Tuesday 24 August 2010

That's Born Into The World Alive

I am pleased to read that Nick Clegg weighs 6lbs 1oz and is doing well.

24 comments:

  1. At high table last night everyone laughed at the screengrab of you getting your ass spanked by the economist. Tell us about German domestic demand again, won't you? Do you want to call in the services of "Martin Miller" and "Stephen Alexander"?

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  2. Out of term?

    Gosh, I love my enemies. They are gifts that keep on giving.

    But on topic, please.

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  3. "Durham lecturer" my arse. Either never set foot here or the sort of student who has never been invited up onto high table. Seems to be an American, so presumably the first.

    As for economists, the people who caused all the trouble, who the hell cares what they think any more?

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  4. Please do not swear on my blog.

    Alas, the neoliberal mafia is still being obeyed unconditionally by Coalition, with its jaw-dropping programme of putting even more people out of work, and of cutting middle-class incomes, in order, so it is held, to stimulate economic recovery. Madness. Utter, utter, utter madness.

    Theirs is not the only economic thought. But it is the only kind permitted to be taught to undergraduates, published in peer-reviewed journals, and so on. It is accepted as uncritically by David Miliband as it is by David Cameron and Nick Clegg.

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  5. It's not a Durham high table without Mr. L.

    Seriously, Durham lecturer really is one. The kind who is never invited to join an SCR, so never knows anything that is really going on. That is how Durham works. No one understands that better than David Lindsay, apart from the people who are not let into the club.

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  6. J comes out of the David Lindsay School of Smugness but he has hit the nail on the head. Durham is a club with a very good library, but it is still a club. Oxbridge people might assume that all lecturers here are in SCRs and no one else is. But we are not like that at all. Our SCRs are invitation-only dining clubs and you can be in as many as will have you without needing any other connection to the university. Those are the networks through which all important decisions and most unimportant ones are made over food and drink, outside office hours. That is how someone like Lindsay can have been hanging around Durham since before this October's freshers started school, and have the University Chancellor Bill Bryson among his friends on Facebook. There have been attempts to get rid of him in the past, by people who from the outside would appear far more important. They haven't worked and never will because what matters at Durham is being clubbable and Lindsay is. At least one officially very senior would be nemesis now plays at being his best mate instead. Says it all, really.

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  7. Not a good look, sweetie. Not a good look at all.

    On topic, please.

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  8. The university's online directory calls you "Academic/Management staff", so you obviously do more than eat, drink and plot, however important those activities are to any healthy institution. No doubt being Academic/Management gives you an academic staff library card, and rumour has it that there is a book in the pipeline. How is it coming along?

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  9. Pretty much done, which is why I wish that the publisher would take it away from me and stop me from tinkering with it. But I shan't be discussing that on here until it is all done and dusted.

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  10. Fantastic news about the book! Who's the publisher?

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  11. Like I said, I'm not discussing it on here. When it's out, which will probably be early next year, then readers of this blog will be the first to know.

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  12. Eh? I didn't ask you to discuss it, I just asked politely who the publisher is. What's so difficult about that question?

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  13. Nothing. But the announcement should come from them. And it will.

    That, and the publisher would be deluged with demented emails from certain underemployed headcases who haunt this blog, quite unable to believe that it and I dare to exist at all despite their specific instructions not to.

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  14. OK, so where's the announcement? If it's going to be published in six months, there'll already be an announcement, but I can't seem to find it by Googling.

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  15. Your stupidity is beyond compare. You know and we know there is no book and no publisher, so we'll put in our magazine in the new year that this is yet another of your fantasies, like "Martin Miller" and the political party that only exists in your tiny brain!

    We're all laughing. But DO say who the publisher is, fatty fraudster!

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  16. Ron L, give the poor souls time. I have only just sent them the last couple of chapters today. But that's it, pending whatever they want to do with it I really am going to have to leave it alone now.

    David2, and which "magazine" would that be? None that anyone reads, anyway.

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  17. You are letting someone edit you?

    If the Oliver Kamm Mafia do their worst over here, you have enough friends among American paleocons and Australian Santamaria devotees to get it published in those countries as "the book that couldn't get published in Britain".

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  18. Not for the first time.

    Not a bad idea. But it shouldn't come to that.

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  19. OK, I'll give them time, so when can we expect an announcement if your book will be published in the new year? Are you paying any money to have it published?

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  20. I have no idea; I did only say "early next year", which can mean any time before the end of June. And even that is largely guesswork on my part. But it is in the sausage factory. They liked the sample material, so now they have my draft of the whole book. The next stage is up to them.

    Paying them? Hell, no! I'm a struggling hack who can only write proper stuff because he has a university staff library card. Vanity publishing? I don't think so! In that case, I'd already have saved a lot of time as well as any money, and just blogged the thing.

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  21. So you've got a contract for your book? If so, you must have a publication date. When is it?

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  22. I told you, I'm not discussing it on here. When it's ready, I'll let you know. As of this week, it is out of my hands for a while. And that feels just fine from where I'm sitting. I've already started on the next one, though.

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  23. Another Durham lecturer30 August 2010 at 18:32

    How's that volume of essays on Radical Orthodoxy coming along, David? .. you know, the one that was awaiting publication in 2004/5?

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  24. I have spent the Bank Holiday weekend writing it. It's almost finished. John Milbank is not a member of the Facebook group, David Lindsay for Parliament, for nothing, you know.

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