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Jan. 22nd, 2004 01:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liadnanLast night, on a whim, I went to the LRB Bookshop for a debate; partly because it had sounded interesting when being touted by the particpants on Today that morning, though the advert in the LRB had already mildly interested me.
The question was: "if one of the Parthenon and the Alhambra had to be bombed flat, which would you choose to save?" Speaking for the Parthenon was Mary Beard, well known to (and in some cases supervisor of) my classicist friends; for the Alhambra Robert Irwin, well known to, um, people who like his books (such as me) and LRB subscribers.
It was, of course, entirely co-incidental that Mary Beard's recent book entitled The Parthenon is now available in paperback, that Robert Irwin's recent book entitled The Alhambra has just been published, edited by one Mary Beard; and, of course, I and everyone there would have bought both books whether or not we had gone... But I digress.
Beard's main line of argument was not on the importance of the Parthenon in our understanding of classical Athens, or on its beauty, but on its mythic status, as the ruin, and its long post-classical history, as church, mosque, and tourist attraction. Irwin emphasised more the Alhambra as a work of beauty -and maths- and, in various different ways, the theme of something frozen came back, in different forms, again and again in his introduction, though he did concede in the floor debate that, like the Parthenon, the Alhambra as we have it is almost as much a product of its restorers as of its creators.
Somewhat surprisingly, to my mind, the Alhambra won. I thought Beard, who took a fairly light-hearted approach to the whole thing spoke rather better, and more naturally -Irwin had obviously written his speech and as a result it sounded stilted- and I found her argument convincing, but there it is.
At the start Beard asked how many had been to the Parthenon: almost all; and how many had been to the Alhambra: perhaps surprisingly, also almost all. Factor of the LRB audience I suppose: during drinks (rather good wine actually) afterwards it suddenly occurred to me that the room including, I can't deny, myself, was almost a caricature of literary-academic London. Heigh ho.
One woman in the audience did make the fair, if somewhat humourless point, that all these "best of" comparisons were irritating and pointless. I do sometimes agree with that (and why the hell should I take the advice of the Great British Public on what I should read, I don't listen to them about much else) but, as Beard pointed out, such questions do help in working out why, exactly, we do think these buildings are important.
When I left I rushed home in order to descend gradually from high to middle brow culture: ER series-opener double bill via Grand Designs (not a wildly interesting one I thought). Not a bad ER actually: I'd forgotten how much I liked it. The advertised twist in ep.2 was fairly blatantly obvious when one read the TV guide ("having heard that Luka is dead, Carter returns to the Congo to recover his body, but has a huge surprise," well, I wonder what that might be). More genuinely surprising was the twist at the end of the episode, with Carter remaining behind. I can't imagine they're about to write him out, but it would be a watershed moment if they did: he is, I think, the only member of the original lead characters left (some of the nurses may have been there all along, but except for Abby and her predecessor they're all character parts really) and in the beginning the series largely turned around him. Maybe time for them to think about calling it a day...?
Finally, I was going to rant about Little Friends on Channel 4, in which small "innocent children" (actually child actors) wind up members of the public; but find that the Square Eyes Column in Private Eye had already done it for me:
"For a programme that seems so remarkably pleased with itself, Little Friends is also sluggishly derivative. There are borrowings from Dennis Pennis, Chris Morris, Ali G., Louis Theroux, and all the other practitioners of saying the unsayable with a poker face. But in every case their comedy had a target- Pennis cut Hollywood stars down to size; Morris preyed on media dogma; Ali G stung pompous gits wanting yoof credentials; Theroux hammered the deluded and the self-obsessed. By contrast Little Friends feeds off the public's inexcusable desire to be nice to children.
Apropos of none of the above, I was watching a rubbish film starring James Belushi the other week, Royce, when I thought: "that thug looks familiar. Surely.. it can't be, no, Anthony Stewart-Head, with American accent. Nah." But it was.
The question was: "if one of the Parthenon and the Alhambra had to be bombed flat, which would you choose to save?" Speaking for the Parthenon was Mary Beard, well known to (and in some cases supervisor of) my classicist friends; for the Alhambra Robert Irwin, well known to, um, people who like his books (such as me) and LRB subscribers.
It was, of course, entirely co-incidental that Mary Beard's recent book entitled The Parthenon is now available in paperback, that Robert Irwin's recent book entitled The Alhambra has just been published, edited by one Mary Beard; and, of course, I and everyone there would have bought both books whether or not we had gone... But I digress.
Beard's main line of argument was not on the importance of the Parthenon in our understanding of classical Athens, or on its beauty, but on its mythic status, as the ruin, and its long post-classical history, as church, mosque, and tourist attraction. Irwin emphasised more the Alhambra as a work of beauty -and maths- and, in various different ways, the theme of something frozen came back, in different forms, again and again in his introduction, though he did concede in the floor debate that, like the Parthenon, the Alhambra as we have it is almost as much a product of its restorers as of its creators.
Somewhat surprisingly, to my mind, the Alhambra won. I thought Beard, who took a fairly light-hearted approach to the whole thing spoke rather better, and more naturally -Irwin had obviously written his speech and as a result it sounded stilted- and I found her argument convincing, but there it is.
At the start Beard asked how many had been to the Parthenon: almost all; and how many had been to the Alhambra: perhaps surprisingly, also almost all. Factor of the LRB audience I suppose: during drinks (rather good wine actually) afterwards it suddenly occurred to me that the room including, I can't deny, myself, was almost a caricature of literary-academic London. Heigh ho.
One woman in the audience did make the fair, if somewhat humourless point, that all these "best of" comparisons were irritating and pointless. I do sometimes agree with that (and why the hell should I take the advice of the Great British Public on what I should read, I don't listen to them about much else) but, as Beard pointed out, such questions do help in working out why, exactly, we do think these buildings are important.
When I left I rushed home in order to descend gradually from high to middle brow culture: ER series-opener double bill via Grand Designs (not a wildly interesting one I thought). Not a bad ER actually: I'd forgotten how much I liked it. The advertised twist in ep.2 was fairly blatantly obvious when one read the TV guide ("having heard that Luka is dead, Carter returns to the Congo to recover his body, but has a huge surprise," well, I wonder what that might be). More genuinely surprising was the twist at the end of the episode, with Carter remaining behind. I can't imagine they're about to write him out, but it would be a watershed moment if they did: he is, I think, the only member of the original lead characters left (some of the nurses may have been there all along, but except for Abby and her predecessor they're all character parts really) and in the beginning the series largely turned around him. Maybe time for them to think about calling it a day...?
Finally, I was going to rant about Little Friends on Channel 4, in which small "innocent children" (actually child actors) wind up members of the public; but find that the Square Eyes Column in Private Eye had already done it for me:
"For a programme that seems so remarkably pleased with itself, Little Friends is also sluggishly derivative. There are borrowings from Dennis Pennis, Chris Morris, Ali G., Louis Theroux, and all the other practitioners of saying the unsayable with a poker face. But in every case their comedy had a target- Pennis cut Hollywood stars down to size; Morris preyed on media dogma; Ali G stung pompous gits wanting yoof credentials; Theroux hammered the deluded and the self-obsessed. By contrast Little Friends feeds off the public's inexcusable desire to be nice to children.
Apropos of none of the above, I was watching a rubbish film starring James Belushi the other week, Royce, when I thought: "that thug looks familiar. Surely.. it can't be, no, Anthony Stewart-Head, with American accent. Nah." But it was.
