Unwelcoming Pleven

Pleven is a city in the northern part of Bulgaria which looks rather forbidding from the heights of the main Russe-Sofia road above which skirt it – densely-packed fingers of white high-rise blocks pointing to the sky. You can imagine the Russian troops in 1877 surveying the settlements as they struggled to break the Turkish siege…..

It has two famous artistic sons – the caricaturist Ilyia Beshkov (  ) and the grand old man of Bulgarian art, Svetlin Roussev, who was Chairman of the Bulgarian Union of Artists from 1973-85 and whose amazing collection in the Sofia Atelier which bears his name (just down from the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral) I had discovered only in December. But is actually one of a pair – the other being in Pleven – to which I made a slight detour on Friday on my way to Bucharest….

The city is approached by strange, empty dual carriageways which suddenly disgorge you into bustling traffic buzzing around a series of hills. It is a couple or so years since I last visited its Ilyia Beshkov gallery – to whose concrete carbuncle I was guided by intuition…..The same happened yesterday… I swung right up a hill and soon caught sight of the old low-slung building on the left which is the National History Museum, with a park on the right which turned out to contain the Svetlin Roussev Gallery….Fortunately there is still uncontrolled parking in the quiet area just under the Beshkov Gallery.

Svetlin Roussev had apparently acquired thousands of artefacts during his time at the heart of Bulgarian painting – passed on presumably by his colleagues. In the last half of the 80s he fell out of favour with the authorities for the stand he took on various issues – and I was shown with some glee in the Sofia library a copy of the one of the Encyclopedias of Bulgarian art from which most of his entry had been airbrushed from history….

His Pleven collection has found an appropriate location in an old Ottoman Hamam – which has one of the most beautiful interiors I have seen. Beshkov cartoons start the tour and my camera was just about to spring into action when I was checked by one of the younger attendants – the first time this had happened in all my tours of regional Bulgarian galleries. Fortunately I was able to use my link with the Sofia gallery which I phoned to have things sorted out. 

But the same happened when I popped in to renew my acquaintance with the Beshkov gallery – and this time no friends in high places to help!

What, I wonder, is the thinking here? I use no flash; the gallery offers no books whose sales might suffer from art enthusiasts with cameras? In any event I was informed that if I sent a written request in advance, I would be allowed…..It was so cold on my last (winter’s) visit that I had been left alone – the attendants. wrapped in their furcoats had been huddled in a side-room in front of an electric heater!   
        

So bad marks to an unwelcoming Pleven…..I will not forget the woman whose spiteful hand is trying to block a Boris Denev painting I really wanted to have join the small file I have on one of my favourite Bulgarian painters.......(so many fall into that category!!)

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Just seen one of the pithiest epithets for the generation I belonged to in the middle of the 20^th Century –

 “We were poor, but we didn’t know it.” In fact, however, in the breadth and depth of the social support we enjoyed, all my classmates (whom I have contacted recently) described our youth in strikingly similar terms – “we were rich, but we didn’t know it”.

It’s from a short piece - Crumbling American dreams - penned a couple of years ago by Robert Putnam (of “Bowling Alone” fame) about his home town into which he was born in 1941. 

He’s now expanded his thoughts into a book - Unhappy Days for America. The link is to a NYRB review which is less than enthusiastic in its assessment…… 

Britain at the Polls - but no longer "Great" or "United" - let alone a...Kingdom

As the UK prepares to go tomorrow to the polls, I have a guilty secret to confess - I haven’t actually cast a vote since 1990 (when I voted for myself in the elections for Strathclyde Region)…..As someone who went into politics (in 1968) because it was so obviously an honourable activity, I’m glad that Scottish voters - due largely to the devolved parliament there and the new style of political conduct it introduced - still consider that the vote counts….Clearly that is not the case elsewhere in the UK

Although my posts in The Independence Argument – home thoughts from abroad showed that, ultimately, I had not been convinced by the argument for Scotland separating from the UK, I have been happy (and amazed) to see the speed with which erstwhile Scottish Labourites have shrugged off their tribal affiliations in recent months….......I was always vaguely annoyed when I was chapping the doors at election time to be told that “we’ve always been Labour here” – somehow I needed a more calibrated endorsement!!! 

Who could have anticipated the massive hemorrhaging of the Labour vote since the independence referendum  of last September???  

One pollster who has been focusing on individual British constituencies seems to be giving a boost to the decidedly un-British (but sensible) phenomenon of “tactical voting” – which seems to be empowering a lot of rightwing voters to hold their noses and switch their support to high-profile (but empty) characters such as Jim Murphy and Nick Clegg…..

I was actually moved by the John Harris video of doorstepping (with a 70-year parliamentarian no one has heard of) to write a comment about what an unctuous piece of stuff that particular guy was all the time I had known him on at the Scottish level before he went to Westminster…..and how staggering it was that he considered himself entitled to keep taking good money…..

My views on political parties these days are set out in the second part of Ways of Seeing….the global crisis. Scottish Television actually asked me yesterday to complete a short (and rather stupid) survey on the election – and I duly recorded that I would be voting Green (on principle, not tactics).

We seem, frankly, to be going backwards in British politics – in 2007 or so there was a strong electoral reform campaign (who remembers the Power Inquiry of 2004-06 and “Power 2010”?).

Now we just seem to have comedian Russell Brand’s antics  (intriguingly the German word for “fire”) – although people do seem to be taking more to the idea of coalition government….. 

Understandably, my preferred option would be for a Labour-SNP coalition (given the strong sniff of social democracy the latter exude) – but the collapse of the Labour vote in Scotland (they seem set to lose at least 30 of their 41 seats to the Scottish nationalists) seems paradoxically to have ruined Milibrand (!)’s chances of commanding the largest group of MPs……..
John Harris - in this latest clip whose accents may be difficult to follow.....- shows just how effective the Conservative propoganda seesm to hav been about the idea of a minority Labour Government depending on Scottish nationalist support....... 

The Emperor has no clothes! Questioning reform

Readers will know that I spent the first half of my working life encouraging structures which gave voice to people who had previously been ignored in and by local government- and the next half working as an external consultant trying to get central government systems in various parts of central Europe and central Asia to operate more in the interests of “the citizen”.

In all cases, the issue was the complacent self-serving nature of those in power – be they professionals or political leaders. Not that the private sector escaped censure since the shortcomings of the large private bureaucracies were well exposed in the 70s and 80s be writers such as JK Galbraith and Rosabeth Kantor…….Untramelled power was the issue……

I wrote all of these experiences up – aware that I was venturing into unknown territory with “shabby and untested equipment” (as TS Eliot might have put it). As a young but senior politician in a Scottish Region in the 70s and 80s with a commitment to community development and action (and a writing bent), I was then almost unique in Britain; and was subsequently one of the first consultants let loose by the European Commission into “transition land” in the 90s in an effort to have a different type of public agency, with different accountabilities…. 

Of course Africa and Asia had been well-frequented haunts of “development consultants” for some decades but they were a different breed – with a different language as well as funding.

Certainly I was one of a small minority in the decades until the new millennium – but there must now be several millions of such “experts” these days who are paid (good wages) to do (short-term) contract work to get public organisations to operate “more effectively”.

And academic institutions throughout the world churn out thousands of papers and books every year about the “development work” which is going on…….critical, well-intentioned and often well-written ….take. for example, this impressive list from the Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre at the University of Manchester.

Curiously, however, only a tiny number of people seem to have tried to make sense of the efforts at “good governance” in central and east Europe and Asia - Tony Verheijen’s Administrative Capacity in the new EU Member States – the Limits of Innovation (2006) and Nick Manning’s International Public Administration Reform – implications for the Russian Federation (2006) were two (although the second actually said very little about Russia) - and in 2009 a collection of papers was published about Democracy’s Plight in the European Neighbourhood: Struggling Transitions and Proliferating Dynasties

 

In 2007 and 2011 I presented detailed overviews and critiques of these various efforts to a network of Schools of Public Administration in Central and Eastern Europe (NISPAcee) but have been disappointed by the way the members of the network simply ape “best practice” nonsense from the west….   

Every now and again the size of the programme budgets of government consultancy work makes the headlines – particularly in the UK - but no one feels able to challenge the notion of squeezing increased productivity from what has been seen for the past few decades to have been bloated bureaucracies…….

I sense that these perceptions – both about “reform” and “bureaucracy” – are in for a rude shock shortly…….we are, after all, approaching almost 50 years of reform efforts and some voices are being raised to question what has been achieved….

This weekend, for example, I hit on a couple of videos of academic addresses by 2 big UK names - Chris Pollitt on 40 years of Public Sector Reform – and Rod Rhodes on political anthropology and political science whose text can be scanned more quickly here (the papers on which the two addresses are based can be read in Rethinking policy and politics – reflections on contemporary debates in policy studies)

Allowing for the simplicities such deliveries require, the basic message they have about the British experience of reform is quite savage……

At the same time I was trying to make sense of a new ( and rare) book on "institutional reform  - Limits of Institutional Reform in Development – changing rules for realistic solutions - whose early part is devoted to a single and obvious point; that almost all institutional reforms have failed in “developing countries” because they don’t fit local circumstances…. Outside experts have been parachuted in with “ready-made solutions” and made little attempt to prepare the locals for the real problems of implementation. The literature on “capacity development” has been strong on how cultural factors impact on organizational performance and, although Andrews doesn’t refer to that literature, the first half of his book emphasizes the counter-productivity of the consultancy industry’s preaching of “best practice”

A rather dry summary of the book’s scope and contents can be found in this LRB review

His discussion (in chapter 3) of the “multiple logics” present in organisations is useful – as is his recognition of the importance of “building change off some of the alternative logics” always present….. and the second half of the book is more promising in its focus on “problem-solving” and “flexibility” (iterative learning).

He still sees a role for external experts – but mainly as a catalyst to help locals (a) explore what sort of “issues” can be reframed as the sort of “Problem” which will receive political attention and (b) develop feasible “solutions” which will attract consensus and support at the implementation stage…It’s not often that the Japanese “5 whys” technique is recognized in this sorts of books – and this was good to see on pages 142-160

But, otherwise, the book reads like something written by a well-read post-graduate in Economics and political science who has been granted open access to all the World Bank files on “developing countries” – ie by someone with limited knowledge both of the real world and of the literature outside his chosen disciplines. And indeed Andrews is an Associate Professor at the Centre for International Development (part of Harvard’s JF Kennedy School of Government) who worked briefly at the World Bank and graduated from a South African University…The book can be partially read here on google

But the book needs a total rewrite – for two reasons. First he needs to identify the lessons from the huge literature on Managing Change of the 1990s – let alone the  more recent “political economy” approach of (say the UK’s ODI) and indeed of the World Bank itself in such recent and major works as its 2008 Governance Reform under Real-World Conditions – citizens, stakeholders and Voice which, amazingly, is not even referenced (although he contributed a chapter). 

And then he needs to do something about the way he uses words and phrases (if not logic). This is a very repetitive and badly-written book full of technocratic jargon and implicit and highly questionable assumptions. He would benefit from reading George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” (1944) and Michael Billig’s recent Learn to Write Badly which savages the way social scientists these days have taken to using opaque invented nouns (rather than simple verbs) leaving the reader utterly confused about who is doing what to whom 

The painting is an undated one by an Ivanova (probably in the 60s) - and a canvass I got for a song in one of my Sofia galleries a few years ago. I still keep it  it without a frame in the hall in my mountain redoubt......

Memory’s Veil - forgetting and remembering

Books have been appearing in recent years celebrating the simple pleasures of life (such as swimming, walking, eating, not talking) and bearing such titles as Wanderlust – a history of walking; “Cooked; a natural history of transformation”; and A Book of Silence

Not that there is anything novel about this – Henri Bergson wrote an entire tract on Laughter in 1900 (popularised in the 1960s in Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation). And artist and art critic John Berger’s most famous book is entitled Ways of Seeing (1972)

Faithful readers will know that I have been working on a new (and enlarged) edition of Introducing the Bulgarian Realists which adds cultural and historical references and a lot more painters.

So it wasn’t surprising that I had dreamed up a new title – “Exploring Bulgaria – a cultural romp”. I briefly entertained the idea of making the subtitle “a sensual romp” before realizing that this would attract the wrong sort of reader! As the book includes short sections on such things as wine, food, video and cinema I even thought of the title “Using Your Senses ”!!

It was, however, only when I was going through a catalogue at the weekend - and found myself constantly having to add the phrase “a superb but forgotten painter” to the names in my book - that I realized that the book's sub-text is ….memory……and forgetting…and not just in Bulgaria

Like many other European countries, Bulgaria has had periods during which a “veil of silence” has been drawn over parts of its history – with September 1944 being the point at which individual memories became selective. By contrast memories of the struggles which brought independence from the Ottomans in 1878 have always burned brightly…..

It is our fate to be forgotten when we die – but one of the nice features of present-day central Sofia are the crimson plaques which now grace the street corners, reminding us of the events and individuals who played a role in Bulgaria’s history. Not just Tsars and Russian generals but poets, revolutionaries, politicians ….even an English one (William Gladstone). A small station on the gorge which winds through the hills outside Sofia on the way north to Russe bears the name (Thompson) of an Englishman (Frank) parachuted into the country during the second world war who was quickly captured and shot. His brother (EP) went on to become a famous British Marxist historian!

But it was only yesterday when I was about to send the text to the printer that it was brought home to me that the whole book is, in a sense, an ODE TO FORGETFULNESS and that my references to Bulgarian events and people are simply one of myriad examples about what I’ve now started to call “Memory’s Veil” – the highly selective way all of us – in whatever country - remember people and artistic talent

Some of you may know the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb whose book The Black Swan became a best-seller a few years ago. In it he makes a profound point about the process by which artistic “genius” is recognised  (or not – the latter being more often the case)

More than four centuries ago, the English essayist Francis Bacon had a very simple intuition. The idea is so trivial that he puts to shame almost all empirical thinkers who came after him until very recently….. Bacon mentioned a man who, upon being shown the pictures of those worshipers who paid their vows then subsequently escaped shipwreck, wondered where were the pictures of those who happened to drown after their vows.

The lack of effectiveness of their prayers did not seem to be taken into account by the supporters of the handy rewards of religious practice. “And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like”, he wrote in his Novum Organum, written in 1620.

This is a potent insight: the drowned worshippers, being dead, do not advertise their experiences. They are invisible and will be missed by the casual observer who will be led to believe in miracles.

Not just in miracles, as Taleb goes onto argue…..it is also the process which decides whether an artist is remembered. For every artist of genius, there have been many more with the same talent but whose profile, somehow, was submerged….

Art, of course, is the subject of high fashion – reputations ebb and flow…..we are vaguely aware of this…but it is money that speaks in the art “market” and it is the din of the cash register to which the ears of most art critics and dealers are attuned……

One of the few other people I know who celebrates unknown or, rather, forgotten artists is Jonathan in Wales who runs a great blog called My Daily Art Display which fleshes out the detail of the lives of long-forgotten but superb artists…..

anticipating post-modernism

Every day, 3-4 articles or blogposts catch my interest and have me surfing and collecting url links for future reference. Occasionally I do a post which incorporates those hyperlinks. It’s the small bit of public service I do these days.

As someone who benefited from university education in the 1960s when it was very much a privilege, I have mixed feelings about their subsequent growth – and about the slavish worship of neo-liberal principles and language which has followed. So I’m always a sucker for a rant about how the “bean counters” (accountants) and management thinking are destroying universities and, in particular, the social sciences and humanities.

Last week saw a good example in a catholic journal which had me surfing nicely. It is one of the many recent (and worthwhile) challenges to the prevailing conventional wisdom that humanities (and “liberal studies”) need to be scaled back if not abolished. It is a rallying cry for such things as scepticism, inquiry, originality  

The language, as one might expect, is a trifle ornate – but bear with me,,,,,”there’s gold in theme there hills….”

In an atmosphere dominated by postmodern irony, pop-neuroscience, and the technocratic ethos of neoliberalism, the self is little more than a series of manipulable appearances, fashioned and re-fashioned to meet the marketing needs of the moment. We have bid adieu to existential inwardness. The reduction of the mind to software and the brain to a computer, which originated among cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind, has been popularized by journalists into the stuff of dinner-party conversations. The computer analogy, if taken as seriously as its proponents wish, undermines the concept of subjectivity—the core of older versions of the self. So it should come as no surprise that, in many enlightened circles, the very notion of an inner life has come to seem passé.

One consequence of this seismic cultural shift is the train wreck of contemporary higher education. Nothing better exemplifies the catastrophe than President Barack Obama’s plan to publish the average incomes earned by graduates from various colleges, so parents and students can know which diplomas are worth the most in the marketplace, and choose accordingly. In higher education as in health care, market utility has become the sole criterion of worth. The monetary standard of value has reinforced the American distrust of intellect unharnessed to practical purposes: …..

 “An undergraduate experience devoted exclusively to career preparation is four years largely wasted. The purpose of college is to enable you to live more alertly, more responsibly, more freely: more fully.” The key to this process is “developing the habit of skepticism and the capacity to put it into practice.

It means learning not to take things for granted, so you can reach your own conclusions.” So it comes down to an effort at self-culture, as Emerson would have said. And self-culture involves an inward turn: it is “through this act of introspection, of self-examination, of establishing communication between the mind and the heart, the mind and experience, that you become an individual, a unique being—a soul. And that is what it means to develop a self.”…… 

The preoccupation with process over purpose, means over ends, has long been a feature of the technocratic mind, which despite occasional countercultural protests (as in the 1960s) has dominated American universities since the late nineteenth century and now seems poised to render other forms of thinking invisible.

The focus on mastering technique rather than grappling with substance means that too often higher education “does nothing to challenge students’ high school values, ideals, practices, and beliefs,” as the author of a new book (Deresiewicz) observes. How can it, if it has no vision of what an educated human being should be, as Allen Bloom complained nearly thirty years ago in “The Closing of the American Mind”.

It is interesting how often Deresiewicz cites Bloom, the bogeyman of the politically correct left in the 1980s, who was nothing if not a passionate defender of the humanities. Resistance to technocratic imperatives cuts across conventional political boundaries. In recent decades, au courant educational ideologues have put technocratic imperatives in a determinist idiom—“the train has left the station” etc.—and have added a dose of management jargon.

The most egregious management-speak is the near universal use of a customer-service model for what universities do. As Deresiewicz observes, commercial values are the opposite of pedagogical ones. If you are interested in students’ long-term welfare, don’t give them what they want—don’t be afraid, he tells professors, to stand on your own authority, to assume you know something your students don’t, which they might profit by learning. The very fact that he has to make this obvious point suggests the parlous state we are in. The easy equation of students with consumers confirms Deresiewicz’s conclusion that the schools “finally don’t care about learning at all”—or about teaching.

 “Teaching is not an engineering problem. It isn’t a question of transferring a certain quantity of information from one brain to another,” he writes, implicitly challenging the current fashion of online education.

On the contrary: “‘Educate’ means ‘lead forth.’ A teacher’s job is to lead forth the powers that lie asleep within her students. A teacher awakens; a teacher inspires.” Not every teacher can measure up to this exalted standard, but its presence at least can make us try.

By comparison, when it comes to motivating teachers, the commercial model offers nothing. The emptiness of management jargon, applied to traditional moral concepts, is nowhere more apparent than in the ubiquity of the word “leadership.” Once upon a time it was something that was considered a duty, an accompaniment of privilege. Now, Deresiewicz writes, it’s little more than “an empty set of rituals known only to propitiate the gods.”

Like so many other ideals of the meritocracy (“innovation,” “creativity,” “disruption”), indeed like the meritocrats themselves, “leadership” lacks content. And where content is absent, power pours in. We are left with Mark Edmundson’s witty summation, quoted by Deresiewicz: a leader is “someone who, in a very energetic, upbeat way, shares all the values of the people who are in charge.”

As often happens it was one of the discussants who led me in the most interesting direction – simply referring us to a book written in 1944 I had never heard of – The Abolition of Man – penned however by a very well-known figure CS Lewis. The argument of the (short) book is summarised here – and the full version can actually be downloaded here. Amazingly the book seems to anticipate the threat which the “anything goes” strand of post-modernism would bring (what I have taken to calling - the “whatever” response

It seems that Lewis (father of Daniel D) took this so seriously that he wrote a dystopian novel about it – That Hideous Strength whose plot is summarised in great detail here; serialised here; and available (courtesy of Gutenberg) in entirety here

Now I have to find the time (and inclination) to read the 2 books…..

The painting is one of three I bought this week at one of the small galleries underneath the Military Club....by a great book illustrator Alex Ivanov.....

Busts I admire

OK I admit it – I admire busts – particularly the sort I see in Museums....

I have grown increasingly to admire Bulgarian sculpture – for example Angel Spassov (1884-1974) and, on the contemporary scene, one of Bulgaria’s foremost sculptors Spartak (Paris) Dermendjiev - who has done a diverse series of clay sculptures whose There are no Happy Bulgarians and mother I admire most…..

So not altogether surprising that, as someone who has become (in the past few years) an art collector, I submitted this weekend to sitting (actually standing) for “Paris” as he “did my head”…..His uncle was a partisan during the war who sported the alias of Spartak – to which Paris owes his name. Some years back he gave me a clay carving of Spartacus when I bought a small bronze he did….

The weekend’s process can be seen here – finishing touches will be done these days; the bust then sliced and emptied (ugh!!); some darkener added; some drying; and then placed in the kiln for almost 12 hours…..with some 15% reduction in mass....

Although we had some good laughs as we chatted (and he sloshed on the clay and carved away), he chose to go for the severe look…..It was a fascinating experience during which I learned more about the man ……watch this space……