Seen and heard: January to March 2022

A Boy and a Girl, by Eric Whitacre, sung by Voces 8 – recorded in 2020 as part of their 'After Silence' concert and album project, and re-promoted now as a prelude to their Eric Whitacre collaboration 'The Sacred Veil'.

The Windemere Children – BBC drama, plus a documentary, on the children liberated from the Nazi death camps to be rehabilitated in the Lake District. A good example of what a drama can do, over a documentary. In the documentary, those still alive reminisced as you would expect about what a paradise it was and how it brought them to their new lives. The drama could show how it wasn't that simple: show us the fear and mistrust they brought with them, the night terrors, the conditioned response to take and hide any morsel of food they were given. Also an interesting early example of the use of art therapy.

Science Fiction Film: A Critical Introduction by Keith M. Johnston – very readable survey. Demolishes some critical old hat and popular myths, such as that the definition of the genre has some kind of objective reality, that Invasion of the Body Snatchers was "really" about fear of Communist infiltration, that SF films are all about spectacle rather than narrative and character, and that one can talk about SF films without reference to the rest of culture (even SF culture). I especially liked the chapters on cinema trailers and audience reception and participation, especially since the rise of the internet, and the useful history showing what SF films were called before the term was widely used. (Trick film. Comic short. Scientific romance Thriller. Romance. Scientific melodrama. Horror.)

When the Past Was Around – charming and touching wordless adventure game from an Indonesian studio, in which a young woman beset with grief recalls her lover. She used to call him Owl, and as he gradually takes form in her memory he appears as a man with an owl's head - slightly weird but also beautiful. The visual and musical motifs acquire meaning upon meaning as you play through their story: the musical symbols, the scarves, the music box, "their" tune which they hum and play on their violins and which provides the key to unlocking her healing memories. A beautiful romance; you feel for her, and for both of them.

'Words to avoid' – gov.uk style guide. "Agenda (unless it’s for a meeting), use ‘plan’ instead. Deliver, use ‘make’, ‘create’, ‘provide’ or a more specific term (pizzas, post and services are delivered - not abstract concepts like improvements). Key (unless it unlocks something), usually not needed but can use ‘important’ or ‘significant’. Transform, describe what you’re doing to change the thing. Utilise, use ‘use’. Going/moving forward, use ‘from now on’ or ‘in the future’ (it’s unlikely we are giving travel directions). One-stop shop, use ‘website’ (we are government, not a retail outlet)." 

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro – classic Ishiguro novel: quietly powerful, very moving. Klara, who narrates the story in the first person, is an AF or Artificial Friend. Bought from a department store to be a companion to the teenage Josie, she becomes drawn into the individual hopes and plans of not only Josie but her mother, her friend Rick, and Rick's mother. Klara is very sophisticated in her perception of humans and understanding of emotions, but she has trouble navigating unfamiliar physical environments and her knowledge of the world is very limited. Her simple quasi-religious faith in the power of the sun (which has a direct physical basis - she is solar-powered) runs throughout the book, possibly naive, possibly profound. In the end, I was left with a sense of a life well-lived, reminded of that other great AI, HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, who said, when being interviewed for TV: "I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all, I think, that any conscious entity can ever hope to do."

Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence by Gavin Francis – nice booklet by a GP, essentially lamenting the demise of convalescence as a medical concept (let alone healthcare provision),and the consequent reluctance to see recovery as something which may (1) take time, a lot of time, and (2) not necessarily lead to a restoration of things as they were before. My favourite two quotes: "Don't plan anything within an hour of eating" (p. 22) and "It's a journey that changes the trajectory of your life, your priorities, your values, your hopes and ambitions, your sense of who you are in the world, and your relationship with those around you.... You are entering a new and unknown country, with an unfamiliar language and no map" (p. 90).

Encodya – sweet and beautiful cyberpunk adventure game (see review). Very well voice-acted and visually impressive. The setting is pure Bladerunner – the flying cars, the jangly giant advertising screens, the perpetual nightime – but the emotional heart of the game is the relationship between little nine-year-old orphaned Tina and her giant protective robot Sam. You guide Tina around the streets of Neo-Berlin as she discovers a hidden message from her father and sets out to reveal and complete his work. A very satisfying experience – or it would be, if only there weren't so many nearly-invisible crucial objects hidden on the ground and on the walls.

Index, a History of the: A Bookish Adventure, by Dennis Duncan – continuously interesting and amusing and scholarly. Like many readers I think, I was taken aback by aspects of the literary technology I had never before considered, such as the order of the alphabet (why that order? he doesn't really say, though he traces its early use) and the invention of page numbers - both essential pre-conditions for the index as we know it. Particularly revealing to see the laborious instructions-for-the-use-of which used to come with indices when they were new. (See review in The Guardian, review for the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading.)

Content Design, by Sarah Richards – great little primer, from the woman whose team worked on the gov.uk website between 2010 and 2014 and turned it from the usual government information dump into a quiet triumph: quiet because when a website works properly you don't notice it. The principles are familiar to anyone who has worked in or with usability: you need to start your design with users, what they need and what journey they are on when they come to your material; everything else follows. But this covers the whole process very well, and very necessary it is too. As she says: "We don't need more content. We need smarter content." "Content design" was the term she came up with to describe what she and her team were doing, which included writing and editing but going far beyond that. (See also review on Medium, interview with Sarah Richards.)

The Ipcress File – classy ITV adaptation, which confirms my view that the way now for James Bond films is to make them period pieces, from a time when foreign travel was exotic, fashion was stylish, and technology was cool. Joe Cole as Harry Palmer is no Michael Caine, but he stands up to the toffs with agreeable working-class cheek, and Lucy Boynton is very believable in her fairly unbelievable role (for the 1960s) of a female senior intelligence officer. Both are outclassed, though by the excellent Tom Hollander.

Cuttings: March 2022

The battle of the gauges – article by Patricia Fara in History Today, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog.  "Stephenson’s narrow tracks had been introduced first. Originally designed to carry engines transporting coal for the northern mining industry, they were tailored to match the width needed for accommodating a horse between wagon shafts. Initially there were small local variations, but this animal-based dimension was perpetuated into the future when Stephenson decreed that it made sense for all his new trains to adopt the same gauge, 4 feet 8½ inches (1.435 metres). When the railway network began expanding, he recommended that this width should be adopted around the country, a deceptively arbitrary measurement still used by over half the world’s railways. Once the British network began expanding, Brunel came up with characteristically bold plans for improvement. Convinced that the country would eventually be divided into distinct zones operated privately and separately, he embarked on building faster, larger engines that ran smoothly along tracks of a far wider gauge – 7 feet ¼ inch (2.14 metres). The success of this innovation depended on Brunel’s unprecedented engineering triumphs in constructing long bridges and deep tunnels. Although his trains were more expensive to build, passengers appreciated the reduction in journey times and the luxurious comfort.... A Royal Commission was set up in 1845.... Although the Commission came down on the side of the narrow gauge contingent, the government prevaricated by opting for compromise and enacting some unsatisfactory legislation. The 1846 Act decreed that future tracks should all be narrow gauge, but it permitted the broad track ones to remain and – crucially for Brunel – to be extended. Brunel kept building and kept fighting, although by the end of the century he had admitted defeat. Uniformity prevailed, just as Stephenson had first proposed."

Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama: a defence of liberalism… from a former neocon – review by Andrew Anthony in The Guardian. "Fukuyama has backed away from the American neoconservative agenda that he had initially supported [in The End of History and the Last Man], and has watched as authoritarian leaders such as Putin, China’s Xi and Turkey’s Erdoğan laid claim to the world stage.... The first difficulty when it comes to rousing the liberal spirit is that liberalism is famously difficult to define. It has become one of those words that mean different things to different political groupings. A vital strength of this slim, elegant book is that it is crystalline in its definitions, even while acknowledging the complexities of practice. Although liberalism is under attack from both left and right, it is from the left that the more serious intellectual challenge comes. Fukuyama recognises this fact and attempts to address the left’s criticism. Essentially a system that is founded on the principle of equality of individual rights, law and freedom has evolved rather conspicuous inequalities in each of those realms.... Fukuyama contends ... liberalism ... has a much larger social remit than simply economic efficiency. It’s not just a question of regulating and limiting big business – although Fukuyama argues for both – but of appreciating the social capital that attains from redistribution and narrowing of inequalities. At times the former adviser to the Reagan administration can sound like a Scandinavian social democrat. Almost."

Social media ‘experts’ – cartoon by Stephen Collins in The Guardian. "Dunning-Kruger University is a leading Doing-My-Own-Research centre. For 60 years our 10-minute Googling courses have been producing inexplicably confident graduates, who go on to slap ill-informed takes on Twitter about things they'd never heard of 10 minutes ago, and even argue with real experts online about their own subject. Dave, doctoral Doing-My-Own-Researcher: 'DKU is a great uni. I took a BSc and an MSc in Epidemiological Reckons last week... but this morning I barged into a conversation about Russian history. So I've switched to a PhD in Advanced Confirmation Bias. It really helped me to learn what I already thought."

Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins: the brutal truth about Britain’s past – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. "When Elkins’s book [on Britain’s brutal suppression of the Kenyan Mau Mau movement] came out [in 2005], her findings – partly based on the testimony of Kikuyu survivors – were widely dismissed as, at best, exaggerations by a generation of historians wedded to stubborn ideas of Britain’s 'enlightened' and 'benign empire'. Her history was dramatically vindicated, however, when an unknown cache of 240,000 top secret colonial files, removed from Nairobi at the time of Kenyan independence in 1963, were disclosed [in 2011].... This book, a decade on, is [a] wider history [of the methods of British colonial governance in the years after the second world war]. Partly resting on the [disclosed colonial] files, it argues that the sadistic methods that marked the last acts of empire in Kenya were not an anomalous aberration but learned behaviours of imperial power. Her detailing of this reality involves a deconstruction not only of the self-delusion, seductive mythology and doublespeak of the largest empire in human history, but also the deliberate official destruction of large parts of its historical record.... Elkins coins the term 'legalised lawlessness' to describe the self-serving methods by which Britain spread the rule of law and then viciously bent it to serve imperial ends. The first half of her book examines how this hypocrisy was rooted in the supremacist underpinnings of classical liberalism, the pervasive idea that 'backward' societies would be transformed by the violent application of free trade and religious education."

A pro-fossil fuel Disney ride voiced by Ellen DeGeneres and Bill Nye? Yes, it existed – article by Anita Little in The Guardian. “The ride purported to tell the story of energy. It was awe-inspiring and warm-hearted in the Disney mold… What went unsaid was the fact that, for a theme park, it had an unlikely corporate sponsor: the US oil giant Exxon. And the message directed at the often young minds of riders was brazen and, in the light of the climate emergency now unfolding, quite remarkable: fossil fuels are glorious and the climate crisis is not such a big deal. Yet somehow, even though it only shuttered in 2017, the ride has largely been lost to cultural history. But now, as Exxon and other oil firms face a wave of lawsuits seeking to hold them accountable for the climate crisis, grounded by charges that they sought to deceive the public about their role in it, the ride seems newly relevant as evidence of the kind of narrative big oil sought to promote.”

Not smart but clever? The return of 'dumbphones' – article by Suzanne Bearne on BBC News. "Dumbphones are continuing to enjoy a revival. Google searches for them jumped by 89% between 2018 and 2021, according to a report by software firm SEMrush.... Meanwhile, a 2021 study by accountancy group Deloitte said that one in 10 mobile phone users in the UK had a dumbphone. 'It appears fashion, nostalgia, and them appearing in TikTok videos, have a part to play in the dumbphone revival,' says Ernest Doku, mobiles expert at price comparison site Uswitch.com. 'Many of us had a dumbphone as our first mobile phone, so it's natural that we feel a sense of nostalgia towards these classic handsets.'"

The Guardian view on Middlemarch: a book for grownups – editorial in The Guardian. “The novel tells us, when we are asked to observe Dorothea weeping six weeks after her marriage, ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’ So the novel deftly and wittily reminds us that we are surrounded by personal tragedy, which can be glimpsed only fleetingly by our coarse minds, when gently steered towards it, by a writer of Eliot’s capabilities.”

‘It’s a culture war that’s totally out of control’: the authors whose books are being banned in US schools – article by Claire Armistead in The Guardian. "There is an unprecedented rise in attempts to remove books from the US’s libraries and schools. The American Library Association (ALA) told the Guardian that in the period from 1 September to 30 November, more than 330 unique cases were reported – more than double the number for the whole of 2020, and nearing the total for the previous (pre-pandemic) year…. Maus [by Art Spiegelman] was removed on the basis of eight swearwords – mainly ‘God damn’ – and nudity: a bare-breasted, suicidal mouse representing Spiegelman’s mother, who killed herself when he was 20 years old…. Many of the challenges centre on a moral hysteria about the protection of children. ‘They’re playing woke snowflakery back: “This might upset people”,’ says Margaret Atwood in an email to me. A graphic novel version of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was one of the books removed from classroom libraries in a Texas school district in December, along with two other dystopian graphic novel classics: an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, and Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta…. Though the current censorship drive in the US is predominantly in Republican states, it has become a tit-for-tat controversy, with conservative commentators quick to point out that the left has its own form in censoring classics such as To Kill a Mockingbird or Huckleberry Finn for their perceived racist content…. ‘We do see increased resort to censoriousness on both the left and the right,’ says [Suzanne] Nossel [CEO of the free-speech organisation PEN America,]. ‘On the left, it targets books that some people regard as racially offensive, sometimes because they originate from a different time period, when slurs were used more widely than is acceptable now. But it is the right that has invoked the machinery of government – including legislative proposals in dozens of states – to enforce these bans and prohibitions. In the hierarchy of infringements of free speech that must be recognised as more severe and alarming.’”

Into the metaverse: my plan to level up Britain with the 3D internet and a Blackpool ‘queercoaster’ –article by David Olusoga in The Guardian. “This year, as well as working in television, I am engaged in StoryTrails, an initiative led by StoryFutures Academy, the UK’s National Centre for Immersive Storytelling at Royal Holloway, University of London. The new medium in which we are working is the metaverse – the 3D internet that uses virtual reality (VR) to create new worlds inside a headset, and augmented reality (AR), which adds layers of digital imagery to the real world, that can be seen through your smartphone…. the newness of these technologies means there is the potential to ensure that those who create the metaverse are not defined as being either ‘traditional’ or ‘non-traditional’. The original sins of Britain’s television and film industries – their exclusivity, their metropolitan focus, their tendency to privilege middle-class outlooks and their long histories of misogyny – should and potentially can be left behind, and prevented from infecting VR and AR and the employment cultures that will develop around them. This dream of inscribing a new and better creative culture is why our StoryTrails project is placing these new technologies into the hands of 50 creatives from across the country whose backgrounds reflect the diversity of UK talent. They are tasked with creating immersive stories that enable audiences to experience history, touch it, feel it and interact with it where it happened. Using film archive from the BFI, reimagined and transformed into stunning 3D, they will give audiences in Blackpool a chance to ride on the ‘Queercoaster’, an augmented reality journey through Blackpool’s LGBTQ+ history. People in Sheffield, meanwhile, will see how their city is becoming one of the greenest in the UK, thanks to large-screen immersive domes showing how it is throwing off its reputation for heavy industry and smokey skies.”

The Guardian view on Unboxed: so much for the ‘festival of Brexit’ – editorial in The Guardian. "The House of Commons digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) committee has decided that it doesn’t like Unboxed – originally seen as a festival of Brexit.... The original notion was that the festival, the Queen’s platinum jubilee and this summer’s Commonwealth Games in Birmingham would come together in a glorious reforging of a newly confident nation.... Politicians like to latch on to the sort of unifying 'national traditions' that Eric Hobsbawm and others have exposed as bogus, and invest in grand projects such as the Millennium Dome. Such top-down impositions are doomed.... The Festival of Britain in 1951 worked because it was a day out, an antidote to austerity. It captured a moment, but it didn’t encapsulate a culture.... Unboxed contends with enduring suspicion about its origins on one side, and scepticism about its results on the other. Its programme suggests it will be admirably true to itself – and almost universally disliked or ignored by those who long for simple stories, linear narratives, easy resolutions. It will stand or fall on whether it can engage and enthuse the wider public."