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Bedroom furniture for young girls with the brand name Lolita has been withdrawn by Woolworths following complaints from parents

BBC, Woolworths withdraws ‘Lolita’ bed

Easily the most startling fact in this farce was that nobody at Woolworths knew of Nabokov’s great novel, ‘one of the best known and most controversial examples of 20th century literature‘; nobody had seen or heard of either of the two films (the James Mason/Peter Sellers pairing, directed by Kubrick being far better than the later Adrian Lyne version); and nobody at the company was even remotely aware of the enormous popular cultural impact of Lolita. According to BBC radio news this evening, Woolworths staff had to look up Lolita on Google to discover what the fuss was about, which might have given them a little shock.

The blunder by Woolworths comes at the end of a week in which the UK’s examination authorising body, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), announced that companies such as McDonalds, FlyBE and Network Rail would be permitted to deliver accredited training qualifications that would supposedly be equivalent to the 16+ school certificates, GCSEs, the 17+ Advanced Level courses, and even University Degrees, a suggestion that seemed greatly to disappoint the critic Bonnie Greer when she was asked to comment on the proposals on the BBC’s topical current affairs panel show, Question Time. She questioned vocational training and offered her preference for a general, liberal education that would, she claimed, encourage students to think for themselves.

Greer seemed reflexively collectivist, a left-behind remnant of her generation’s high watermark and a representative of all those who still share her mindset, for whom it would surely be anathema to admit the possibility that private provision of at least some education, vocational or otherwise, might not always and forever be a priori worse than that provided by the State. Consider Woolworth’s buyers, marketeers, salespeople; all of them inhabiting a shrunken mental universe in which one of the most interesting writers of the 20th Century never existed, this controversial book was never written and the subsequent very highy regarded film was never directed. Can we trust private companies to put together meaningful courses if their employees are so detached and uninformed as the staff of Woolworths?

I think we can. Most of these depressingly ignorant employees would themselves have been educated at State Comprehensive schools, schools that eject 20% of their pupils onto the labour market each year unable to read. What proportion of them will have been taught at all about the literary canon, or have been introduced to a cultural heritage beyond, for example, the badly-daubed mural tribute to murdered rapper Tupac sported on the walls of one West Midlands school (a miserable 34% of pupils with 5 A*-C at GCSE,  but all conversant with West Coast gangsta rap)?

Unlike the American-born Greer, I passed through State schooling in the UK, an early disadvantage I have been attempting for years to remedy, and I have taught in several State schools. I know that many of the mainstream QCA-approved courses are a meaningless sham, introducing children to little that is useful, or even of passing interest – an achievement made possible by the combination of bureaucratic centrally-planned course specifications on the one hand and uninformed and poor teaching on the other. It is not plausible that the content, or the teaching, of privately-organised and highly vocational courses could be significantly worse than those currently delivered to many students in most schools.

This summer in Spain I read, for the first time, Don Quixote – and I ploughed through some parts of the rather thick book in the Don’s homeland, the region of La Mancha.

I thought I’d solved the puzzle of the protagonist’s name: Key-Ho-Tay or Kwiksot?

I’ve previously spoken the name ‘Don Quixote’ as Don Key-ho-tay although of course I’ve been aware of the alternative Don Quick-Sot. The version of the book I had, in the translation by John Rutherford (winner of the 2002 Primo Valle Inclàn Prize) definitely plumps for Kwiksot. For example, on page 222 (Chapter XXVI) of the paperback, he translates a poem to read:

Enough to fill the biggest pot
Are tears of doleful Don Quixote
…
And when it touched his tender spot
Tears flowed from doleful Don Quixote

So no confusion there. My previous assumption of Key-ho-tay was an affectation because I thought it more sounded more foreign.

But hang on a moment. Checking the Spanish equivalent I find it reads:

Y en tocándole el cogote,
Aquí lloró Don Quijote

El Ingenioso Hidalgo de Don Quijote de la Mancha. Capítulo XXVI

Quijote, it turns out, is the modern Spanish rendition, after spelling reforms – Quixote is the spelling in medieval Castilian – and according to Yahoo’s Spanish Dictionary: translation of cogote, cogote is pronounced Koggo-tay, which would mean that Quixote is said Key-Ho-Tay after all.

Obviously, Rutherford’s translation is cleverly making allowance for a traditional English mispronounciation. On another page his translation reads,

‘…Don Biscuit, or Don Fixit, or Don Riskit’.

‘Don Quixote he must have said, Lady,’ Sancho interrupted

Which carries throught the Kwiksot pronunciation. And as Wikipedia points out, traditional English rendering is also preserved in the pronunciation of the adjectival form quixotic.

Gavin wondered if anyone had predicted that an Orwellian, totalitarian state might come in a religious guise.

Well the answer’s yes, of course. Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale describes a totalitarian theocracy that specifically (for this is Atwood) oppresses women. She just picked the wrong religion.

Atwood’s novel doesn’t really take on the broader theme of totalitarianism, in the manner of 1984 and other dystopian nightmares, or of theocracy, except in their specific impact on women. She has a particular, feminist, fish to fry; but it’s interesting to hear that before she, perhaps unconvincingly, decided on Christianity as the theocracy of choice, she did consider Islam, in the context of Iran and the then recent Iranian revolution.

Surely the iconography and condition of women in The Handmaid’s Tale are directly read from Islam? In Atwood’s story, women have no property rights, they don’t study, they don’t wear make-up. Sexual expression is tightly regulated and homsexuals are hanged.

Where in the world does this sound like? The USA, the last surviving Enlightenment revolution where freedoms are constitutionally guaranteed, and religion and state rigourously separated? Or, Say Saudi Arabia, or Iran, or the Sudan?

The tendency in recent times by some on the Left to make common cause against the USA with theocratic fascists has coloured my re-reading of Atwood’s book. The Handmaid’s Tale wasn’t intended to be a prediction, and the theocracy was, if you like, a dark satire of Atwood’s projections of American, right-wing, fundamentalist Christianity. I can’t help but feel some irritation at the bien-pensants of the West continually, and safely, kicking out minor and temporary problems whilst before them lies a whole ocean of the traditional Islamic repression of women.

Assistant Secretary-General at the Muslim Council of Britain, Inayat Bunglawala, on not expressing regret for murderous threats:

So on February 14 1989, when the Iranian Islamic leader, Imam Khomeini delivered his fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie’s death, I was truly elated. It was a very welcome reminder that British Muslims did not have to regard themselves just as a small, vulnerable minority…

Looking back now on those events I will readily acknowledge that we were wrong to have called for the book to be banned.

Inayat Bunglawala on Comment Is FreeI used to be a book burner

Satanic Verses Death Timeline

• February 12, 1989: Six people are killed and 100 injured during anti-Rushdie protests in Islamabad, Pakistan.
• February 13, 1989: One person is killed and 60 injured in anti-Rushdie riots in Srinagar, India.
• February 24, 1989: Twelve people die in anti-Rushdie rioting in Bombay, India.
• 1990: Five bombings target bookstores in England.
  July 1991: Hitoshi Igarashi, the novel’s Japanese translator, is stabbed to death
• July 1991: Ettore Capriolo, its Italian translator, is seriously wounded.
• July 2, 1993: Thirty-seven Turkish intellectuals and locals participating in the Pir Sultan Abdal Literary Festival, die when their hotel in Sivas, Turkey, namely the Madimak Hotel, is burnt down by 2000 members of various anti-democratic, pro-sharia radical islamist groups protesting against Aziz Nesin, Rushdie’s Turkish translator.
• October 1993: The novel’s Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, is shot and seriously injured

In the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a
Christian and Sam Harris’s recent bestseller, The End of
Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case
against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the
major religious texts, he documents the ways in which
religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual
repression, and a distortion of our origins in the
cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument
for a more secular life based on science and
reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope’s
awesome view of the universe, and Moses and
the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry
of the double helix.

Zeldman’s redesigned Happy Cog and his story about his science teacher suggests a tricksy, sly, and clever man. By the way, buy his book, I did (and I’m not getting an Amazon referral for that).

Looking over this post I realised where the title comes from. There’s a Roland Barthes essay in Mythologies called, The Iconongraphy of the Abbé Pierre which suggests he has a zero degree haircut, a haircut that doesn’t signify.

If you’re interested you could try Writing Degree Zero but it’s a bit of a tedious read, I recommend instead the very funny Mythologies, a collection of essays lighter and wittier than his sometimes pompous and turgid prose.

The moon’s an arrant thief
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun

I’m reading, for the first time, Pale Fire, by Nabokov. Wow.

And all the time, and all the time, my love,
You too are there, beneath the word, above
The syllable, to underscore and stress
The vital rhythm. One heard a woman's dress
Rustle in days of yore. I've often caught
The sound and sense of your approaching thought.
And all in you is youth, and you make new,
By quoting them, old things I made for you

Can he do that when he’s not seriously trying? And I thought The Golden Gate was marvellous – I had no idea the notion. feel, tone was lifted from Pale Fire; and that while Seth’s bathetic tetrameter’s aren’t too tongue-in-cheek, Nabokov could toss out this stuff to write a bigger, more peculiar and ambitious book. Quite remarkable.

Helen picked up a book called The Story Of The World In Pictures for £4.99 in a local charity shop. It doesn’t seem to have a publication date but there is a small copyright notice dating it to 1934.

worldstory/cinema
Queueing Up For The Cinema In Malaya

The caption reads:

The responsibility of those who control the cinema industry is clearly seen when films percolate to native races. What, for instance, will be the effect os sophisticated comedies of society on the minds of natives? There is so little in common between the two types of culture that much damage may be done unless theimportation of film is strictly regulated