Just one thing to flag up today, a BBC Radio 4 series that I have been listening to on my commute: A History of the World in 100 Objects. Each fifteen-minute slot features objects from the British Museum, with its director, Neil McGregor, taking us on a journey from pre-history to the present, looking at everything from flints to carved pestles, all the way to Dolly the cloned sheep and the credit card. It is a bravura series, uniting two of Britain's great institutions, the British Museum and the BBC.

Only the latter would have dared to turn over a whole four months of programming to serious history, and ousted book of the week from its evening slot, in order to present this series in full. Neil McGregor from the Museum is an exemplary encyclopaedia of the world's artefacts: lucid, concise and, above all, extremely enthusiastic about the messages from history that each object conveys. The programmes are beautifully produced, sharp snapshots in time; it is mark of its success in describing each object and the craftsmanship that has gone into it that one never feels it would have anything to gain by being shown on television, rather than just talked about on radio.

Nevertheless, the supporting website, which features high-resolution images, is a wealth of digital information. Both are an absolute must - and luckily it will always remain accessible, as the BBC has decided to keep all the programmes on a permanent podcast. This is an archive for the future, as well as a pleasure for the present.

Labels: A History of the World, British Museum, Daily Diary

In between doing a hundred other things - that is to say, whilst I am on the bus commuting to and from my library job - I start to reread Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, in preparation for a tutorial in a couple of days' time.

I have taught this now for five years, but what amazes me whenever I teach already-familiar material is that it retains its capacity to surprise. Always, it seems, I spot something that I have not noticed before, some formal trick or moment that ties in with the broader themes that I plan to discuss with my students. In this case, I notice a moment from the middle of Act 1.

After Gayev recounts to his sister Ranyevskaia the death of their former nurse, Lopakhin, the successful businessman, turns to Ranyevskaia, and suddenly says, "I feel I'd like to tell you something nice, something jolly." He then proceeds to elaborate his scheme about leasing the estate to holidaymakers. At first glance, there seems nothing odd about this, other than perhaps his urgency to explain it amidst the fluster of her recent arrival from Paris.


But then one thinks critically about the back story of the play. Lopakhin has been living near the estate whilst Ranyevskaia has been away in Paris. He has, we imagine, been in close contact with Gayev and Varya, who effectively manage it in her absence. Why, then, does he wait until this moment - until the early hours of the morning and within minutes of Ranyevskaia's return - to expound it? The only difference, the only thing which can account for it, is Ranyevskaia herself. What matters is not just the plan and its cold economics, but the passionate possibility it signifies for Lopakhin.

We can well imagine that this plan has been hatching long in his mind, and now he cannot possibly wait until a more opportune moment. He, once her "little peasant boy," has found a way to come up to her level, in her intellectual and social estimation of him. But whilst Lopakhin's future plan for the orchard is tied to his acute awareness of his peasant past, Ranyevskia's rejection of his ostensibly sensible idea as being "nonsense" is tied to her familial past, and hence two concepts of what the orchard means in class, economic, and historical terms are diametrically and poignantly opposed.

As the scene moves on into Feer's reminiscences about the history of the orchard when the estate was a success, Chekhov cleverly and implicitly reveals Ranyevskaia's true feelings about the orchard through her response to the seemingly "daft" serf. As Feers' nostalgically waffles on about the cherries and the jam, Gayev tells him to be quiet. But Ranyevskia asks, "and where is that recipe now?" She geniunely wants to know, wants to cling to the orchard as embodying the possibility of economic salvation in its own right, and therefore marking some sort of continuity with the past rather than the need for change.

Throughout the play, Lopakhin is self-conscious that he is a mere peasant, a "sow's ear" dressed up as a "silk purse." Gayev, an outright snob, does seem to see him as such, calling him a "boor." But Ranyevskaia seems more accomodating, although she does reject the idea of country villas as being "vulgar." Her rejection of Lopakhin's plan is not to do with her objections to him because he is beneath her class. Rather, she is genuinely concerned for the orchard, and all that it stands for that is literally and figuratively rooted in history.

And what is doubly poignant about this point is that her plans and feelings are so at odds with those of Lopakhin. For Lopakhin feels love for her as revealed through the dramatic timing of his announcement of his plans for the orchard; Ranyevskaia, too, who married a solicitor rather than a nobleman, might be potentially capable of reciprocating that love, rather than ideologically loathing Lopakhin because he is a mere peasant. Yet her plan - which she hopes will save the orchard - is not to marry him herself, but to marry him to Varia.

Right from the start of the play, then, emotional and social aspirations are in conflict, as are different views of what the cherry orchard signifies, and future opportunities for resolution are already defeated. Lopakhin may buy the orchard and turn it into villas, but to do so will be to alienate Ranyevskaia, the one character who might potentially accept him as a free man of the post-emancipation era, rather than viewing him as still essentially a serf, as her brother does.

Labels: Chekhov, Daily Diary, The Cherry Orchard

No serious reading today. No time today. Only I do spot one article on the BBC that is of interest: David Runciman explaining why people vote against their own self-interests. As I have noted before on this blog, at least British politics make some degree of sense. The working class, mainly concentrated in the formerly industrialised northern regions of England, tend to vote Labour, for the party that stands (or used to) for the redistribution of wealth. The rich south, especially in the financial districts of London, votes for the free-market Conservatives. When this pattern is not followed, it is logically enough because the Conservatives have managed to appeal to other core issues that concern working class voters, such as immigration, or because Labour have moved to the centre to appease middle-class concerns, such as healthcare and education.

In the US, though, the whole scheme seems awry. It is almost as if the poorer you are, the more likely you are to vote Republican, against your own interests in receiving free healthcare, for example. In his article, Runciman does a good job of explaining this inconsistency. It is all to do with the patronising effect that comes about when liberals try to help the disenfranchised:

The Republicans have learnt how to stoke up resentment against the patronising liberal elite, all those do-gooders who assume they know what poor people ought to be thinking.

Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America's poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.

This still does not seem to me to be quite enough to explain how deeply-rooted suspicion of Democratic government is in the US, such that even its positive actions - or what would appear to be so from a European vantage point - are seen as negative and oppressive by those they seek to help. But it's a good start.

Labels: Barack Obama, Daily Diary, Republicanism