Where is that no good cat?

Back at the gym again then. Ugh. I went to bed at 9.30 last night. Never mind. As I recall you start to feel OK again after the first two weeks. Also, we have a mouse. Obviously a fan of John Cleese, it ran out into the living room during A Fish Called Wanda the other night. We have set traps baited with cheese and peanut butter, but without success as yet. Perhaps we ought to alter our tentative dog-buying plans and look at cats instead. Everyone now, "Thomas!"

My grave's bigger than your grave

I was telling the story over the summer about how Adam Smith's grave, which Elizabeth and I went to see in Edinburgh, is adorned with a big flagstone inscribed with a quotation from The Wealth of Nations reading "The property which every man has in his own labour; as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable" -- here is a cool picture of it taken by somebody else. How funny, I thought, that Smith's grave thereby becomes kind of a big shrine to capital. This is, it turns out, just the point. The flagstone is brand new this year, an element in a long-running campaign to turn Smith's grave into the right-wing counterpart of Karl Marx's tomb in Highgate cemetery, a monument to capitalism to outdo Marx's to socialism. The Scotsman wrote in June:

A campaign to give the grave more prominence was started four years ago and has resulted in today's official unveiling of an Adam Smith flagstone on the Canongate entrance to the Kirk and markers through the graveyard to the tomb of the Kirkcaldy-born philosopher.

Oil boss Bob Lamond, who was educated at George Heriot's and studied geology at Edinburgh University, donated £10,000 for the improvements, which he hopes will attract more visitors to the historic grave.

The grave has been given further prominence by a large Caithness stone slab, inscribed with a quotation from Smith's most famous book The Wealth of Nations, being installed in front of it thanks to a donation from the private bank Adam and Company, a subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Mr Lamond's interest in the grave came after he read an article in a business magazine during the mid-nineties contrasting the state of Smith's dilapidated tomb in Edinburgh with the well-kept grave of socialist philosopher Karl Marx in London.

"I was amazed to read this," explained Mr Lamond, 61, a regular visitor to the Capital since he moved to Canada in 1965. The contribution that Smith made to the world should be recognised."

If Smith's contribution sometimes goes unrecognized, his profile, which has since the '80s adorned the ties of right-wing economists, certainly doesn't. Now Smith's grave has become part of the push to make him into a neoconservative pin-up. The stone seems a little bit like taking all of Smith's work and replacing it with a big sign saying "Having lots of money is OK!" But then I suppose all iconography works something like that.

"I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail." -- H.L. Mencken

Chi-town again

Anonymous is right -- I have been slacking. But it's been the holidays, and I think I'm entitled. Not any more, though. Back to work, and back to blogging. So what's been going on? Well, I've been back less than a day and already the car is playing up and a cupboard has fallen off the wall. Have fixed the latter. The former is probably better off without my attentions.

Thanks to the hard work of Will and Palmer, I've finally become a belated convert to The Decline of British Sea Power. What an album! "From Scapa Flow to Rotherhithe, I felt the lapping of an ebbing tide" (etc.). Also on my CD player right now are the best of Sam Cooke and Donald Fagen's The Nightfly, which features some of Fagen's finest sardonic lyrics, e.g.:

Have you got a steady boyfriend?
Cause honey I've been watching you
I hear you're mad about Brubeck
I like your eyes, I like him too
He's an artist, a pioneer
We've got to have some music on the new frontier

Will and I have been at the ukuleles again. This year we produced uke versions of "Something," by The Beatles and (more importantly) "Urgent" by Foreigner (complete with kazoo solo). Hopefully these will appear online soon... In Polecats style I produced a cassoulet, which was quite nice, though it did take two days to make, and involved slow-cooking duck legs in lard for two hours.

It'll soon be time for me to start teaching section of an undergrad. Henry James class. As anyone who has talked to me this holiday will know, I am quite scared about this. However, I have managed to remember two verses of the Henry James song I made up in the Wenlock a while back.

Henry James, Henry James
He wrote The Turn of the Screw
And he also wrote another book
That was called What Maisie Knew

Henry James, Henry James
He had a famous brother
Who wrote about one variety of religious experience
And then he wrote about another.

Sadly I fear there was more, but I can't remember it right now. Not to worry -- I'm sure this will tell the undergraduates all they need to know.

Lots of other things happened over the past month -- but then I've seen most of you Englishers to tell you about them, and people in Chicago, well, you probably aren't so interested in Drewsie's wedding etc. So -- onward and upward.