Off go sundry Crawfs to Poland for a few days, myself mainly working.
Not much posted here this month. Am I running out of steam for this blogging business? Or is it just grey, muggy, flat August malaise time?
Sigh.
Quickies to keep you amused for a few days while I am away …
A gripping piece by Parag Khanna on the rise of cities over at Foreign Policy. OK, plenty is already out there on this subject, but this analysis looks at the wider foreign policy issues:
… just 100 cities account for 30 percent of the world’s economy, and almost all its innovation. Many are world capitals that have evolved and adapted through centuries of dominance: London, New York, Paris. New York City’s economy alone is larger than 46 of sub-Saharan Africa’s economies combined. Hong Kong receives more tourists annually than all of India.
These cities are the engines of globalization, and their enduring vibrancy lies in money, knowledge, and stability. They are today’s true Global Cities…
Neither 19th-century balance-of-power politics nor 20th-century power blocs are useful in understanding this new world. Instead, we have to look back nearly a thousand years, to the medieval age in which cities such as Cairo and Hangzhou were the centers of global gravity, expanding their influence confidently outward in a borderless world.
… perhaps borders don’t need to change at all, but rather melt away, so long as locals have access to the nearest big city no matter what "country" it is in. This is, after all, how things really work on the ground, even if our maps don’t always reflect this reality.
Think of the human energy whirring away in these new conglomerations. Where does that leave the rest of us?
Maybe the wholepoint of becoming irrelevant, marginalised and parochial is that … you don’t realise it’s happened?
Back on home ground, Simon Heffer reminds us of the use of the gerund:
I once got a job by finding 24 mistakes in a piece of prose in which I had been told I would find 20, and which had been given to me as part of a test during an interview: this was because the person who had set the test, good though his English was, did not know about gerunds.
Therefore he had not seen that phrases such as “it was the shop being closed that was the last straw” should have read “it was the shop’s being closed”.
Quite. But if almost no-one other than Simon grasps that nice grammar point in English any more, has that part of the language effectively died out?
Finally, I have mentioned Ray Bradbury here on this site. He’s still writing away at 90. Here is a glowing account of his life and significance by James E Person Jnr:
What remains for those who haven’t read Bradbury for some time are memorable books worth rereading and a collage of unforgettable images: the canals of Mars filled with fragrant wine, a gun that fires deadly bees, a man covered with animated tattoos, a cocky gun-slinging bully sitting down in a barber chair for his final shave at the hands of a barber he’s threatened once too often, a spaceship harvesting a small fragment of the sun, a frightened old woman racing home through the midnight streets of Green Town and groping for the light switch in a darkened room in which a stranger awaits, and an adolescent boy fearing for the life of his humble, decent father amid the autumn twilight in a small Midwestern town.
So if you are not familiar with this genius, buy this to get started
Plenty more Bradbury marvels where that comes from.
S’long.
What? You want one more?
Lileks as always is on fire. Can you look at his searching deconstruction of Peter Lorre in Mr Moto’s Last Warning and not burst out laughing?
Do widzenia!
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