An Italian in Madrid – one of three numbers in a show by the Richard Alston Dance Company at Northampton Derngate, Sensitive and beautiful dancing to the music of Scarlatti – the titular Italian – featuring as guest dancer the very wonderful Vidya Patel, a finalist in the BBC Young Dancer competition 2015 (see her performing). So good we immediately booked to see it again at the next opportunity, unfortunately not till February 2017. I was also inspired to buy a CD of the Scarlatti sonatas, choosing a performance by Angela Hewitt, after having been blown away by her rendition of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and I was not disappointed.
Vitreus Art Gallery and Craft Workshop – beautiful stained glass as domestic decoration, being made before your eyes, with a wide variety of other crafts on sale, publicised as part of a South Northamptonshire week-long arts trail of open studios. A lovely Saturday afternoon, rounded off by tea and cake at the on-site tea room.
Kew Gardens – my first visit, and much bigger and more beautiful than I’d anticipated, only having seen fragments on TV. You could forget you’re in London, if it weren’t for the planes passing overhead every two minutes. Highlights: (1) the Marianne North Gallery, built to showcase the botanical paintings of the Victorian traveller, recently featured in the BBC programme Kew’s Forgotten Queen (the paintings themselves are reproduced on the ArtUK website); (2) the Hive, a sculpture installation, dynamically linked to an actual beehive, so its lighting and sound reflect real-time bee activity. Both of these, plus the memory of the excellent EPIC Ireland museum in Dublin (see previous post), made me reflect on the importance, now that information is so readily available on the internet, of galleries and installations which add value from a sense of immersion or being in a space. All three of these are great places to be, not just to find out stuff.
Hypernormalisation – new documentary by Adam Curtis, his usual provocative and startling reflection on how we got to the mess we’re in, this time taking in Donald Trump, the failure of the West’s Middle East policy, and the dawn of a post-truth world.
Cats – a new version (I saw the original London production in the 1980s, with Brian Blessed as Old Deuteronomy), which marked our delighted grand-daughter’s introduction to musical theatre. Packed full of great music and great dancing, and some strong performances,
Polymnia 10th anniversary concert, with Lesley Garrett – a pleasure and an honour to perform alongside her.
Words are my matter – new collection of essays and talks by Ursula Le Guin. I particularly liked the following: “Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It’s an act: you do it. You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling shouting rush of the media. You take in what you can and want to take in, not what they shove at you fast and hard and loud in order to overwhelm and control you…. And though you’re usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another mind. You aren’t being brainwashed or co-opted or used; you’ve joined in an act of the imagination.… Reading is a means of listening…. Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time, and silence.” So obvious, and yet (as I've previously posted) some of my colleagues continue to categorise reading as an “essentially passive” form of learning activity. What terribly dull and boring texts they must be reading. Or writing.
Thursday, 17 November 2016
Tuesday, 15 November 2016
Cuttings: October: 2016
A Little History of Religion by Richard Holloway: God versus oppression - review by Tim Whitmarsh in The Guardian. "This history is 'little' not in the sense of being compact, punchy or condensed, but in the way that you might say 'that’s a nice little house', or 'I’ll just have a little cup of coffee”'. It is a 'little history' because it is written from a comfortable armchair. Holloway’s is an unashamedly, but apparently unselfconsciously, Protestant account. He takes it for granted that the only religious experience that matters is divine revelation, when God talks directly to human beings: none of that ritual mumbo-jumbo that bothers the anthropologists. So we race past entire areas of human experience. He explicitly states that Shinto, ancient Greek polytheist and native American beliefs aren’t proper religion; presumably he would say the same about the indigenous cultures of Africa or South America, since he never mentions them.... Holloway is at his best in the closing chapters, where he explores the meaning for us today of thousands of years of reflection on religion, this most peculiar aspect of human culture. Here he captures sympathetically and undogmatically the impasse that we have reached, where science, liberal values, secularism, religious conservatism, global diversity, postcolonialism and fundamentalism are on a terrifying collision course. His diagnosis of the situation is spot-on. If there is a solution to be found, however, it will lie not in partisan 'little histories' like this, but in an expansive, generous, self-aware and intellectually sophisticated understanding of how we ended up here."
‘Oh Excellent Air Bag!’: two centuries of laughing gas - review by Frances Wilson in The Guardian. "This exuberant anthology of responses to nitrous oxide, edited with wit and imagination by Adam Green, begins with extracts from Davy’s Researches and ends with a one-act play by Theodore Dreiser called Laughing Gas (1916).... The press that has brought us this heavenly volume is the publishing wing of the Public Domain Review, an internet journal dedicated to releasing out of copyright material from the history of ideas. An Aladdin’s cave of curiosities, it is for me the best thing on the web, and '"Oh Excellent Air Bag!"' has all the generosity, waywardness and rollicking spirit of the online project. How many other books furnish their reader with an 'Index of Exclamations and Similes'?"
In the age of the algorithm, the human gatekeeper is back - article by Michael Bhaskar in The Guardian. "The more we have, the more we rely on algorithms and automated recommendation systems. Hence the unstoppable march of algorithmic recommendations, machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data into the cultural sphere. Yet this isn’t the end of the story. Search, for example, tells us what we want to know, but can’t help if we don’t already know what we want. Far from disappearing, human curation and sensibilities have a new value in the age of algorithms.... Curation can be a clumsy, sometimes maligned word, but with its Latin root curare (to take care of), it captures this irreplaceable human touch. We want to be surprised. We want expertise, distinctive aesthetic judgments, clear expenditure of time and effort. We relish the messy reality of another’s taste and a trusted personal connection. We don’t just want correlations – we want a why, a narrative, which machines can’t provide. Even if we define curation as selecting and arranging, this won’t be left solely to algorithms. Unlike so many sectors experiencing technological disruption, from self-driving cars to automated accountancy, the cultural sphere will always value human choice, the unique perspective."
The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin - article by Julie Phillips in The New Yorker. "The history of America is one of conflicting fantasies: clashes over what stories are told and who gets to tell them. If the Bundy brothers [the armed anti-government agitators who occupied an Eastern Oregon wildlife refuge] were in love with one side of the American dream—stories of wars fought and won, land taken and tamed—Le Guin has spent a career exploring another, distinctly less triumphalist side. She sees herself as a Western writer, though her work has had a wide range of settings, from the Oregon coast to an anarchist utopia and a California that exists in the future but resembles the past. Keeping an ambivalent distance from the centers of literary power, she makes room in her work for other voices. She has always defended the fantastic, by which she means not formulaic fantasy or 'McMagic' but the imagination as a subversive force. 'Imagination, working at full strength, can shake us out of our fatal, adoring self-absorption,' she has written, 'and make us look up and see—with terror or with relief—that the world does not in fact belong to us at all.'”
How we got to The Girl on the Train: the rise of the psychological thriller - article by John Mullan in The Guardian. "Calling a thriller 'psychological' credits it with a kind of literary complexity. The very first recorded use of the term 'psychological thriller' was in an admiring review of Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil in 1925. Most dictionaries of literary terms lack an entry for this genre, as if it were a figment of reviewers’ or publishers’ imaginations.... In one way these stories are the opposite of the serial killer fantasies with which we have been diverting ourselves for several decades. In the psychological thriller the killer is not a dedicated monster, it is someone close to us, someone familiar. The genre thrives in domestic settings.... In his great novels of the 1860s, [Wilkie] Collins invented a series of narrative tricks and peculiar plot elements that thriller writers still draw on. The Girl on the Train depends on the fact that one of its narrators, Rachel, suffers from alcohol-induced memory loss. She struggles through the book to recover the memories that might explain a woman’s mysterious disappearance. She even wonders whether she might somehow be responsible. It was Collins who introduced to the English novel this strangest of possibilities: that a person might not know what they know – might not even know what they have done.... [Collins] pioneered the use of multiple narrators. His preface to The Woman in White declared, 'An experiment is attempted in this novel, which has not (so far as I know) been hitherto tried in fiction. The story of the book is told throughout by the characters of the book.' Collins made it possible that a narrator might even be a culprit. He showed how to extract thrills from narrative unease."
The History Thieves by Ian Cobain: how Britain covered up its imperial crimes - review by Ian Jack in The Guardian. "Britain’s retreat from empire is remembered in a popular iconography that contains only a little violence.... For a postwar generation like mine, too young for national service and a troopship to the colonies, most of it happened inside the local Regal or Odeon. Movietone footage would show Princess X or Prince Y standing on a podium to witness a ceremony of national independence, smiling at the native dancers as fireworks explode overhead. This book supplies a more troubling image: as the sun sets on the greatest empire the world has ever seen, long columns of smoke fill the tropical skies. In a thousand bonfires, Britain is burning the historical evidence... This purging of the record happened across the world, in British Guiana, Aden, Malta, North Borneo, Belize, the West Indies, Kenya, Uganda – wherever Britain ruled. In the words of Ian Cobain, it was a subversion of the Public Record Acts on an industrial scale, involving hundreds if not thousands of colonial officials, as well as MI5 and Special Branch officers and men and women from army, navy and air force. All of them, whether they knew it or not, were breaking a legal obligation to preserve important official papers for the historical record, in the expectation that most would eventually be declassified. The British government took extraordinary measures to make sure that the fate of these papers remained a secret, whether they had been 'migrated' to the UK or destroyed abroad."
This Faithful Machine - article by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in The Paris Review, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Gag pieces advertising pencils or fountain pens as feature-laden 'word processors' became a staple of the 1980s computer press. Peter McWilliams stretched the joke to a short book about the fictitious McWilliams II Word Processor (Portable! User friendly! Prints characters from every known language!). Users of all stripes were coming to grips with the strange new ontology of writing on the screen. 'Writing with light' was the phrase authors invoked over and over again. 'It seemed like the future,' Peter Straub said of his own IBM Displaywriter, bought to collaborate long-distance on The Talisman with Stephen King, who had at the time what he delighted in referring to as his 'great big Wang.' But writing with light had its perils, too: notoriously temperamental floppy disks were given to spawning 'bad sectors,' a phenomenon so rampant that Amy Tan founded a Kaypro computer-support group with that name shortly before the start of her own fiction career in San Francisco. Other writers worried what would happen when their words slid off of the edge of the glowing glass screen—the manual accompanying Perfect Writer, the Kaypro’s default software, came with a fanciful visual aid to illustrate the principle behind the scrolling mechanism, the better to reassure anxious users."
Virtual reality: the Guardian's 6x9 is shown at the White House - article by Francesca Panetta in the online members only section of The Guardian. "Some of you may have seen 6x9: a virtual experience of solitary confinement, which we launched on theguardian.com in April. For those of you unfamiliar with the project, you can watch it on your smartphone by downloading an app, and using a pair of goggles such as the affordable Google Cardboard or a Gear VR. Once 6x9 begins, you are transported into a room that measures six foot by nine foot – the average size of so-called “supermax” isolation cells in the US. There are between 80,000 and 100,000 people in solitary confinement in the US, and the piece gives a glimpse from the inside: the claustrophobia; the inhumane conditions where you live next to your toilet while your food arrives on a tray through a slot twice a day; the psychological disturbances that can result from sensory deprivation. In 6x9, you get a very real sense of the disturbances experienced by the formerly incarcerated prisoners who feature in the piece. You hallucinate, float to the ceiling, your vision begins to blur. Before its White House appearance, 6x9 travelled from the Sundance festival in Utah to the Tribeca festival (where it was watched by, among others, Robert de Niro) in New York. But South by South Lawn was particularly important because of the event’s aims. With 6x9, we wanted to allow our audience to feel what it is like to be in solitary confinement, but we also wanted to effect change." (See also video.)
The Terranauts by TC Boyle: ‘an ark to save humanity’ - review by M. John Haarrison in The Guardian. "Hermetically sealed under three-eighths of an inch of armoured glass in the remote Arizona desert, Ecosphere 2 contains several artificial biomes, including savanna, a rainforest and a bijou sea with its own coral reef. Internal air pressure is controlled by vast mechanical lungs. Two thousand sensors gauge 'everything from soil respiration to ocean salinity'. The whole contraption burns thousands of kilowatt-hours of energy a day to support the eight human beings who live inside. Their aim? To survive for two years, sustained only by what they produce. Nothing in, nothing out. ... Life inside is hard, but sometimes idyllic. Much of the time they’re exhausted.... They dream about food, and they remember in detail the food they ate in the days before the door closed on the real world, which they call Ecosphere 1, or E1. They argue about who’s working the hardest. When they aren’t arguing, they have sex. They have a lot of sex, and it’s sex that, inevitably, blows the whole thing up; at which point all their barely veiled resentments are dragged to the surface like fish from the ecosphere pond.... Based on a similar experiment in the Arizona desert in the 1990s [Biosphere 2], Terranauts is funny, but not always in a way you can laugh at."
Do students know what’s good for them? - article by Tom Stafford in MindHacks blog. "Of course they do, and of course they don’t. Putting a student at the centre of their own learning seems like fundamental pedagogy. The Constructivist approach to education emphasises the need for knowledge to reassemble in the mind of the learner, and the related impossibility of its direct transmission from the mind of the teacher. Believe this, and student input into how they learn must follow.... Obviously we learn best when motivated, and when learning is fun, and allowing us to explore our curiosity is a way to allow both. However, putting the trajectory of their experience into students’ hands can go awry. One reason is false beliefs about how much we know, or how we learn best. Psychologists studying memory have long documented such metacognitive errors, which include overconfidence, and a mistaken reliance on our familiarity with a thing as a guide to how well we understand it, or how well we’ll be able to recall it when tested (recognition and recall are in fact different cognitive processes).... Education scholars have reacted against pure student-led or discovery learning, with one review summarising the findings from multiple distinct research programmes taking place over three decades: 'In each case, guided discovery was more effective than pure discovery in helping students learn and transfer'."
Video games where people matter? The strange future of emotional AI - article by Keith Stuart in The Guardian. "If you’re a video game fan of a certain age, you may remember Edge magazine’s controversial review of the bloody sci-fi shooting game, Doom. ... 'if only you could talk to these creatures, then perhaps you could try and make friends with them, form alliances … Now that would be interesting.' Of course, we all know what happened. There would be no room in the Doom series, nor any subsequent first-person blast-’em-up, for such socio-psychological niceties. Instead, we enjoyed 20 years of shooting, bludgeoning and stabbing, the ludicrous idea of diplomacy cast roughly aside. But during this era, something else was happening in game design, and in academic thinking around video games and artificial intelligence. Buoyed by advances in AI research and aided by increasingly powerful computer processors, developers were beginning to think about the possibilities of non-player characters (NPCs) who could think and act in a more complex and human way – who could provide the emotional feedback that the Edge reviewer was thinking about."
‘Oh Excellent Air Bag!’: two centuries of laughing gas - review by Frances Wilson in The Guardian. "This exuberant anthology of responses to nitrous oxide, edited with wit and imagination by Adam Green, begins with extracts from Davy’s Researches and ends with a one-act play by Theodore Dreiser called Laughing Gas (1916).... The press that has brought us this heavenly volume is the publishing wing of the Public Domain Review, an internet journal dedicated to releasing out of copyright material from the history of ideas. An Aladdin’s cave of curiosities, it is for me the best thing on the web, and '"Oh Excellent Air Bag!"' has all the generosity, waywardness and rollicking spirit of the online project. How many other books furnish their reader with an 'Index of Exclamations and Similes'?"
In the age of the algorithm, the human gatekeeper is back - article by Michael Bhaskar in The Guardian. "The more we have, the more we rely on algorithms and automated recommendation systems. Hence the unstoppable march of algorithmic recommendations, machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data into the cultural sphere. Yet this isn’t the end of the story. Search, for example, tells us what we want to know, but can’t help if we don’t already know what we want. Far from disappearing, human curation and sensibilities have a new value in the age of algorithms.... Curation can be a clumsy, sometimes maligned word, but with its Latin root curare (to take care of), it captures this irreplaceable human touch. We want to be surprised. We want expertise, distinctive aesthetic judgments, clear expenditure of time and effort. We relish the messy reality of another’s taste and a trusted personal connection. We don’t just want correlations – we want a why, a narrative, which machines can’t provide. Even if we define curation as selecting and arranging, this won’t be left solely to algorithms. Unlike so many sectors experiencing technological disruption, from self-driving cars to automated accountancy, the cultural sphere will always value human choice, the unique perspective."
The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin - article by Julie Phillips in The New Yorker. "The history of America is one of conflicting fantasies: clashes over what stories are told and who gets to tell them. If the Bundy brothers [the armed anti-government agitators who occupied an Eastern Oregon wildlife refuge] were in love with one side of the American dream—stories of wars fought and won, land taken and tamed—Le Guin has spent a career exploring another, distinctly less triumphalist side. She sees herself as a Western writer, though her work has had a wide range of settings, from the Oregon coast to an anarchist utopia and a California that exists in the future but resembles the past. Keeping an ambivalent distance from the centers of literary power, she makes room in her work for other voices. She has always defended the fantastic, by which she means not formulaic fantasy or 'McMagic' but the imagination as a subversive force. 'Imagination, working at full strength, can shake us out of our fatal, adoring self-absorption,' she has written, 'and make us look up and see—with terror or with relief—that the world does not in fact belong to us at all.'”
How we got to The Girl on the Train: the rise of the psychological thriller - article by John Mullan in The Guardian. "Calling a thriller 'psychological' credits it with a kind of literary complexity. The very first recorded use of the term 'psychological thriller' was in an admiring review of Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil in 1925. Most dictionaries of literary terms lack an entry for this genre, as if it were a figment of reviewers’ or publishers’ imaginations.... In one way these stories are the opposite of the serial killer fantasies with which we have been diverting ourselves for several decades. In the psychological thriller the killer is not a dedicated monster, it is someone close to us, someone familiar. The genre thrives in domestic settings.... In his great novels of the 1860s, [Wilkie] Collins invented a series of narrative tricks and peculiar plot elements that thriller writers still draw on. The Girl on the Train depends on the fact that one of its narrators, Rachel, suffers from alcohol-induced memory loss. She struggles through the book to recover the memories that might explain a woman’s mysterious disappearance. She even wonders whether she might somehow be responsible. It was Collins who introduced to the English novel this strangest of possibilities: that a person might not know what they know – might not even know what they have done.... [Collins] pioneered the use of multiple narrators. His preface to The Woman in White declared, 'An experiment is attempted in this novel, which has not (so far as I know) been hitherto tried in fiction. The story of the book is told throughout by the characters of the book.' Collins made it possible that a narrator might even be a culprit. He showed how to extract thrills from narrative unease."
The History Thieves by Ian Cobain: how Britain covered up its imperial crimes - review by Ian Jack in The Guardian. "Britain’s retreat from empire is remembered in a popular iconography that contains only a little violence.... For a postwar generation like mine, too young for national service and a troopship to the colonies, most of it happened inside the local Regal or Odeon. Movietone footage would show Princess X or Prince Y standing on a podium to witness a ceremony of national independence, smiling at the native dancers as fireworks explode overhead. This book supplies a more troubling image: as the sun sets on the greatest empire the world has ever seen, long columns of smoke fill the tropical skies. In a thousand bonfires, Britain is burning the historical evidence... This purging of the record happened across the world, in British Guiana, Aden, Malta, North Borneo, Belize, the West Indies, Kenya, Uganda – wherever Britain ruled. In the words of Ian Cobain, it was a subversion of the Public Record Acts on an industrial scale, involving hundreds if not thousands of colonial officials, as well as MI5 and Special Branch officers and men and women from army, navy and air force. All of them, whether they knew it or not, were breaking a legal obligation to preserve important official papers for the historical record, in the expectation that most would eventually be declassified. The British government took extraordinary measures to make sure that the fate of these papers remained a secret, whether they had been 'migrated' to the UK or destroyed abroad."
This Faithful Machine - article by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in The Paris Review, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Gag pieces advertising pencils or fountain pens as feature-laden 'word processors' became a staple of the 1980s computer press. Peter McWilliams stretched the joke to a short book about the fictitious McWilliams II Word Processor (Portable! User friendly! Prints characters from every known language!). Users of all stripes were coming to grips with the strange new ontology of writing on the screen. 'Writing with light' was the phrase authors invoked over and over again. 'It seemed like the future,' Peter Straub said of his own IBM Displaywriter, bought to collaborate long-distance on The Talisman with Stephen King, who had at the time what he delighted in referring to as his 'great big Wang.' But writing with light had its perils, too: notoriously temperamental floppy disks were given to spawning 'bad sectors,' a phenomenon so rampant that Amy Tan founded a Kaypro computer-support group with that name shortly before the start of her own fiction career in San Francisco. Other writers worried what would happen when their words slid off of the edge of the glowing glass screen—the manual accompanying Perfect Writer, the Kaypro’s default software, came with a fanciful visual aid to illustrate the principle behind the scrolling mechanism, the better to reassure anxious users."
Virtual reality: the Guardian's 6x9 is shown at the White House - article by Francesca Panetta in the online members only section of The Guardian. "Some of you may have seen 6x9: a virtual experience of solitary confinement, which we launched on theguardian.com in April. For those of you unfamiliar with the project, you can watch it on your smartphone by downloading an app, and using a pair of goggles such as the affordable Google Cardboard or a Gear VR. Once 6x9 begins, you are transported into a room that measures six foot by nine foot – the average size of so-called “supermax” isolation cells in the US. There are between 80,000 and 100,000 people in solitary confinement in the US, and the piece gives a glimpse from the inside: the claustrophobia; the inhumane conditions where you live next to your toilet while your food arrives on a tray through a slot twice a day; the psychological disturbances that can result from sensory deprivation. In 6x9, you get a very real sense of the disturbances experienced by the formerly incarcerated prisoners who feature in the piece. You hallucinate, float to the ceiling, your vision begins to blur. Before its White House appearance, 6x9 travelled from the Sundance festival in Utah to the Tribeca festival (where it was watched by, among others, Robert de Niro) in New York. But South by South Lawn was particularly important because of the event’s aims. With 6x9, we wanted to allow our audience to feel what it is like to be in solitary confinement, but we also wanted to effect change." (See also video.)
The Terranauts by TC Boyle: ‘an ark to save humanity’ - review by M. John Haarrison in The Guardian. "Hermetically sealed under three-eighths of an inch of armoured glass in the remote Arizona desert, Ecosphere 2 contains several artificial biomes, including savanna, a rainforest and a bijou sea with its own coral reef. Internal air pressure is controlled by vast mechanical lungs. Two thousand sensors gauge 'everything from soil respiration to ocean salinity'. The whole contraption burns thousands of kilowatt-hours of energy a day to support the eight human beings who live inside. Their aim? To survive for two years, sustained only by what they produce. Nothing in, nothing out. ... Life inside is hard, but sometimes idyllic. Much of the time they’re exhausted.... They dream about food, and they remember in detail the food they ate in the days before the door closed on the real world, which they call Ecosphere 1, or E1. They argue about who’s working the hardest. When they aren’t arguing, they have sex. They have a lot of sex, and it’s sex that, inevitably, blows the whole thing up; at which point all their barely veiled resentments are dragged to the surface like fish from the ecosphere pond.... Based on a similar experiment in the Arizona desert in the 1990s [Biosphere 2], Terranauts is funny, but not always in a way you can laugh at."
Do students know what’s good for them? - article by Tom Stafford in MindHacks blog. "Of course they do, and of course they don’t. Putting a student at the centre of their own learning seems like fundamental pedagogy. The Constructivist approach to education emphasises the need for knowledge to reassemble in the mind of the learner, and the related impossibility of its direct transmission from the mind of the teacher. Believe this, and student input into how they learn must follow.... Obviously we learn best when motivated, and when learning is fun, and allowing us to explore our curiosity is a way to allow both. However, putting the trajectory of their experience into students’ hands can go awry. One reason is false beliefs about how much we know, or how we learn best. Psychologists studying memory have long documented such metacognitive errors, which include overconfidence, and a mistaken reliance on our familiarity with a thing as a guide to how well we understand it, or how well we’ll be able to recall it when tested (recognition and recall are in fact different cognitive processes).... Education scholars have reacted against pure student-led or discovery learning, with one review summarising the findings from multiple distinct research programmes taking place over three decades: 'In each case, guided discovery was more effective than pure discovery in helping students learn and transfer'."
Video games where people matter? The strange future of emotional AI - article by Keith Stuart in The Guardian. "If you’re a video game fan of a certain age, you may remember Edge magazine’s controversial review of the bloody sci-fi shooting game, Doom. ... 'if only you could talk to these creatures, then perhaps you could try and make friends with them, form alliances … Now that would be interesting.' Of course, we all know what happened. There would be no room in the Doom series, nor any subsequent first-person blast-’em-up, for such socio-psychological niceties. Instead, we enjoyed 20 years of shooting, bludgeoning and stabbing, the ludicrous idea of diplomacy cast roughly aside. But during this era, something else was happening in game design, and in academic thinking around video games and artificial intelligence. Buoyed by advances in AI research and aided by increasingly powerful computer processors, developers were beginning to think about the possibilities of non-player characters (NPCs) who could think and act in a more complex and human way – who could provide the emotional feedback that the Edge reviewer was thinking about."
Wednesday, 9 November 2016
A fable from Europolis
A travelling salesman was advertising his wares. He was selling weapons and armour. One day he came to a village where a great soldier lived.You can see the story told in this walkthrough video, at timecode 4:50. In the near-future dystopian city of Europolis, Zoe comes across her friend Baruti, the election campaign manager for the Social Democrats, being threatened by the gangster's thugs. If (as in this walkthrough) Zoe chooses to intervene, this is the story which the gangster tells her as his warning.
"This shield," said the salesman "is so strong that nothing can pierce it. It will resist any impact. It will protect a warrior from all harm."
"This spear," said the salesman, "is so sharp that it will pierce any armour, killing your opponent instantly."
"How can it be," answered the great soldier, "that you have a shield that cannot be pierced and a spear that can pierce anything? The two cannot possibly co-exist."
So the salesman grabbed the shield and the spear. "It does not matter whether the two can or can not co-exist. m****rf****r", he said, running the great soldier through, killing him, "when I'm the one wielding both."
Thursday, 13 October 2016
Seen and heard: September 2016
The Sky Road – mountains on one side, bogs and loughs and inlets on the other: the Connemara landscape is stunning. And on this road, you do really as though you’re climbing into the sky.
Kylemore Abbey – “Forget Hogwarts,” said the tourist guide, “this is where I’d have liked to go to school.” And until 2010 you could, if you were a girl (and your parents could muster the cash), because the Benedictine nuns here used to run a small but high-powered girls boarding school. Now they produce hand-made chocolates instead. (And maintain the divine offices of course.) A beautiful building in an idyllic location (amidst the mountains, beside a lough, within many acres of landscaped estate), built as the forever home of an Irish-Manchester Victorian industrialist and his new bride, whose life was tragically cut short by dysentery on a foreign trip. A great place to visit, but the nuns really do need more and better space of their own away from all us international tourists.
Anam Cara – recorded talks by the late lamented spiritual writer John O’Donohue. Coming from the Celtic tradition, he is strong on seeing God as imminent in the natural world, so it felt only proper to listen to his recorded talks in that part of Ireland from whence he sprung. Hearing him talk about the spirituality of the senses, while driving through the rich and raw Connemara landscape with a good breakfast in my belly and the taste of damn fine coffee in my mouth, it was easy to feel the wisdom of his words.
EPIC Ireland – brand new exhibition centre in Dublin docklands, about the Irish diaspora, but really easy to relate to and making you feel proud to be Irish (even if you’re not). (EPIC is supposed to stand for Every Person Is Connected.) I think this is the best designed exhibition I’ve ever seen: every gallery, every exhibit, allowing engagement at multiple levels – aesthetic, emotional, intellectual, seriously specialist – with very good use of touch-screen interactivity. Coupled with a visit to the Irish Family History Centre, where the super-friendly staff helped my wife with tracing her Irish ancestry. I wonder what an equivalent exhibition for the Chinese diaspora would be like?
The Deer’s Cry – The Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimage, performing at Church of Christ the Cornerstone, Milton Keynes. The usual sensational performance, this time unusually combining William Byrd and Arvo Pärt. Two particular take-aways this time. (1) Pärt’s setting of The Deer’s Cry: basically what’s better known as St Patrick’s Breastplate, but this form of words is more suggestive of the uncertainty and potential danger of the world, in which the protection of Christ is sought. And why “The Deer’s Cry” anyway? Isn’t a deer usually silent, so its crying out is significant? (My wife reminds me that the deer, or the hart, is a medieval symbol for the soul which makes sense.) (2) The proximity it’s now possible to feel between the world of the Psalmist and our own: for example, “Set free my soul from the lying mouth and from the deceitful tongue”, and “I spoke of peace, and they called out for war” (Psalm 120). Of course Byrd’s time too was characterised by wars and persecutions, and the pre-concert talk pointed out how his music conveys the pain and insecurity of which he had personal experience.
Kylemore Abbey – “Forget Hogwarts,” said the tourist guide, “this is where I’d have liked to go to school.” And until 2010 you could, if you were a girl (and your parents could muster the cash), because the Benedictine nuns here used to run a small but high-powered girls boarding school. Now they produce hand-made chocolates instead. (And maintain the divine offices of course.) A beautiful building in an idyllic location (amidst the mountains, beside a lough, within many acres of landscaped estate), built as the forever home of an Irish-Manchester Victorian industrialist and his new bride, whose life was tragically cut short by dysentery on a foreign trip. A great place to visit, but the nuns really do need more and better space of their own away from all us international tourists.
Anam Cara – recorded talks by the late lamented spiritual writer John O’Donohue. Coming from the Celtic tradition, he is strong on seeing God as imminent in the natural world, so it felt only proper to listen to his recorded talks in that part of Ireland from whence he sprung. Hearing him talk about the spirituality of the senses, while driving through the rich and raw Connemara landscape with a good breakfast in my belly and the taste of damn fine coffee in my mouth, it was easy to feel the wisdom of his words.
EPIC Ireland – brand new exhibition centre in Dublin docklands, about the Irish diaspora, but really easy to relate to and making you feel proud to be Irish (even if you’re not). (EPIC is supposed to stand for Every Person Is Connected.) I think this is the best designed exhibition I’ve ever seen: every gallery, every exhibit, allowing engagement at multiple levels – aesthetic, emotional, intellectual, seriously specialist – with very good use of touch-screen interactivity. Coupled with a visit to the Irish Family History Centre, where the super-friendly staff helped my wife with tracing her Irish ancestry. I wonder what an equivalent exhibition for the Chinese diaspora would be like?
The Deer’s Cry – The Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimage, performing at Church of Christ the Cornerstone, Milton Keynes. The usual sensational performance, this time unusually combining William Byrd and Arvo Pärt. Two particular take-aways this time. (1) Pärt’s setting of The Deer’s Cry: basically what’s better known as St Patrick’s Breastplate, but this form of words is more suggestive of the uncertainty and potential danger of the world, in which the protection of Christ is sought. And why “The Deer’s Cry” anyway? Isn’t a deer usually silent, so its crying out is significant? (My wife reminds me that the deer, or the hart, is a medieval symbol for the soul which makes sense.) (2) The proximity it’s now possible to feel between the world of the Psalmist and our own: for example, “Set free my soul from the lying mouth and from the deceitful tongue”, and “I spoke of peace, and they called out for war” (Psalm 120). Of course Byrd’s time too was characterised by wars and persecutions, and the pre-concert talk pointed out how his music conveys the pain and insecurity of which he had personal experience.
Cuttings: September 2016
Why Tim Berners-Lee is no friend of Facebook - column by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "If there were a Nobel prize for hypocrisy, then its first recipient ought to be Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook boss. On 23 August, all his 1.7 billion users were greeted by this message: 'Celebrating 25 years of connecting people. The web opened up to the world 25 years ago today! We thank Sir Tim Berners-Lee and other internet pioneers for making the world more open and connected.'... What Zuck conveniently omits to mention, though, is that he is embarked upon a commercial project whose sole aim is to make the world more 'connected' but less open.... An open platform is one on which anyone can build whatever they like. It’s what enabled a young Harvard sophomore, name of Zuckerberg, to take an idea lifted from two nice-but-dim oarsmen, translate it into computer code and launch it on an unsuspecting world.... The open web enabled Zuckerberg to do this. But – guess what? – the Facebook founder has no intention of allowing anyone to build anything on his platform that does not have his express approval. Having profited mightily from the openness of the web, in other words, he has kicked away the ladder that elevated him to his current eminence. And the whole thrust of his company’s strategy is to persuade billions of future users that Facebook is the only bit of the internet they really need."
How to actually talk to a woman wearing headphones - article by Martha Mills in The Guardian's Brain flapping blog. "An article has surfaced from the quagmire of bilge that is The Internet and it has caused, not without reason, a small tornado of outrage. Written as dating advice for 'The Modern Man' (a misnomer if ever there were one), it promises a solution to the hot ‘n’ horny down-on-their-luck young bucks of the world who face the tedious obstacle of a woman wearing headphones, because how dare she. ... Here’s how it plays out in real life. Trust me, I’ve been it, seen it and spoken to the survivors: Him: I see you don’t want to be talked to but I find you physically attractive and I’m making that your problem. Her: Please leave me alone. Him: F*** YOU, YOU STUCK UP B****, I DIDN’T FANCY YOU ANYWAY. With 'advice' like this out there, it’s hardly any surprise, is it? These lonely men so desperately in search of conquests have been given permission, blessed with the entitlement to go forth and pluck their bounty using but five humble steps. So imagine their horror and indignation when that which has been promised doesn’t want to be plucked and tells them to sling their greasy hook."
Trump, Erdoğan, Farage: The attractions of populism for politicians, the dangers for democracy - article by Jan-Werner Müller in The Guardian, extracted from his book What is Populism? (University of Pennsylvania). "Populist politicians are not like other politicians in a democracy. But the difference is not that they are somehow closer to the 'masses' who, according to the self-declared non-establishment thinker John Gray, are everywhere in 'revolt'. It is also not that they want direct, as opposed to representative, democracy. Populists are fine with the idea of representation, as long as they get to represent who they consider to be the real people.... The crucial difference is that populists deny, or wish away, the pluralism of contemporary societies. When they say equality, they mean sameness, which is to say: conforming to some ideal of Middle America, Little England, or whatever a symbolic representation of real peoplehood comes down to for them.... The notion that populists in power are bound to fail one way or another is comforting. It’s also an illusion. For one thing, while populist parties necessarily protest against elites, this does not mean that populism in government will become self-contradictory. All failures of populists in government can still be blamed on elites acting behind the scenes, whether at home or abroad."
David Hare on writing nothing but the truth about a Holocaust denier - article by David Hare in The Guardian, concerning his screenplay for the film 'Denial'. "In 2000 the British historian David Irving, whose writing had frequently offered a sympathetic account of the second world war from the Nazi point of view, had sued Lipstadt in the high court in London, claiming that her description of him as a denier in her previous book Denying the Holocaust had done damage to his reputation.... In 2010 I was first approached by the BBC and by Participant Media to adapt Deborah Lipstadt’s book History on Trial for the screen... It was clear from the start that this film would be a defence of historical truth. It would be arguing that although historians have the right to interpret facts differently, they do not have the right knowingly to misrepresent those facts. But if such integrity was necessary for historians, then it surely had to apply to screenwriters too. If I planned to offer an account of the trial and of Irving’s behaviour, I would enjoy none of the film writer’s usual licence to speculate or invent. From the trial itself there were 32 days of transcript, which took me weeks to read thoroughly. Not only would I refuse to write scenes which offered any hokey psychological explanation for Irving’s character outside the court, I would also be bound to stick rigidly to the exact words used inside it. I could not allow any neo-fascist critic later to claim that I had re-written the testimony. Nor did I want to. The trial scenes are verbatim.... During the early days of the Renaissance, Copernicus and Galileo would have scoffed at the idea that there was any such thing as authority. A sceptical approach to life is a fine thing and one which has powered revolutionary change and high ideals. But a sceptical approach to scientific fact is rather less admirable. It is dangerous. As Lipstadt says in my screenplay, certain things are true. Elvis is dead. The icecaps are melting. And the Holocaust did happen. Millions of Jews went to their deaths in camps and open pits in a brutal genocide which was sanctioned and operated by the leaders of the Third Reich. There are some subjects about which two points of view are not equally valid. We are entering, in politics especially, a post-factual era in which it is apparently permissible for public figures to assert things without evidence, and then to justify their assertions by adding 'Well, that’s my opinion' – as though that in itself was some kind of justification. It isn’t. And such charlatans need to learn it isn’t. Contemplating the Lipstadt/Irving trial may help them to that end."
Whodunnit and whowroteit: the strange case of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor - article by Jonathan Coe in The Guardian. "The author of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor was only 22 years old when it was published and just four years earlier he had barely been able to speak a word of English. His name was Ernst Wilhelm Julius Bornemann – subsequently anglicized to Ernest Borneman – and he had arrived in London as a communist refugee from Nazi Germany in 1933. In Berlin he had already made the acquaintance of Bertolt Brecht and worked for Wilhelm Reich’s Socialist Association for Sexual Counselling and Research. Somewhere along the way, either in Germany or London or both, he also worked as a film editor and acquired a reputation as a virtuoso of the cutting room.... Graham MacInnes’s memoir One Man’s Documentary gives a vivid portrait of Borneman at work as a film editor. Watching him make sense of the vast mass of footage assembled for a naval documentary called Action Stations, MacInnes [wrote:]... 'To see his wavy blond head bent rigidly over a hand viewer; his strong but elegant hands ripping “outs” of film backward like gravel flung behind a bone-digging dog; his swift, frenzied but orderly snatching of “takes” from bins; his skilled manipulation, without getting them twisted or torn, of half a dozen shots; his mouth full of clips, his shirt-sleeved figure draped with film like a raised bronze statue with Aegean seaweed: this was to see a Laocoon writhing in the agony of creation."
Are the rules better off broken? - column by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "The thing most people find hardest to believe about the Simple Sabotage Field Manual is that it isn’t a joke. It really was a top-secret document, created in 1944 by the predecessor to the CIA, and it really was distributed to agents working behind enemy lines in the second world war.... The manual is a guide to the art of 'purposeful stupidity' – easy ways in which the citizens of occupied Europe might be encouraged to lower morale and wreak havoc in their workplaces, thereby helping bring down the Axis powers. What’s amazing is that it reads like a description of every modern jobsworth you’ve ever encountered. 'Insist on doing everything through "channels",' one section advises. 'Never permit shortcuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.' When possible, 'refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration". Attempt to make the committee as large as possible – never less than five.' Misfile papers. Give out wrong phone numbers. Haggle over the wording of documents. And if there’s truly critical work to be done? Hold a conference instead. ... The really telling thing about the Simple Sabotage manual, as Galford et al point out [in their 2015 book also called Simple Sabotage], is how many of its prescriptions for sowing chaos resemble not disobedience but extreme obedience – following procedures to the letter, obsessing about perfect accuracy, chewing over every detail. ... Too often, managers assume the key to improvement must be clearer procedures and standards, more exactingly enforced. But when your management philosophy encourages the kind of behaviour that US intelligence services once sincerely believed might cause the collapse of nations, perhaps it’s time to reconsider. One way rules go wrong is when people don’t follow them. But another is what happens when they do."
So who put the cyber into cybersex? - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Where did the 'cyber' in 'cyberspace' come from? Most people, when asked, will probably credit William Gibson, who famously introduced the term in his celebrated 1984 novel, Neuromancer.... But the cyber- prefix actually goes back a long way before Gibson – to the late 1940s and Norbert Wiener’s book, Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, which was published in 1948....As a 'transdiscipline' that cuts across traditional fields such as physics, chemistry and biology, cybernetics had a brief and largely unsuccessful existence: few of the world’s universities now have departments of cybernetics. But as Thomas Rid’s absorbing new book, The Rise of the Machines: The Lost History of Cybernetics shows, it has had a long afterglow as a source of mythic inspiration that endures to the present day. ... Rid has effectively had to compose an alternative history of computing.... For him, the modern world of technology begins not with the early digital computers developed at Bletchley Park, Harvard, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania but with the interactive artillery systems developed for the US armed forces by the Sperry gyroscope company in the early 1940s. From this unexpected beginning, Rid weaves an interesting and original story. The seed crystal from which it grows is the idea that the Sperry gun-control system was essentially a way of augmenting the human gunner’s capabilities to cope with the task of hitting fast-moving targets. And it turns out that this dream of technology as a way of augmenting human capabilities is a persistent – but often overlooked – theme in the evolution of computing."
We're the Superhumans: meet the stars of Channel 4’s Paralympics trailer - article by Homa Khaleeli in The Guardian. "The extraordindary clip, which has been watched by millions, pays tribute to 140 people with disabilities – from a man who drums with his feet to a record-breaking wheelchair racer..."
Writing for an audience: doing history in public - article by Carys Brown (First Year PhD student) in [Cambridge University] History Faculty Newsletter Issue 7 August 2016. "When I joined the editorial team of the Faculty’s graduate blog, Doing History in Public (https://doinghistoryinpublic.org), in 2015, it was mainly because of an interest in public history. What I did not expect was that editing and writing for an online blog would change the way I thought about my academic writing.... The most frightening difference for me, to start with, was the absence of footnotes.... Without them I felt like I was making it all up. I wasn’t, but my reaction did make me reflect more carefully on the power of claims I was making.... A further temptation in academic writing is the use of complex language.... Even specialist readers have a low tolerance for unnecessarily long or complex sentences. Personally, I know that the more subordinate clauses my sentences have, the more confused I am.... For me, ... trying to write outside my academic comfort zone continues to be a great help as I undertake my research, and one which I would recommend to anyone."
A creative writing lesson from the ‘God of Story’ - interview article by Tim Lott in The Guardian. "An intensive inquiry into the nature and structure of narrative, McKee’s 'Story seminar' has been running in one form or another since he first gave the lecture at the University of Southern California in 1983. McKee credits himself with inventing the language of Hollywood – with its talk of the 'mid-point climax', the 'inciting incident' and the 'negation of the negation', a phrase that originated with Hegel, but in movies means something like “the ultimate negative”: a fallen hero who is not merely defeated but wants to die, or a character who doesn’t simply lose faith in God but begins to hate God. His claim is not an empty boast. So prominent is McKee in film-making circles that he had the rare honour, for a writing teacher, to be depicted at some length – satirically, but not without tenderness – by Brian Cox in the Charlie Kaufman-written film Adaptation. Kaufman, not incidentally, also distrusts 'craft'...."
Why a forgotten 1930s critique of capitalism is back in fashion - article by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. "The leading lights of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer, never lived to develop social media profiles, but they would have seen much of what the internet offers as confirmation of their view that the culture industry allows the 'freedom to choose what is always the same'. 'Culture appears more monolithic than ever, with a few gigantic corporations – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon – presiding over unprecedented monopolies,' argues Ross. 'Internet discourse has become tighter, more coercive.' In the late 1990s, as an arts editor at the Guardian, I commissioned an article to explore the perils of customised culture. The idea was to question the tailoring of cultural products to your tastes, the whole 'If you liked that, you’ll love this' thing. Wasn’t the point of art, I thought then, to blast through the continuum of one’s tastes rather than pander to them? John Reith, the BBC’s first director general, once said that good broadcasting gives people what they do not yet know they need. When the piece came in, several of my colleagues wondered: what is so very bad about customised culture? Isn’t getting more of what we know we like a good thing? But, I wailed, good broadcasting and great art offer a kind of serendipity that expands your horizons rather than keeping you in an eternal feedback loop."
Play All by Clive James: how box sets saved us from reality TV and Hollywood - review by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "With this book – after a few decades spent making TV shows, writing poetry, cultural criticism and memoir, and translating Dante – Clive James returns to the field he made his own. From 1972 to 1982, on the back page of the Observer Review, he turned the witty television column into an art form.... James has always been a generous critic – not in the sense of letting bad work off the hook, or in showering good work with superlatives, but in giving munificently of his time, and in using it to pay careful attention.... What he loves about box-set drama is that, even though it isn’t always great, it is made by people who believe in the product. 'There never was, and never will be, a successful entertainment fuelled by pure cynicism,' he writes – a description that could also apply to his own work. He shares with these serial dramas a fiercely intelligent populism, a willingness to play to the crowd while trusting that they will be able to keep up without too much plot summary or hand-holding. To despise the crowd-pleasing impulse of Game of Thrones, he writes, 'you have to imagine you aren’t part of the crowd. But you are: the lesson that the 20th century should have taught all intellectuals. Now it is a different century, and they must go on being taught.'"
Star Trek at 50: myths, maidens and flirting on the final frontier - article by Michael Newton in The Guardian. "It is one of the strengths of Star Trek that it can imagine a technological futurity where whatever it is that makes us human not only survives, but flourishes. In Space Seed, Khan, a eugenically-engineered superman cryogenically frozen since the 1990s, declares, 'I am surprised how little improvement there has been in human evolution. Oh, there has been technical advancement, but how little Man himself has changed!' Well, good. In The Ultimate Computer, Kirk faces the prospect of being replaced as captain by artificial intelligence. The future’s automated world looks set to lose its last human element. Only, of course, it doesn’t: the new supercomputer turns murderous; the human touch remains indispensable. Out there, in eternity, the human version of living stands as one of the richest, valuable in its capacity for imagination and spontaneity, gentleness and courage."
The greatest record sleeves, as chosen by the designers - interviews by Dave Simpson in The Guardian. Peter Saville on the cover to Autobhan (1974) by Kraftwerk: "Autobahn was the first album I ever bought, after I heard the single on the radio. In 1974, as a teenager who had never been abroad, listening to the full 22-minute title track while staring at the autobahn symbol on the sleeve felt like being taken on a journey. I was on a European highway, in a soundscape crafted by classically trained musicians, seeing cathedrals and power stations, villages and skyscrapers, ancient and modern, in time as well as distance. It was a continental tour – from gothic to postmodern, from the dark ages to Brigitte Bardot – with the pulsebeat of a speeding vehicle. All defined in a simple symbol. As a fledgling visual artist, this was my first lesson in semiotics. I realised that visual codes acted as keys to unlock the huge range of potential awareness in an audience."
Missing the Zeitgeist - article by Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times, quoted by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Fox News succeeded because it was brilliant enough to identify a market failure, not because it was sleazy enough to cause one. Murdoch, Ailes and those who build up Fox News did so by identifying a group of news consumers who were being ignored by news producers. It is only now, in the election season of 2016, that we can see how dire a problem this snub revealed, not just for the media but for the whole political system. It was a sign than the informed opinions of the broad public had ceased to count in American political and social life. The Fox News people understood that you can’t solve this problem by being 'more objective'. When it is being ignored by elites, the broad public prefers opinions to facts — because while everyone has opinions, as the saying goes, facts are increasingly things that get handed down by experts. In short, Fox News bet 20 years ago that the 'objectivity' of a nation’s elites could be a kind of bias. The past year’s events in the US show that it has won that bet."
How to actually talk to a woman wearing headphones - article by Martha Mills in The Guardian's Brain flapping blog. "An article has surfaced from the quagmire of bilge that is The Internet and it has caused, not without reason, a small tornado of outrage. Written as dating advice for 'The Modern Man' (a misnomer if ever there were one), it promises a solution to the hot ‘n’ horny down-on-their-luck young bucks of the world who face the tedious obstacle of a woman wearing headphones, because how dare she. ... Here’s how it plays out in real life. Trust me, I’ve been it, seen it and spoken to the survivors: Him: I see you don’t want to be talked to but I find you physically attractive and I’m making that your problem. Her: Please leave me alone. Him: F*** YOU, YOU STUCK UP B****, I DIDN’T FANCY YOU ANYWAY. With 'advice' like this out there, it’s hardly any surprise, is it? These lonely men so desperately in search of conquests have been given permission, blessed with the entitlement to go forth and pluck their bounty using but five humble steps. So imagine their horror and indignation when that which has been promised doesn’t want to be plucked and tells them to sling their greasy hook."
Trump, Erdoğan, Farage: The attractions of populism for politicians, the dangers for democracy - article by Jan-Werner Müller in The Guardian, extracted from his book What is Populism? (University of Pennsylvania). "Populist politicians are not like other politicians in a democracy. But the difference is not that they are somehow closer to the 'masses' who, according to the self-declared non-establishment thinker John Gray, are everywhere in 'revolt'. It is also not that they want direct, as opposed to representative, democracy. Populists are fine with the idea of representation, as long as they get to represent who they consider to be the real people.... The crucial difference is that populists deny, or wish away, the pluralism of contemporary societies. When they say equality, they mean sameness, which is to say: conforming to some ideal of Middle America, Little England, or whatever a symbolic representation of real peoplehood comes down to for them.... The notion that populists in power are bound to fail one way or another is comforting. It’s also an illusion. For one thing, while populist parties necessarily protest against elites, this does not mean that populism in government will become self-contradictory. All failures of populists in government can still be blamed on elites acting behind the scenes, whether at home or abroad."
David Hare on writing nothing but the truth about a Holocaust denier - article by David Hare in The Guardian, concerning his screenplay for the film 'Denial'. "In 2000 the British historian David Irving, whose writing had frequently offered a sympathetic account of the second world war from the Nazi point of view, had sued Lipstadt in the high court in London, claiming that her description of him as a denier in her previous book Denying the Holocaust had done damage to his reputation.... In 2010 I was first approached by the BBC and by Participant Media to adapt Deborah Lipstadt’s book History on Trial for the screen... It was clear from the start that this film would be a defence of historical truth. It would be arguing that although historians have the right to interpret facts differently, they do not have the right knowingly to misrepresent those facts. But if such integrity was necessary for historians, then it surely had to apply to screenwriters too. If I planned to offer an account of the trial and of Irving’s behaviour, I would enjoy none of the film writer’s usual licence to speculate or invent. From the trial itself there were 32 days of transcript, which took me weeks to read thoroughly. Not only would I refuse to write scenes which offered any hokey psychological explanation for Irving’s character outside the court, I would also be bound to stick rigidly to the exact words used inside it. I could not allow any neo-fascist critic later to claim that I had re-written the testimony. Nor did I want to. The trial scenes are verbatim.... During the early days of the Renaissance, Copernicus and Galileo would have scoffed at the idea that there was any such thing as authority. A sceptical approach to life is a fine thing and one which has powered revolutionary change and high ideals. But a sceptical approach to scientific fact is rather less admirable. It is dangerous. As Lipstadt says in my screenplay, certain things are true. Elvis is dead. The icecaps are melting. And the Holocaust did happen. Millions of Jews went to their deaths in camps and open pits in a brutal genocide which was sanctioned and operated by the leaders of the Third Reich. There are some subjects about which two points of view are not equally valid. We are entering, in politics especially, a post-factual era in which it is apparently permissible for public figures to assert things without evidence, and then to justify their assertions by adding 'Well, that’s my opinion' – as though that in itself was some kind of justification. It isn’t. And such charlatans need to learn it isn’t. Contemplating the Lipstadt/Irving trial may help them to that end."
Whodunnit and whowroteit: the strange case of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor - article by Jonathan Coe in The Guardian. "The author of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor was only 22 years old when it was published and just four years earlier he had barely been able to speak a word of English. His name was Ernst Wilhelm Julius Bornemann – subsequently anglicized to Ernest Borneman – and he had arrived in London as a communist refugee from Nazi Germany in 1933. In Berlin he had already made the acquaintance of Bertolt Brecht and worked for Wilhelm Reich’s Socialist Association for Sexual Counselling and Research. Somewhere along the way, either in Germany or London or both, he also worked as a film editor and acquired a reputation as a virtuoso of the cutting room.... Graham MacInnes’s memoir One Man’s Documentary gives a vivid portrait of Borneman at work as a film editor. Watching him make sense of the vast mass of footage assembled for a naval documentary called Action Stations, MacInnes [wrote:]... 'To see his wavy blond head bent rigidly over a hand viewer; his strong but elegant hands ripping “outs” of film backward like gravel flung behind a bone-digging dog; his swift, frenzied but orderly snatching of “takes” from bins; his skilled manipulation, without getting them twisted or torn, of half a dozen shots; his mouth full of clips, his shirt-sleeved figure draped with film like a raised bronze statue with Aegean seaweed: this was to see a Laocoon writhing in the agony of creation."
Are the rules better off broken? - column by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "The thing most people find hardest to believe about the Simple Sabotage Field Manual is that it isn’t a joke. It really was a top-secret document, created in 1944 by the predecessor to the CIA, and it really was distributed to agents working behind enemy lines in the second world war.... The manual is a guide to the art of 'purposeful stupidity' – easy ways in which the citizens of occupied Europe might be encouraged to lower morale and wreak havoc in their workplaces, thereby helping bring down the Axis powers. What’s amazing is that it reads like a description of every modern jobsworth you’ve ever encountered. 'Insist on doing everything through "channels",' one section advises. 'Never permit shortcuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.' When possible, 'refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration". Attempt to make the committee as large as possible – never less than five.' Misfile papers. Give out wrong phone numbers. Haggle over the wording of documents. And if there’s truly critical work to be done? Hold a conference instead. ... The really telling thing about the Simple Sabotage manual, as Galford et al point out [in their 2015 book also called Simple Sabotage], is how many of its prescriptions for sowing chaos resemble not disobedience but extreme obedience – following procedures to the letter, obsessing about perfect accuracy, chewing over every detail. ... Too often, managers assume the key to improvement must be clearer procedures and standards, more exactingly enforced. But when your management philosophy encourages the kind of behaviour that US intelligence services once sincerely believed might cause the collapse of nations, perhaps it’s time to reconsider. One way rules go wrong is when people don’t follow them. But another is what happens when they do."
So who put the cyber into cybersex? - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Where did the 'cyber' in 'cyberspace' come from? Most people, when asked, will probably credit William Gibson, who famously introduced the term in his celebrated 1984 novel, Neuromancer.... But the cyber- prefix actually goes back a long way before Gibson – to the late 1940s and Norbert Wiener’s book, Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, which was published in 1948....As a 'transdiscipline' that cuts across traditional fields such as physics, chemistry and biology, cybernetics had a brief and largely unsuccessful existence: few of the world’s universities now have departments of cybernetics. But as Thomas Rid’s absorbing new book, The Rise of the Machines: The Lost History of Cybernetics shows, it has had a long afterglow as a source of mythic inspiration that endures to the present day. ... Rid has effectively had to compose an alternative history of computing.... For him, the modern world of technology begins not with the early digital computers developed at Bletchley Park, Harvard, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania but with the interactive artillery systems developed for the US armed forces by the Sperry gyroscope company in the early 1940s. From this unexpected beginning, Rid weaves an interesting and original story. The seed crystal from which it grows is the idea that the Sperry gun-control system was essentially a way of augmenting the human gunner’s capabilities to cope with the task of hitting fast-moving targets. And it turns out that this dream of technology as a way of augmenting human capabilities is a persistent – but often overlooked – theme in the evolution of computing."
We're the Superhumans: meet the stars of Channel 4’s Paralympics trailer - article by Homa Khaleeli in The Guardian. "The extraordindary clip, which has been watched by millions, pays tribute to 140 people with disabilities – from a man who drums with his feet to a record-breaking wheelchair racer..."
Writing for an audience: doing history in public - article by Carys Brown (First Year PhD student) in [Cambridge University] History Faculty Newsletter Issue 7 August 2016. "When I joined the editorial team of the Faculty’s graduate blog, Doing History in Public (https://doinghistoryinpublic.org), in 2015, it was mainly because of an interest in public history. What I did not expect was that editing and writing for an online blog would change the way I thought about my academic writing.... The most frightening difference for me, to start with, was the absence of footnotes.... Without them I felt like I was making it all up. I wasn’t, but my reaction did make me reflect more carefully on the power of claims I was making.... A further temptation in academic writing is the use of complex language.... Even specialist readers have a low tolerance for unnecessarily long or complex sentences. Personally, I know that the more subordinate clauses my sentences have, the more confused I am.... For me, ... trying to write outside my academic comfort zone continues to be a great help as I undertake my research, and one which I would recommend to anyone."
A creative writing lesson from the ‘God of Story’ - interview article by Tim Lott in The Guardian. "An intensive inquiry into the nature and structure of narrative, McKee’s 'Story seminar' has been running in one form or another since he first gave the lecture at the University of Southern California in 1983. McKee credits himself with inventing the language of Hollywood – with its talk of the 'mid-point climax', the 'inciting incident' and the 'negation of the negation', a phrase that originated with Hegel, but in movies means something like “the ultimate negative”: a fallen hero who is not merely defeated but wants to die, or a character who doesn’t simply lose faith in God but begins to hate God. His claim is not an empty boast. So prominent is McKee in film-making circles that he had the rare honour, for a writing teacher, to be depicted at some length – satirically, but not without tenderness – by Brian Cox in the Charlie Kaufman-written film Adaptation. Kaufman, not incidentally, also distrusts 'craft'...."
Why a forgotten 1930s critique of capitalism is back in fashion - article by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. "The leading lights of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer, never lived to develop social media profiles, but they would have seen much of what the internet offers as confirmation of their view that the culture industry allows the 'freedom to choose what is always the same'. 'Culture appears more monolithic than ever, with a few gigantic corporations – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon – presiding over unprecedented monopolies,' argues Ross. 'Internet discourse has become tighter, more coercive.' In the late 1990s, as an arts editor at the Guardian, I commissioned an article to explore the perils of customised culture. The idea was to question the tailoring of cultural products to your tastes, the whole 'If you liked that, you’ll love this' thing. Wasn’t the point of art, I thought then, to blast through the continuum of one’s tastes rather than pander to them? John Reith, the BBC’s first director general, once said that good broadcasting gives people what they do not yet know they need. When the piece came in, several of my colleagues wondered: what is so very bad about customised culture? Isn’t getting more of what we know we like a good thing? But, I wailed, good broadcasting and great art offer a kind of serendipity that expands your horizons rather than keeping you in an eternal feedback loop."
Play All by Clive James: how box sets saved us from reality TV and Hollywood - review by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "With this book – after a few decades spent making TV shows, writing poetry, cultural criticism and memoir, and translating Dante – Clive James returns to the field he made his own. From 1972 to 1982, on the back page of the Observer Review, he turned the witty television column into an art form.... James has always been a generous critic – not in the sense of letting bad work off the hook, or in showering good work with superlatives, but in giving munificently of his time, and in using it to pay careful attention.... What he loves about box-set drama is that, even though it isn’t always great, it is made by people who believe in the product. 'There never was, and never will be, a successful entertainment fuelled by pure cynicism,' he writes – a description that could also apply to his own work. He shares with these serial dramas a fiercely intelligent populism, a willingness to play to the crowd while trusting that they will be able to keep up without too much plot summary or hand-holding. To despise the crowd-pleasing impulse of Game of Thrones, he writes, 'you have to imagine you aren’t part of the crowd. But you are: the lesson that the 20th century should have taught all intellectuals. Now it is a different century, and they must go on being taught.'"
Star Trek at 50: myths, maidens and flirting on the final frontier - article by Michael Newton in The Guardian. "It is one of the strengths of Star Trek that it can imagine a technological futurity where whatever it is that makes us human not only survives, but flourishes. In Space Seed, Khan, a eugenically-engineered superman cryogenically frozen since the 1990s, declares, 'I am surprised how little improvement there has been in human evolution. Oh, there has been technical advancement, but how little Man himself has changed!' Well, good. In The Ultimate Computer, Kirk faces the prospect of being replaced as captain by artificial intelligence. The future’s automated world looks set to lose its last human element. Only, of course, it doesn’t: the new supercomputer turns murderous; the human touch remains indispensable. Out there, in eternity, the human version of living stands as one of the richest, valuable in its capacity for imagination and spontaneity, gentleness and courage."
The greatest record sleeves, as chosen by the designers - interviews by Dave Simpson in The Guardian. Peter Saville on the cover to Autobhan (1974) by Kraftwerk: "Autobahn was the first album I ever bought, after I heard the single on the radio. In 1974, as a teenager who had never been abroad, listening to the full 22-minute title track while staring at the autobahn symbol on the sleeve felt like being taken on a journey. I was on a European highway, in a soundscape crafted by classically trained musicians, seeing cathedrals and power stations, villages and skyscrapers, ancient and modern, in time as well as distance. It was a continental tour – from gothic to postmodern, from the dark ages to Brigitte Bardot – with the pulsebeat of a speeding vehicle. All defined in a simple symbol. As a fledgling visual artist, this was my first lesson in semiotics. I realised that visual codes acted as keys to unlock the huge range of potential awareness in an audience."
Missing the Zeitgeist - article by Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times, quoted by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Fox News succeeded because it was brilliant enough to identify a market failure, not because it was sleazy enough to cause one. Murdoch, Ailes and those who build up Fox News did so by identifying a group of news consumers who were being ignored by news producers. It is only now, in the election season of 2016, that we can see how dire a problem this snub revealed, not just for the media but for the whole political system. It was a sign than the informed opinions of the broad public had ceased to count in American political and social life. The Fox News people understood that you can’t solve this problem by being 'more objective'. When it is being ignored by elites, the broad public prefers opinions to facts — because while everyone has opinions, as the saying goes, facts are increasingly things that get handed down by experts. In short, Fox News bet 20 years ago that the 'objectivity' of a nation’s elites could be a kind of bias. The past year’s events in the US show that it has won that bet."
Monday, 19 September 2016
Seen and heard: July 2016
The Strictly Prom – tremendous TV, with pro dancers from Strictly Come Dancing strutting their stuff to classical and light music numbers given the big BBC Symphony Orchestra treatment. Needs the visuals, however, to capture the excitement of the performance; not so good with sound only on the radio, except for the irrepressible 1920 and '30s numbers.
We're the Superhumans (Yes I can) – sensational promotional video for the Paralympics, showcasing ability rather than disability, including a death-defying wheelchair stunt at the end. Truly superhuman.
One Night in 2012 – fascinating documentary following the preparation for the single night smash hit opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games, which unexpectedly brought the nation together in a warm glow of positive feeling towards the Games and towards ourselves. Especially interesting to get an insight into the logistics of organising so many volunteer members of the public, called upon to play Brunels, nurses, nannies, teenagers, and so on. It wasn’t just chance and wishful thinking that made (nearly) everything go right on the night.
Frosta del sol – the summer “beach” or super-sandpit at our local garden centre, which turned out to be a great place to take the toddler members of our family for an entire afternoon’s peace and quiet (for us): buckets and spades and moulds and sieves and balls provided, along with two first rate playworkers, and even a carousel for variety. Best of all, the beach was located right next to the garden centre tea room, enabling us to keep an eye on the kids from our tea table. Very good value.
Powerplay – psychotherapy and spirituality day at Turvey Monastery. Enriching and inspirational as usual, my main take-away memory this time being the provokation to consider the possible positive connotations of the word “powerplay”, usually used in a negative sense, if you go deeper into the possible meanings of the component “play”.
Magic Carpet – stunning audio-visual interactive display in the Milton Keynes shopping mall, as part of the MK International Festival. The shifting and changing projected patterns on the floor fascinated our two-year-old grandson, although he was just as interested by the floor-mounted access hatches and a cabinet of fire extinguishers. We couldn’t let him hold one of the sound-producing eggs, unfortunately: too much risk of his dropping or throwing it.
The 80s with Domenic Sandbrook – a fun TV trip through the popular culture and politics of the decade, although Sandbrook’s right-wing orientation is more evident here than in his previous explorations. It’s all very well to minimise the role of Margaret Thatcher and observe how the changes of the 1980s were supported or even driven by ordinary people rather than politicians or cultural leaders, but that’s rather like saying that Nazi Germany would have happened without Hitler: probably true but not necessarily helpful to understanding unless you go a great deal deeper into the socio-politics than Sandbrook (who I imagine is not a Marxist historian) would be prepared to go.
Fauré Requiem, sung by The Sixteen, accompanied by the Academy of Ancient Music, which I played for my mother during her final hour on 30 July 2016. Thank you to the staff of Bletchley House Care Home for their support.
We're the Superhumans (Yes I can) – sensational promotional video for the Paralympics, showcasing ability rather than disability, including a death-defying wheelchair stunt at the end. Truly superhuman.
One Night in 2012 – fascinating documentary following the preparation for the single night smash hit opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games, which unexpectedly brought the nation together in a warm glow of positive feeling towards the Games and towards ourselves. Especially interesting to get an insight into the logistics of organising so many volunteer members of the public, called upon to play Brunels, nurses, nannies, teenagers, and so on. It wasn’t just chance and wishful thinking that made (nearly) everything go right on the night.
Frosta del sol – the summer “beach” or super-sandpit at our local garden centre, which turned out to be a great place to take the toddler members of our family for an entire afternoon’s peace and quiet (for us): buckets and spades and moulds and sieves and balls provided, along with two first rate playworkers, and even a carousel for variety. Best of all, the beach was located right next to the garden centre tea room, enabling us to keep an eye on the kids from our tea table. Very good value.
Powerplay – psychotherapy and spirituality day at Turvey Monastery. Enriching and inspirational as usual, my main take-away memory this time being the provokation to consider the possible positive connotations of the word “powerplay”, usually used in a negative sense, if you go deeper into the possible meanings of the component “play”.
Magic Carpet – stunning audio-visual interactive display in the Milton Keynes shopping mall, as part of the MK International Festival. The shifting and changing projected patterns on the floor fascinated our two-year-old grandson, although he was just as interested by the floor-mounted access hatches and a cabinet of fire extinguishers. We couldn’t let him hold one of the sound-producing eggs, unfortunately: too much risk of his dropping or throwing it.
The 80s with Domenic Sandbrook – a fun TV trip through the popular culture and politics of the decade, although Sandbrook’s right-wing orientation is more evident here than in his previous explorations. It’s all very well to minimise the role of Margaret Thatcher and observe how the changes of the 1980s were supported or even driven by ordinary people rather than politicians or cultural leaders, but that’s rather like saying that Nazi Germany would have happened without Hitler: probably true but not necessarily helpful to understanding unless you go a great deal deeper into the socio-politics than Sandbrook (who I imagine is not a Marxist historian) would be prepared to go.
Fauré Requiem, sung by The Sixteen, accompanied by the Academy of Ancient Music, which I played for my mother during her final hour on 30 July 2016. Thank you to the staff of Bletchley House Care Home for their support.
Sunday, 18 September 2016
Seen and heard: August 2016
Gershwin Gala, The John Wilson Orchestra Prom – every John Wilson Orchestra concert is a treat, and this one, featuring the songs of George and Ira Gershwin, especially so: not only blisteringly wonderful performances of the film versions – now the definitive versions – of familiar songs but an introduction to many less famous numbers also, such as The Babbitt and The Bromide mercilessly making fun of the poverty of man-to-man conversation.
Woburn Safari Park – a return visit with both our grandchildren, highlights including rhinos sauntering by our car at near-touching distance, swan boats on the lake, and a zebra crossing :) (I must be the millionth person to make that joke, which come to think of it I first heard in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.)
Ana Moura – a wonderful fado singer, to whom we were referred by my wife’s elder son, to whom he in turn had been referred by Spotify.
Shardlight – sad, atmospheric, dystopian adventure game from Dave Gilbert and Wadjet Eye. The protagonist is an engineer in a post-apocalyptic society, in which an aristocratic elite (dressed in ancien regime frippery) hoard the vaccine for the deadly green lung disease while the majority of the population live in poverty, the dominant religion being the cult of the death-bringing Reaper, whose arrival is prefigured by the appearance of ravens. A good yarn, but the endings – there are three alternatives – are understandably unconvincing, especially the “best” one.
Woburn Safari Park – a return visit with both our grandchildren, highlights including rhinos sauntering by our car at near-touching distance, swan boats on the lake, and a zebra crossing :) (I must be the millionth person to make that joke, which come to think of it I first heard in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.)
Ana Moura – a wonderful fado singer, to whom we were referred by my wife’s elder son, to whom he in turn had been referred by Spotify.
Shardlight – sad, atmospheric, dystopian adventure game from Dave Gilbert and Wadjet Eye. The protagonist is an engineer in a post-apocalyptic society, in which an aristocratic elite (dressed in ancien regime frippery) hoard the vaccine for the deadly green lung disease while the majority of the population live in poverty, the dominant religion being the cult of the death-bringing Reaper, whose arrival is prefigured by the appearance of ravens. A good yarn, but the endings – there are three alternatives – are understandably unconvincing, especially the “best” one.
Wednesday, 14 September 2016
Learning design and educational technology: what’s the relationship?
Many writings about learning design assume or argue that learning design has something to do with educational technology. In Conole et al. (2004), for example, learning design is what links educational technologies to learning theories: theory-enabled design points to which technology to use, and one can read back from an educational technology to the theory which informed its design.
It’s certainly the case that many people turn to learning design because of questions about how to use educational technology or laudable concerns not to use it badly. However, after 20 years of practice in producing online distance learning, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best summary of the relationship between learning design and educational technology is: None at all.
Learning design, if it's a kind of design, is about matching form and function, means and ends: in particular, it is about working out what learning activities will enable students or other learners to reach certain learning outcomes. So the typical output of a learning design process is a set of learning activities, on the principle that learners are only going to learn as a result of what they, as learners, do, not what you, as teachers, do. (See previous post.) But those learning activities could be implemented through many different technologies, and which one you choose will depend on what is available to you, is reliable, and (crucially) is available to learners.
If you have an activity which calls for some kind of group discussion, that could be done face-to-face in a seminar or workshop, remotely and synchronously using online conferencing, or asynchronously using online forums; or learners could watch a recording of such a discussion, or read a transcript, and make some response of their own – probably less satisfactory, but for learners in prison (for whom my university has to make provision on many of its courses) it may be the only practical option.
If you are going to have learning activities designed around some sort of PDP or portfolio function, then you need to consider that particular products for supporting these may come and go. Over an eight or ten year lifespan, which is the norm for courses at my university, then the prevailing technologies are likely to change at least once during that period. Under those circumstances, it seems to me clear that the course’s learning design, the top-level description of the activities which learners will do, is that part of the design which does not change. The question of which technology can best implement those activities is also a design question, but a separate one.
Reference
Conole et al. 2004, 'Mapping pedagogy and tools for effective learning design', Computers and Education, vol 43, pp 17-33.
It’s certainly the case that many people turn to learning design because of questions about how to use educational technology or laudable concerns not to use it badly. However, after 20 years of practice in producing online distance learning, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best summary of the relationship between learning design and educational technology is: None at all.
Learning design, if it's a kind of design, is about matching form and function, means and ends: in particular, it is about working out what learning activities will enable students or other learners to reach certain learning outcomes. So the typical output of a learning design process is a set of learning activities, on the principle that learners are only going to learn as a result of what they, as learners, do, not what you, as teachers, do. (See previous post.) But those learning activities could be implemented through many different technologies, and which one you choose will depend on what is available to you, is reliable, and (crucially) is available to learners.
If you have an activity which calls for some kind of group discussion, that could be done face-to-face in a seminar or workshop, remotely and synchronously using online conferencing, or asynchronously using online forums; or learners could watch a recording of such a discussion, or read a transcript, and make some response of their own – probably less satisfactory, but for learners in prison (for whom my university has to make provision on many of its courses) it may be the only practical option.
If you are going to have learning activities designed around some sort of PDP or portfolio function, then you need to consider that particular products for supporting these may come and go. Over an eight or ten year lifespan, which is the norm for courses at my university, then the prevailing technologies are likely to change at least once during that period. Under those circumstances, it seems to me clear that the course’s learning design, the top-level description of the activities which learners will do, is that part of the design which does not change. The question of which technology can best implement those activities is also a design question, but a separate one.
Reference
Conole et al. 2004, 'Mapping pedagogy and tools for effective learning design', Computers and Education, vol 43, pp 17-33.
Tuesday, 13 September 2016
Cuttings: July 2016
Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing: did tech change literary style? by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum - review by Brian Dillon in The Guardian. "In a photograph taken in his high-tech home office at 29 Merrick Square, London, in 1968, thriller writer Len Deighton is hard at work on his next novel, Bomber. An electric typewriter is perched atop a desk, a huge telex machine extrudes paper coils on to the florid carpet, and a video camera on a tripod is pointed at the author’s face. In the foreground is another, bulkier, typewriter connected by a fat cable to a cabinet or console. The author of Billion Dollar Brain had lately taken delivery of a magnetic tape selectric typewriter (MT/ST) (marketed in Britain as the IBM 72 IV). It was first posited at IBM’s main offices in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1957; the finished product weighed 200lb and cost $10,000. And with it Deighton was about to compose the first novel ever written on a word processor."
Deal or no deal? Brexit and the allure of self-expression - article by Molly Crockett in The Guardian Headquarters column. "In the wake of the Brexit referendum, many people across the globe have expressed bewilderment at what they see as Leave voters’ irrational decision-making. Headlines and commentaries abound accusing Leavers of voting against their self-interest.... If self-interest is defined in purely economic terms, there may be some truth in these accusations. But psychologists have long known that humans consider far more than their pocketbooks when making decisions. One of the clearest demonstrations of this comes from the ultimatum game. The game is simple: one player, the 'proposer', is given some money and proposes a way to split the pie with a second player, the 'responder'. The responder has a choice: she can accept the proposer’s offer, in which case both players are paid accordingly. Or, she can reject the offer, in which case neither player gets any money. Classical economic theories [predict that] since some money is always better than no money, responders should always accept any nonzero offer. However, in reality humans play the game very differently: responders overwhelmingly reject offers they perceive to be unfair, usually around less than 30% of the stake. ... The aversion to unfair treatment is so strong that people are willing to give up as much as a few months’ wages to reject unfair offers. When Werner Güth published the first ultimatum game studies in 1982, economists were shocked – just as Brexit commentators are now flabbergasted by the referendum results. Both failed to appreciate that people often disregard economic self-interest in order to express their emotions and their identities."
Pinpoint by Greg Milner: how is GPS changing our world? - review by Will Self in The Guardian. "Milner ventures a short way into the impact of the technology on our cognitive function, and even essays a few remarks on the philosophic conundrums it raises, but these issues are better dealt with in Nicholas Carr’s account of the risks of automation, The Glass Cage, whereas the bulk of this book is a fairly nerdy account of the backroom whiz-kids who figured out the nuts and bolts of the system."
What is the role of the left in times of political crisis? Reading George Eliot after Brexit - article by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "Set in the months following the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, the novel asks uncomfortable questions about the wisdom of putting the nation’s fate in the hands of people who believe their interests lie far from your own. Put simply: can democracy be relied upon to get the answer right? And, if the answer is no, then what does that reveal about the deep chasm that divides one part of society from another? Eliot wouldn’t have known the phrase 'haves and have-nots' but she would have grasped what it meant, and she already knew why it mattered.... When I first read the novel I could never work out why the political movers and shakers pay so much attention to the labouring classes. The Great Reform Act of 1832 was carefully designed to give the vote to a handful of urban property holders rather than to the miners whom Eliot depicts hanging around the Sugar Loaf pub waiting for the election agent to woo them with free drink. It was only on a subsequent reading that the penny dropped. Felix Holt isn’t about 1832 at all. Like any historical novel, it’s actually about the present – in this case 1866.... Eliot, as so often turns out to be the case, is actually closer to the truth that we could have guessed. It turned out that doubling the electorate in 1867 required the political parties to spend far more time and money on securing votes than ever before. Rhetoric coarsened as the stakes rose, wild and impossible promises were made and there was more drunkenness at the ballot box than anyone could remember, even the great boozy days of 1832."
Deal or no deal? Brexit and the allure of self-expression - article by Molly Crockett in The Guardian Headquarters column. "In the wake of the Brexit referendum, many people across the globe have expressed bewilderment at what they see as Leave voters’ irrational decision-making. Headlines and commentaries abound accusing Leavers of voting against their self-interest.... If self-interest is defined in purely economic terms, there may be some truth in these accusations. But psychologists have long known that humans consider far more than their pocketbooks when making decisions. One of the clearest demonstrations of this comes from the ultimatum game. The game is simple: one player, the 'proposer', is given some money and proposes a way to split the pie with a second player, the 'responder'. The responder has a choice: she can accept the proposer’s offer, in which case both players are paid accordingly. Or, she can reject the offer, in which case neither player gets any money. Classical economic theories [predict that] since some money is always better than no money, responders should always accept any nonzero offer. However, in reality humans play the game very differently: responders overwhelmingly reject offers they perceive to be unfair, usually around less than 30% of the stake. ... The aversion to unfair treatment is so strong that people are willing to give up as much as a few months’ wages to reject unfair offers. When Werner Güth published the first ultimatum game studies in 1982, economists were shocked – just as Brexit commentators are now flabbergasted by the referendum results. Both failed to appreciate that people often disregard economic self-interest in order to express their emotions and their identities."
Pinpoint by Greg Milner: how is GPS changing our world? - review by Will Self in The Guardian. "Milner ventures a short way into the impact of the technology on our cognitive function, and even essays a few remarks on the philosophic conundrums it raises, but these issues are better dealt with in Nicholas Carr’s account of the risks of automation, The Glass Cage, whereas the bulk of this book is a fairly nerdy account of the backroom whiz-kids who figured out the nuts and bolts of the system."
What is the role of the left in times of political crisis? Reading George Eliot after Brexit - article by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "Set in the months following the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, the novel asks uncomfortable questions about the wisdom of putting the nation’s fate in the hands of people who believe their interests lie far from your own. Put simply: can democracy be relied upon to get the answer right? And, if the answer is no, then what does that reveal about the deep chasm that divides one part of society from another? Eliot wouldn’t have known the phrase 'haves and have-nots' but she would have grasped what it meant, and she already knew why it mattered.... When I first read the novel I could never work out why the political movers and shakers pay so much attention to the labouring classes. The Great Reform Act of 1832 was carefully designed to give the vote to a handful of urban property holders rather than to the miners whom Eliot depicts hanging around the Sugar Loaf pub waiting for the election agent to woo them with free drink. It was only on a subsequent reading that the penny dropped. Felix Holt isn’t about 1832 at all. Like any historical novel, it’s actually about the present – in this case 1866.... Eliot, as so often turns out to be the case, is actually closer to the truth that we could have guessed. It turned out that doubling the electorate in 1867 required the political parties to spend far more time and money on securing votes than ever before. Rhetoric coarsened as the stakes rose, wild and impossible promises were made and there was more drunkenness at the ballot box than anyone could remember, even the great boozy days of 1832."
Seen and heard: June 2016
Mantua Trame Sonore chamber music festival – including a Bach cello suite in the Rotunda and three short concerts by my choir Polymnia in the Basilica di Santa Barbara, Palazzo Ducale. An honour to perform in the church where Monteverdi worked, and a pleasure to sing for such appreciative audiences. Another highlight of our tour: a joint concert with the Coro Ars Nova of nearby Carpenedolo, a strong local choir built up from nothing over the past 20 years by their energetic choir master.
Pallazo Te, Mantua – better value than the more famous Palazzo Ducale, which is impressive but stuffy, whereas this summer palace for the Gonzaga dukes is light and airy and packed full of fabulous frescos, some of them (such as the Camera dei Giganti) rivalling the best comic book art. A bonus during our visit was the periodic free performances by local musicians, as part of the chamber music festival, very much at home in the Renaissance galleries.
Spotlight – slow-paced but powerful film dramatisation of the Boston Globe’s uncovering of child abuse amongst the city’s Catholic priests, when no one wanted to know. Especially interesting in the light of the reflection that the internet might have made this kind of journalism impossible now. "The Spotlight team had identified 12 priests who they knew had been implicated in child sex abuse. They wanted to get the names out there, but Baron told them to hold their fire and aim for the bigger target: the Catholic church itself. 'Would an editor have that sort of restraint now?' asks [Josh Singer, co-writer of the film Spotlight]. 'As opposed to just throwing what you have up on the web? If you’d just run those names it would have been a he-said-she-said with every single one. Instead of talking about the bigger story, which is the system.'" (Article by Henry Barnes in The Guardian.)
Star Wars: The Force Awakens – catching up with this at last on DVD, found it great fun but disappointingly reprising many of the same story tropes of the original Star Wars. A good new central female character though in Rey, played by Daisy Ridley, who is our grand-daughter’s second favourite character from the film (her first being BB8, naturally).
In Treatment, series 3 – a stronger tighter series than the previous two, with the issues of Paul’s clients bleeding into his own life and his own therapy in a clear and plausible way. We still think he’s a dangerously unsafe psychotherapist, though, by UK standards.
Pallazo Te, Mantua – better value than the more famous Palazzo Ducale, which is impressive but stuffy, whereas this summer palace for the Gonzaga dukes is light and airy and packed full of fabulous frescos, some of them (such as the Camera dei Giganti) rivalling the best comic book art. A bonus during our visit was the periodic free performances by local musicians, as part of the chamber music festival, very much at home in the Renaissance galleries.
Spotlight – slow-paced but powerful film dramatisation of the Boston Globe’s uncovering of child abuse amongst the city’s Catholic priests, when no one wanted to know. Especially interesting in the light of the reflection that the internet might have made this kind of journalism impossible now. "The Spotlight team had identified 12 priests who they knew had been implicated in child sex abuse. They wanted to get the names out there, but Baron told them to hold their fire and aim for the bigger target: the Catholic church itself. 'Would an editor have that sort of restraint now?' asks [Josh Singer, co-writer of the film Spotlight]. 'As opposed to just throwing what you have up on the web? If you’d just run those names it would have been a he-said-she-said with every single one. Instead of talking about the bigger story, which is the system.'" (Article by Henry Barnes in The Guardian.)
Star Wars: The Force Awakens – catching up with this at last on DVD, found it great fun but disappointingly reprising many of the same story tropes of the original Star Wars. A good new central female character though in Rey, played by Daisy Ridley, who is our grand-daughter’s second favourite character from the film (her first being BB8, naturally).
In Treatment, series 3 – a stronger tighter series than the previous two, with the issues of Paul’s clients bleeding into his own life and his own therapy in a clear and plausible way. We still think he’s a dangerously unsafe psychotherapist, though, by UK standards.
Cuttings: June 2016
Simon Cowell wants to write a children’s book? Here’s what will give it the X Factor - article by Michael Rosen in The Guardian. "Simon Cowell has announced a new venture: he is going to write a children’s book.... What tips can I offer...?... You need to translate your own personal experience into your chosen format. Maybe the animals in the wood are arguing about who can make the best noises – the mouse squeaks, the crow caws, the weasel squeals – they can’t decide who is the winner. Unbeknownst to them, while they were arguing, Simon the Fox was listening. Up he pops and says, 'Why don’t I be the judge, and whoever is the best will come to my palace for a meal?' 'Yes!' say the animals, and one by one they stand in front of Simon and make their noises. Simon chooses one of them and takes them off to his ... well, actually, he doesn’t have a palace, he has a den. And the meal? Oh yes, it’s Simon’s meal. He eats the winner. "
The Ancient Origins of Consciousness by Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt: how the brain created experience - review by Stephen Rose in The Guardian. "Feinberg and Mallatt argue that the seeds of consciousness lie in the very origins of life on Earth, more than 3bn years ago. Not of course the rich subjectivity with which the word is imbued today, but what they call sensory consciousness, the ability to respond to and act on the external environment, as when their present-day successors – single-celled animals such as amoeba – detect and navigate towards food sources and withdraw from noxious ones. Even such single-celled creatures behave as if they have a sense of bodily integrity, their membranes studded with molecular receptors which can recognise the difference between themselves and something that is not-self. This is where the authors’ neuroevolutionary path to human consciousness begins."
Dumbing up - letter by Paul Shepheard to The Guardian (print edition only, 11.6.16, p 19). "Richard Dawkins gets it wrong about fiction ('What's in a number?', 4 June). He asks, what's so special about things that never happened? But fiction is analogous. Whether War and Peace or Beowulf, fiction is, by analogy, about things that happen to everybody every day."
Vinegar Girl [reversion of 'The Taming of the Shrew'] by Anne Tyler: a sparky spin on Shakespeare - review by Elizabeth Lowry in The Guardian. "Tyler draws out the warning implicit in the play: that if men will persist in finding weakness and deviousness in women sexually attractive, they are going to get the half-formed partners they deserve. At her school Kate is often 'downright astonished by how much the women in the faculty lounge sounded like the little girls nattering away in Room 4'. Other men make Kate 'feel too big and too gruff and too shocking', but Pyotr is 'the kind of person who liked her true self, for better or for worse'. By taking him as her husband, the shrew doesn’t surrender her moxie, but rather finds a counterweight to her own strength. The balance of power the two Kates and their Petruchios achieve is the basis of a successful marriage. This sparky, intelligent spin on Shakespeare’s controversial classic demolishes the old saw that you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar with a simple question posed by Pyotr. That may be true, he says – but why would you want to catch flies?"
Could Steiner schools have a point on children, tablets and tech? - article by Sarfraz Manzoor in The Guardian. "The methods at [the Iona school in Nottingham], which are based on the controversial teachings of Austrian 19th century philosopher Rudolf Steiner, may be different from those employed in mainstream state schools, but the Iona was recently declared outstanding by the School Inspection Service – the independent equivalent of Ofsted. The report noted that 'pupils do not use computers or the internet when in school but staff have ensured that they have learned about internet safety'. It went on: 'Teaching is inspirational and highly effective … teachers are very well trained and highly skilled.' Any school would be grateful to be described in such glowing terms but the staff here are particularly proud that they achieved their outstanding status without technology. In addition to the ban on computers in school, parents are discouraged from letting their children watch television, play computer games or use smartphones at home...."
The English language is under siege from tone-deaf activists - column by Clive James in The Guardian. "In Australia there is some outfit going by the name of the Productivity Commission that calls books 'cultural externalities'. Speaking as someone who, when well, writes cultural externalities for a living, I think it might be more efficient, from the productivity angle, if we could go on calling them books. But I admit that this is merely my opinion, not settled science. If I were advancing this opinion in the form of a tweet or comment, I could insert the acronym IMO, so proving that the standard dead white male language of Jane Austen is now being assailed not only by expansive phrases from institutions that wish to sound more important, but also by piddling abbreviations from individuals who wish to sound pressed for time. Admittedly, some of those individuals wish to sound humble, too, and might even be so; but saying IMO is a counterproductive way of conveying that impression, because we already assume that your opinion is only your opinion. And saying IMHO is an even more counterproductive way of conveying it, because nobody who says 'in my humble opinion' is any more humble than Saddam Hussein and Imelda Marcos dancing the tango."
‘Could he actually win?’ Dave Eggers at a Donald Trump rally - article by Dave Eggers in The Guardian. "Believing that Trump’s supporters are all fascists or racists is a grave mistake. This day in Sacramento presented a different picture, of a thousand or so regular people who thought it was pretty cool how Trump showed up in a plane with his name on it. How naughty it was when he called the president 'stupid'. How funny it was when he said the word 'huge' the peculiar way he does, without the “h” (the audience yelled back “uuuuge!”, laughing half with him, half at him). In the same way we rooted for Clay a few years ago when he showed up as an actual actor in a Woody Allen movie, the audience at a Trump rally is thinking, How funny would it be if this guy were across the table from Angela Merkel? That would be classic. Americans who have voted for Trump in the primaries have done so not because they agree with all, or any, of his statements or promises, but because he is an entertainment. He is a loud, captivating distraction and a very good comedian. His appeal is aided by these rallies, and by media coverage, and both are fuelled not by substance but by his willingness to say crazy shit. Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager, has insisted that they 'let Trump be Trump' and the wisdom of the strategy is undeniable. As long as he continues to say crazy shit, he will continue to dominate the news and will continue to attract crowds. The moment he ceases to entertain – to say crazy shit – he will evaporate."
Brexit is a fake revolt: working-class culture is being hijacked to help the elite - column by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "I ... know what a real revolt looks like. The miners strike; the Arab spring; the barricade fighting around Gezi Park in Istanbul in 2013. So, to people getting ready for the mother of all revolts on Thursday, I want to point out the crucial difference between a real revolt and a fake one. The elite does not usually lead the real ones. In a real revolt, the rich and powerful usually head for the hills, terrified. Nor are the Sun and the Daily Mail usually to be found egging on a real insurrection. But, all over Britain, people have fallen for the scam. In the Brexit referendum, we’ve seen what happens when working-class culture gets hijacked – and when the party that is supposed to be defending working people just cannot find the language or the offer to separate a fake revolt from a real one."
Reading from the screen: Good for education? - post by Mark Nichols, in his blog 'TEL-ling it like it is'. "A conference paper by Geoff Kaufman ... and Mary Flanagan ... called “High-low split: Divergent cognitive construal levels triggered by digital and non-digital platforms” has had some coverage.... The studies published in the paper compared levels of construal (perception and comprehension, or ‘gist’) of subjects reading the same matter from print, and a screen in an RCT (Randomised Control Trial).... In a recently accepted article entitled “Reading and studying on the screen: An overview of literature toward good learning design practice” (I’ll provide a link once it’s published), I overview much of the recent literature on reading from the screen vs reading print. My conclusions are, as relevant to Kaufman and Flanagan, as follows: (1) Reading from the screen is perceived by readers as being a different genre to reading from print. Various studies show that readers approach reading from the screen differently than they do reading from print. Surface reading (or overconfidence) is common for on-screen reading. The issue is not so much the fact that text is on screen, rather the approach of the reader is not self-critical enough. (2) Education design techniques geared to raise the readers’ construal with on screen text can be applied to reduce cognitive load, overconfidence, and the natural tendency toward lower construal. The final study clearly demonstrates that readers can improve their construal level if they are properly calibrated or oriented to the task at hand. While 48% is still short of the 66% correct attained by print readers, the significant gain is evidence that intervention can make a positive difference. (3) Comparing text from the screen and in print is not a fair appraisal of the former’s utility in education. If all the on screen student is exposed to is the same text they could otherwise have printed, the educational opportunities of on screen have not been applied. Educational designers can – and ought to – apply on screen reading in ways that encourage effective engagement with the ideas in the text."
Death by GPS: are satnavs changing our brains? - article by Greg Milner in The Guardian, extracted from his book Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Our World. "So what happens to our brains as we transition into a world where GPS does it all for us? Some cognitive experts believe we may be undergoing fundamental changes. 'Physical maps help us build cognitive maps,' Julia Frankenstein of the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Freiburg in Germany has argued. Spending our days moving through various environments, we fill in the details of our cognitive map based on our egocentric experiences. Can the granular detail of that map fade through misuse? 'The problem with GPS systems is, in my eyes, that we are not forced to remember or process the information. As it is permanently "at hand", we need not think or decide ourselves,' Frankenstein says. 'The more we rely on technology to find our way, the less we build up our cognitive maps.' Life becomes a series of strip maps: 'We see the way from A to Z, but we don’t see the landmarks along the way… developing a cognitive map from this reduced information is a bit like trying to get an entire musical piece from a few notes.'"
As an English European, this is the biggest defeat of my political life - article by Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian. "As an English European I see two tasks before us, which stand in a certain tension with each other. On the one hand, now the people’s decision has been made, we must do everything we can to limit the damage to this country. And if it turns out that 'this country' is to be without Scotland, then let England be the one of Charles Dickens and George Orwell, not that of Nigel Farage and Nick Griffin. Since we have predicted, in entirely good faith, that the consequences of Brexit will be disastrous, this means we have to work to prove ourselves wrong. I would be so happy if we were proved wrong. As Europeans, on the other hand, we must do everything we can to ensure the European Union learns the lessons of this stinging reverse, which has its origins as much in recent European as in earlier British history. For if the EU and the eurozone do not change, they will be engulfed too, by a thousand continental versions of Farage. And with all its faults, the union is still worth saving. I stand by my adaptation of that great English European Winston Churchill’s famous remark on democracy: this is the worst possible Europe, apart from all the other Europes that have been tried from time to time."
How painter Winifred Knights became Britain’s ‘unknown genius’ - article by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "This summer [until 18 September] the Dulwich Picture Gallery is mounting a retrospective of [Knights'] work, the first ever. On display are all her significant pieces, including The Marriage at Cana (1923), shipped from New Zealand, and Scenes from the Life of St Martin of Tours (1928‑33), a stunning triptych that will be unhooked from the wall of Canterbury Cathedral and trundled up the A2 to south London. Most thrilling of all, The Santissima Trinita (1924-30), generally considered Knights’ masterpiece, has been lent by its private owners. These works appear alongside The Deluge, together with scores of preparatory sketches. In a Knights painting, a group of monumental figures typically pauses at a moment of revelation or transcendence. Although individual shapes have been simplified and stylised, the figures are still emphatically human, much in the manner of an early Renaissance church fresco. Indeed, Knights’ painstakingly drawn and luminously coloured work is a reminder that pre-Raphaelite art – with its love of detail, decorative colour, interest of line and the conveyance of nature – had a long and distinguished influence in British painting right up to the second world war. Yet here, in fact, may lie the reason for Knights’ fall from critical favour following her early death in 1947. When art historians in the postwar period came to describe what they believed had happened during the first part of the 20th century, they inevitably privileged modernism, with its international language of abstraction, over the kind of figurative work that seemed tied to a regressively local way of seeing the world. According to this paradigm, Knights’ work wasn’t just old-fashioned, it was wrong.
The Ancient Origins of Consciousness by Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt: how the brain created experience - review by Stephen Rose in The Guardian. "Feinberg and Mallatt argue that the seeds of consciousness lie in the very origins of life on Earth, more than 3bn years ago. Not of course the rich subjectivity with which the word is imbued today, but what they call sensory consciousness, the ability to respond to and act on the external environment, as when their present-day successors – single-celled animals such as amoeba – detect and navigate towards food sources and withdraw from noxious ones. Even such single-celled creatures behave as if they have a sense of bodily integrity, their membranes studded with molecular receptors which can recognise the difference between themselves and something that is not-self. This is where the authors’ neuroevolutionary path to human consciousness begins."
Dumbing up - letter by Paul Shepheard to The Guardian (print edition only, 11.6.16, p 19). "Richard Dawkins gets it wrong about fiction ('What's in a number?', 4 June). He asks, what's so special about things that never happened? But fiction is analogous. Whether War and Peace or Beowulf, fiction is, by analogy, about things that happen to everybody every day."
Vinegar Girl [reversion of 'The Taming of the Shrew'] by Anne Tyler: a sparky spin on Shakespeare - review by Elizabeth Lowry in The Guardian. "Tyler draws out the warning implicit in the play: that if men will persist in finding weakness and deviousness in women sexually attractive, they are going to get the half-formed partners they deserve. At her school Kate is often 'downright astonished by how much the women in the faculty lounge sounded like the little girls nattering away in Room 4'. Other men make Kate 'feel too big and too gruff and too shocking', but Pyotr is 'the kind of person who liked her true self, for better or for worse'. By taking him as her husband, the shrew doesn’t surrender her moxie, but rather finds a counterweight to her own strength. The balance of power the two Kates and their Petruchios achieve is the basis of a successful marriage. This sparky, intelligent spin on Shakespeare’s controversial classic demolishes the old saw that you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar with a simple question posed by Pyotr. That may be true, he says – but why would you want to catch flies?"
Could Steiner schools have a point on children, tablets and tech? - article by Sarfraz Manzoor in The Guardian. "The methods at [the Iona school in Nottingham], which are based on the controversial teachings of Austrian 19th century philosopher Rudolf Steiner, may be different from those employed in mainstream state schools, but the Iona was recently declared outstanding by the School Inspection Service – the independent equivalent of Ofsted. The report noted that 'pupils do not use computers or the internet when in school but staff have ensured that they have learned about internet safety'. It went on: 'Teaching is inspirational and highly effective … teachers are very well trained and highly skilled.' Any school would be grateful to be described in such glowing terms but the staff here are particularly proud that they achieved their outstanding status without technology. In addition to the ban on computers in school, parents are discouraged from letting their children watch television, play computer games or use smartphones at home...."
The English language is under siege from tone-deaf activists - column by Clive James in The Guardian. "In Australia there is some outfit going by the name of the Productivity Commission that calls books 'cultural externalities'. Speaking as someone who, when well, writes cultural externalities for a living, I think it might be more efficient, from the productivity angle, if we could go on calling them books. But I admit that this is merely my opinion, not settled science. If I were advancing this opinion in the form of a tweet or comment, I could insert the acronym IMO, so proving that the standard dead white male language of Jane Austen is now being assailed not only by expansive phrases from institutions that wish to sound more important, but also by piddling abbreviations from individuals who wish to sound pressed for time. Admittedly, some of those individuals wish to sound humble, too, and might even be so; but saying IMO is a counterproductive way of conveying that impression, because we already assume that your opinion is only your opinion. And saying IMHO is an even more counterproductive way of conveying it, because nobody who says 'in my humble opinion' is any more humble than Saddam Hussein and Imelda Marcos dancing the tango."
‘Could he actually win?’ Dave Eggers at a Donald Trump rally - article by Dave Eggers in The Guardian. "Believing that Trump’s supporters are all fascists or racists is a grave mistake. This day in Sacramento presented a different picture, of a thousand or so regular people who thought it was pretty cool how Trump showed up in a plane with his name on it. How naughty it was when he called the president 'stupid'. How funny it was when he said the word 'huge' the peculiar way he does, without the “h” (the audience yelled back “uuuuge!”, laughing half with him, half at him). In the same way we rooted for Clay a few years ago when he showed up as an actual actor in a Woody Allen movie, the audience at a Trump rally is thinking, How funny would it be if this guy were across the table from Angela Merkel? That would be classic. Americans who have voted for Trump in the primaries have done so not because they agree with all, or any, of his statements or promises, but because he is an entertainment. He is a loud, captivating distraction and a very good comedian. His appeal is aided by these rallies, and by media coverage, and both are fuelled not by substance but by his willingness to say crazy shit. Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager, has insisted that they 'let Trump be Trump' and the wisdom of the strategy is undeniable. As long as he continues to say crazy shit, he will continue to dominate the news and will continue to attract crowds. The moment he ceases to entertain – to say crazy shit – he will evaporate."
Brexit is a fake revolt: working-class culture is being hijacked to help the elite - column by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "I ... know what a real revolt looks like. The miners strike; the Arab spring; the barricade fighting around Gezi Park in Istanbul in 2013. So, to people getting ready for the mother of all revolts on Thursday, I want to point out the crucial difference between a real revolt and a fake one. The elite does not usually lead the real ones. In a real revolt, the rich and powerful usually head for the hills, terrified. Nor are the Sun and the Daily Mail usually to be found egging on a real insurrection. But, all over Britain, people have fallen for the scam. In the Brexit referendum, we’ve seen what happens when working-class culture gets hijacked – and when the party that is supposed to be defending working people just cannot find the language or the offer to separate a fake revolt from a real one."
Reading from the screen: Good for education? - post by Mark Nichols, in his blog 'TEL-ling it like it is'. "A conference paper by Geoff Kaufman ... and Mary Flanagan ... called “High-low split: Divergent cognitive construal levels triggered by digital and non-digital platforms” has had some coverage.... The studies published in the paper compared levels of construal (perception and comprehension, or ‘gist’) of subjects reading the same matter from print, and a screen in an RCT (Randomised Control Trial).... In a recently accepted article entitled “Reading and studying on the screen: An overview of literature toward good learning design practice” (I’ll provide a link once it’s published), I overview much of the recent literature on reading from the screen vs reading print. My conclusions are, as relevant to Kaufman and Flanagan, as follows: (1) Reading from the screen is perceived by readers as being a different genre to reading from print. Various studies show that readers approach reading from the screen differently than they do reading from print. Surface reading (or overconfidence) is common for on-screen reading. The issue is not so much the fact that text is on screen, rather the approach of the reader is not self-critical enough. (2) Education design techniques geared to raise the readers’ construal with on screen text can be applied to reduce cognitive load, overconfidence, and the natural tendency toward lower construal. The final study clearly demonstrates that readers can improve their construal level if they are properly calibrated or oriented to the task at hand. While 48% is still short of the 66% correct attained by print readers, the significant gain is evidence that intervention can make a positive difference. (3) Comparing text from the screen and in print is not a fair appraisal of the former’s utility in education. If all the on screen student is exposed to is the same text they could otherwise have printed, the educational opportunities of on screen have not been applied. Educational designers can – and ought to – apply on screen reading in ways that encourage effective engagement with the ideas in the text."
Death by GPS: are satnavs changing our brains? - article by Greg Milner in The Guardian, extracted from his book Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Our World. "So what happens to our brains as we transition into a world where GPS does it all for us? Some cognitive experts believe we may be undergoing fundamental changes. 'Physical maps help us build cognitive maps,' Julia Frankenstein of the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Freiburg in Germany has argued. Spending our days moving through various environments, we fill in the details of our cognitive map based on our egocentric experiences. Can the granular detail of that map fade through misuse? 'The problem with GPS systems is, in my eyes, that we are not forced to remember or process the information. As it is permanently "at hand", we need not think or decide ourselves,' Frankenstein says. 'The more we rely on technology to find our way, the less we build up our cognitive maps.' Life becomes a series of strip maps: 'We see the way from A to Z, but we don’t see the landmarks along the way… developing a cognitive map from this reduced information is a bit like trying to get an entire musical piece from a few notes.'"
As an English European, this is the biggest defeat of my political life - article by Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian. "As an English European I see two tasks before us, which stand in a certain tension with each other. On the one hand, now the people’s decision has been made, we must do everything we can to limit the damage to this country. And if it turns out that 'this country' is to be without Scotland, then let England be the one of Charles Dickens and George Orwell, not that of Nigel Farage and Nick Griffin. Since we have predicted, in entirely good faith, that the consequences of Brexit will be disastrous, this means we have to work to prove ourselves wrong. I would be so happy if we were proved wrong. As Europeans, on the other hand, we must do everything we can to ensure the European Union learns the lessons of this stinging reverse, which has its origins as much in recent European as in earlier British history. For if the EU and the eurozone do not change, they will be engulfed too, by a thousand continental versions of Farage. And with all its faults, the union is still worth saving. I stand by my adaptation of that great English European Winston Churchill’s famous remark on democracy: this is the worst possible Europe, apart from all the other Europes that have been tried from time to time."
How painter Winifred Knights became Britain’s ‘unknown genius’ - article by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "This summer [until 18 September] the Dulwich Picture Gallery is mounting a retrospective of [Knights'] work, the first ever. On display are all her significant pieces, including The Marriage at Cana (1923), shipped from New Zealand, and Scenes from the Life of St Martin of Tours (1928‑33), a stunning triptych that will be unhooked from the wall of Canterbury Cathedral and trundled up the A2 to south London. Most thrilling of all, The Santissima Trinita (1924-30), generally considered Knights’ masterpiece, has been lent by its private owners. These works appear alongside The Deluge, together with scores of preparatory sketches. In a Knights painting, a group of monumental figures typically pauses at a moment of revelation or transcendence. Although individual shapes have been simplified and stylised, the figures are still emphatically human, much in the manner of an early Renaissance church fresco. Indeed, Knights’ painstakingly drawn and luminously coloured work is a reminder that pre-Raphaelite art – with its love of detail, decorative colour, interest of line and the conveyance of nature – had a long and distinguished influence in British painting right up to the second world war. Yet here, in fact, may lie the reason for Knights’ fall from critical favour following her early death in 1947. When art historians in the postwar period came to describe what they believed had happened during the first part of the 20th century, they inevitably privileged modernism, with its international language of abstraction, over the kind of figurative work that seemed tied to a regressively local way of seeing the world. According to this paradigm, Knights’ work wasn’t just old-fashioned, it was wrong.
Sunday, 11 September 2016
Cuttings: August 2016
From Twister’s ‘sex in a box’ to Pokémon Go’s new reality: how games define the times - article by Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. "Monopoly... was initially called the Landlord’s Game and was invented at the turn of the 20th century to teach people about social inequality. 'It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing, with all its usual outcomes and consequences,' wrote Elizabeth Magie, its inventor, in a political magazine. 'In a short time, I hope … men and women will discover that they are poor because Carnegie and Rockefeller, maybe, have more than they know what to do with,' she added. The Landlord’s Game was popular with leftwing intellectuals. However, over the next few decades less pedagogical versions of the game popped up. It seems that during the economic depression of the 1930s, people were more interested in playing at being a tycoon than interrogating tycoonism. In 1935, Parker Brothers (now a subsidiary of Hasbro) purchased the rights to a version of the game created by Charles Darrow, and this became the one we know today: a training ground for tiny Trumps. Ironically, and perhaps inevitably, the Landlord’s Game was subsumed by the very power structures it was criticising. As the game went on to sell more than 250 million copies worldwide, its female inventor was forgotten, while a man monopolised the glory and the profit. Monopoly is a practical demonstration of the way in which capitalism doesn’t just grab land but minds; appropriating its critics and turning counter-culture into consumer culture."
The Happiness Industry by William Davies: why capitalism has turned us into narcissists - review by Terry Eagleton in The Guardian. "What Davies recognises is that capitalism has now in a sense incorporated its own critique. What the system used to regard with suspicion – feeling, friendship, creativity, moral responsibility – have all now been co-opted for the purpose of maximising profits.... Happiness for the market researchers and corporate psychologists is a matter of feeling good. But it seems that millions of individuals don’t feel good at all, and are unlikely to be persuaded to buck up by technologies of mind control that induce them to work harder or consume more. You can’t really be happy if you are a victim of injustice or exploitation, which is what the technologists of joy tend to overlook. This is why, when Aristotle speaks of a science of well-being, he gives it the name of politics. The point is of little interest to the neuroscientists, advertising gurus or mindfulness mongers, which is why so much of their work is spectacularly beside the point."
Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, David Hare and more ... leading writers on Donald Trump - article with contributions from various writers in The Guardian. Steven Pinker: "Most people idealise democracy as a form of governance in which an informed populace deliberates about the common good and carefully selects leaders who carry out their preferences. By that standard the world has never had a democracy. Political scientists such as Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, authors of Democracy for Realists, who study how democracies really work are repeatedly astonished by the shallowness and incoherence of people’s political beliefs and the tenuous connection of those beliefs to their votes. Most voters are ignorant not just of current policy alternatives but of the most elementary facts about politics and history, such as the major branches of government or which countries have used nuclear weapons. Their opinions flip depending on how a question is worded: they say that the government spends too much on 'welfare' but too little on 'assistance to the poor', and that it should use 'military force' but not 'go to war'. When they do formulate a preference, they commonly vote for a candidate with the opposite one. Nor does voting provide a feedback signal on a government’s overall performance. Voters punish incumbents for recent events over which they have dubious control, such as macroeconomic swings and terrorist strikes, or no control at all, such as droughts, floods or even shark attacks. Achen and Bartels suggest that most people correctly recognise that their votes are astronomically unlikely to affect the outcome of an election and so they prioritise work and family over educating themselves about politics. They use the franchise as a form of self-expression: they vote for candidates who they think speak up for their kind of people."
From Trump to Brexit rhetoric: how today's politicians have got away with words - article by Mark Thompson in The Guardian. "I believe instead that the crisis in our public language springs from a set of interlocking political, cultural and technological forces – forces that go beyond any one ideology, or interest group, or national political situation. The first factor is the changing character of western politics, with previous affiliations based on class and other forms of traditional group identity giving way, especially after the end of the cold war, to a more complex and uncertain landscape in which political leaders struggle for definition and differentiation.... The second factor is that widening gulf between the worldview and language of the experts who make modern policy and those of the public at large. ... The next factor is digital technology and its impact both on pre-existing media and on the wider dissemination and discussion of political ideas.... The fourth force at work is related to our understanding of how persuasive language works. Over the course of the 20th century, empirical advances were made in the way words are used to sell to goods and services. They were then systematically applied to political messaging, and the impressionistic rhetoric of promotion increasingly came to replace the rhetoric of traditional step-by-step political argument. The effect has been to give political language some of the brevity, intensity and urgency we associate with the best marketing, but to strip it of explanatory and argumentative power."
Mythomania by Peter Conrad: the real meaning of Apple, cronuts and the Kardashians - review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "Mythomania is a collection of themed essays about modern culture, some of which began life as BBC Radio 4 programmes, and it follows consciously in the footsteps of the first great deconstructor of cultural symbols, Roland Barthes. In Mythologies, published in 1957, Barthes mused brilliantly on the meaning of subjects ranging from detergents to red wine, plastic and wrestling. 'The topics Barthes dealt with uncovered the hidden mythical content of daily reality,' Conrad notes approvingly, and in similar fashion he inquires in elegant and allusive style about such up-to-date phenomena as laptops, selfies, S&M fiction, vampire movies, the Kardashians, the downfall of Oscar Pistorius, and chicken-based restaurant chains.
The Happiness Industry by William Davies: why capitalism has turned us into narcissists - review by Terry Eagleton in The Guardian. "What Davies recognises is that capitalism has now in a sense incorporated its own critique. What the system used to regard with suspicion – feeling, friendship, creativity, moral responsibility – have all now been co-opted for the purpose of maximising profits.... Happiness for the market researchers and corporate psychologists is a matter of feeling good. But it seems that millions of individuals don’t feel good at all, and are unlikely to be persuaded to buck up by technologies of mind control that induce them to work harder or consume more. You can’t really be happy if you are a victim of injustice or exploitation, which is what the technologists of joy tend to overlook. This is why, when Aristotle speaks of a science of well-being, he gives it the name of politics. The point is of little interest to the neuroscientists, advertising gurus or mindfulness mongers, which is why so much of their work is spectacularly beside the point."
Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, David Hare and more ... leading writers on Donald Trump - article with contributions from various writers in The Guardian. Steven Pinker: "Most people idealise democracy as a form of governance in which an informed populace deliberates about the common good and carefully selects leaders who carry out their preferences. By that standard the world has never had a democracy. Political scientists such as Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, authors of Democracy for Realists, who study how democracies really work are repeatedly astonished by the shallowness and incoherence of people’s political beliefs and the tenuous connection of those beliefs to their votes. Most voters are ignorant not just of current policy alternatives but of the most elementary facts about politics and history, such as the major branches of government or which countries have used nuclear weapons. Their opinions flip depending on how a question is worded: they say that the government spends too much on 'welfare' but too little on 'assistance to the poor', and that it should use 'military force' but not 'go to war'. When they do formulate a preference, they commonly vote for a candidate with the opposite one. Nor does voting provide a feedback signal on a government’s overall performance. Voters punish incumbents for recent events over which they have dubious control, such as macroeconomic swings and terrorist strikes, or no control at all, such as droughts, floods or even shark attacks. Achen and Bartels suggest that most people correctly recognise that their votes are astronomically unlikely to affect the outcome of an election and so they prioritise work and family over educating themselves about politics. They use the franchise as a form of self-expression: they vote for candidates who they think speak up for their kind of people."
From Trump to Brexit rhetoric: how today's politicians have got away with words - article by Mark Thompson in The Guardian. "I believe instead that the crisis in our public language springs from a set of interlocking political, cultural and technological forces – forces that go beyond any one ideology, or interest group, or national political situation. The first factor is the changing character of western politics, with previous affiliations based on class and other forms of traditional group identity giving way, especially after the end of the cold war, to a more complex and uncertain landscape in which political leaders struggle for definition and differentiation.... The second factor is that widening gulf between the worldview and language of the experts who make modern policy and those of the public at large. ... The next factor is digital technology and its impact both on pre-existing media and on the wider dissemination and discussion of political ideas.... The fourth force at work is related to our understanding of how persuasive language works. Over the course of the 20th century, empirical advances were made in the way words are used to sell to goods and services. They were then systematically applied to political messaging, and the impressionistic rhetoric of promotion increasingly came to replace the rhetoric of traditional step-by-step political argument. The effect has been to give political language some of the brevity, intensity and urgency we associate with the best marketing, but to strip it of explanatory and argumentative power."
Mythomania by Peter Conrad: the real meaning of Apple, cronuts and the Kardashians - review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "Mythomania is a collection of themed essays about modern culture, some of which began life as BBC Radio 4 programmes, and it follows consciously in the footsteps of the first great deconstructor of cultural symbols, Roland Barthes. In Mythologies, published in 1957, Barthes mused brilliantly on the meaning of subjects ranging from detergents to red wine, plastic and wrestling. 'The topics Barthes dealt with uncovered the hidden mythical content of daily reality,' Conrad notes approvingly, and in similar fashion he inquires in elegant and allusive style about such up-to-date phenomena as laptops, selfies, S&M fiction, vampire movies, the Kardashians, the downfall of Oscar Pistorius, and chicken-based restaurant chains.
Thursday, 9 June 2016
Seen and heard: May 2016
The Harley Gallery and Portland Collection at Welbeck Abbey – respectively a modern art gallery in a converted stable block and a purpose-built gallery to make publicly available (free) the treasures of the Dukes of Portland. The Collection was well worth seeing, but we’re unlikely to re-visit: a lot of not tremendously good aristocratic portraits (even the much-publicised Van Dykes were not his best, out-classed by the paintings of Hyacinthe Rigaud – an artist new to us and still interesting even though, despite the name, he turned out to be a man), with some impressive silverware and landscape paintings. The Gallery included a temporary exhibition of works by Rose English (surely an adopted name) riffing of the twin aristocratic interests of horses and beautiful young women: most wittily in her 1975 ‘Country Life' in which old black-and-white covers of Country Life magazine, featuring young aristocratic women on their engagement or coming out (which meant something different then), are mounted alongside small ceramic horses, some of them wearing Jaegar headscarves. Priceless!
Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit – BBC TV series. Interesting and clever, of course, but also lovely to see how Beard, who was already good in her previous TV shows, has now perfected her broadcasting persona. She talks directly to you through the TV screen as though you’re her best mate: sort of like an academic Miranda, without the pratfalls. Walking through Mantova (Mantua) and coming across a Roman column embedded in a later house, I longed for her to appear at my elbow and explain the inscription to me, running her finger along the letters.
In the Club – series two of the BBC drama, picking up the story of the mothers from the ante-natal class eighteen months on, with new babies (from them and from new characters) on the way. Once again there’s a sense of an impending car crash about each episode, but still there’s still something compelling about this drama: even though the characters aren’t necessarily likeable, you want them to be okay. And that’s the product of good writing and acting.
Falling upward: a spirituality for the two halves of life – by Franciscan priest Richard Rohr. According to him, the main preoccupations of our culture (establishing an identity, finding a social group, achieving security) reflect the spiritual priorities of the first half of life, which is about developing a strong container for the personality. In the second half of life the priority becomes finding the contents that container was meant to hold, which entails taking the downward path and engaging in shadow work. Old dualisms no longer have much meaning, but growth and development takes place through humiliation, sadness and disappointment. Makes sense, though knowing it doesn’t make doing it any easier.
The Palazzo Ducale (Ducal Palace), Mantova – two hours plus of Renaissance splendour. Except that is, for the first seven rooms which contain only miscellaneous antiquities and signs laboriously explaining why the room has the name by which it is known, usually because of some feature long-since destroyed or removed so what’s the point: an object-lesson in how not to write captions. But the paintings were great (several Rubens, including recovered fragments of one cut up for sale by a Napoleonic general during a looting spree), and the decorated rooms towards the end of the tour were truly fabulous. Highlight for us was the Zodiac room: a bedroom with a ceiling showing the night sky, constellations marked out, which I’m afraid reminded us of In the Night Garden; it even included Iggle Piggle’s boat.
Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit – BBC TV series. Interesting and clever, of course, but also lovely to see how Beard, who was already good in her previous TV shows, has now perfected her broadcasting persona. She talks directly to you through the TV screen as though you’re her best mate: sort of like an academic Miranda, without the pratfalls. Walking through Mantova (Mantua) and coming across a Roman column embedded in a later house, I longed for her to appear at my elbow and explain the inscription to me, running her finger along the letters.
In the Club – series two of the BBC drama, picking up the story of the mothers from the ante-natal class eighteen months on, with new babies (from them and from new characters) on the way. Once again there’s a sense of an impending car crash about each episode, but still there’s still something compelling about this drama: even though the characters aren’t necessarily likeable, you want them to be okay. And that’s the product of good writing and acting.
Falling upward: a spirituality for the two halves of life – by Franciscan priest Richard Rohr. According to him, the main preoccupations of our culture (establishing an identity, finding a social group, achieving security) reflect the spiritual priorities of the first half of life, which is about developing a strong container for the personality. In the second half of life the priority becomes finding the contents that container was meant to hold, which entails taking the downward path and engaging in shadow work. Old dualisms no longer have much meaning, but growth and development takes place through humiliation, sadness and disappointment. Makes sense, though knowing it doesn’t make doing it any easier.
The Palazzo Ducale (Ducal Palace), Mantova – two hours plus of Renaissance splendour. Except that is, for the first seven rooms which contain only miscellaneous antiquities and signs laboriously explaining why the room has the name by which it is known, usually because of some feature long-since destroyed or removed so what’s the point: an object-lesson in how not to write captions. But the paintings were great (several Rubens, including recovered fragments of one cut up for sale by a Napoleonic general during a looting spree), and the decorated rooms towards the end of the tour were truly fabulous. Highlight for us was the Zodiac room: a bedroom with a ceiling showing the night sky, constellations marked out, which I’m afraid reminded us of In the Night Garden; it even included Iggle Piggle’s boat.
Cuttings: May 2016
Girl Up by Laura Bates: feminism shouldn’t be so nice - review by Helen Lewis in The Guardian. "Having met Bates a few times, and having followed her work with schools on sex education and with the British Transport police on sexual assault, I have no hesitation in declaring her to be A Good Thing. This book is not a memoir or a confessional ... but nonetheless it feels infused with the warmth of her personality.... Partly this is down to her fundamental decency, and partly it is about her willingness (or deliberate decision) to avoid those areas of feminism that are pock-marked with landmines. This book knows its audience: it has been written firmly in the register and vocabulary of contemporary online feminism.... There is so much that is good in this book that I am frustrated by its omissions. For example, although various role models are interviewed, ranging from Paris Lees to Mary Beard, there is no sense of feminism as an intellectual tradition. You could be forgiven for thinking that it sprang, fully formed, into life in about 2006.... This approach also means that there is no attempt to foster solidarity across the generations, or to relate the specific concerns of younger women to a larger ideological framework. There is little reference to pregnancy (except how to avoid it) and childcare, and none to other caring responsibilities. In this respect, the book is extremely in tune with online feminism, which can be acutely, even painfully, attentive to the needs of those who are 'agender, asexual, queer, intersex, gender fluid etc', while simultaneously giving not the tiniest of tiny shits about women over, say, the age of 50.... while I hope that Girl Up will be the first book on feminism many young women will read, I hope also that it is not the only one."
You Could Look It Up by Jack Lynch: search engines can’t do everything - review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "People have been complaining about the prevalence of mere 'dictionary and index learning' – effectively, pre-modern Googling – for a couple of centuries or more. But what is new may be our unwarranted confidence that what we find is the last word. As the literary scholar Jack Lynch argues: 'The information at our fingertips is more diverse than ever before, but in some ways it is more limited.'... Almost a meta-reference work in itself, You Could Look It Up provides potted biographies of 50 great reference works, from the very first extant legal codes, through manuals of botany and medicine, to the great dictionaries and encyclopedias.... Scattered throughout Lynch’s book are thoughts on his subject in the digital age, but he could perhaps have mounted a more sustained defence of the reference book even in our time, for the best reference books are still good books as well as simple repositories of facts. They have a literary value wholly absent from Wikipedia and its ilk.... What’s more, the effectively unlimited space online can militate against the concision and happy riffability of a well-edited single-volume reference. A reference book embodies what Lynch calls the art of 'distillation', which has always been the antidote to complaints throughout the ages of information overload. The serendipity of browsing [furthermore] has yet to be successfully recreated in electronic form."
Penny dreadfuls: the Victorian equivalent of video games - article by Kate Summerscale in The Guardian, relating to her book The Wicked Boy (Bloomsbury, 2016). "The prevalence of penny dreadfuls (as they were known in the press) or penny bloods (as they were known to shopkeepers and schoolboys) had by 1895 become a subject of great public concern. More than a million boys’ periodicals were being sold a week, most of them to working-class lads who had been taught to read in the state-funded schools set up over the previous two decades.... The new wave of literate children sought out cheap magazines as a diversion from the rote-learning and drill of the school curriculum, and then from the repetitive tasks of mechanised industry. Penny fiction was Britain’s first taste of mass-produced popular culture for the young, and – like movies, comics, video games and computer games in the century that followed – was held responsible for anything from petty theft to homicide. The dreadfuls were also implicated in social unrest. Since 1884, when the vote had been extended to most British men, the press had often pointed out that children raised on such literature would grow up to elect the rulers of the nation.... The dreadfuls gave a frightening intimation of the uses to which the labourers of Britain could put their literacy and newly won power: these fantasies of wealth and adventure might foster ambition, discontent, defiance, a spirit of insurgency. There was no knowing the consequences of enlarging the minds and dreams of the lower orders."
From Steve Reich to rock: why 1976 was a big year for minimal music - article by Gillian Moore in The Guardian. "The big story in British classical music was the death, at just 63, of Benjamin Britten, the most stellar British composer since Henry Purcell. But 1976 also saw the composition of a remarkable cluster of important works that could all be classified as minimalist, a term that Michael Nyman first applied to music in 1968 and which has remained useful, if contentious, ever since. Nyman himself told me recently that 1976 was the year that he 'became a composer again, after having been silent for 11 years, although somewhat noisy as a music critic'. ... Late in 1976 Nyman staged the first London performance of his friend Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, hot off the press, at London’s Southbank Centre.... Three months after Music for 18 Musicians was first performed in New York, Philip Glass, Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs’s Einstein on the Beach was premiered in Avignon.... The blast from these huge American pieces was felt even at the heart of the European avant garde in 1976, with György Ligeti pausing in the middle of writing his opera Le Grand Macabre to write a short piece for two pianos, Self Portrait with Reich and Riley (with Chopin in the Background).... Something was also happening in the Soviet bloc. Estonian composer Arvo Pärt had been silent for a number of years, in a creative crisis brought about by his alienation from the Soviet authorities, frustration with the European avant garde and attempts to reconcile his creativity with his religious faith. But in September 1976, he broke his silence with a tiny piano miniature, Für Alina, which signalled a huge change: this was a music that was pared down, spare, meditative and influenced by the chants and bells of the Gregorian Church...."
She takes a good picture: six forgotten female pioneers of photography - article by Sarah Crompton in The Guardian. "[Minna] Keene is one of six female photographers in the Tate show ['Painting with Light: Art and Photography from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Modern Age'], included on merit for their relevance to the theme. With the exception of Julia Margaret Cameron, all are less recognised than their male counterparts. Yet in their day they were exhibited and acclaimed. ... In the late Victorian period, photography was an attractive option for women. Although most came from comfortable, well-to-do homes, the fact was that any woman with enough money to purchase the equipment and chemicals they needed could train themself and get started. It was much more difficult to take up painting."
Dreamsnake by Vonda N McIntyre - review by Eric Brown in The Guardian. "The heroine of Vonda N McIntyre’s Dreamsnake (Jo Fletcher, £9.99) is a healer named Snake, who travels a far-future post-apocalyptic Earth aiding the sick and dying of the world’s many tribes. Her three snakes have been genetically modified to provide vaccines and medicines, and when one of the creatures, the alien dreamsnake of the title, is killed, Snake embarks on a picaresque adventure in search of its replacement. The power of the story lies as much in the lucid, understated prose as the depiction of a future society split into a thousand schisms as Snake deals with love, prejudice and a host of moral and ethical dilemmas that characterise the fractured world. First published in 1978 and winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, Dreamsnake is a beautiful achievement."
Whatever next? How plot grips us, from Dickens to Line of Duty - article by John Mullan in The Guardian. "Plot is not just a sequence of connected events (in this sense, every TV drama or novel equally has a plot). It is something rarer: the unfolding of a hidden design. Plot involves the laying of clues, the implicit promise to the reader or viewer that the true significance of what we read or see is not self-evident, but will eventually be revealed. A good plot exploits not just suspense, but also a kind of retrospective curiosity. When we know that a story has a plot we find ourselves asking not so much, 'What will happen next?' as, 'What has already happened?' The hidden design has, we trust, been contrived by an author, so when we enjoy a plot we are enjoying being manipulated by him or her. Perhaps this is why such enjoyment has often been thought suspect.... Plot is what stops narrative being just one thing after another. Plotless stories threaten to be endless. So those American TV dramas that, if successful, are destined for box sets may have resounding endings but lack the capacity to fulfil a design. They are designed to be endless – or rather, to be ended when actors or producers become bored, or the appetite of viewers seems sated.... You can see why serious novelists became suspicious of plots: they subjugate reality to a plan; they require that the author be a trusted manipulator. Yet novel readers have never relinquished their delight in a good plot. Plot activates our confidence in design, our faith that the creator of a narrative knows what he or she is doing from the first moment. Which is why a carefully contrived plot is most satisfying when – as with Bleak House or The Killing – the material is darkest and the characters themselves most perplexed, and why that satisfaction can be as deep as any other response to fiction."
Philip Pullman: Why I love comics - interview by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. "Why are the British are so queasy about comics? 'I think it comes from Pope Gregory the Great in 580 something,' says Pullman unexpectedly. 'He said, what words are for the reader, pictures are for those who cannot read. But what that pronouncement did was to set up a hierarchy of esteem, so to speak: if you were clever you had words; if you’re not very clever you have pictures. That has remained almost unchanged for over 1,500 years.' That can’t be the whole story. After all, in the US, Japan and France graphic novels are popular, and even respectable. What’s our problem? Maybe the puritans had something to do with it, Pullman suggests. 'The iconoclasm and the destroying of the statues and stained glass. The sense that these are vain fripperies and we should go back to the purity of language without pictures. I’m just guessing.'”
Why the arrival, not the journey, matters - blog post by John Naughton, reproducing his talk to the launch of the Journal of Cyber Policy. "If, as now seems obvious, the Internet is a [General Purpose Technology], then our societies are only at the beginning of a journey of adaptation, not the end. And this may surprise some people because the Internet is actually rather old technology....So you’d have thought that our society would have figured out the significance of the network by now. Sadly, not. And that’s not because we’re short of information and data about it. On the contrary, we are awash with the stuff. Our problem is that we don’t, as a culture, seem to understand it. We remain in that blissful state that Manuel Castells calls “informed Bewilderment”. So a powerful force is loose in our societies and we don’t really understand it. Why is that?... Maybe [one] reason why we are taken aback by the rise of the Internet is because we have been so dazzled by the technology that we have been infected by the technological determinism that is the prevailing ideology in the reality distortion field known as Silicon Valley. The folks there really do believe that technology drives history... But technology is only one of the forces that drives history because it doesn’t exist — or come into being — in a vacuum. It exists in a social, cultural, political, economic and ideological context, and it is the resultant of these multifarious forces that determines the direction of travel.... Focussing exclusively on the technology creates other blind spots too. For example, it renders us insensitive to the extent to which the Internet — like all major technologies — was socially constructed. This is how, for example, surveillance became “the business model of the Internet” — as the security expert Bruce Schneier once put it. In this case the root cause was the interaction between a key affordance of the technology — the power of network effects — and Internet users’ pathological reluctance to pay for online services. Since the way to succeed commercially was to 'get big fast' and since the quickest way to do that was to offer ‘free’ services, the business model that emerged was one in which users’ personal data and their data-trails were harvested and auctioned to advertisers and ad-brokers."
Exhausted? It’s time to focus - column by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "It’s been known for some time that people share things on social media – a lot – without reading them first.... The writer Alex Balk recently compared Facebook to 'the coffee table on which people placed their unread copies of Thomas Piketty’s Capital': when we share, we’re often really focused on promoting a certain image. But a new study goes further: apparently, sharing things, or just having the option to share, undermines the ability to digest and remember them. (Participants were twice as likely to make errors in a comprehension test.) When your attention is partly occupied by thoughts of how you’ll share or discuss what you’re reading, it’s a distraction from actually reading it – made worse, presumably, if your newsfeed’s also scrolling by in the corner of your eye. Social media is like belonging to a book club, but only ever reading novels while you’re at the book club, two glasses of cabernet the worse for wear."
What makes bad writing bad? - article by Toby Litt in The Guardian. "Bad writing is mainly boring writing. It can be boring because it is too confused or too logical, or boring because it is hysterical or lethargic, or boring because nothing really happens.... Bad writers continue to write badly because they have many reasons – in their view very good reasons – for writing in the way they do. Writers are bad because they cleave to the causes of writing badly. Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self. The person who will admire it first and last and most is the writer herself.... Bad writing is written defensively; good writing is a way of making the self as vulnerable as possible.... Often, the bad writer will feel that they have a particular story they want to tell. It may be a story passed on to them by their grandmother or it may be something that happened to them when they were younger. Until they’ve told this particular story, they feel they can’t move on. But because the material is so close to them they can’t mess around with it enough to learn how writing works. And, ultimately, they lack the will to betray the material sufficiently to make it true.... Your friends and family will love your tricks, because they love you. But try busking those tricks on the street. Try busking them alongside a magician who has been doing it for 10 years, earning their living. When they are watching a magician, people don’t want to say, 'Well done.' They want to say, 'Wow.'"
You Could Look It Up by Jack Lynch: search engines can’t do everything - review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "People have been complaining about the prevalence of mere 'dictionary and index learning' – effectively, pre-modern Googling – for a couple of centuries or more. But what is new may be our unwarranted confidence that what we find is the last word. As the literary scholar Jack Lynch argues: 'The information at our fingertips is more diverse than ever before, but in some ways it is more limited.'... Almost a meta-reference work in itself, You Could Look It Up provides potted biographies of 50 great reference works, from the very first extant legal codes, through manuals of botany and medicine, to the great dictionaries and encyclopedias.... Scattered throughout Lynch’s book are thoughts on his subject in the digital age, but he could perhaps have mounted a more sustained defence of the reference book even in our time, for the best reference books are still good books as well as simple repositories of facts. They have a literary value wholly absent from Wikipedia and its ilk.... What’s more, the effectively unlimited space online can militate against the concision and happy riffability of a well-edited single-volume reference. A reference book embodies what Lynch calls the art of 'distillation', which has always been the antidote to complaints throughout the ages of information overload. The serendipity of browsing [furthermore] has yet to be successfully recreated in electronic form."
Penny dreadfuls: the Victorian equivalent of video games - article by Kate Summerscale in The Guardian, relating to her book The Wicked Boy (Bloomsbury, 2016). "The prevalence of penny dreadfuls (as they were known in the press) or penny bloods (as they were known to shopkeepers and schoolboys) had by 1895 become a subject of great public concern. More than a million boys’ periodicals were being sold a week, most of them to working-class lads who had been taught to read in the state-funded schools set up over the previous two decades.... The new wave of literate children sought out cheap magazines as a diversion from the rote-learning and drill of the school curriculum, and then from the repetitive tasks of mechanised industry. Penny fiction was Britain’s first taste of mass-produced popular culture for the young, and – like movies, comics, video games and computer games in the century that followed – was held responsible for anything from petty theft to homicide. The dreadfuls were also implicated in social unrest. Since 1884, when the vote had been extended to most British men, the press had often pointed out that children raised on such literature would grow up to elect the rulers of the nation.... The dreadfuls gave a frightening intimation of the uses to which the labourers of Britain could put their literacy and newly won power: these fantasies of wealth and adventure might foster ambition, discontent, defiance, a spirit of insurgency. There was no knowing the consequences of enlarging the minds and dreams of the lower orders."
From Steve Reich to rock: why 1976 was a big year for minimal music - article by Gillian Moore in The Guardian. "The big story in British classical music was the death, at just 63, of Benjamin Britten, the most stellar British composer since Henry Purcell. But 1976 also saw the composition of a remarkable cluster of important works that could all be classified as minimalist, a term that Michael Nyman first applied to music in 1968 and which has remained useful, if contentious, ever since. Nyman himself told me recently that 1976 was the year that he 'became a composer again, after having been silent for 11 years, although somewhat noisy as a music critic'. ... Late in 1976 Nyman staged the first London performance of his friend Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, hot off the press, at London’s Southbank Centre.... Three months after Music for 18 Musicians was first performed in New York, Philip Glass, Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs’s Einstein on the Beach was premiered in Avignon.... The blast from these huge American pieces was felt even at the heart of the European avant garde in 1976, with György Ligeti pausing in the middle of writing his opera Le Grand Macabre to write a short piece for two pianos, Self Portrait with Reich and Riley (with Chopin in the Background).... Something was also happening in the Soviet bloc. Estonian composer Arvo Pärt had been silent for a number of years, in a creative crisis brought about by his alienation from the Soviet authorities, frustration with the European avant garde and attempts to reconcile his creativity with his religious faith. But in September 1976, he broke his silence with a tiny piano miniature, Für Alina, which signalled a huge change: this was a music that was pared down, spare, meditative and influenced by the chants and bells of the Gregorian Church...."
She takes a good picture: six forgotten female pioneers of photography - article by Sarah Crompton in The Guardian. "[Minna] Keene is one of six female photographers in the Tate show ['Painting with Light: Art and Photography from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Modern Age'], included on merit for their relevance to the theme. With the exception of Julia Margaret Cameron, all are less recognised than their male counterparts. Yet in their day they were exhibited and acclaimed. ... In the late Victorian period, photography was an attractive option for women. Although most came from comfortable, well-to-do homes, the fact was that any woman with enough money to purchase the equipment and chemicals they needed could train themself and get started. It was much more difficult to take up painting."
Dreamsnake by Vonda N McIntyre - review by Eric Brown in The Guardian. "The heroine of Vonda N McIntyre’s Dreamsnake (Jo Fletcher, £9.99) is a healer named Snake, who travels a far-future post-apocalyptic Earth aiding the sick and dying of the world’s many tribes. Her three snakes have been genetically modified to provide vaccines and medicines, and when one of the creatures, the alien dreamsnake of the title, is killed, Snake embarks on a picaresque adventure in search of its replacement. The power of the story lies as much in the lucid, understated prose as the depiction of a future society split into a thousand schisms as Snake deals with love, prejudice and a host of moral and ethical dilemmas that characterise the fractured world. First published in 1978 and winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, Dreamsnake is a beautiful achievement."
Whatever next? How plot grips us, from Dickens to Line of Duty - article by John Mullan in The Guardian. "Plot is not just a sequence of connected events (in this sense, every TV drama or novel equally has a plot). It is something rarer: the unfolding of a hidden design. Plot involves the laying of clues, the implicit promise to the reader or viewer that the true significance of what we read or see is not self-evident, but will eventually be revealed. A good plot exploits not just suspense, but also a kind of retrospective curiosity. When we know that a story has a plot we find ourselves asking not so much, 'What will happen next?' as, 'What has already happened?' The hidden design has, we trust, been contrived by an author, so when we enjoy a plot we are enjoying being manipulated by him or her. Perhaps this is why such enjoyment has often been thought suspect.... Plot is what stops narrative being just one thing after another. Plotless stories threaten to be endless. So those American TV dramas that, if successful, are destined for box sets may have resounding endings but lack the capacity to fulfil a design. They are designed to be endless – or rather, to be ended when actors or producers become bored, or the appetite of viewers seems sated.... You can see why serious novelists became suspicious of plots: they subjugate reality to a plan; they require that the author be a trusted manipulator. Yet novel readers have never relinquished their delight in a good plot. Plot activates our confidence in design, our faith that the creator of a narrative knows what he or she is doing from the first moment. Which is why a carefully contrived plot is most satisfying when – as with Bleak House or The Killing – the material is darkest and the characters themselves most perplexed, and why that satisfaction can be as deep as any other response to fiction."
Philip Pullman: Why I love comics - interview by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. "Why are the British are so queasy about comics? 'I think it comes from Pope Gregory the Great in 580 something,' says Pullman unexpectedly. 'He said, what words are for the reader, pictures are for those who cannot read. But what that pronouncement did was to set up a hierarchy of esteem, so to speak: if you were clever you had words; if you’re not very clever you have pictures. That has remained almost unchanged for over 1,500 years.' That can’t be the whole story. After all, in the US, Japan and France graphic novels are popular, and even respectable. What’s our problem? Maybe the puritans had something to do with it, Pullman suggests. 'The iconoclasm and the destroying of the statues and stained glass. The sense that these are vain fripperies and we should go back to the purity of language without pictures. I’m just guessing.'”
Why the arrival, not the journey, matters - blog post by John Naughton, reproducing his talk to the launch of the Journal of Cyber Policy. "If, as now seems obvious, the Internet is a [General Purpose Technology], then our societies are only at the beginning of a journey of adaptation, not the end. And this may surprise some people because the Internet is actually rather old technology....So you’d have thought that our society would have figured out the significance of the network by now. Sadly, not. And that’s not because we’re short of information and data about it. On the contrary, we are awash with the stuff. Our problem is that we don’t, as a culture, seem to understand it. We remain in that blissful state that Manuel Castells calls “informed Bewilderment”. So a powerful force is loose in our societies and we don’t really understand it. Why is that?... Maybe [one] reason why we are taken aback by the rise of the Internet is because we have been so dazzled by the technology that we have been infected by the technological determinism that is the prevailing ideology in the reality distortion field known as Silicon Valley. The folks there really do believe that technology drives history... But technology is only one of the forces that drives history because it doesn’t exist — or come into being — in a vacuum. It exists in a social, cultural, political, economic and ideological context, and it is the resultant of these multifarious forces that determines the direction of travel.... Focussing exclusively on the technology creates other blind spots too. For example, it renders us insensitive to the extent to which the Internet — like all major technologies — was socially constructed. This is how, for example, surveillance became “the business model of the Internet” — as the security expert Bruce Schneier once put it. In this case the root cause was the interaction between a key affordance of the technology — the power of network effects — and Internet users’ pathological reluctance to pay for online services. Since the way to succeed commercially was to 'get big fast' and since the quickest way to do that was to offer ‘free’ services, the business model that emerged was one in which users’ personal data and their data-trails were harvested and auctioned to advertisers and ad-brokers."
Exhausted? It’s time to focus - column by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "It’s been known for some time that people share things on social media – a lot – without reading them first.... The writer Alex Balk recently compared Facebook to 'the coffee table on which people placed their unread copies of Thomas Piketty’s Capital': when we share, we’re often really focused on promoting a certain image. But a new study goes further: apparently, sharing things, or just having the option to share, undermines the ability to digest and remember them. (Participants were twice as likely to make errors in a comprehension test.) When your attention is partly occupied by thoughts of how you’ll share or discuss what you’re reading, it’s a distraction from actually reading it – made worse, presumably, if your newsfeed’s also scrolling by in the corner of your eye. Social media is like belonging to a book club, but only ever reading novels while you’re at the book club, two glasses of cabernet the worse for wear."
What makes bad writing bad? - article by Toby Litt in The Guardian. "Bad writing is mainly boring writing. It can be boring because it is too confused or too logical, or boring because it is hysterical or lethargic, or boring because nothing really happens.... Bad writers continue to write badly because they have many reasons – in their view very good reasons – for writing in the way they do. Writers are bad because they cleave to the causes of writing badly. Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self. The person who will admire it first and last and most is the writer herself.... Bad writing is written defensively; good writing is a way of making the self as vulnerable as possible.... Often, the bad writer will feel that they have a particular story they want to tell. It may be a story passed on to them by their grandmother or it may be something that happened to them when they were younger. Until they’ve told this particular story, they feel they can’t move on. But because the material is so close to them they can’t mess around with it enough to learn how writing works. And, ultimately, they lack the will to betray the material sufficiently to make it true.... Your friends and family will love your tricks, because they love you. But try busking those tricks on the street. Try busking them alongside a magician who has been doing it for 10 years, earning their living. When they are watching a magician, people don’t want to say, 'Well done.' They want to say, 'Wow.'"
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