A while ago I mentioned the The Jewel of Medina, the novel withdrawn before publication because of fears that it would provoke Islamists. Since then, Stanley Fish has further diminished his reputation – how can such a bright man be so silly? – by insisting that the publisher’s action can’t be considered censorship. Although the novel has not yet been released, it was picked up by an independent publisher in London, Martin Rynja, a man who likes taking risks, and in the US by Beaufort Books. (The story so far can be found here.) Now three men have been arrested in London in connection with the firebombing of Rynja’s home and office. Beaufort Books have (temporarily) closed their office.

Are we there yet, Stanley?

The star lot was The Golden Calf, a bull in a large gold-plated formaldehyde fish tank-a symbol of the worship of a false god. It went for ?10m, bang in the middle of the range. The Kingdom-yet another Hirst shark-went for ?9.6m, well above the ?4m-?6m estimate. This was an incredible, gravity-defying feat. As the sale started, one of America’s largest investment banks went bankrupt, and a giant insurance company, AIG, was saved only by nationalisation just as the auction ended. The shares of even solid, boring banks were crashing in London and New York. The art market was sending a confusing message. Could it really be that a dead bull floating in a tank was a safer home for your cash than a deposit at the Halifax?

_ Ben Lewis in Prospect.

One of those collocations around which ironies spin, a little planetary system of cool. But all, I think, to be resisted. True, it reads like a sketch for an episode in Rushdie. But also like the chapter opening of a future book about the decadence of capitalism.

Elephant stamp to the reader who can spot the source of the entry title.

Last week, the most farsighted market players were flabbergasted, even as they comprehended that they were witnessing a capitulation to some kind of greater truth?that Wall Street had got caught up in a pyramid scheme of its own devising.

That’s Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker . He puts it more succinctly than anyone I’ve read so far. But I’ve yet to read an informed commentator who doesn’t say pretty much that. Here, luckily, the market is too small and the players too few for a comparable efflorescence of bullshit. But we’re taking our share of the damage, both directly, in the collapse of slick imitators like Babcock and Brown, and in what matters much more, the collapse of confidence in market values. So we have perfectly sound companies with actual products and no significant debt trading at price-earnings ratios that translate to no future earnings, ever.

In Australia we ought to be furious, both with the initiators of all this and with their local avatars. But we’re not. For most people, it seems, the operations of the market are like weather, uncontrollable, or nuclear physics, unintelligible.The professional commentators are too cool – or too frightened – to get angry.

A good deal of this represents generalised apathy about the workings of the world, but some of it surely is down to an education system for which the operations of the market are either sacred or shameful. Our economics departments teach the theology, our commerce departments (much more popular nowadays) teach the rituals. Over in humanities the market economy is what kinky sex used to be, a shameful practice that we don’t talk about. (Kinky sex, of course, is now a burgeoning area of study.)

It was good to be reminded this week of a more generous vision.

For more than half a century [John Kenneth] Galbraith argued that the truly important economic issues must be evaluated through the lens of economics, politics, sociology, law, ideology and history simultaneously, that the work of economics is far messier than the blackboard mathematical models that claim hegemony, and that economic analysis and prescription must always keep front and center both the factors of power and the narratives societies use to tell their economic stories.

_ Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 2005, p. 653

OK so that’s one busy lens in the metaphor, but it’s times like these that remind us that the market is not the forbidden turf on which only specialists may walk: it’s a common.

From a blog by Sarah Horrigan, who works as an e-learning developer:

? my head is far more full of ideas than it has been for a long time and part of that is in no small part down to the diminished distractability factor. With a book you engage with the book. You don’t go ‘ooooh, there’s another book over there, I’ll just go investigate that and be back to this in a bit’. It’s you and the page. The words don’t link anywhere. Don’t animate. Don’t do anything fancy. Don’t overheat and shut down at inappropriate moments (glares pointedly at laptop). But I’m struck by how much we push forwards with new technologies and leave behind technologies which are perfectly adequate, beautiful in their simplicity and may well do an even better job at helping you make mental connections.

It turns out that Professor Reiss was not speaking for the Royal Society after all – well anyway, they’ve sacked him – and may have meant only that science teachers should be courteous to the pre-scientific element in the classroom. Why am I not surprised that Reiss’s day job is in an Institute of Education?

John Connell reckons Reiss has a point but argues for an aggressive approach: let’s shine a light into these poor kids’ darkness. I think not, not out of respect for creationism – we are not called upon to respect wearily-familiar folly, except in blood relations – but because faith thrives on direct attack. Every well-brought-up fundamentalist has been taught what sorts of things the wicked world will say. Best not to buy the script. Some kids will get the real science, others won’t, most will learn both how to pass biology and please the parents.

Meanwhile over at the Institute of Education where Professor Reiss puts in some time, the matter is turned into flummery, like this:

Here we would want to acknowledge that in science classrooms in both schools and universities, there is a diversity of social, cultural and faith groups. Teachers and academics need to be aware of this diversity to develop appropriate and inclusive practices, whether natural or social scientists.

Doesn’t that sound nice?

American poet, August Kleinzahler, writes:

? I, for one, have never in my lifetime seen the situation of poetry in this country more dire or desperate. Nor is the future promising. Cultural and economic forces only suggest further devastation of any sort of vital literary culture, along with the prospects of the very, very few?it is always only a very few?poets who will matter down the road. What little of real originality is out there is drowning in the waste products spewing from graduate writing programs like the hog farm waste that recently overflowed its holding tanks in the wake of Hurricane Isabel, fouling the Carolina countryside and poisoning everything in its path.

Let me put it starkly: the better animals in the jungle aren?t drawn to poetry anymore ? Just as the new genre of the novel drew off most of the brilliant young writers of the nineteenth century, movies, television, MTV, advertising, rock ?n? roll, and the internet have taken the best among the recent crop of young talent. Do you suppose for a moment that a spirited youngster with a brilliant, original mind and gifted up the yin-yang is going to sit still for two years of creative writing poetry workshops presided over by a dispirited, compromised mediocrity, all the while critiquing and being critiqued by younger versions of the same?