Draw Breath

…can be found over on Malcolm Redfellow's site (with a tip of the cap to Slugger).

Here, a third, is my favourite:

 

By Sean Street.

 

Update: Malcolm gives the poem some thoughtful consideration here.

 

It's the time of year again when we academics are welcoming a new crop of students into our classes.

I always have mixed feelings about this time of year. Apart from the obvious that Winter is coming and that the students stay the same age but I get older, the new academic year serves as a reminder of the fundamental questions any teacher worth their salt ought to ask.

It's easy to wonder about the formal aspects of running courses. And you simply have to wonder how you're going to convey all that information between now and the end of semester. The fundamental questions, though, are pretty much contradictory: 'why should the students be interested in what I've got to say?' and 'how much ought I to cater to them?'

One change in my years of teaching, at least at undergraduate level, is that you can't simply assume that students are interested because they have taken the course. Nor can you assume that they'll participate in a way that you can reasonably expect. So part of the teaching-in-higher-education job comes down to explaining to students why they should be more bothered by some issue than they need to be to pass. You also spend your time trying to cajole them into some involvement in their own classes.

Tactics towards the final element in all this are dealt with in the thread started by Chris Bertram over on Crooked Timber. Let the terror of silence begin!

Congrats to Mick Fealty. His (and the Telegraph's) new Brassneck venture looks like a pretty good competitor with CIF, though with some obvious differences. And competition like this is always good!

There's an interesting list in the Telegraph of Britain's 100 Most Influential People on the Left, presumably as part of Iain Dale's burgeoning list-making hobby. But, as always, these lists say as much about the list-makers as they do about those who they list.

How Iain Dale and Brian Brivati, the list's compilers, define 'the left' is certainly fascinating. But I'm not sure it's particularly coherent. Essentially, Dale and Brivati decide that they can't describe the left in line with older progressive or socialist norms, so they come up with a rather all-encompassing description of the left as "a brand which identifies with certain historical trends and against certain others…[that is] for reform in a broad sense."

Of course, once you look at the list it becomes obvious why they can't define the left by its more traditional precepts and choose the rather woolly definition instead. The list is spectacularly wide-ranging.

Now, as Dale and Brivati say, no one will agree with the list, so it would be pointless to engage in a 'him-out-her-in' game with them. My beef involves a more fundamental objection to the excercise, though. Despite Dale and Brivati's efforts, they no more get to grips with what 'influence' might mean than with what it might mean to be on the left.

In attempting to answer the 'what is influence?' question, Dale and Brivati fall back once again on the branding metaphor. So, they ask, "who has made and is making the most impact on the market position of brand “Left” in its competition with other brands in the highly competitive market place of British politics." Indeed.

But wait: "influence is about more than market position." You might have influence "in terms of air-time," but not votes. And your influence might be of a different sort depending on what profession you hail from. And it matters who you are relative to other people in your organisation or profession.

After all their agonising thought, Dale and Brivati seem to resort to describing influence in terms of winning the next election for Labour: influence on the left equals, they say the "power to change people’s lives and to do that the left, through the most effective vehicle available to them in the real world, the Labour Party, need to win the next election."

But this looks like an enormous cop-out. First, there's the breadth problem. Telegraph readers might find that problem more obvious if someone stated that being influential on the British right could be reduced to 'working to get the David Cameron into Downing Street.' Second, just look at the list: are many of these people really working towards the continued electoral success of New Labour? George 'Miaow' Galloway? Well they might have a point there. But Alex Salmond?

There's also the more general problem: surely for a definition of influence to be meaningful it has to extend beyond narrow electoral-political conceptions of power. To give one trans-Atlantic example, Al Gore has had more influence since losing political power than he had when he was sort-of in the White House. But – and here's where I half-sympathise with Dalen and Brivati – once you go down that line you're left without even an arguably objective measure for influence.

The list as constructed – inclusive of a wide range of people in culture, media and politics, but defined in terms of politics – just fits in with a general rightist myth (one that I'm actually not convinced Dale subscribes to. As Kevin points out in the comments, Dale is a perfectly reasonable commentator): that the left is a unified functioning entity, not a disparate set of people who adhere to an even wider range of ideas. In fact, nothing much defineable unifies the broad left and the category seems pretty much impossible to use for listing purposes.

At the end of the day, what Dale and Brivati really mean is: 'A List of 100 Noteworthy People on the Left, as Seen from the Perspective of Telegraph Readers.' It doesn't seem as authoritative, but there's something refreshingly authentic about acknowledging the subjectivity of subjective claims.

(By the way, email hat tip to McGrathy).

Update: I've just given this post a quick evening tidy: the style wasn't precisely flowing. This iteration is a little bit better and the meaning hasn't changed.

Well that's a good thing to see: in following up on figures cited by O'Neill, over on A Pint of Unionist Lite, on the costs of a United Ireland, I noticed that the Irish Department of Finance allows you to download its budget figures in OpenOffice format as well as the ubiquitous and monopolistic Microsoft. Good to see Irish government sites accounting for proper standards. 

John Quiggin has a good post over on Crooked Timber discussing the need for the Democrats to put an end to the Iraq debacle as soon as possible. Since a direct motion to end the war probably wouldn't work, Quiggin advocates that Congress repeat the tactic that brought Vietnam to an end: simply stop paying for it.

This leads to a sub-debate in the comments on whether the emerging Vietnam <=> Iraq consensus has any merit. It probably does. Still, I'm concerned at the idea that the ending-the-war options are the same for the Democrats now as they were then. I think that things are much much worse for them this time around.

For a start, the conclusion to the Vietnam disaster was a stablising moment for Vietnam itself. After all, the conflict had never really been a war of liberation. It had been an intervention in a civil war. The end of the war was a clarification of a fact that had been apparent for a long time: successive American administrations had not been trying to do the impossible and win the but rather had been shoring up the twilight of a tyrannical and unpopular proxy's regime.

The belated acceptance of this fact had only served to underline that Vietnam had been kept in ruins for longer than it would otherwise have been. Moreover, the primary consequence of the American withdrawal was reduction in misery and the political stability that comes with the restoration of civil order.

Today's problem for the Democrats (never mind for the Iraqis) is that the American pull-out will not coincide with the end of a civil war. Rather it will provide the opportunity for the various parties to the civil war that the Americans kicked off to take their conflict to a whole new level.

If George Packer is correct for instance, then Baghdad will undergo an unprecedented and pre-meditated bout of anti-Sunni ethnic cleansing. The end of American involvement, in other words, will likely be accompanied by intensified misery in Iraq.

This leaves the Democratic candidates in a bind that brings them half-way towards a succession of Vietnam era American Presidents. American involvement in Vietnam, at least if Daniel Ellsberg is to be believed, was prolonged because successive presidents didn't want to be seen as the ones who had lost the war. Better to prop the regime up than be on watch when it falls.

Problem is, assuming Bush leaves his mess for someone else to clean up, and assuming the media will be inclined to cover events post-withdrawal, it'll be very hard to for the Clinton/Obama/whoever administration to explain that the images of intensified disaster people will see will only be a result of the withdrawal to the extent that the circumstances of withdrawal were set during and straight after the invasion.

In other words, opprobrium tends to land on those in power at the time no matter whether they are responsible or not.

This, when it comes, won't be helped by the fact, as Henry Farrell points out, that the ambiguity of defeat will allow the Republican post-war narrative to remain unchanged from its Vietnam iteration. Even at its most triumphalist pitch, the right's narrative of this war has been about defeating their political opponents at home, with Iraq almost a sideshow. They won't be the first to put their losses down to liberal and fifth-columnist inspired moral turpitude at home. Most likely, the American right and their few remaining European harlequins will continue to propagate the myth that the wars they start end not in defeat but in betrayal.

American public discourse has always had a problem in thinking that suffering in Iraq was all its own. When the war finally ends, at least for them, the debate will continue as to precisely whose chickens have come home to roost.

I have just finished the incredible In the Wake by Per Petterson. Petterson won this year's IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for Out Stealing Horses. In the Wake is at least semi-autobiographical in that it describes the Scandanavian Star disaster of 1990, the disaster in which a number of Petterson's own family died. The book is a meditation on loss but is not without moments of comedy. We meet the main character lapsing into an all to common breakdown on the streets of his home town. Such is his despair at not possessing enough money to buy a fizzy drink in his local shop that the shop assistant simply gives it to him without question.

Grief on the loss of his much loved family members has rendered life unbearably heavy; even the weight of his own body seems too much. Six years on from the tragedy, his life is still a waking nightmare; dreams and vsions intersperse the book. The book reminds me of some of Thomas Hardy's most poignant poems on grief; the mist of Hardy here being replaced by vast snowscapes. There is no one moment of recovery, simply a series of false starts which somehow propel the narrator back to some kind of normality. The incongruousness of some of these false starts is not lost on him, whether in a moment of sheer panic while in flagrante or while being told to keep driving during a snow storm.

In the Wake may not have got any major awards but in the tradition of all great books, it lingers and changes in the mind long after a first reading.

Hat tip to P O'Neill on Irish Election, who points towards Ryanair's formal notice of requisition for an EGM at Aer Lingus. As P. says, Ryanair have to be very careful about saying that they are seeking the reinstatement of the Shannon-Heathrow link for the commercial good of Aer Lingus as a whole: otherwise (in my non-expert reading of corporate law) they would be seeking to commit a fraud on the company.

But you have to think that this is bullshit. Surely the Belfast-Heathrow decision by the management of Aer Lingus is (whatever we may think of it) a tactic to recover profitable ground lost. Belfast-Heathrow is presumably bound to be more profitable than Shannon-Heathrow.

I get the feeling, now that they're sending lawyers out to do their talking, that Ryanair's heart isn't in this particular stunt any more. So how are they going to back down? My guess is that they will be defeated and will then moan about how their the only ones looking after the customer etc. In other words, no change.

Good post over on Brad deLong's blog that gives a parallel perspective to the one I gave here.

According to the people deLong quotes, we have to see the subprime crisis in the context of new modes of banking, rather than in the more traditional terms of banking that have held up until now.

The conventional story about hedge funds is that, through their profit-making behaviour, they iron out the inefficiencies of the securities markets. They make money from information inefficiencies but since their investors tend to be the very firms who created the inefficiencies hedge funds act as a feedback mechanism, retrieving some of the money lost by the banks etc in the normal course of their work. In Sebastian Mallaby's words, linked to above, hedge funds "do not so much create risk as absorb it."

Hedge funds are the dung beetles of the financial world, in other words. While the great elephants of the plain lazily half-digest everything they eat, beetles, in looking after themselves, spread the fertiliser far and wide thus put all the pooey goodness back into the system.

But the problem is that the greatest profits are to be had at the margins and, in a segment of the financial market that is totally unregulated, nobody knows where those margins ought sensibly to end.

The fallacy of the subprime bet was that risk was regarded as another market inefficiency that could be addressed as a simple matter of price.

What nobody realised was that, with risk seemingly spread so thin, people at every level had an incentive to exploit the system. This was fine and dandy while new money kept getting thrown into the pot. It became a problem when the run towards the lucrative margin turned into a flight from the edge.

So, with the help of deLong's post, here's an alternative story about hedge funds, at least where they seek to bite the giddy fruit on the outer branches of the banking tree: they sought out risks that regulated and self-regulated banks dared not take on on their own and took a punt on them. The bet backfired because everyone thought they were passing the inevitable costs on to someone else before the music stopped.

But the risks were not spread so thin as they seemed. Or rather, the known knowns of subprime got large enough for people to become seriously worried about the unknown unknowns. And that's when the current panic really started to bite. After all there's nothing quite like playing Russian roulette when you think the gun is fully loaded.

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PS. Zoology; musical chairs; Genesis; Siberian parlour games. I'm telling ya: no metaphor is safe…