Layer 408 . . . Christmas, Nordic Noir, Scandinavia, Crime Fiction, the Millenium Trilogy, Larsson, the Dragon Tattoo, Wallender, Existential Angst,The Pope and Thought For Today

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I suppose it was quite an odd thing to be doing on Christmas Eve: watching a documentary called Nordic Noir, whose subject was Scandinavian crime fiction. However, since I seem to be one of very few people who have yet to either read the book or see the film of Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I'm aware I'm missing out on quite a worldwide phenomenon - the Millenium Trilogy. It seems Stieg Larsson is just one of several Scandinavian authors of crime fiction who are well worth reading. This documentary, narrated by Mariella Frostrup, is well worth watching. I obviously have a lot of catching up to do. I haven't been watching the Wallander series either.

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/tv/2010/12/nordic-noir-scandinavian-crime-fiction.shtml

The programme was particularly good on the novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, both journalists and both politically radical, met in 1961 while working for magazines published by the same company. They married the next year and the carefully planned crime series (essentially police procedurals), 10 books in 10 years, was written in the evenings, after their children had been put to bed.

[They apparently each wrote alternate chapters of each of their books.]

According to Wahlöö, their intention was to "use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideological pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type."

http://www.scandinavianbooks.com/crime-book/swedish-author/sjowall-wahloo.html

The Nordic countries seem similar to Scotland in many ways - various interviewees in the documentary talked about the 'cold, bleak, and dark winters', and the 'long, dark nights', that frequently lead to depression. There was an example given of someone who went to live in Sweden (or was it Finland?), found themselves becoming horribly depressed, and yet found the angst and depression lifted immediately when they returned to London. Which is interesting - since London itself can often be cold, gloomy and depressing. Perhaps not quite as 'dark, grim and difficult' as more northern climes.

Peter Høeg is a Danish writer of fiction who wrote an acclaimed book called 'Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow'. "I feel more highly for snow than for love", says Høeg/Smilla. Interesting thought. I do admire Danish intelligence.

Karim Fossum, on the other hand, says of her (crime) books, "I'm really writing about death  - and how it affects us." We need more books about death and how it affects us.

Jo Nesbo - who comes across as quite hardboiled and sardonic , said,  "Norway was a very poor country that became a very rich country - thanks to the discovery of oil and gas. Money corrupted us, though many of us want to stay small and simply get by - by doing our own thing." Apparently his books ask questions about why so many people are nowadays so violent, and about what's happening to our increasingly affluent, corrupt and degenerate societies.

In an interview about the Wallender character the actor who plays him in the Swedish TV series draws an interesting parallel between being a 'good detective' and being a 'good professional' in other fields that are personally and emotionally demanding. He rightly makes the point that a good practitioner in any 'caring' profession works 'like an artist', using intuition and instinct.

Or at least they used to, before the era of targets, performance management, payment by results, bonuses, league tables, covering your back and looking after Number One - first and foremost. No room for that touchy-feely, self-sacrificing stuff these days. Deliver or die. I do hate that word deliver, in the context of professional practice.

The Swedish TV series of Wallander apparently explores ideas about professional self-sacrifice through episodes like the one where his daughter decides to become a police officer. Wallander is shaken because he understands just how much the job demands - and how it's almost inevitable that the side effects will be  'alcoholism and loneliness'. I know far too many good people who went at least some way down that road in their chosen profession.

When the daughter says she'll just quit if things get too rough, he replies, "Good cops don't quit! They allow themselves to be ground down! Without doing a thing to stop it . . . The job absorbs you . . . You don't even notice you're losing the people you love . . ."

How many good people do I know who've suffered relationship breakdowns, physical breakdowns or personal breakdowns . . .

"You end up with a world-weary disenchantment because of the things you witness . . . "

And so say all of us.

The tragic irony is that the superb young actress who played the role of Wallender's daughter committed suicide whilst still young. Maybe the world is too unbearable for sensitive and brilliant minds. But I wonder what happens if such people decide to set aside their own pain and angst and focus their lives on serving others and helping to make the  world a better place for others. Maybe this is what actually keeps the Wallanders of this world functioning, in a strange, lonely, alcoholic, ironic way.

World-wearyness and disenchantment might be the starting point for some careers, and not just the end point. Witness the increasing numbers of people who have given up on shit like banking in order to do something worthwhile with their lives.

Happy Christmas!

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PS The Pope

Ratso was quite a catch for the Today programme yesterday - giving us the benefit of his wisdom and spiritual insight in the Thought For Today slot.

Oh Lord.

If we have to have Popes then I personally want them to sound Italian, or at least Mediterranean.  I definitely do not want a Pope whose accent resembles the cartoonish characters we used to know and hate in the old films about World War Two. Or even Basil Fawlty doing a German accent.

I need to make myself clear - I am not anti-German, though goodness knows plenty of my extended family have, or had, good reason to be. There are many things to admire in modern Germany, and in German history, since in many ways it's been a cradle of European civilisation. It has an amazing track record in philosophy, science, engineering, technology, invention, and manufacturing. It led the reaction against corrupt Roman Catholicism - German protestant thinking insisting that we can all have a direct, personal link with the metaphysical and spiritual, without any need for priestly channeling. Its version of social democracy has been far more enlightened than ours.  It's been the key player in the European Union.

Ratzinger, on the other hand, is the opposite of a progressive, enlightened leader. He's been a key figure in the cover-up of the child abuse scandals, and the decades-long refusal to give any ground on the use of condoms. So what does he now have to say?

Not much. The Messiah was a great leader. He brought liberation to humankind. He was the saviour of people throughout the world. [Mmmmm - even non-Christians?] He was born in poverty and obscurity and opened a path that leads to fulfillment in life. [Admittedly the Buddha was born an Indian prince and not a pauper, but didn't he do something similar?] God gives us hope, and brings us life. [Not me he doesn't - I get mine elsewhere.] May God bless you all.

Amen.

Have a nice day.
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Layer 380 . . . Education, Obama, the Coalition, and Royal Wedding Madness

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Every single national newspaper had on its front page today a huge photograph of William and Kate. They were obviously expecting sales to go nuts, and they probably did.

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I'm still thinking about the section of the Ken Robinson video (mentioned in the last blog) where he talks about the decline in children's curiosity and willingness to ask questions as they move through 10 years of schooling.

I have a video somewhere in which Melvyn Bragg interviews the wonderful Gore Vidal, and Gore says something very similar about what schools and our education system do to children's curiosity. I'm now going to find the video and quote from it here.

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Fiona Millar wrote this column about Katharine Birbalsingh and Tory education policies in Education Guardian:

Our schools do not need foreign solutions

Alarm about our state schools is largely unfounded, argues Fiona Millar, and looking abroad for solutions is a mistake

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/nov/09/state-schools-gove-policies

I have been in two minds over whether to write about Katharine Birbalsingh, the south London deputy head whose scathing attack on state schools was lapped up at the Tory party conference. Over my several decades as a journalist, I have seen several Katharine Birbalsinghs come and go. They emerge from nowhere; catch the media's attention, often because of the way they look. Would she have made the same impact if she had been white and middle aged?

Around 1% of what they say is true; the rest is usually eye-catching propaganda that plays into the prejudices of the audience. In my experience these characters usually inhale too much of their own publicity, get over-promoted and vanish as quickly as they appeared.

Birbalsingh is only one of the players Michael Gove has hired to bolster his flagging flagship policies. Arne Duncan, Obama's education secretary and Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children's Zone, have also been recruited for more rhetoric about broken systems and intransigent teachers.

The selective use of overseas educationalists as witnesses is particularly hazardous.

It is barely a year since the Swedes performed this role, but they have been quietly dropped now. Why? Because too many other people popped up to testify that their system was not working. Now the Swedes have introduced a new law that brings free schools under the same regulatory framework as local municipal schools. Don't expect to hear much more about them in a hurry.

Similar doubts are now seeping out about US charter schools. The Credo study from Stanford University suggests that less than a fifth of charter schools outperform US public (state) schools, most are about the same and two-fifths are worse, often because they are incompetently run. Some are mired in financial scandals.

The most devastating critique of US school reforms comes from another former education minister, Diane Ravitch, an early charter devotee who now writes books and articles and tours the US to warn against the dangers of faddish piecemeal reforms that aren't "scalable". Ravitch is now in favour of public education and high-quality teaching rather than privatisation.

It is a shame she didn't see the light earlier, but there is still time for us. Every day in this country, hundreds of thousands of children go to schools that are generally orderly and disciplined, they make progress and pass so many exams that we now can't afford to send them all to university. The cogs that keep that system working are hard-working teachers and heads who bear no resemblance to the caricatures in the repertoires of any of Michael Gove's celebrity guests.

There are schools, often in challenging urban areas, without the strong leadership required to make a difference and they need to be confronted. But they do not mean that an "excuses culture" is rife, that our system is an international disgrace or that we need to absorb, wholesale, policies that may be only partially successful in their home countries, however captivating or charismatic their advocates may be.

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In the London Review of Books this week there's an excellent essay called The Matter With Obama. Well worth a read.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n22/david-bromwich/the-fastidious-president

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There's also an essay on the coalition's economic and social policies:

Nothing to do with the economy
Ross McKibbin

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n22/ross-mckibbin/nothing-to-do-with-the-economy

‘Business now has certainty,’ the chancellor said at the end of his statement on the Comprehensive Spending Review; but that is the one thing business doesn’t have.

Much of the government’s budget strategy is dependent on consequences which might be favourable, on premises which are almost certainly wrong, on sheer fantasy, and on that will-o’-the-wisp, ‘confidence’.

 It is pretty clear that those on benefits of whatever kind will suffer, however the cuts are interpreted. Anyone disabled, or partly disabled and on employment support, or dependent on housing benefit, or in need of social housing, or reliant on local authority care – indeed anyone on a low income – will lose.

 And women will lose more than men. They are more likely to be made redundant by local government and the cuts in child tax credit are more likely to keep them out of work.

As for the rich, there has been no serious attempt to drag any of them into the circle of suffering – the bankers least of all. Their good fortune is the inevitable result of the decision to fund the deficit primarily from cuts in expenditure rather than from taxation, and the belief, in the face of all recent evidence, that the future of the economy depends on them.

In so far as the spending proposals are ‘fair’ and the ‘rich’ are affected, this is largely due to the efforts of the previous government, whose 50 per cent tax on incomes of over £150,000 a year the coalition had no option but to accept. That the poor do comparatively badly and the rich do comparatively well is not a surprise. Budget cuts that fall disproportionately on welfare programmes must be unfair.

I doubt that the cuts have very much to do with the economy: if they did they would have been more plausible and less risky. It is very unlikely that Osborne, if asked, could give any economic rationale for them. Nor could the Conservative MPs who cheered and waved their order papers when he had finished telling them that everything was going to be made significantly worse. The importance of the cuts is not economic but political and ideological.
First, they restore an apparently coherent, specifically Conservative and politically useful identity to the Conservative Party, distinguishing it from Labour. For the last 20 years or so the Tories have not had such an identity . . . But the ‘deficit’ gave them an opportunity; and the bigger the cuts the bigger the opportunity.

The crisis allowed the Conservatives to transform a crisis of the banks into a crisis of the welfare state. This, they hope, will enable them to restructure government and ‘shrink’ the state and its welfare systems once and for all, something they have been trying to do for the last 30 years.

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