Christopher Smith

@christophersmith.bsky.social

3971 Followers 1374 Following

University of St Andrews; Executive Chair, Arts & Humanities Research Council; International Champion and Creative Industries Sector Champion UK Research and Innovation All views my own, but none of the poetry.

R S Thomas, The Other There are nights that are so still that I can hear the small owl calling far off and a fox barking miles away. It is then that I lie in the lean hours awake listening to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic rising and falling, rising and falling wave on wave on the long shore by the village that is without light and companionless. And the thought comes of that other being who is awake, too, letting our prayers break on him, not like this for a few hours, but for days, years, for eternity.
This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level. Look at it talking to you. You look out a window Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it. You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other. The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot. What’s a plain level? It is that and other things, Bringing a system of them into play. Play? Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern, As in the division of grace these long August days Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters. It has been played once more. I think you exist only To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.
Monet Houses of Parliament at sunset
Book cover, Sverker Sörlin, Snö, a detail of snow covering trees and landscape from a painting by Gustav Fjaestad
a late summer country scene, photograph
Edward Burra The Straw Man, men violent punch and kick a straw man beneath a railway bridge. A woman and child walk away in the background.
cover of Moya Cannon's Bunting's Honey, with an image, The Pink Bush by Joseph Quilty
Cover of Beverley Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
Grand Canyon National Park
The Lover and Dame Oyseuse outside a walled garden, from a British Library manuscript of the Roman de la Rose, c.1490-1500
Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, book cover
Still from Derek Jarman’s Blue. Photo: Liam Daniel © 1993 Basilisk Communications Ltd. The sound of bells ring as the screen fills with blue. As they echo and fade, Derek Jarman’s voice begins, “O blue come forth, O blue arise, O blue ascend, O blue come in.” Blue (1993) was Jarman’s final film before he passed away from AIDS just a year after its creation. 
Portrait of George Herbert
Giotto Scrovegni Chapel, depiction of Christ riding into Jerusalem
Photo of Tony Judt, 1948-2010
Book cover Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century.
More recently, I think we really are the victims of a discursive shift, since the late 1970s, towards economics. Intellectuals don't ask if something is right or wrong, but whether a policy is efficient or inefficient. They don't ask if a measure is good or bad, but whether or not it improves productivity. The reason they do this is not necessarily because they are uninterested in soci- ety, but because they have come to assume, rather uncritically, that the point of economic policy is to generate resources. Until you've generated resources, goes the refrain, there's no point having a conversation about distributing them. This, it seems to me, comes close to a sort of soft blackmail: surely you are not going to be so unrealistic or unworldly or idealistic as to place goals before means? We are accordingly advised that everything begins with eco- nomics. But this reduces intellectuals-no less than the workers they are discussing-to rodents on a treadmill. When we talk of increasing productiv- ity or resources, how do we know when to stop? At what point are we suffi- ciently well-resourced to turn our attention to the distribution of goods? How would we ever know when the time has come to talk about deserts and needs rather than outputs and efficiencies? The effect of the dominance of economic language in an intellectual culture which was always vulnerable to the authority of "experts" has acted as a brake upon a more morally informed social debate.
I see the present century as one of growing insecurity brought about partly by excessive economic freedom, using the word in a very specific sense, and growing insecurity also brought about by climate change and unpredictable states. We are likely to find ourselves as intellectuals or polit- cal philosophers facing a situation in which our chief task is not to imagine better worlds but rather to think how to prevent worse ones. And that's a slightly different sort of situation, where the kind of intellectual who draws big pictures of idealized, improvable situations may not be the person who is most worth listening to.
Book cover Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century
So one must be careful when reading Zweig and others as a guide to the lost world of central Europe. In 1985, I visited an exhibition in the Histori- cal Museum of the City of Vienna, "Traum und Wirklichkeit: Wien 1880- 1930." In one room the curators had pasted enlarged pages from a Viennese right-wing paper. The article, in German of course, was about the horrors of cosmopolitanism: the Jews and the Hungarians and Czechs and Slovaks and others who were polluting Vienna and creating crime. The curators had highlighted this text in different colors according to the words and their roots, to show how very little of it was in literary German: much of this char- acteristically nativist rant was, unbeknown to its author, written in words of Yiddish, Hungarian or Slavic origin.
Embrace the fact that dual use occurs naturally given the ubiquitous nature of modern technology (e.g., AI, material science, the internet, drones) and the broad needs of a modern military (e.g., health, fitness). Instead, administer programmes as “military RD&I” and “everything else “(i.e., civilian, dual use) and optimise the innovation dividend arising from the need for increased national security and defence expenditure by exploiting dual use both ways.
Truth - large pink letters
Book cover, Olive Schreiner, From Man to Man, Virago Modern Classics with Edvard Munch, Red and White (two women, dressed in red and white respectively)
woodcut; a fool blindfolds justice
Book cover of Isabel Wilkerson, Caste The origins of our discontents
the pace of change in sciences and medicine will mean we need humanities and social sciences more than ever. New technologies are changing politics and transforming the way culture is developed and communicated. They need ethics, philosophy, language and history to guide them. Universities like ours, cherishing the full range of academic disciplines, will have a vital role in showing how sciences and humanities can inform and strengthen each other.
John Burnside
Fra Angelico, Annunciation