group of NCOs are standing around a map of the battlefield with tin soldiers arranged, and one of them simply picks up a pan and brush and sweeps all the soldiers into the dustbin. This seems to resonate with people. But a few years ago, I read The Wipers Times, a series of satirical journals produced in the trenches, and I was struck how much criticism was meted out to Lloyd George compared to the military leaders.

This was a good read, though quite hard work as there's quite a lot of military detail, and I particularly enjoyed the occasional lapse into military vernacular such as a soldier's biggest fear being the loss of his "wedding tackle"!! How quaint.

Five things - ok it's my turn

Here are five things that you might not know about me. On the other hand, you might already know them, given that I have a marked tendency to go on and on about stuff...

1. Let's go for the jugular and start with the most dramatic one. In early 1990, I got held up by gunpoint in a pub in the West End. It's a great story.

2. I owe my marital status to a bet. I won £30 AND a future husband!

3. My favourite form of stressbusting is to read lesbian detective novels. I love them.

4. I once had plastic surgery (ok so most of you already know that).

5. I am an ex-page three girl! When I was a baby my photo appeared on page three of the Sun, on the letters page!

So there you go.

Disintermediation of political parties?

I'm reading the Lyons Review of Local Government "National prosperity, local choice and civic engagement" at the moment. It's a fairly seminal document, and a lot of the ideas contained within it were destined to reappear in the Local Government White Paper "Strong and prosperous communities", published in October 2006.

Both the Lyons Review and subsequently the White Paper, are concerned with levels of civic engagement in British society. They both reference the problem of low turn-out rates in local government elections.

But an interesting thing happened to me this week. Within the space of 24 hours, I received two completely separate emails, each asking me to sign the Petition Against The Road Tax on the Number 10 website. I duly signed. It seemed quite popular - in fact the TV news that night reported that a phenomenal 253,000 have signed it so far. I also signed the petition to get rid of British Summertime. It seems that, in spite of all that we say about political apathy in the post-cold war period, people still have opinions about particular interests, and want to make a difference if they can find a way of doing so.

So is the problem, in fact, political parties? That would seem to make sense, given the broad detachment from big ideas that is characteristic of post-Cold War intellectual life. Let's say that political parties have traditional been about a recognition of collective social interests and a formulation of over-arching ideas that meet those interests.

In a fragmented society that no longer believes in either broad social groupings or big ideas, could electronic petitions, and other micro-forms of consultation, in fact be the way forward for modern democracies? Not forever, I hope. I like to think that humanity will one day find it in itself to put the traumas of the 20th century behind it, and rehabilitate the Big Idea. But for the time being, it keeps the grey cells active, and maybe maintains the idea that people can make a difference.

To be honest, I don't even know whether or not it's a good thing. That's not the point of this entry. But that might be where things are headed. After all, librarians have to cope with disintermediation, so why shouldn't politicians feel some of the pain?