Cuttings: March 2016

Leonard by William Shatner: the secrets of Kirk’s 50-year friendship with Spock - review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "It wasn’t simply the two men’s contrasting appearance that defined their early career options ('choices' would imply far too much autonomy – they took everything they were offered). Shatner is excellent on the way that he and Nimoy’s story also turns on the distinction between their acting styles. Shatner, who had trained under Tyrone Guthrie at the Stratford Shakespeare festival in Ontario, was always an outside-in player, fluent in the kind of stagey gestural acting that you associate with prewar Olivier. By the time he got to perform Kirk as an essentially Shakespearean hero, brave but given to soul-wrenching soliloquies, Shatner had yanked the English language out of any natural rhythm into a wilfully bumpy pattern of pauses, bunching and sudden rills. Nimoy, by contrast, was 'method' through and through. He started from the inside and worked outwards, and the result was a kind of mannered naturalism. Fine if you were doing Clifford Odets on Broadway, but slightly laborious if you were playing a character who could best be summed up by a pair of latex rabbit ears and a slathering of Max Factor 'Chinese Yellow'. Still, it worked. Shatner’s scenery-chewing allowed Nimoy to retreat into the internalised drama of Spock, a creature caught between his rational Vulcan brain and his messy human heart."

Performing King Lear by Jonathan Croall: ‘you have to rip your heart out’ - review by Simon Callow in The Guardian. "Every one of the actors interviewed in the book is exercised and sometimes defeated by the question of what to make of the astounding scene of the king’s arrival and his abrupt call to business... Is he a benevolent dictator? A capricious tyrant? A foolish old man? Is the division of the kingdom a good idea, or a deranged one? How mad, in fact, is he? How powerful? How old? Almost immediately, he embarks on an interrogation of the daughters to whom he is bequeathing the segments of his kingdom: how much do they love him? Are these questions an impulse of the moment? Or do they stem from insecurity, vanity, profound calculation? Two sisters vie with each other in protestations of love, one refuses to answer. Are Goneril and Regan wickedly manipulative? Or are they doing their best with a barmy old dad? Is Cordelia principled, or a prig? Or are all these questions irrelevant?"

The Life Project: what makes some people happy, healthy and successful and others not? - article by Helen Pearson in The Guardian. "In March 1946, scientists recorded the birth of almost every British baby born in one, cold week. They have been following thousands of them ever since, in what has become the longest running major study of human development in the world. These people – who turn 70 over the next two weeks − are some of the best studied people on the planet.... Often, the observations that scientists have made through these studies have not made for comfortable reading: they have revealed the persistent inequalities in society, and how the obesity epidemic has hit us hard. As one scientist told me, the birth cohorts hold a mirror up to Britain, and sometimes we don’t like what we see."

The death of the digital native: four provocations -  article by Donna Lanclos from her talk at Digifest. ("In these four provocations, anthropologist Donna Lanclos argues that the notion of the 'digital native' is bogus and disempowering, that pandering to student expectations can backfire, universities should be open by default, and our attitude to educational technology needs a rethink.") "The 'digital native' is a generational metaphor. It's a linguistic metaphor. It's a ridiculous metaphor. It's the notion that there is a particular generation of people who are fundamentally unknowable and incomprehensible.... The workshops we're developing with Jisc are around helping people to visualise their practices so that if they do want to change, at least they know where they're starting from. It's so much more empowering a metaphor than native/immigrant. It's about what you do and why you do it, not about who you are as a person. It takes some of the value judgements out of descriptions of modes of behaviour."

The Game of Fibble - blog post by Ursula K. Le Guin. "I present the rules of Fibble, as invented and developed by E. and C. Le Guin and L. Howell, and named by U. Le Guin.... [1] Two to four players, the more the merrier. [2] The only words allowed are words that (so far as anybody there knows) do not exist. [3] If another player recognizes that a word you made is a real English word, you have to take it apart and make one that isn’t. [4] After you have placed this word on the [standard Scrabble] board, you must pronounce and define it to the other players.... [A few examples of words and definitions:] ESWOX: a kind of footgear worn by the ZOMOI, a warlike people of the Albanian hinterland. TORG: a piece of leg armor worn with eswox. PURPODED: past tense of the verb purpode, to intend to do something which blows up in your face. FLOTT: a wet fart. LORPINE, adj.: lying around on your face not doing anything The KOUDHIAD: the great epic of the grasslands, recounting the deeds of the hero Koudh. NAGNEET, beloved of the hero Koudh, a beautiful maiden but ill-natured. ANAGNEET, sister of Nagneet, less beautiful but much nicer."

Beyond email: could startup Slack change the way you work? - article by Jemima Kiss in The Guardian. "Slack is part of a wave of technologies trying to change the way we communicate, enabling continuous, fluid, more natural conversations to replace restrictive and time-consuming emails. Already, more than 2.3 million people use it every day, sending 1.5bn messages every month. ... Despite being founded by four white men, Slack has defied Silicon Valley’s self-reinforcing recruitment patterns to create probably the most diverse company in tech’s top tier. It feels like a company run by grownups; there is no ping pong at its San Francisco HQ, and its brand of conscientious, thoughtful culture has attracted staff such as [black female ex-Google employee] Erica Baker."

What do Islamist extremists believe? Salafi-Jihadism by Shiraz Maher – review by Patrick French in The Guardian. "During the 1990s, fighters and revolutionaries from diverse theatres – the Algerian civil war, Bosnia, Chechnya, Tunisia, the Afghan victory over the Soviets, the crushed Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – were looking for a new ideological direction. 'The violence of groups like al-Qaida and associated movements is neither irrational nor whimsical,' Maher states. 'For every act of violence they will offer some form of reference to scriptural sources.' ... In every sphere of life, the Islamist worldview was transmuting and the quietists were eclipsed. As the French academic Olivier Roy has written, this was as much about the Islamisation of radicalism as it was about the radicalisation of Islam. Militant Sunni groups reinterpreted rules on warfare to develop what Maher calls a 'novel doctrine of vicarious liability,' enabling them to target individual citizens of democracies, since these citizens had chosen their governments and were therefore responsible for their decisions. Muslims were told they must, in an existentialist way, take action if they were not to break their covenant with God. Democracy was presented not as a system to safeguard the rights of individuals, but as a damaging creed that separated religion from public life: divine sovereignty must be secured within an earthly political system. The idea of Muslim exclusivity expanded in new ways, and militants were instructed not to accept the support of unbelievers. Since the US was 'the central base of corruption and moral decay', those who excused its actions were apostates."

Blood, Met and tears: the homeless singers who discovered a Passion - article based on diary entries by Penny Woolcock in The Guardian. "January 2014. Streetwise Opera’s weekly workshops are open to anybody who is homeless or has experienced homelessness, as well as members of the wider community. They are run like any amateur choir, with professional workshop leaders, small public events and a big show every couple of years. Performers turn up to sing and not to discuss their problems – a revolutionary concept that I have grown to love and respect. It was Matt Peacock, founder and CEO, who asked whether I would like to direct Bach’s St Matthew Passion with Streetwise in collaboration with The Sixteen, one of the world’s greatest early music ensembles...." [See recording of the Easter 2016 production at http://streetwiseopera.org/films/streetwise-opera-and-sixteens-passion.]