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The Mr. Bean film sees the eponymous hero, a hapless museum attendent, foisted on a foreign museum under the pretence that he is a visiting expert. Grilled about his critical methods, he answers that “I sit and look at the paintings”. The museum officials, impressed by this back-to-basics approach, immediately hire him.

Beyond the world of farce, there’s always a bubbling undercurrent of non-professional intellectuals, independent scholars by choice or implication, sometimes producing work of staggering quality but entirely lacking in professional ambition. Over the years, they build up devoted, if rarely large, audiences — people cutting their essays out of whatever small magazine they can get published in, stashing away otherwise-forgotten gems, like the cluster of music geeks hovering around that promising local band which never quite gets a CD out. The internet makes it much easier, of course.

George Scialabba seems to be one of them, according to this review by Scott McLemee.

It also, incidentally, provides a more positive view of Opus Dei, as a form of social innovation more suited to the young and devote than traditional orders:

“For several hundred years,” he told me, “a small minority of Italian/French/Spanish adolescent peasant or working-class boys — usually the sternly repressed or (like me) libido-deficient ones — have been devout, well-behaved, studious… the bright ones become Jesuits; the more modestly gifted or mystically inclined become Franciscans…”

Instead, he was drawn into Opus Dei — a group trying, as he puts it, “to make a new kind of religious vocation possible, combining the traditional virtues and spiritual exercises with a professional or business career.”

I like Jonathan Raban, and I’ve not read Phillip Blond’s

Red Tory

. Still, I’m more than a little dubious of the former’s critique of the latter. It seems to be mainly based on a cultural affinity for the city over the country, and on a disbelief that institutions run by stodgy and self-isolating small-c conservatives can ever do social good.

what meaning they might have for people on sink estates or in sprawling, ethnically diverse conurbations, like those of the Midlands and the North, is beyond comprehension. Like his literary predecessors, Blond, when he thinks of England, sees mainly its church-spire-haunted countryside.

Well, yes, but so what? If Blond can get rural tory do-gooders actually

doing good

rather than tut-tutting over the neighbours, I’m all in favour. Let’s make a more radical urban variant, and build an odd-couple alliance of urban anarchists and rural reactionaries.

I’m an intermittent fan of GTD. That is, I tend to ignore it for a while, and then

This largely depends on what’s happenign in my life; there are long stretches where I only need to deal with one or two large projects. Since GTD is optimized for managers needing to track a large number of small tasks, it’s not much use for me. But then live spins out of control, and I return to David Allen for some imitation of control.

Within GTD, the big problem is that it doesn’t handle big tasks very well. Often a project consists of “Do this. Then do it another 850 times, over the next 3 moths”. Sure, I can keep adding each chunk to my next actions, but it doesn’t really help. What I need is something to remind me that I need to work on the task, show and recognize the work I’m putting into it, and otherwise keep out of the way.

So, I took a look round online to figure out how to deal with the problem. Turns out there isn’t one; everybody has bolted her own system onto it. Sucks, really it does.

I’m less than overwhelmed by Michael Bracewell’s book England is Mine. I do have to admit, though, that he has a nice turn of phrase — even if it is in a style that must have landed him in Pseuds Corner:

So pop, despite itself, became arty. English society, high on the new convenience foods, allowed English culture to develop a kind of boil-in-the-bag popism as the successor to the beans on toast of social realism. [80]

[slightly less entertaining on re-reading, when I realise that “boil-in-the-bag popism” probably means music rather than the Bishop of Rome]

This seems too good to be true. In fact it was, and got canceled pretty sharply.

Kings is a television drama series ….loosely based on the Biblical story of King David, but set in a kingdom that culturally and technologically resembles the present-day United States

I despair that what it took to puff up the Lib Dems was one good TV appearance and some worship from the media. I’m frankly baffled that the most technocratic and centrist of the parties can paint themselves as outsiders. Seriously? Have you met a lib dem who

wasn’t

a politics junkie. But I’m thrilled by the prospect of a strong LD presence in a hung parliament, leading to AV+ and then to a situation where we can finally get some real politics in the UK.

Meanwhile, it’s fun to watch Tories bashing Cameron for accepting the centre ground, just as the left has long been bashing Blair & co. Both criticisms are right, of course: you don’t win an argument by accepting your opponent’s case.

there is rage, albeit hypocritical and belated, that the entire strategy pursued by the Cameron regime over the past four and a half years has left the party so pathetically incapable of defending itself against this mountebank and his frequently preposterous party. For the strategy has left the Conservative Party – and Mr Cameron in particular, as was clear in the first televised debate – without much in the way of conviction to use to counter the Clegg soufflé, and apparently believing in nothing.

Sasha Frere-Jones on Patti Smith’s autobiography:

It’s refreshing to read a memoirist so dedicated to telling a version of her life that is more about ideas than bedpost notches, though sad to think that only someone like Smith could push this past her editors. The New Irony: only a rock star has the moxie to be a prude now.

Naturally, though, I’m more inspired by what the other Sasha finds in it:

It’s a love story, in every sense; not only an account of a love affair, but of a connection that goes beyond sexuality and familiarity into true understanding and devotion….

he pair were the cutting edge of late 60s and early 70s creative New York, and the energy and belief and idealism surrounding them practically wafts off the page.

Good: Laurie Penny has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political writing. Better: she’s willing to deliver a well-placed kick to the shins of the organizers, for defending the indefensible, for remaining closed within a tiny bubble of the political elite, and generally for being symptomatic of the fuckwittery of a disconnected and introspective political elite.

Nonetheless, I’m glad of the Orwell Prize, because it has introduced me to Madam Miaow. another excellent shortlisted blog, which I wouldn’t otherwise have discovered. And…she’s hardly less scathing than Laurie, about “

a truly flesh-crawling example of how skewed and corrupt is the mentality of these people who are running and ruining our lives

“.

Johann Hari on good form:

something stranger still is happening in The Election That Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Every day in this country, two big forces artificially drag the British government way to the right of the British people, making it enact policies that benefit a small, rich elite at the expense of the rest. We are not supposed to notice this, never mind try to change it. Yet suddenly, in this election, those forces have been exposed.