fieldus

Interesting look at a murder investigation recently carried out by the Hampshire constabulary. The film focuses on how the investigating team approached the problem of identifying a victim and catching a murderer.
Some googling provide further information. Strangely, thisishampshire identifies a Detective Sergeant Richard Rowledge as the man leading the investigation. In the documentary, the Senior investigating officer is DCI Jason Hogg.

Ziaul Haque, 27, worked at the Euston Ibis hotel with 26-year-old Sylwia Sobczak of Tottenham. They were in some kind of relationship which obviously turned sour and ended with Haque murdering Ms Sobczak. Her burnt body was found by a dog walker on a bridleway half a mile from the centre of Dummer in Hampshire on May 8.

A very sad tale from the new London - a kind of DIRTY, PRETTY THINGS without the happy ending.

Reading the newspaper reports, it’s disappointing to note the relish with which they report that the body was found near the estate owned by the parents of Tara Palmer-Tompinkson.
Report from The Guardian
Documentary available on 40D
New Statesman review

From The New York Times:

Jonathan Lear, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago who is teaching a course with Mr. Coetzee this semester, said: “One of the things he looks at, which other people including myself lack the courage to look at, is human cruelty and insensitivity as it occurs in all sort of contexts. If you read his work, it’s really a surgical, clinical diagnosis of what’s going on here, and it’s not pretty. On the other hand, he has an amazing human passion that is very clear even when he’s describing the worst things people do to one another. He’s asking what are the conditions of our salvation and damnation.”

Cityscapes by Marc Yankus (New York, NY)

“In moments of transient repose, when its elements are briefly cloaked in softness, a kind of beauty envelops even the most mundane street scenes.”

As a recent reader of GREAT EXPECTATIONS, it was good to have some articulation of why I enjoyed it as much as I did:

From Jon Michael Varese, writing the Guardian books blog:

“We need to read Dickens’s novels,” she wrote, “because they tell us, in the grandest way possible, why we are what we are.”

There it was, like a perfectly formed pearl shucked from the dirty shell of my over-zealous efforts – an explanation so simple and beautiful that only a 15-year-old could have written it. I could add all of the decoration to the argument with my years of education – the pantheon of rich characters mirroring every personality type; the “universal themes” laid out in such meticulous and timeless detail; the dramas and the melodramas by which we recognise our own place in the Dickensian theatre – but the kernel of what I truly wanted to say had come from someone else. As is often the case in Dickens, the moment of realisation for the main character here was induced by the forthrightness of another party.

And who was I, that I needed to be told why I was what I was? Like most people, I think I knew who I was without knowing it. I was Oliver Twist, always wanting and asking for more. I was Nicholas Nickleby, the son of a dead man, incurably convinced that my father was watching me from beyond the grave. I was Esther Summerson, longing for a mother who had abandoned me long ago due to circumstances beyond her control. I was Pip in love with someone far beyond my reach. I was all of these characters, rewritten for another time and place, and I began to understand more about why I was who I was because Dickens had told me so much about human beings and human interaction.

There are still two or three Dickens novels that I haven’t actually read; but when the time is right I’ll pick them up and read them. I already know who it is I’ll meet in those novels – the Mr Micawbers, the Mrs Jellybys, the Ebenezer Scrooges, the Amy Dorrits. They are, like all of us, cut from the same cloth, and at the same time as individual as their unforgettable aptronyms suggest. They are the assurances that Dickens, whether I am reading him or not, is shining a light on who I am during the best and worst of times.

Edward Carr on the dwindling of the polymath:

In an age of specialists, does it matter that generalists no longer thrive? The world is hardly short of knowledge. Countless books are written, canvases painted and songs recorded. A torrent of research is pouring out. A new orthodoxy, popularised by Malcolm Gladwell, sees obsessive focus as the key that unlocks genius.

Just knowing about a lot of things has never been easier. Never before have dabblers been so free to paddle along the shore and dip into the first rock pool that catches the eye. If you have an urge to take off your shoes and test the water, countless specialists are ready to hold your hand.

And yet you will never get very deep. Depth is for monomaths—which is why experts so often seem to miss what really matters. Specialisation has made the study of English so sterile that students lose much of the joy in reading great literature for its own sake. A generation of mathematically inclined economists neglected many of Keynes’s insights about the Depression because he put them into words. For decades economists sweated over fiendish mathematical equations, only to be brought down to earth by the credit crunch: Keynes’s well-turned phrases had come back to life.

A moment’s repose in Queen’s Park brings to mind Louis MacNiece’s evocative poem, Autumn Journal:

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From a review Graham Swift’s memoir, Making An Elephant:

But probably the most affecting essay is his recollection of fishing adventures with Ted Hughes, who showed him some of his favorite stretches of river in Devon. Swift recounts that “once, when I said goodbye to him to come back to London and made that glib and flimsy remark, ‘Back to the real world,’ he said, without any trace of sentimentality and almost sternly, ‘No, this is the real world.’ ”

Something to ponder.

Discussion with Philip Zimbardo, researcher who conducted the Stanford Prison experiment in The Believer. Touches on punishment and responsibility.

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Interesting enough shoptalk with the former barrister:
Mark Sarvas interviews Joseph O’Neill (via Nigel Beale).

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Esther Rantzen writing in The Telegraph puts Tracey Connelley and Steven Barker, responsible for the death of ‘Baby P’, into an intergenerational context.
Were the social workers in Haringey aware of this? If they weren’t, will they be in the future?

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