What I’m reading #143

At Popbitch, a reader writes:

My brother once organised a talk and book signing with left-wing journalist and documentary maker John Pilger at Waterstones back in the late 90s.
The Q&A afterwards was a bit  quiet, so I stuck my hand up and asked if he thought that the internet would be useful for investigative journalism. He looked at me like I was deranged and dismissed the idea with a booming “NO.”
Last I heard he was hanging out with Julian Assange. My brother got a job with Amazon and that branch of Waterstones has closed down.

Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist, asks, “Remind me, what was so great about free trade?” Quote unquote:

The second insight is that while international trade seems to involve competing with foreigners, it’s often more illuminating to see it as a battle between domestic producers. My home town of Oxford makes Minis, which we can export in exchange for camembert. But what if a post-Brexit government decides to hammer the camembert trade? It’s not impossible: cabinet minister Liz Truss did once describe the UK’s reliance on foreign cheese as a “disgrace”.
There are two ways to make cheese in the UK: the obvious way, using cows, and the indirect way, by making cars and then trading the cars in exchange for cheese. The British cheese industry is, in a very real sense, directly competing with the British car industry. Protect one with a tariff, and you hurt the other.

 Aidan Hartley who writes the “Wild Life” column in the Spectator is a farmer in Kenya. It is grim because of weathers and poachers. Quote unquote:

Around the farmstead itself is a high security electric fence with thousands of volts pulsing through it. I’ve seen a baboon climb over it — and I know a leopard got through it one night — but unless the wires are cut there is no way a human can breach the line without triggering loud alarms and flashing lights. The first alarm goes off at about 9 p.m. I go out with the fencing team until we find the cut wires, fix them and restore power. We have an askari defending the barn, where our last hay reserves are stored for the farm’s cattle. It’s just a matter of time before the invaders try to either steal it or burn the barn out of spite.
At midnight the alarm goes off again. Wandering along the fence line in the dark with the team, the hairs on my neck stand up. People outside the fence are watching us and I wonder what arms they carry and if they will use them. The cut is found and fixed. At 2 a.m. the alarm sounds again — and then again at 4 a.m.

At the Spinoff, the distinguished Katherine Mansfield scholar (also poet, novelist, librettist, dramatist, biographer, anthologist etc) Vincent O’Sullivan on dem bones, dem bones of KM and the plan to disinter them and bring them to Wellington. Quote unquote:

In our capital city one is able at times to see a lock of hair; the shawl that covered a coffin; the typewriter; the manuscripts with their lines of text like distant tangled wire. (An image I draw from her childhood in Karori.) So what a deft mayoral instinct this seems to be – we must own the bones. Are our corporeal remains no more than our pure water, to be given free to foreigners? Yet the recumbent, a niggler says, didn’t she choose France as where she preferred to live? Ah yes, the mayor says, to live! He has us there! But who would prefer to lie, forever, near rackety Versailles, when Wellington is still on offer?

Poets to the left of me, versifiers to the right. Here, at Open Culture, is TS Eliot reading The Waste Land and The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock. Hard to tell that he was from St Louis, Missouri. Fun fact: he wrote Prufrock, possibly the most middle-aged poem ever, when he was 22.

How to speak British: dialect coach Andrew Jack demonstrates the regional variations of English plus Scottish, Irish and Welsh. I am not convinced by his Yorkshire, which to my ear depends not so much on vowels as on stressing the surprising syllable, often the first (to be fair, he covers only South Yorkshire), but the others are brilliant. I detest the English prejudice against the Welsh – it is non-trivial – but he is amusing when he concludes: “Come down the west coast [from Liverpool] and you’re in Wales, North Wales where it’s breathy like that, and South Wales where you get much heavier and Welsh people who sometimes even sound a bit drunk.”

Economist letter of the month: a modest proposal from Ted Stroll of San Jose, California. Quote unquote:

There is a simple solution to the Brexit conundrum, one that will allow Britain to have its trade cake and eat it too: the UK need only become the 11th province of Canada. Canada and the EU recently concluded a trade agreement and the UK would accede to it as a Canadian province. It would also join NAFTA and enjoy liberal trade terms with the United States.
Adjustments would be few and easy. Canada’s provinces have wide powers and by treaty the UK’s could be even broader. The queen would remain head of state. As a provincial flag, the Union flag would still be flown, with the Canadian flag a discreet presence on government buildings.

More from Open Culture: George Harrison on why everyone should play the ukulele, which I had to learn so I could teach the children. (My wife, bless her, thought it would be easy for me because I can play the guitar. Wrong: different number of strings, different tuning. But I had performed Joni Mitchell songs in her weird tunings – every song a different tuning! – so I was a half-step ahead, I thought. Wrong again.) Quote unquote:

“You can’t play it and not laugh!”

Possibly true – Miss 13 plays “Smoke on the Water” on it, which does make me laugh.

So here is the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra, Bret McKenzie on vocals, with Randy Newman’s “Short People”. When this record came out I had a girlfriend who was 1.82 m tall. She thought the song was hilarious.