Peter Stothard - Times Online - WBLG

Not blogging

Over the next two weeks this TLS blog (and loyal commenters) ought to be getting back to literary business - to Shakespeare and Sophocles and maybe even Henry James.

We have the chance to leave behind the Summer question of whether it was wholly wise for me to use that Benetton ad (I won't even link to it) to illustrate a post about Byzantine horse medicine.

Or what that decision - and other stylistic traits of picturing or prose - might suggest (or not) about the blogger's subconscious.

A colleague here has suggested that in years to come these recent additions to the fringes of the Times Literary Supplement will merit the attention of sociologists in search of Masters degrees.

A possibility worth remembering by all writers perhaps. Thanks, anyway, for every well intentioned suggestion.

Proper thought on them will have to wait, however, till the end of a newspaper-writing task which will take me to the beginning of October.

Till then I will be posting comments, where I can, (the social scientists of the future would not want it any other way) but not posting on my own account.

.

European Constitution

Two piles of paper arrived on the desk today.

The first is of page-proofs from next week's TLS - Niall Ferguson's challenging review of Ian Kershaw's Fateful Choices, Ten decisions that changed the world 1940-1941.

At the end of Ferguson's long critique of how it happened that Britain continued fighting after the fall of France, that Hitler attacked the USSR and that Stalin ignored the warnings, he warns us to remember what we too easily forget.

"It was not just the decisions of dictators, emperors, presidents and prime ministers that determined the character of the Second World War. It was the decisions of hundreds of millions of people."

The second pile of paper is a pamphlet from the group, Open Europe, setting out the case for a referendum in Britain on the new European Constitutional Treaty, the latest in the long line of attempts by politicians and bureaucrats to integrate Europe so tightly that nothing like WW2 can 'ever happen again'.

I apologise for beginning with a TLS article which has not yet appeared and a document which requires a certain on-line study for those far afield.

But such is 'blogging'.

Happy Birthday to (almost all) commenters

When I started this blog almost exactly two years ago, our 'webmaster' warned me that 'comments', as letters to blogs were known, should not be treated like 'letters' to The Times or the TLS.

What he meant, speaking very politely, was that instead of selecting carefully what to publish (as this editor had always done in his editing life) the new TLS and Timesonline blogger should think carefully before NOT publishing any comment.

And I have broadly followed that advice - picking up the little orange pyramids in my typepad box most days and pressing 'Publish' even if the comments do not seem always relevant to what I or anyone else has written - and even if their own sense is not as clear as the newspaper-subeditor-of-old might have wished.

So we have had serious debates and silly ones.

We have had debates that might just as easily have happened around another blog - and debates about whether certain sorts of comment, certain lengths of comment, certain obsessions of comment, discouraged other readers from joining in.

It has been a strange experience sometimes - but mostly a good one.

And good for the TLS too, which thanks in part to commenters here and to the fascinating 'Don's life' of my colleague, Mary Beard, is attracting ever more on-line readers and subscribers.

But I'm beginning to wonder whether a touch more red pencil is required.

Ship don't shop

Shipping  not shopping!

No houses, pubs, supermarkets!

No fish-tanks!

Gravel and grit! Before any of the great delights of modern seaside success.

The Kent oyster town of Whitstable, pictured by Turner, described by Dickens, hated and barely disguised by Somerset Maugham, is at the centre now of a vigorous 'Hands Off Our Harbour' campaign.

All along the main street there are posters demanding that the local council abandon its plan to move aside dusty industrial plants and bring in bright money-magnets for tourists.

This is a place where success has long come from saying 'No'.

But success is now so great that 'No', it seems, is becoming harder to say.

Mole and badger play Prokoviev

Like the Times critic Geoff Brown, I enjoyed the Gergiev Prom last week.

Sadly (and doubtless sadly only for me) my lone lasting memory now is of the sight of the distinguished North Ossetian conductor, fingers spread for orchestral persuasion, mouth set for semi-muted-grunts, lithe body bouncing, head like a mirror.

And then beside him the Georgian pianist for the Prokoviev 2nd piano concerto, Alexander Toradze, massively shouldered, hands heavy enough to mash miscreants in any Tbilisi alley, a sweet-souled hammer of a man.

Both bizarrely feral beside the British formality of the LSO.

The one a Caucasus mole.

The other a giant badger.

If I'd been wholly deaf (instead of merely stronger in sight than sound), I'd have thought we were in a different part of the Prokoviev repertoire.

In  some unknown sequel to Peter and the Wolf, where instead of hunters and ducks in a Russian garden we had the kind of animals cavorting around the Thames banks in the dark from where I'm writing now.