Dame With A W

In honour of the release of Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, here's one of the finest moments from Shortpacked!:

Centenary

'I say, is it really true that the French artillery had to fire on their infantry?' Delaforce asked. 'To drive them over the top?'
'Absolutely,' Finlayson said. 'They had a mutiny. The troops wouldn't leave the trenches, so the French generals laid down a barrage on them. That soon shifted them.'
'What happened afterwards?'
'Afterwards? There was no afterwards. Why d'you think they didn't want to get out of the trenches?'

- Derek Robinson, Goshawk Squadron (1971) 

A Storm In Macedonia

I'm currently at Olynthos in northern Greece, excavating on the Classical city site. On Tuesday we couldn't work because of torrential rain and a thunderstorm. During the storm, lightning struck the electricity pylon just across the road, about 20 metres from where I was sitting. The pylon was knocking out and a small fire started, which had to be put out by the local fire brigade. These are the photos I took of that:

 

In terms of actual archaeology, we don't really have any features in the trench yet, but we have had a couple of interesting finds: a stone tool which might be prehistoric, but could also be the sort of thing a Classical potter might have used to burnish pottery, and a sling bullet which is almost certainly from the siege which destroyed Olynthos in 348 BC. This is my photo of the latter:

 

EDIT 27/07/14: I've taken the picture of the sling bullet down, both because it is unpublished archaeological material, and because we don't want to encourage looting on the site.

Kohima-Imphal

While the 70th anniversary of D-Day got fairly extensive coverage recently, I've seen pretty much nothing about the fact that it's also 70 years since the battle of Kohima-Imphal, the most significant battle of the Second World War in south-east Asia. It's not too difficult to discern the difference in coverage, as fighting to liberate France from the Nazis has very different connotations to fighting in order to keep Burma British.

Nonetheless I feel I should mention it, as my grandfather on my Dad's side was there, with the 2nd battalion of the South Lancashire Regiment. This article suggests that there are now only three surviving members of the Burma Star Association, although, of course, the vast majority of Commonwealth troops in the battle were Indian. Also, Dad tells me that Grandad never actually joined the Burma Star Association, believing it to be full of clerks and other rear-echelon types.

I Survived Able Archer 83

Borrowing a trick from Blood & Treasure, an article over at the Guardian suggests that Manchester was destined to be the recipient of "one or two 'airbursts' of up to five megatons" in the event of war with the Soviet Union. The Nukemap website suggests the following effects for a five megaton airburst over Manchester:



Heaton Chapel is just to the north-west of Stockport, so I don't fancy two year-old me's chances very much.

Minimum Wage

J.T. once asked me what sociologists had to say about gangs and inner-city poverty. I told him that some sociologists believed in a "culture of poverty" - that is, poor blacks didn't work because they didn't value employment as highly as other ethnic groups did, and they transmitted this attitude across generations.

"So you want me to take pride in the job, and you're only paying me minimum wage?" J.T. countered. "It don't sound like you think much about the job yourself."

- Sudhir Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day: A rogue sociologist crosses the line (2008)

Coup Leader Kills Himself

Nirvana in London, 1991

Writing Terror

So for various reasons, I've recently been investigating what's been written about the European terrorism of the 1970s/1980s. One of the things which is striking is how the "terrorist memoir" seems to be a niche sub-genre these days. This year one of November 17 published Γεννήθηκα 17 Νοέμβρη, but there are a couple of efforts from Baader-Meinhoff and other German groups, and the occasional Red Brigader. Even Britain gets in on the act with Stuart Christie's Granny Made Me An Anarchist. What's curious is that even though right-wing terrorist groups were pretty prominent during the same period, they don't seem to be represented in the memoirs market, and I'm wondering why that is. Lack of the literary/intellectual tradition that the left has? Publishers less sympathetic? Something else?

The Wrong Kind of Cynicism

And, vexingly for Eric, on the rare occasions he’s convinced a journalist that the CIA murdered his father, the revelation has not been greeted with horror. One writer declined Eric’s invitation to attend his press conference saying, ‘We know the CIA kills people. That’s old news.’
In fact, Eric told me, this would be the first time anyone had ever publicly charged the CIA with murdering an American citizen.
‘People have been so brainwashed by fiction,’ said Eric as we drove to the local Kinko’s to pick up the press releases for the conference, ‘so brainwashed by the Tom Clancy thing, they think, “We know this stuff. We know the CIA does this.” Actually, we know nothing of this. There’s no case of this, and all this fictional stuff is like an immunization against reality. It makes people think they know things that they don’t know and it enables them to have a kind of superficial quasi-sophistication and cynicism which is just a thin layer beyond which they’re not cynical at all.’

- Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004)

The story of Eric's father, Frank Olson, and why he may have been murdered, can be found here, as well as in Ronson's book.

Bleak Mouse

I think I preferred it when you were into opium, Micky.

The Road Warrior

This is a homemade armoured vehicle being used by the Kurdish YPG militia in north-east Syria (the photo is from the Avashin Twitter account). It's interesting to wonder about the influence of films like Mad Max on this, although improvised armoured fighting vehicles date back to the Spanish Civil War.

The 嫦娥 Has Landed

A video of the Chinese "Jade Rabbit" lander touching down on the Moon. As various people on the internet are pointing out, if you're under 37, these are the first pictures taken on the surface of the Moon during your lifetime.

A Good Day To Be A Headline Writer

Beaucoup Theories

There's supposed to be a half-dozen or six dozen or two dozen more fucking plots in the works, like the fucking assassination metaphysic is just out there too undeniably -

- James Ellroy, American Tabloid (1995)

Theories! We were almost lost in theories, there were so many of them.

- Inspector Frederick Abberline, lead investigator of the "Jack The Ripper" murders, quoted in Cassell's Saturday Journal, May 22nd 1892

Red Heat

The Blog Vintage Everyday has some great Soviet police posters dating from the 1950s to the 1980s. Here are my favourites:

TALK TO THE HAND!

Soviet law enforcement was equipped with the MASSIVE SLEEVES OF JUSTICE.

In fairness, this isn't much creeper than police posters I see in contemporary Britain.

I would watch the hell out of this film.

ANTHROPOID

Up to now, the Nazis, if somewhat halfhearted in the concealment of their crimes, have nevertheless kept up a superficial discretion that has enabled some people to avert their gaze from the regime’s true nature. With Lidice, the scales have fallen from the whole world’s eyes. In the days that follow, Hitler will understand. For once, it is not his SS who will be let loose but an entity whose power he does not fully grasp: world opinion. Soviet newspapers declare that, from today, people will fight with the name Lidice on their lips – and they’re right. In England, miners from Stoke-on-Trent launch an appeal to raise money for the future reconstruction of the village and come up with a slogan that will be echoed all around the world: 'Lidice shall live!' In the United States, in Mexico, in Cuba, in Venezuela and Uruguay and Brazil, town squares and districts, even villages, are renamed Lidice. Egypt and India broadcast messages of solidarity. Writers, composers, filmmakers and dramatists pay homage to Lidice in their works. The news is relayed by newspapers, radio, and television. In Washington, D.C., the naval secretary declares: 'If future generations ask us what we were fighting for, we shall tell them the story of Lidice.' The name of the martyred village is scrawled on the bombs dropped by the Allies on German cities, while in the East, Soviet soldiers do the same on the gun turrets of their T34s. By reacting like the crude psychopath that he is (rather than the head of state that he also is), Hitler will suffer his most devastating defeat in a domain he once mastered: by the end of the month the international propaganda war will be irredeemably lost.

But on June 10, 1942, neither he nor anyone else is aware of all this – least of all Gabčík and Kubiš. The news of the village’s destruction plunges the two parachutists into horror and despair. More than ever, they are wracked by guilt. No matter that they have rid Czechoslovakia and the world of one of its most evil creatures – they feel as if they themselves have killed the inhabitants of Lidice.
…
No one ever manages to persuade them that Heydrich’s death was good for anything.

Perhaps I am writing this book to make them understand that they are wrong.

 - Laurent Binet, HHhH (2012)

A Gazely Stare

 

Now all I have to do is work out the single most unsettling place in the house to put it.

 

No One Here Gets Out Alive

Today the Londonist Twitter account asked people for the most ludicrous flats and houses they'd seen in the capital. Highlights included the following:

@Londonist Room in shared flat: £350pcm. Was a bed mounted on a platform above the washing machine and tumble drier in a utility room.

— Judoon Platoon (@Judoon_Platoon) August 21, 2013

Choice London flat horror stories being tweeted by @Londonist. I once looked at one with a trail of blood from Hackney rd to the front door.

— Jess Lilley (@lilleyjuice) August 21, 2013

@Londonist I once saw a house in Deptford, the kitchen was covered in black dust, the words 'help me' was clearly written in said grime...

— Alex MacDonald (@Selected_Poems) August 21, 2013

@Londonist flat in Archway with shower in the kitchen behind a curtain. Agent said "Its space saving, and sociable".... It shouldn't be!

— Emma B (@emsypickle) August 21, 2013

@Londonist Saw a flat advertised as having '3 split-level mezzanine bedrooms'. Turns out that's code for '3 built-in bunk-beds'.

— Flora (@AccidentalLDNr) August 21, 2013

@Londonist Saw a house in Harrow where you had to climb through the shower to get to the bath, which was situated 10cms from the ceiling

— Emily Waddell (@callsignemily) August 21, 2013

There have now been three examples of properties being offered with no actual roof. Three.

— Londonist (@Londonist) August 21, 2013

Nice Chaps, Aren't They? Picturesque...

In a column in this weekend's Spectator, "Taki" describes Greece's neo-fascist Golden Dawn as "good old-fashioned patriotic Greeks" who are "not house-trained, and many of its members tend to use rough language and get physical." I instantly knew what the column made me think of:

I've seen them all right. I was in sunny Italy when the Fascisti went for the Freemasons in twenty-five. Florence it was. Night after night of it with shooting and beating and screams, till you felt like vomiting. I was in Vienna in thirty-four when they turned the guns on the municipal flats with the women and children inside them. A lot of the men they strung up afterwards had to be lifted on to the gallows because of their wounds. I saw the Paris riots with the garde mobile shooting down the crowd like flies and everyone howling "mort aux vaches" like lunatics. I saw the Nazis in Frankfurt kick a man to death in his front garden. After the first he never made a sound. I was arrested that night because I'd seen it, but they had to let me go. In Spain, they tell me, they doused men with petrol and set light to them.

Nice chaps, aren't they? Picturesque...

- Eric Ambler, Uncommon Danger (1937)

Monuments are for Defeats, as well as Victories

It's a decade since I started this blog, while I was an MA student living in north London - a period of 12 months which I count as one of the happiest times in my life. On that basis I felt that some sort of acknowledgement of the anniversary was appropriate. At the same time, there's no doubt that if the version of me who started the blog in 2003 could see himself in 2013 he'd be disappointed, and rightly so.