Author: drmcarley

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Things I have learned about Brazil in the last two weeks

I have now been in the middle of Sao Paulo state for just over a fortnight. Lessons learned:

  1. It is hot, like Africa hot, like you could fry Sally O’Brien on an egg if you had a stone hot.
  2. There are two big black cats around here that look as if their mammies were interfered with by jaguars.
  3. Brazilians eat a lot of meat. Round here Desperate Dan would be considered a perfumed ponce for having that effeminate pastry nonsense.
  4. Sliced, grilled cow hump is very tasty.
  5. Do not cross the woman with the machete who chops the ends off the unripe coconut so that you can drink the coconut water. She has a machete and she chops the ends off coconuts to make a crust.
  6. There is at least one person here who believes a chap can put coconut water in whisky and remain a gentleman. Such a man probably cheats at billiards.
  7. Everybody knows somebody who has been to Dublin, except for the people who have been there themselves.
  8. Brazilian academics will cheerfully go on strike for three months in pursuit of an above inflation pay claim.
  9. Brazilian academics have had their pensions slashed: they can no longer retire on full pay after thirty five years service.
  10. I might need to do a t-test on my sample size, but there is only one vegetarian in Sao Paulo state. Or all of Brazil, quite probably.
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Linebaugh, Taylor and Roddick for engineers

This is a set of brief notes which I issued to engineering students on a now defunct degree, as part of a class on the social context of engineering. This is converted from a LaTeX file which accounts for the lack of direct links to references.

Chips and ships …

At the end of the eighteenth century, workers in the naval shipyards of London were paid, if they were lucky, twice a year. Their wages were subject to various deductions for on-site services (the resident surgeon was paid from the men’s wages) and for disciplinary offences (football, cricket, absence from roll calls). Furthermore, wages were often not paid at all—in 1767, wages were fifteen months behind—and since sacked workers did not receive their back pay, there was little incentive to strike (The material on the London shipyards is taken from Linebaugh, 2003).

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Shifting Sands

For resentful white folks in search of a struggle with which to express solidarity, there is a rich seam of oppression to be mined in Ireland. Violence in Ireland has long been assimilated to the violence of national liberation struggles in the developing, or post-colonial, world. At a distance, some of the ambiguities can be fudged: in 1998, I attended a gig which turned out to be in aid of the Committee for the Self-Determination of the People of Ireland, at a centro sociale in Rome. The headline act was the Modena City Ramblers, who sound something like the Pogues would have done if they had been a bunch of communists from Emilia-Romagna (but I repeat myself). Their songs have included misty-eyed laments about Irish rain, Bobby Sands’ friends, and Che Guevara’s motorcycle trip. Their last release but one was a concept album about a joint Allied-partisan operation in 1945; on the cover was an SAS dagger and `Who Dares Wins’.

The affection of the Italian left for Ireland, or at least for an image of Ireland, is no surprise: the discourse of `struggle’, armed or otherwise, is a good fit for `solidarity’ with `oppressed peoples’. The mythologization of Ireland on the right is another thing entirely.

Should you ever find yourself near a demonstration in Italy, or watching a football match involving an Italian club, you will inevitably see flags featuring a stylized Celtic cross. The cross is an icon, in the literal sense of venerated symbol, because of its use by French Waffen SS troops, wiped out in the defence of Berlin against the Bolshevik hordes in 1945, but also for its connection to Ireland and Irish mythology. Like Hitler, the neo-fascist movement in Italy has long drawn inspiration from Norse mythology: one legendary street-fighter had a taste for charging left-wing demonstrations swinging a hammer over his head, Odin-like, rather than using the standard issue 36mm spanner. Clearly, a warrior myth is useful for people who use `hierarchical’ and `anti-democratic’ as compliments, and see Tolkien’s books as models of a well-ordered society, so much so that the 1970s neophyte Nazi spent his summers at `Camp Hobbit’.

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Arise Kilnamanagh and take your place among the nations of the earth

Dublin, perhaps uniquely, has suffered mythologization by genius and by sentimentality. Caught between Leopold Bloom and the Leprachaun Museum (yes, there is), the city of Dublin, the living breathing people and the physical structures they live in and on, has fallen out of sight. Joyce and Flann O’Brien caught its speech, but the one did it so perfectly people are afraid to read him, and the other was so accurate they think the humour is a laughing matter; James Plunkett wrote Dublin on a human scale and gave it flesh and blood characters, but is little known outside Ireland. We have ended up with Bloomsday and Paddy’s Day, the first now more kitsch than the second.

Karl Whitney has now written a book that gives us back Dublin as a city, not the set of a novel, or the battlefield of dreams of some misty eyed tourist in search of their heroic and downtrodden ancestors.
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Twenty year old interview with Brendan Power

In another life I put together a short-lived newsletter on harmonica playing. Around then, harmonica genius Brendan Power was kind enough to let me interview him sitting on the side of the stage at Whelan’s in Dublin. It might be interesting.

IHN I suppose the first question is why did you start playing harmonica?

BP I went to a gig, in 1976 I think, and I heard Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and I was blown away by Sonny Terry’s harmonica style. Went out and bought a harmonica the next day. Got right into blues for about three years or so. A blues fanatic you know, this blues purist. Went out and bought blues albums and Sonny Boy Williamson II, Rice Miller, was someone who really, I loved his sound. Listened to that a lot. So, it was really the blues.

IHN And then you started going into jazz-blues-trad-fusion-psychedelic …

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Turbulence and Noise

I have produced some notes for a final year aerospace engineering unit on Turbulence and Noise (PDF). The introduction reads:

This is not a textbook and should not be read as one. It is a set of notes written for a final year unit at the University of Bath, with the aim of introducing aerospace engineering students to the extra concepts, mainly mathematical, which they will need in order to be able to read research papers in turbulence and noise. These papers are a mixture of classic work, such as Lighthill’s analysis of aerodynamically-generated noise, and more recent studies which apply state-of-the-art techniques to hard problems, and either extend our understanding of the physics, or give us completely new insights, in a way not previously possible.

The notes are written fairly informally, to give some intuitive sense of the concepts, as an aid to getting started on the real thing. Having read about correlation functions, for example, you will be in a position to read a paper which makes use of them, but that does not mean you will find it easy. You will find it possible, and the more papers you read, the deeper the understanding you will develop as you see how different people have made use of the same techniques. In practice, any writing of substance will require multiple readings, and will reveal more of itself under each reading.

Turbulence and acoustics are difficult, and you will not master them on this unit. You will have to work hard on ideas which will not be obvious, and were not obvious to the smart people who developed them. You will often feel stupid and confused, and you will wonder why you are doing this. You are doing this because it is worth it: you are taking on a difficult topic which some of the brightest people in history have found hard, but have nonetheless been able to contribute to.

Feeling stupid means you are working on something worth the trouble: if you want to feel clever, watch Sesame Street or read the Daily Mail.

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Policing by consent (of the police)

In a BBC Radio 4 programme about the relationship between the Conservative Party and the UK police, the presenter, journalist Robin Aitken, discusses the breakdown in the previously amicable relationship between the Tories and the police, harking back to the golden age of upstanding beat coppers who were trusted by the public. Roger Scruton pops up to talk of how the law in Britain is felt as the property of the people, and how the police are servants of the public and not an arm of the state. One interviewee wants to go back to the standards which prevailed thirty or forty years ago.

These would be standards of torture (Birmingham Six, Guildford Four, Maguire Seven), murder (Blair Peach, inter alia), political repression (Orgreave), and, more recently, in addition to established practice, the impregnation of political activists and the desertion of them and their children. All of the above has been covered up for by perjury.

Aitken mentions that for many years the only critics of the police were the `radical left’, where it would appear `radical left’ means `people who think the police should obey the law and not beat confessions out of people’. He is shocked, however, by the idea that a police officer would lie about a government minister saying `pleb’.

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Planting your sack on the date line

From Maurice Craig’s classic The Elephant and the Polish Question, where Craig considers what he might do given unlimited funds.

J. Pierpont Morgan (I think) said that if you had to ask what it cost to run a steam yacht you were not rich enough to own one. Very well then: I shall be rich enough to have one built to my own specification. When I say a steam yacht I mean a steam yacht: not one with diesel engines. She must have a proper triple-expansion engine with polished cylinder heads and fluted con-rods, served by a scotch or water-tube boiler—I don’t mind which—oil-fired in the interests of cleanliness and to avoid drudgery. There would be no such unpleasant smells and sounds as accompany diesel operation. As to the accomodations and appointments, I am not particular so long as they are gentlemanly.

I would do all the obvious things such as cruising among the Isles of Greece and in the Baltic, and revisiting by water all those cities which must be approached by sea: Leningrad, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Genoa, Venice, Constantinople. I would go either Westwards through the Panama Canal or Eastabout via Indonesia and Japan and would instruct my professional crew to take the ship, using the extremely precise navigational aids with which she would be equipped, to the International Date Line, where I could stand on the bridge with one testicle in Wednesday and the other in Thursday. And from there I would send postcards to all my friends.

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Micks with sticks

When I was about ten years old, at a hurling match in Croke Park with my parents, a spectator nearby with an English accent offered an instruction to a defender who was chasing down a forward making a break: `Hit him you fucking coward!’ It appears that that spectator’s spirit is restless, and animating part of the viewing public.

Hurling is now available on Sky, despite the objections raised by leading members of the GAA:

“The whole point of the GAA,” he says, “is that we stand against capitalism, that money is a necessary evil. Our objective is the creation of cohesive communities, that is our target.”

It appears that hurling has become popular amongst sports fans in Great Britain, who have never seen it before, and are impressed. Great, and if this means Bath gets a hurling team, I’ll be delighted. The trouble is what people find impressive. One Irish-based sports website has collated some of the twitter responses, admittedly going for the more egregious, for the first game shown on Sky and now the second weekend. Some people are impressed by the speed and skill, some people are bemused, and some respond by describing it as `a pub fight on grass’, `a scrap doon the scheme’, `confirms my belief that the Irish are mental’, `superb combination and [sic] skill and violence’, and elsewhere `You can literally twat each [other] with a 2 x 4 piece of wood, smash a cricket ball at opposite players, rugby tackle each other.’

God knows the Irish are used to affording some English people an opportunity for a mix of condescension and amused tolerance of those strange foreigners (Brendan O’Carroll’s success is the principal evidence), but there’s no call for this nonsense. It should be possible to do better than this, and certainly not resort to admiration of the `violence’ of a highly skilled, and generally sportingly played, game.

For the avoidance of doubt, the only tackle allowed in hurling is shoulder-to-shoulder, not a rugby tackle and certainly not `literally’ hitting someone with a 2×4. Serious injury is very rare in hurling, because usually the stick takes the punishment.

Hurling is one of the oldest recorded sports in the world—it appears in Irish mythology dating back three thousand years—and is certainly the fastest field game. It requires skill, grace, courage, and is played by amateurs organized by an association which owns the third largest stadium in Europe. The Gaelic Athletic Association is probably the only major body in Ireland which is not an embarrassment, owing to its roots in every community, in Ireland and outside it. Hurling is unambiguously a genuinely special, uniquely Irish, event, and it is being turned into an extravaganza of Micks with Sticks, the professional wrestling of field sports, delighting some people who have decided to see it as an opportunity for delighting in Irish madness and taste for violence.

It takes a few minutes to find out something about the game. You might even sound expert given a little effort. With a bit more work, you can probably find a local club and see a game live. Or would that be too much like genuine interest?