Reading this piece by Alice today (the archiving is up the spout, so just go there and scroll down) has only made me that bit more confused, because everything she says about the wisdom of having long term goals and hanging on to them is true, but I'm still struggling to clarify the long terms goals I have for Brian's Culture Blog. Alice told me yesterday that she thought that as soon as this blog was going, it would just pour out like something horrible from the rear end of an unkindly fed farm animal (not her words but that was the thrust). Yet it hasn't happened. Maybe this is the turning point. Don't know. What am I trying to achieve here? Okay so I know about Mies van der Rohe (see below). But who else cares that I know and what I know about such persons? What am I trying to do?

Is it spreading libertarianism by proving that we libertarians are dead cultural really, and don't only like Star Wars and heavy metal? But the more I think about this, the less I care about it. It really doesn't matter if libertarians only like Star Wars. What matters is whether they (we – and that might be a clue, that I put they instead of we) are right about how the world should be.

So is it me trying to prove that I like other things besides Star Wars? Actually I don't much like Star Wars at all, any more. I find now that I can't allow myself to get excited about movies where sound is portrayed as travelling through a vacuum. The people who made these movies (or the people who told George Lucas how he was going to have to make these movies, or whatever) were not, when they started out, being serious. It's one thing to get something wrong because you forgot it, or didn't realise that people in those days never wore clothes like that, or that the date of that was whatever it was rather than what you said. It's quite another to get it wrong on purpose, and not care, the way they did with all the noises in Star Wars. But so what? Who cares what I think of Star Wars? Why on earth do I think it matters?

One thing I do know is that it's not me in general, because I in general am writing all kinds of things for other blogs, even as I still struggle with this one.

Tip for writers, which I am now trying to apply to myself. When you are suffering from writers block, which in a moderate form is what is afflicting me here. Try to get it clearer in your mind who you are writing for, and what you are trying to say to them. For example, when I was only writing pamphlets for the Libertarian Alliance, I would often get this wrong to start with, and find that I couldn't write whatever it was. Then I would refocus on my audience, and restate to myself what I wanted to say to these particular people, and when that was done, suddenly out it would all come, and the job would have its back broken in about an hour and a half.

It often helps, when writing something, to actually put at the very start who you have in mind as your target readership. If you are writing for hardcore libertarians, and trying to say something to them, then put that. If, on the other hand, you are aiming the piece at the "intelligent layman", again, put it, and if the hardcores get bored with all the obvious things you are saying to these uninitiates, tough, you've already dealt with that. Once you've put that, you can then get on with writing for the people you are writing for.

But who are my target readers here? I don't yet have it clear in my mind.

Maybe I'm the target reader. Maybe that's the obvious point I'm missing here. Maybe all I really want is a diary that I can read in ten years time, to tell me what I was thinking about just now, and to hell with the rest of you people. Maybe that's the story here.

Final thought. I recently read what I thought was a very good book about How To Have Ideas (called, if I remember it rightly: How To Have Ideas – something along those lines anyway). It said that you have ideas by first doing lots of good but open-minded thinking, where you struggle as best you can to lay out the problem, and to hurl as many notions down on the table that might be steps towards an answer.

Then, and this was the intriguing bit, you forget about it. You think about it, then forget, and do something else. And then, in its own seet time, the answer to what you were previously agonising about presents itself to you.

I'm still at the hurling of ideas onto the table stage with this blog. And maybe that's what I should do for the next few weeks, just fling postings up here, written in all kinds of different modes and aimed at all kinds of different fantasy target audiences, until suddenly – ping!!! – I get it clear what I'm doing.

Anyway, enough for now. That may or may not have helped, but the How To Have Ideas book said that at this stage in the process, all ideas are okay, however confused or however seemingly wrong.

I've just read the first comment from "emma" on Alice's piece, and she says more pithily something a lot like what I've just said.

I now have one of those digital TV boxes, which get you more free channels to look at. Thanks to it I recently saw a TV show about Mies van der Rohe, and I did a posting about the Bauhaus (where Mies taught for a few years) on my education blog.

I find that videotaping digital TV doesn't work. The sound goes all haywire. But turns out that one of the oddities of these free channels is that they are in the habit of repeating shows only hours after first showing them, and I am now watching a film of a piano recital by Evgeny Kissin which I caught the end of earlier in the evening and thought I had missed. More to the point, I got to see that Mies van der Rohe programme again.

First, a word of praise to the presenter of it, the handsomely jowly Australian Robert Hughes. Until now I've known Hughes only through his bizarre televised pronouncements about abstract art and a few second hand rumours of his opinions about political correctness. Hughes claims to see all kinds of profundities in the various big name abstract daubs of the twentieth century, in the manner of a courtier confidently describing the stitching and colouring of the Emperor's new clothes, and until now my view of Hughes was that he is a bag a wind. But this Mies show was excellent, as were the two other architecture shows Hughes also did, about the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi, and about Hitler's architectural alter ego Albert Speer. There were rather too many pointless shots of Hughes himself doing nothing very much except hobble about on his crutches or gaze profoundly into the distance. That aside, he was making judgements about these architects, and giving you biographical information about them and their architectural struggles and triumphs, that made perfect sense and which were clearly about something that was there in the buildings, and not just in Hughes' profound brain.

About Mies, Hughes said something that is obviously completely true, but which one does not expect such an art-speaky person actually to say, which is that Mies' in-between sized buildings are boring dross. He took a close look at the Farnsworth house, and that looks very fine. The huge skyscrapers are splendid. But the two, three and four story buildings he did for the Illinois Institute of Technology are totally boring.

Hughes did not say much about why, but I now will try to.

I think there are two reasons for the failure of Mies' in-between sized buildings. The Mies aesthetic is all about big, simple, Platonic shapes, which for him usually meant rectangular boxes. The "massing of forms in space" etc. etc. But like most craftsmen (which is what he was), Mies had his own favourite materials, which he used again and again for all the buildings he did, small, medium, or big. Again and again, he would go to work with rectangular boxes made with steel frames, concrete floors, and large sheets of glass.

If you do this for a very small building, such as the Farnsworth House, the overall shape is clear. There are not enough horizontals and verticals to break up the simplicity of the shape. The Farnsworth House has Platonic beauty.

If you do this for a very large building, such as the mighty Seagram Building, the grand simplicity of the shape is also clear. There are so many horizontals and verticals that instead of breaking up the simplicity of the shape, these verticals and horizontals merely form a fine-grained texture on the surface of a flat shape. The Seagram Building has Platonic beauty.

The problem came when he did in-between sized buildings, like the IIT buildings. The grand simplicity of the shape is not clear. The detailing is repetitious enough to be boring, but not vast enough for the detail to be ignorable, in favour of the vastness of the great shape. The IIT buildings are extreme and striking only in their extreme mediocrity.

Mies claimed to be doing a new form of classicism. Big deal. A boring office block done in accordance with the rules of proportionality that governed the design of the Parthenon is, I'm afraid, still a boring office block.

And then, second, there is the weather. A modern building that has become shabby and had started to peal and rot and turn blotchy is a particularly horrid sight, because there is no decoration to assert itself through the blotches and retain the original architect's version of what the building is supposed to look like. Your average Modern Movement, Mies-type building is notoriously liable to look nicer when miniature and made of balsa wood, then in its full sized outdoor version.

Small Mies buildings, like the Farnsworth House, are small enough for their owners to be able to keep them in mint condition and to refrain from defiling them with inappropriate décor or furniture, provided they want to. The owner of the Farnsworth House is now somebody very rich called Palumbo, who worships the place, and who, I'm sure, keeps all weather damage at bay, damn the cost. (Old Mrs/Miss/Ms Farnsworth took against Mies and his house, and made a point of smothering the thing with wildly inappropriate décor and garden features, as if hanging towels on Michelangelo's David. She and Mies may even have had some kind of love affair, which caused her to turn against Mies in later years.

Mies skyscrapers are big enough for the weather to be powerless. The Platonic shapes are just too big for any blotches or fading to matter, certainly not at a reasonable distance. The shape is all.

But, the in-between buildings are large enough for it to be a serious burden to keep them spick and span, but too small to triumph over the ravages of weather and time. They are thus doubly appalling. They are boring from the word go and they quickly also become shabby and dilapidated.

Hughes then went on to say that Mies can't be blamed for his imitators. But I disagree with Hughes' claim that these imitators seriously diverged in the quality of what they achieved from Mies himself. The imitation Mies big city big blocks and big towers that now abound throughout the world are as impressive – or as brutishly dull if that's what you think of them, which I don't provided they're big enough – as Mies' originals. There are also many little modern houses done in the Mies manner which, if looked after devotedly like the handsome but utterly impractical sculptures that they are, can likewise look very fine. And the in-between junk first built by Mies and then spawned by Mies and by the Modern Movement generally is all as drearily hideous as the Mies originals were, but on the whole no more so. And all for the same reasons.

I speak with feeling about this in-between stuff. I live in London, and for about two decades between about 1957 and 1977 almost all new London buildings was done in this ghastly style. Perfectly decent brick buildings would be destroyed to make way for these horrible blockhouses, and I hold Mies, in part, personally responsible for this catastrophe. Very few buildings in London are big enough or small enough for the Mies style to work well. Mies plus London equals architectural horror.

Besides which, Mies was a teacher (hence my piece on my education blog). Is a teacher supposed to accept no responsibility for the alleged horrors of his pupils? It's one thing to be an architect and be copied. But Mies was a professor of architecture for twenty years. Also, Mies fancied himself as a craftsman. Crafts are supposed to be passable on to the next generation. Is it a craft, if it only works for the original creator of it?

Where Mies, and the whole Mies attitude, did produce miracles of good taste and beauty was in furniture design, and in the design of twentieth century indoor domestic objects in general.

These items are small enough for the Mies fascination with the detail of different materials to register and be beautiful.

And, this stuff doesn't get shabby and ugly as a result of the weather, because it almost always spends its entire life indoors. On the contrary, a piece of kitchen furniture with a completely smooth outside surface is by its nature very easy to keep clean and hence looking great.

Above all, unlike architecture, the furniture and kitchen equipment and light fittings and so on that Mies and his many followers and imitators designed is mass produced. This means that the really successful Mies and Mies inspired designs can be mass produced by the tens of thousands and sometimes by the million, while the far more numerous failed designs can been quietly junked. These people invented twentieth century interior design.

Everything I have already said about the virtues of the Farnsworth House applies also to his best furniture designs, such as the splendid Barcelona Chair, and you don't even have to be a millionaire to keep a Barcelona Chair looking good.

But to talk of Barcelona Chairs is to miss the real point of Mies' impact upon our lives. Few of us have Barcelona Chairs. But we all have kitchens, and in your kitchen as in mine, I guarantee you, the influence of Mies van der Rohe is all pervasive.

The theory is that eventually there will be people who come here every few days or so but who never go to my blog-womb, Samizdata, from one month to the next. They prefer culture to politics, you see. So for any readers of this sort, here's the news that I have a semi-cultural piece up there today, about Tom Wolfe's reportage of the latest scientific dramas he has discovered, concerning Neuroscience. Well, maybe not the latest, because the book I have been reading (Hooking Up) was published three years ago. But quite late. The regular Samizdata fare this weekend is demonstrations and wars and men second-guessing each other about how to hurt each other. But Tom Wolfe is culture, and is especially liked by people who don't much care for a lot of what passes for culture these days. (See my previous two rather bad-tempered postings here.)

Tom Wolfe is one of my favourite writers, but I only really enjoy his factual reportage. His novels just strike me as great engineering bricks of reporting, with the names changed and the facts altered until they aren't actionable, and life's too short for that. Mine anyway. But when he keeps the original names, dates and places, as in The Right Stuff or (a key BCBlog text) The Painted Word, or in almost all of the stuff in Hooking Up, I just love it. I'm now deep into all the New Yorker bashing at the end.

Is there any fiction that I do like? Three writers spring to mind, among many more whom I'll doubtless be telling you about in the months and years to come.

There's Nick Hornby, who has done four books so far: Fever Pitch, High Fidelity, About A Boy, and How To Be Good. Fever Pitch began as a Tom Wolfe type piece of journalism, but then went on to be a fiction movie. It was the one about the crazed Arsenal supporter, originally Nick Hornby himself, but played in the movie by Colin (Mr D'Arcy) Firth. High Fidelity began as a novel set in London, and became a movie set in the USA starring John Cusack and the sublime Jack Black, who may never do anything better.

I like the New York Democrat (I assume) writer of what US critics presumably regard as only middlebrow fiction, Susan Isaacs, my two favourites by her being Intimate Relations and Magic Hour, the first being about New York Democrat politics, and the second being a detective mystery, with a great plot that ought not to be revealed.

It must mean something that almost all of these books that I like involve happily ending romances. I like that, presumably in part because I have yet to achieve such a resolution in my own personal life but live in hope, and also because I believe I have various girl-hormones sloshing around in my brain chemistry. Tom Wolfe's fiction doesn't tend to end with a happy romantic settlement. His typical plot is hubris-nemesis, rather than boy-meets-girl-boy-gets-girl.

And the third writer of fiction I would like to draw your attention to here is: me. So far I have managed to write just two short stories, numbers 1 and 3 in the Libertarian Alliance Fictions series. (And guess what? Both are available as html files as well as pdf! How did that happen? You can now copy, paste and denounce.)

Both are also about the way that people with energetically pursued plans often get ahead in life, but not in quite the ways they'd originally planned. In the first of these, the hero and heroine live happily ever after, but in the second the anti-hero commits suicide, in what I hope is an entertaining way and for entertaining reasons.

I like these stories a lot or I would not have published them. I write to amuse myself, and until that happens I'm not going to foist the stories on anyone else.

There are only two so far because I find it impossible to just sit down and write a story. For me, a short story worth telling is rather like a scientific discovery. You can't just whistle one up, any more than you can contrive a Unified Field Theory just because you would like to and have promised it to someone by next Friday. I am wrestling with two more stories, but so far I can't sort them out.

But, once I have thought a story through to the end, one of the signs that it is a real story is that it could just as well be told by somebody else, albeit in a different way, much as a rival scientist might pip you to publication with the same idea that you also had, wording it all rather differently, but essentially telling the exact same story. Another symptom of this same thing is that I often dangle half-baked plots in front of friends and ask them to help me with the baking. Art as collective discovery, rather than art as individual creation. Discuss.

My preferred method of telling my stories is to pack the maximum of plot information into the minimum of verbiage, and to set the wheels of the plot rapidly in motion immediately. Later I may choose to load some atmosphere onto one of the carriages, but first I like to get the train rattling along properly. From then on, gratuitous atmosphere allowing, the basic point is to get to the destination with the minimum of time-wasting. Others might tell what is essentially the same story but take several hundred pages doing it. I'm too lazy for that. Well, maybe not lazy. But when I do get results in my life, it is by keeping on doing lots of little things, little things (like little blog pieces) that others can probably spare the time for, rather than a few big things which they might ignore unless I became a Big Name.

But that's enough about me. What do you think of my stories?

I call myself a culture blogger, but I completely missed this, which the BBC reported on over ten days ago:

The first notes in the longest and slowest piece of music in history, designed to go on for 639 years, are being played on a German church organ on Wednesday.

The three notes, which will last for a year-and-a-half, are just the start of the piece, called As Slow As Possible.

Composed by late avant-garde composer John Cage, the performance has already been going for 17 months - although all that has been heard so far is the sound of the organ's bellows being inflated.
The music will be played in Halberstadt, a small town renowned for its ancient organs in central Germany.

It was originally a 20-minute piece for piano, but a group of musicians and philosophers decided to take the title literally and work out how long the longest possible piece of music could last.

They settled on 639 years because the Halberstadt organ was 639 years old in the year 2000.

Peter Simple wouldn't need to change a word of that.

The phrase in the above report that gives the game away is the bit that says "and philosophers". It says something good about the music profession that on their own, and unlike their visual arts cousins, they might not have been capable of this degree of insanity. It took the addition of some philosophers to their number to push them completely over the boundary where it says "one step further and you are officially completely barking bonkers".

But that last bit can't be right. Surely if a piece of music can last for 639 years, there is no particular problem about it going on for a couple of centuries longer. What has the mere age of the Halberstadt organ in the year 2000 to do with the maximum length of a piece of music? Either the BBC has got this wrong, which is possible, or these musicians and philosophers are not only completely mad, but also, and unlike many other completely mad people, rather illogical.

But this report is rather late. Maybe this stunt has already fizzled out. Or maybe April 1st in Germany happens early in February.

My thanks to heavyweight culture watcher Dave Barry for drawing my attention to this extraordinarily silly event.

Just because I haven't recently been writing here about culture, that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about it, and thinking about writing about it. Nevertheless, my hopes of hitting my stride have yet to be fulfilled. I'm still trying to find my voice, and picture my readership.

Part of it is I realise that my cultural tastes are not as elevated as I would like them to be. Even my taste in music depresses me somewhat. For although I love the great canon of classical pieces that everyone else loves (minus most of opera except Mozart, Wagner and Puccini), I simply can't be bothered to listen to most of what is offered now as the latest "classical music", and find myself only echoing Ayn Rand's views on literature. Apparently someone once said to her that her stuff wasn’t exactly in the Mainstream of American Literature and she replied: "The mainstream of American literature is a stagnant swamp."

Last night, via my newly acquired digital TV attachment, I found myself watching and listening to one of last year's Proms, consisting of two works by Oliver Knussen conducted by the man himself. One was called Where The Wild Things Are and the other was called Higglety Pigglety Pop! Physically, Knussen is a very substantial figure, but I am afraid I found the music itself – the idiotic classical-style singing of it especially – utterly risible. Plain embarrassing. Stagnant swamp. And ten times more embarrassing for trying to be funny. There was a whole line of on-purpose badly dressed singers in jumpers and tracksuits all classical-singing away as if their lives depended on it – as I suppose their lives do, poor wretches – grinning idiotically at the "jokes" they were singing so idiotically, and it's a long time since I've seen a group of educated English people look more ridiculous.

If this kind of rehashed Schoenberg is supposed to be the future of classical music, how come a third of the seats were empty, and how come also that about a third of those who were present looked like they were only clapping at the end because they didn't want to hurt the wretchedly massive, sweating, only-fifty-years-old-but-heart-attack-any-year-now Knussen's feelings, and because they knew that TV cameras were present? And why weren't all those present who, like me, despised it all completely, throwing vegetables and waving football rattles and abusive placards? Because it wasn't worth it, is why. This stuff is dead in the water. No need to attack the corpse. Just let it sink.

But now here's my problem. Although the above is my definite opinion of Knussen, were I to be faced by one of those erudite explanations …

Oliver Knussen is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest composers of his generation. He is often labelled a 'minaturist', partly on the basis that he hasn't written many long pieces of music but also because his scores are extremely concentrated - 'every note counts'.

Much of his music is characterised in its construction by the manipulation of small musical cells and, in his mature works, by polyrhythmic musical textures. But that alone doesn't account for the imagination that has produced works like the Fantasy Operas 'Where the Wild Things Are' and 'Higglety, Pigglety Pop!' and settings of texts from Walt Whitman to Winnie-the-Pooh.

… of why I am completely wrong about Kussen's music, and how it will echo down the ages alongside Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius and the rest of them, my only answer would be a not very much elaborated version of an old cartoon caption I once saw. A child is facing a plate of gunk which the adults around him are telling him he must eat, because it is good for him. Says he: "I say it's spinach and I say to hell with it."

Bear with me. I'm just checking that I (approximately) know how to do this picture stuff.

So far so good.

In the wake of the Columbia disaster, science fiction is on a lot of people's minds this week. A disaster to a mundane little space ship returning from mere earth orbit, having been studying the behaviour of insects in zero G if you please, has caused the bereaved space fans to take refuge in reveries about what it may all be leading to, despite all the frustrations and banalities of what passes for space travel now.

I did the libertarian science fiction binge when I was in my late teens, but now … it doesn't really do it for me any more. But SF remains a big deal for many of my libertarian friends. Paul Marks has a piece on Samizdata today, and is typically pessimistic about how statist SF authors have, he argues, now become. But, read the comments. And Tom Burroughes has a piece over at Survivalarts, about SF book covers. This was in response to an earlier piece by Russell Whitaker, blogmaster of Survivalarts, which Samizdata also used on Tuesday, in explicit connection with, as he put it, "you know what".

The bad BCBlog news for SF people is that I probably won't have that much to say about SF here, and what I do say is as likely to be critical as positive. This is deliberate. My tastes in art don't seem to fit with the usual libertarian tendencies. BCBlog will thus be especially keen to point out that if you want to be a libertarian, that does not mean that you have to share the widespread libertarian fascination with SF, Lord of the Rings, etc. If, like me, you prefer hard history to hard SF, or you like to read strictly earthbound novels suggested to you by TV serialisations (I read the whole of A Dance to the Music of Time about a year ago) - if you prefer Jane Austen to Robert Heinlein (as I now do) - you should feel quite at home here. Apologies for what follows, though. You might want to stop reading this posting now.

Because … one fairly recent SF book I did enjoy a lot was Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep. The elaborate stuff about mini-dog-packs I couldn't get excited about. But the way that doomed emailers would send out calmly analytical descriptions across the depths of the galaxy about why they were about to be wiped into oblivion, or why some other emailer was perhaps not to be trusted, was, for me, charming. And I liked that the emails were easy to find in the text because typographically distinct. I read them all with great care.

Some of the emails that concerned the forthcoming arrival of The Blight were rather as if Dale Amon had been doing something like his Columbia disaster analysis for Samizdata last weekend, but while he himself was on board a space ship whose forthcoming incineration he was calmly trying to account for. "So, here's what I think will happen … if I'm right about how the left wing will behave, we will see the first explosions from inside the capsule, and our best hope will be to … but this will almost certainly not work … then we'll probably have about another one to two seconds of life before we get blown to buggery, but I remain open to correction on that … I think it will be a quick death, but that could be wishful thinking on my part …"

I didn't participate in the email chat era myself, and still feel (note: not think – this is not an argument, merely an unexamined emotional response) that chatrooms are pointless dead-ends, just another bunch of places where opinions can go to die – which I'm sure is how lots feel (ditto – above) about blogs. For me an email is just a cheap and convenient telegram rather than a means to have a serious conversation. But Vinge captures and universalises an entire era, or what I imagine was an era. I especially like how he reproduces all the guff you get at the top of an email, about how the message travelled, via what giant machines, who else is getting it, and so forth, just like with a lot of emails now, or perhaps I mean then. He also goes into the details of how much it is all costing, the way more and more people are able to forget about now, but had to concern themselves with at first.

Reviews I've just been glancing at for linking purposes suggest that, for a real SF-er, the email stuff is fairly obvious. So 1990s man. But wow, how about those dogs! And the changing laws of physics! But for me, the emails helped me to make sense of the physics, and gave me a sense of the vastness of the galactic civilisation(s) Vinge was evoking. And thank goodness also for the map at the beginning.

But those reviewers are right. Just as TV SF tells you more about the technology and fashions when it was made than the technology and fashions of the far flung future, so A Fire Upon The Deep – certainly the email aspect of it – tells you about the 1990s rather than about the time that the book is supposedly set in. "More interesting than Single White E-m@il" hardly counts as a rave review.

I like this picture. I got it from the 2Blowhards, but I forget when the posting was, or who the artist is. I like two things about the picture. I like the way he's done the face, and I like the way he hasn't finished the rest of it. It's a bit like a lot of adverts you see on the tube, where you are encouraged both to see a thing, and to see that it is very definitely only a drawing of a thing. This is a pipe. This is not a pipe. Etc. Most of all, I like that I am learning how to put pictures here. My thanks to Alex Singleton.

Expect many more pictures.

I promised myself my next posting here would be about Shakespeare or something. But then I saw this, which is very funny, and actually, even in a Shakespeare kind of way, quite profound.

Opening paragraph:

In the online world, I, Hankscorpio74, am known to be charismatic, tough, quick-witted, and tenacious as a copperhead snake. Like my namesake, Globex Corporation president Hank Scorpio, I am roguish and unflappable, possessing the confidence and flair of 20 men. Unfortunately, all of that changes when I drag my cursor down to "Shut Down" at the bottom of the "Special" menu. For all the admiration and respect I command in chat rooms, in real life, it's a different story. Oh, how I wish I were more like my online persona.

Me too.

My BCBlog persona reads Shakespeare constantly, pausing only to re-read Crime and Punishment. I read crap by comparison, most of the time.

But I do genuinely like to have classical music on, even if I don't listen to it properly a lot of the time. Future posting: How I like being able to shut Wagner up with one press of the finger when I've had enough Wagner and how he might not have liked that very much – "funny, yet strangely profound" Instapundit. (I wish.)

My friend and Libertarian Alliance colleague Sean Gabb is one of the best writers and talkers with whom I am personally acquainted. A month or two ago I tried to persuade him to take up blogging, but he ended the discussion by saying: "Blogging is not the solution to any problem that I have." Fair enough.

The basic reason Sean doesn't have a problem that blogging would solve is that he is an extraordinarily fluent producer of quite long essays. He is able to produce pieces in a few hours which are as long as stuff that takes me a week, minimum. The erudition just flows.

Sean became the editor of the Libertarian Alliance's would-be quarterly journal Free Life in 1991, issues of which have been appearing, with variable regularity, ever since. But out of Free Life has emerged Sean's own series of internet based writings, known as Free Life Commentary, written entirely by him, and a source of constant joy and enlightenment to his many thousands of fans and contacts the world over. Free Life, the journal, recycles some of these commentaries for a paper (as well as internet) readership, but nothing like all of them.

Sean's political stance is an interesting one, easily mistaken for modern-day orthodox conservatism, but in fact it is anything but that (as is the case with many who call themselves "conservative"). What Sean calls himself, and very accurately, is an "Old Whig". He is a liberal of the definitely pre-Victorian variety. He is a pessimist about everything now happening in the world except the Internet.

Issue Number 89 of Free Life Commentaries has already been circulating for a week or two, but I waited until it became available as an html file before featuring it on this blog. The subject of this Commentary is the claim now being pressed that the Elgin Marbles should be returned to Greece. No prizes for guessing Sean's conclusion:

Anyone who looks for Greece in the modern inhabitants of that country will be disappointed. In almost every sense, the modern Greeks bear as little relationship to the builders of the Acropolis as we do to the builders of Stonehenge. But there is still a Greece - not a nation, perhaps, but a spirit. Wherever there is reason and light and beauty, there is Greece. Wherever people wonder what is truth and how we can perceive it, there is Greece. Without Greece, there would have been no Shakespeare or Milton, no Newton or Leibnitz, no Bach or Mozart, no Descartes or John Locke or David Hume, no Adam Smith. We, the civilised classes of Western Europe and the English-speaking world, are the true heirs of Greece; and, beyond all reasonable doubt, England has been the Athens of that New Greece. The Elgin Marbles are presently in London, and by all that we may regard as sacred, it is our duty to keep them there.

But don't be content to regard that as a summary, for it is not. He has much more to say, and I urge you to read it all. If you find yourself liking Sean's style as much as I do, you will find the effort almost effortless.

Practically everything that Sean writes seems to have a political dimension to it, and often almost nothing but that. "Cultural" issues of Free Life Commentary turned out to be much rarer than I had supposed, when I went through the list of them over the weekend. Culture-vultures who share Sean's interest in the past might care to sample numbers 27 (about the National Maritime Museum), 53 (about Macauley's History of England) and 55 (about the teaching of Latin). As to more modern matters, I could only find 12 (about a particularly horrible TV show that Sean and I both turned up to take part in, but then ran away from in disgust), and 9 (which is a review of the movie Starship Troopers – typically, Sean hadn't and presumably still hasn't read the Heinlein book).

As to Sean's fluency as a speaker, I can only say that the talks he has given at my last-Friday-of-the-month evenings are always treasurable and well attended.

I especially remember a truly wonderful Brian's Fridays talk he gave about the impact upon civilisation of the invention of the printing press. It was quite different from the usual talk that you hear about printing, in which the spread of the presses across the map of Europe is described, the books the pressed printed are reflected upon, and in which the disruptive impact of vernacular versions of the Bible being available to a new mass public is reflected upon especially. Reformation, counter-reformation, nationalism, and so forth. What Sean talked about instead was the way that knowledge was preserved before the printing press existed, i.e. the way that knowledge was only preserved with extreme difficulty and expense. The idea of a growing body of knowledge was pretty much impossible, because it was all they could do to keep the stock of knowledge that they already had. So far as I can tell, Sean did little by way of specific preparation for this talk. He just sat himself down and proceeded to tell us the story. Later he gave the orthodox impact-of-printing talk, and that too was very good.

He has yet to get around to writing out either of these talks or anything resembling them, so far as I am aware. Perhaps this posting will nudge him into doing this. I would certainly link to and quote from any such piece or pieces if he did.

I have also heard Sean give more public speeches many times over the years, and he does that with similar distinction. In a couple of days I am due to attend one of his academic lectures, and I hope to be reporting soon about that on my Education Blog. I'm sure I shall enjoy myself very much.

More from January 2003