Thomas Jones

@moonjets

I work @lrb.co.uk, most of my opinions are other people’s

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Thomas Jones@moonjets· 6d

Name a movie where the title character isn’t the main character

M•G•M's
ACCLAIMED PRODUCTION
OF
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S
JULIUS CAESAR
MARLON BRANDO * JAMES MASON
as MARK ANTONY
as BRUTUS
JOHN GIELGUD * LOUIS CALHERN
as CASSIUS
as JULIUS CAESAR
EDMOND O'BRIEN NO GREER GARSON
as CASCA
as CALPURNIA
DEBORAH KERR
as PORTIA

Thomas Jones@moonjets· 11d

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. But which is the stone that holds up the bridge? Kublai Khan asks. The bridge isn’t held up by this or that stone, replies Marco, but by the line of the arch that they form. Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: Why do you speak to me of the stones? It’s only the arch that matters to me. Polo replies: without stones there is no arch.

Thomas Jones@moonjets· 16d

An oldish piece on Milman Parry, with some thoughts (by way of Walter Ong) on the ways that new technologies affect not only how we tell stories, but also how we think about old stories, including Homer’s. From handwriting to printing to gramophones to movie cameras. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

In the introduction to his father’s collected papers, Adam Parry acknowledges that ‘each of the specific tenets that make up Parry’s view of Homer had been held by some former scholar ... Parry’s achievement was to see the connection between these disparate contentions and observations.’ In 1962 Walter Ong argued that ‘Parry’s special type of interest in Homer was made possible by the fact that he lived when the typographical era was breaking up.’ Adam Parry was unconvinced by this, but the arrival of ‘an age of secondary orality’, as Ong put it, ‘the orality of telephones, radio and television, which depends on writing and print for its existence’, must have made it easier to imagine, however imperfectly, the ‘primary oral cultures’ that existed (and in places still exist) before the invention of writing. The newsreels that reported the assassination of King Alexander are worlds away from the Iliad and the Odyssey, and would have been scripted, but they still used formulaic phrases – ‘a hail of lead’, ‘this foul deed’ – to tell, out loud, different versions of the same story, of a voyage across the Mediterranean and the violent death of a king.

Thomas Jones@moonjets· 17d

Thomas Jones@moonjets· 19d

Changing trains in Florence, tile for a side trip to the Bargello www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Jul 8

Percy Shelley died otd 1822. A terrible person in many ways, at times a truly brilliant poet. A few years ago I wrote about Nora Crook’s superb edition of ‘The Triumph of Life’. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

By the time of his death on 8 July 1822, a month shy of his thirtieth birthday, the adolescent opening of Queen Mab - 'How wonderful is death!' - had evolved into a hopeless question: "Then, what is Life?' Shelley had no answer, but he puts the question in a poem that rushes relentlessly on, spiralling back on itself through extremes of euphoria and despair, redrawing the bounds of what had been thought possible in English verse, until it is abruptly cut off.

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Jun 23

In case you’re wondering what ‘this’ is, it’s this: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

In June 1935 they met Avdo Međedović, ‘our Yugoslav Homer’, a farmer in his sixties living near Bijelo Polje, a town in north-eastern Montenegro. He told Vujnović his life story – his nine years in the army brought to an end by a bullet to his left arm; his marriage at the age of 29 to a woman he’d never met; his career as a butcher ruined by his son’s gambling debts; his son disappearing to join the army – and he played the gusle and sang nine songs over the course of six weeks. ‘He sat cross-legged on the bench,’ Lord wrote a few years later, ‘sawing the gusle, swaying in rhythm with the music. He sang very fast, sometimes deserting the melody, and while the bow went lightly back and forth over the string, he recited the verses at top speed. A crowd gathered.’ One of Međedović’s epics was as long as the Odyssey.

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Jun 23

Brian Stone on the devastating heatwave that swept over Europe in 2003, from his excellent book The City and The Coming Climate, which I reviewed 13 years ago. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...

In all, the EU estimated that more than 70,000 citizens of 12 countries died from heat-induced illnesses over a four-month period in the summer of 2003. This number represents more fatalities than have resulted from any EU or American conflict since World War Two or any natural disaster (e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes and floods) to have ever struck a developed nation. It dwarfs the 1800 deaths attributed to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and effectively renders trivial the 900 lives lost during the highly publicised Sars epidemic that struck in the same year as the heatwave ... Americans would need to experience more than 20 terrorist attacks equivalent in destruction to 9/11 before such a death toll would be approached. Yet the global response to this climate event, an event that reveals more about the profoundly changing environment in which we now live than any other yet endured, has largely been one of indifference.

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Jun 21

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

The Ipcress File (the book) came out around the same time as Dr No (the movie). Reviews of the novel pointed out the contrast between the glamour of James Bond and the grime of Deighton's spy world: there are no Aston Martins or high-rolling casinos in The Ipcress File, just 'a little grey rusting Morris 1000' and a grimy strip-joint on Wardour Street. The class difference between the protagonists is less apparent in the igoos movies, though - Fleming's hero is an Etonian but Sean Connery wasn't - and I don't see that James Bond is a less boring name than Harry Palmer. Both men are tough and sexy and quick-witted. Still, Deighton's reputation was established as the creator of an anti-Bond, and it's at least true that 007 wouldn't be found messing around with eggs in the kitchen until Roger Moore whips a quiche out of the oven for Tanya Roberts in A View to a Kill in 1985.

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Jun 21

Not to be confused with

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Jun 17

This isn’t true, is it

The annual G7 meeting brings together the leaders of the world's biggest economies: the US, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, Canada and Japan.

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Jun 12

December 2022. Starmer was referring to the result of the lobby's World Cup
league in which he performed below Burnham. Starmer called the result a
"brilliant" one for the Greater Manchester mayor. "He also got to see his boyhood team Argentina win the World Cup," he added.
"It was a mixed bag, because he also got to see his boyhood team France lose the final and his boyhood teams Morocco and Croatia lose in the semis. But Andy sadly can't be with us tonight because he doesn't know where Westminster is."
One person recalled to me this week that "the only time I have seen Starmer looking genuinely amused" was while telling that joke. I, and at least one

At times I've considered pinning something to my social media profiles to the effect "yes, I've heard the one about a Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite going into a pub".
This joke - punchline: "what will you be having, Mr Burnham?" - has become so ubiquitous that the man has even started repeating it himself.

Thomas Jones@moonjets· May 21

Always a pleasure to be cited in the Financial Times (the review in question: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...)

This absence of edge can at times lead to a lack of narrative tension in her fiction. “Everyone’s so tiresomely friendly and co-operative all the time,” the London Review of Books complained of Bel Canto, in which a group of hostages becomes enmeshed with their captors.

Thomas Jones@moonjets· May 12

Did he cross the Midlands in a sealed train

Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor and potential Labour leadership candidate, has arrived at Euston in London today, the Telegraph is reporting. It is not known yet why he is in the capital.

Thomas Jones@moonjets· May 1

The least of this - or perhaps not - is that Dawkins is writing a novel! How will it compare to E.O. Wilson’s? www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...

Wilson wants his novel to show how alike ants and people are. ‘There are of course vast differences between ants and men,’ he writes in the prologue. 'But in fundamental ways their cycles are similar. There is something genetic about this convergence. Because of it, ants are a metaphor for us, and we for them.' We routinely use figurative language drawn from the human sphere when talking about ants - queen, soldier, worker - and there's a long literary history of comparing people to ants: the Trojan soldiers leaving Carthage in Book Four of the Aeneid, for example. But in both cases it's important not to confuse resemblance with identity. Anthill means to

resemblance with identity. Anthill means to continue the project Wilson began in Sociobiology (1975), arguing (with some rather unpleasant implications) that human social relations are biologically determined, that in some fundamental and important way - 'there is something genetic about this convergence' - people are just like ants. And yet what Anthill actually demonstrates is the precise opposite. Wilson's human characters may exhibit antlike behaviour, but that proves nothing because they're so unlike real human beings. While his ants - and this is a rare and marvellous achievement - are absolutely nothing like people either.

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Apr 29

I sometimes think that Bomber, as well as being Deighton’s best novel, and the first written on a word processor (I’m also confident Pynchon read it while writing Gravity’s Rainbow), may be the best novel by an Englishman not only about but since the Second World War www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Bomber is in many ways Deighton's least characteristic novel, though it's also probably his best, and it's hard to imagine anyone else writing anything quite like it. The book is a remarkable example of the way a narrative of great complexity can be constructed through the careful assembly of simple elements, and a timely reminder, nearly sixty years after it was written and more than eighty after it's set, that bombing a hospital is an atrocity whoever does it, and for whatever reason, deliberate or not.

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Apr 25

I PARTIGIEN
U n'è par véa dla glória
Non è per via della gloria
sa sém andè in muntagna
se siamo andati in montagna
a fè la guèra.
a fare la guerra.
Ad guèra a sémi stóff,
Di guerra eravamo stufi,
ad patria enca.
di patria anche.
Evémi bsogn ad déi:
Ma avevamo bisogno di dire:
lasés al méni lébri,
lasciateci le mani libere,
i pi, i ócc, agli uréci;
i piedi, gli occhi, le orecchie;
lasés durméi te fén
lasciateci dormire nel fienile
s'una ragaza.
con una ragazza.
Par quest avém spare
Per questo abbiamo sparato,
a's sém fatt impiché
ci siamo fatti impiccare
a sém andè e' mazèll
e siamo andati al macello
pianzénd te còr
piangendo nel cuore,
e al labri ch'al treméva.
con le labbra che tremavano.
Mò ènca acsè a savémi
Ma anche così sapevamo
che a pèt d'un bòia d'un fascésta,
che di fronte a un boia di fascista
nèun a sémi zénta
noi eravamo persone
e lou del mariuneti.
e loro marionette.
E adès ch'a sém mórt
E adesso che siamo morti
nu rumpéis i quaiéun
non rompeteci i coglioni
sal cerimóni,
con le cerimonie:
pansé piutòst mi véiv
pensate piuttosto ai vivi,
ch'i n'apa da pérd ènca lòu
che non debbano perdere anche loro
giovinèza.
la giovinezza.
I PARTIGIANI
(Nino Pedretti - Al vòusi)

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Apr 11

And not only that but … www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

My Oxford colleague Steven Balbus goes much further. The coincidence of geometry that makes the Sun and Moon roughly the same size in the sky also means that they both contribute to the tides we experience on Earth. The beating of the solar and lunar tidal cycles against each other brings the difference between more extreme spring tides and lesser neap tides. This means there are liminal places on Earth that are covered with water occasionally but dry most of the time: ideal habitats for an oft-stranded species of fish to learn to breathe air or take its first steps onto land.

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Mar 23

Len Deighton, London Match (1985)

"Did they tell you what the agent said or did they merely tell you the content of his messagel'
'Oh, the messages were edited, but otherwise as received. They had to be; the staff handling the material didn't know enough about economics to understand what it was about.'
'But you identified different sources?' I asked yet again.
'Sometimes we could, sometimes that was easy. Some of it was total rubbish.'
From different agents?' I persisted. My God, but it was agony to deal with old people. Would I be like this one day?
'Some of their agents sent only rumours. There was one who never provided a word of good sense. They called him "Grock".

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Mar 22

There was! That gets a mention in the article too

It's around this point that Brutus, by now in his twenties, surfaces in the historical record. In the summer of 59, a man called Lucius Vettius went to the Senate with information about a conspiracy to murder Pompey. The repentant Vettius confessed to being one of the conspirators; among the others he named was Brutus. The senators seem not to have believed him, but threw him in jail for carrying an offensive weapon. He repeated his allegations the next day, but 'removed Brutus' name from his speech entirely, Cicero says, before going on to hint that the omission may have had something to do with the fact that Brutus' mother, Servilia, was sleeping with Caesar. Their relationship led to the rumour (which can't be true) that Brutus was Caesar's illegitimate son.

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Mar 22

Italy too has foaming nimby campaigns against renewable energy infrastructure. Just imagine wind turbines ruining this landscape.

An aerial view of the decommissioned Alessandro Volta thermoelectric power station on the site of an abandoned nuclear power station in Montalto di Castro, Lazio, Italy

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Mar 20

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Mar 15

When Caesar saw Brutus among his attackers, Plutarch writes, 'he covered his head with his toga and let himself fall?' Suetonius adds that, according to some reports, he said in Greek: 'Kai su, teknon' (which Shakespeare turned into the Latin ‘Et tu, Brute?'). It literally means 'You too, child, but what Caesar may have intended by the words isn't clear. Tempest cites 'an important article' by James Russell (1980) ‘that has often been overlooked'. Russell points out that the words kai su often appear on curse tablets, and suggests that Caesar's putative last words were not 'the emotional parting declaration of a betrayed man to one he had treated like a son' but more along the lines of 'See you in hell, punk.'

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Mar 6

This was the one that most freaked me out

A giant Captain Haddock with bottles for pupils applies a corkscrew to the head of Tintin who is trapped in a bottle (a dream sequence from The Crab with the Golden Claws)

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Feb 27

On the Italian centre-left’s anti-immigration turn, from 2018. A lesson not learned by Starmer’s Labour Party. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/ma...

The PD, in government, cracked down on immigration. With EU backing, it last year negotiated a deal with Libyan forces, supplying them with funds and equipment to keep people from crossing the Mediterranean, knowing full well what detention in Libya would mean for them.
The number of people arriving from Africa on Italy's shores dropped dramatically, from more than 180,000 in 2016 to fewer than 120,000 in 2017, and under ooo so far this year. The PD's electoral dividend from this moral capitulation was nil (at best).

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Jan 9

What was your #childhoodcinema The ABC in Basingstoke, long since demolished: Snow White, ET, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future… I think Young Einstein might have been the last (and least good) movie I saw there.

The ABC cinema in Basingstoke with Flashdance, Airplane and Rocky III on the marquee. Photo from cinematreasures.org

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Nov 25

Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash by Giacomo Balla (1912)

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Nov 20

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

FIFTEEN DAYS AGO: 2706 people in Italy had at this point tested positive for Sars-CoV-2; there were 443 new cases; 276 had recovered; 107 were dead. The Italian government announced on Wednesday, 4 March that schools would be closed the following day, and would
not reopen until Monday, 16 March. A week had passed since Ash Wednesday. It would have been neat if the beginning of quarantine had coincided with the first day of Lent. And not merely neat: it might well have saved lives. But lateness is one of the defining characteristics of the Covid-19 pandemic. The two-week incubation period is only one of the reasons we are stumbling too far behind the virus. The belief that 'it won't be like that here' is strong: it was strong in Italy - it was strong in me - when the disease was concentrated in China. When I talk to friends and family in the UK, it sometimes feels as if I'm speaking not only from another country, but from another time, 15 days in the future.
In each of the Terminator movies, the time-travelling hero repeats a shibboleth: 'Come with me if you want to live.' The message in the real world, though, is 'Stay at home.'

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Oct 8

This is one of the things I was trying to write about here www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

LL OF THIS was taking place under Fascism. Mussolini was appointed prime minister by the king of Italy
on 30 October 1922. Ferrari, busy at the Alfa Romeo headquarters in Milan, wasn't paying attention. Italy's last multi-party elections before 1946 (though they were hardly free or fair) were held on 6 April 1924. A week later Nuvolari won the opening race of the Grand Prix season at Tigullio. The socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered by a Fascist death squad on 10 June 1924, nine days after Ferrari won the Circuito del Polesine in an Alfa Romeo RL SS. Antonio Gramsci was arrested on 9 November 1926.
'Enzo Ferrari spent 1926 in Modena,' Dal Monte writes. 'He was seen at football matches, cycling events and, in the winter months, even at ski events on the slopes of the Apennines.' What else was he supposed to do?

Thomas Jones@moonjets· Oct 5

From a review of Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...