Blackwell Epiphany - final adventure game in the Blackwell sequence. A strong and fitting end, though unlike some other players I didn't cry or come close to it at the denouement. Deserving of its classic status, and a case study of what can be achieved with a relatively simple game engine and some very good writing.
David Mitchell, Thinking About It Only Makes it Worse - fun collection of essays from his Observer column, with witty and genuinely perceptive angles on politics, popular culture, and life in general.
Partners in Crime - or Tommy and Tuppence, as I think most people are calling it. Very agreeable BBC drama series featuring Agatha Christie's husband-and-wife amateur detectives, with David Walliams and Jessica Rayne presenting just the right hint of camp. Particularly nice to see the character Uncle Tony, who is something hush-hush in the secret service, played by James Fleet from The Vicar of Dibley. If running the secret service is what Hugo Horton did when he grew up, it could explain a thing or two.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.- new film. We had low expectations, given the poor reviews, but found it surprisingly acceptable. Henry Cavill wears a suit well and delivers the appropriate charm for Napoleon Solo, and though Arnie Hammer is an entirely different Illya Kuryakin from David McCallum (he's much taller for one thing, and more angry) the banter between the two of the is top class, and so is the sixties cool (Italian fashion houses, motor racing, yachts on the Mediterranean). Hugh Grant is supremely avuncular as Mr Waverley, contrasting with the oppressive parents of their own pre-U.N.C.L.E. secret services, paving the way for a franchise which I for one would be very happy to see. One of the ideas for re-booting the James Bond franchise, before Daniel Craig gave it a shot of adrenaline, was to return Bond to his historical roots, re-setting him in the Cold War of the '50s and '60s. Well, U.N.C.L.E. has got there first.
Danny and the Human Zoo - BBC TV drama by and loosely based on the early life of Lenny Henry, taking a few liberties with the biographical facts to tell what I guess was the emotional truth of his story: about what he had to do to fit in, first as a kid bullied at school (impressions – the same ones that all the impressionists did, but as he said, “in colour”) and then an aspiring young entertainer (joining the Black and White Minstrel Show), from which he had to break away from to find his own voice as a comedian and now a fine actor.
Alina Ibragimova Plays Bach – a pair of BBC promenade concerts. Some of the most sensational music ever written for the violin, stunningly played by a small woman alone on the vast stage of the Albert Hall. So intense, we could only listen to one at a time. However did she manage three in a concert, with the remaining three a few days later?
Thursday 17 September 2015
Wednesday 2 September 2015
Cuttings: August 2015
Shhhhhhh: an exploration of silence - review of BBC Radio 4 programme 'Shhhhhhh' by Hannah Verdier in The Guardian. "Silence isn’t something you hear much on the radio.... That dead air, the interview gone wrong, the pause of doom. So Lucy Powell’s hour-long exploration of silence, Shhhhhhh, was welcome and compelling. Powell admits to being 'enamoured and perplexed' by silence. Her fascination began when a zen master set her a kōan... Her quest continues in this thought-provoking documentary, which smoothly leaps from one theory to the next with great enthusiasm.... In the increasingly noisy world, the contrast between everyday buzz and the nearest we ever get to silence is sharp. It’s powerful: from a teenage sulk to the two minutes’ silence of remembrance. 'It is the stuff of comedy and the end of tragedy. It is as full of meaning and almost as various as speech,' concludes Powell. Happiness, sadness, peace and mortality: who would have thought silence could provoke such a broad investigation? Her passion for silence is contagious, inspiring listeners to switch off and go and find a quiet space of their own. Shhhhhhh!"
Yes Please by Amy Poehler: a "non-book" - review by Laura Miller in The Guardian. "Yes Please arrives on printed pages sandwiched between cardboard covers, so technically, it is a book. However, it's the type of title the publishing business sometimes refers to as a 'non-book', meaning that it has few of the qualities bookish people like to think of as exmplifying the form. It is not a coherent, well-knit piece of writing organised around a central narrative or argument. It is hard to imagine anyone making sense of parts of it, let alone wanting to read the whole thing, if they aren't already familiar with Amy Poehler's work in film, TV and improv comedy. It is meant for those people who, on hearing Poehler's name, explain, 'Oh, I love her!' Not that there aren't many reasons to love Poehler, who manages to be very funny and fundamentally decent at the same time..."
I believe in an authority greater than David Cameron’s. Am I an extremist? - 'Loose canon' column by Giles Fraser in The Guardian. "The Church of England is the longest-running prevent strategy in history. If not from its inception, then certainly from the end of the English civil war, the big idea of the C of E was to prevent radicalisation – precisely the sort of radicalisation that led to religious people butchering each other throughout the 1630s and 40s. ... Increasingly suspicious of theological dispute, the idea was to kill off God – or at least God-talk – with religion. ...Religion itself – going to church and so on – was reclaimable as a part of the much-needed project of national togetherness.... But God had to be kept out of it as much as possible. ...And then along comes Islam – and, thankfully, it disrupts this absurd game and refuses to play by the rules. Its practitioners want to talk about God, sex and politics rather than mortgages, school places and the latest Boden catalogue. ... But David Cameron’s whole attack upon 'non-violent extremism', his upping the ante on the Prevent agenda, is an attempt to replay that clapped-out C of E strategy of stopping people talking about God in a way that might have social or political consequences."
Inside Out: what universities can learn from Pixar about emotions - article in The Conversation by Emma Jones. "In Inside Out, it is emotions which are guiding Riley’s every waking moment and even influencing her dreams.... But for centuries, stemming from the work of philosophers such as Plato and Descartes, emotions have been viewed largely as a series of reckless impulses that were unthinking and potentially destructive..... If Inside Out’s producer, Pete Docter, had subscribed to this theory, the five emotions would have been relegated to a small broom cupboard in the far corner of 'headquarters' and the console guiding Riley would have been firmly in the control of a large, overbearing figure known as cognition or reason....Inside Out follows more recent philosophical and scientific thinking in ascribing a value and importance to emotions.... However, the world of higher education has not yet caught up with contemporary thinking on emotions. There is still a tendency for individual disciplines and departments to focus on developing their own academic character and traditions with emotions viewed as belonging solely in the pastoral domain."
Headings Are Pick-Up Lines: 5 Tips for Writing Headlines That Convert - article on Nielsen/Norman Group website by Hoa Loranger. "A headline is often the first piece of content people read. And often it is the ONLY thing people read. If you want to make your encounters with people to be successful, make sure to write solid headlines.... Below are 5 tips for writing engaging headlines:
1. Make sure the headline works out of context.... 2. Tell readers something useful.... 3. Don't succumb to cute or faddish vocabulary.... 4. Omit nonessential words.... 5. Front-load headings with strong keywords."
American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism by Matthew Avery Sutton - review by Nicholae Guyatt in The Guardian. "Christian fundamentalism was born in the big cities of Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, funded by wealthy businessmen such as Lyman Stewart, a California oil tycoon who bankrolled The Fundamentals (1910-15), the book series that gave the movement its name.... The central paradox of Sutton’s book, which he acknowledges but never quite resolves, is why anyone expecting Armageddon would waste time on politics. For more than a century, prophecy adherents have largely agreed on the end times sequence: war in the Middle East, world government and the rise of the antichrist will mark a seven-year period known as the tribulation. Jews will suffer particular torture, but will ultimately find refuge in Christ. Evangelicals can afford to be sanguine about this because they think God will teleport them to heaven just before things turn bad.... The idea of impending doom has always allowed outsiders to make a virtue of their marginalisation. We can see this in the in the 20s and 30s, when American evangelicals struggled to break into the political mainstream. It seems less true of the period after the second world war as Christian fundamentalism found a foothold in the Republican party. The most iconic postwar evangelicals – Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson – occasionally predicted that the end times were approaching, but focused their energies on mending a broken world. The religious right rejected the idea that vice and godlessness would sweep the US towards apocalypse, looking to mobilise a 'moral majority' behind conservative principles."
Return: A Palestinian Memoir by Ghada Karmi - review by Avi Schalim in The Guardian. "In 2005, Karmi returned to her homeland not as a tourist but as a consultant to the ministry of media and communications of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. She wanted to be at the heart of things, to be part of the community, to make her contribution to state-building.... Karmi’s entire life had centred on the fundamental facts of the catastrophe of 1948, from which all else was derivative. By her own estimation, she is one of the custodians of Palestinian history. So it came as a bit of a shock to discover that for the Palestinians in the occupied territories, people like her are irrelevant, far removed from the immediate reality of the extraordinarily harsh conditions imposed on them by the Israelis, their army and their settlements. It was not that the past was another country. But the locals were more preoccupied with the daily struggle for survival against a brutal oppressor than with the grand Palestinian narrative of the past."
‘I start each VI Warshawski book convinced I can’t do it’ - interview with Sara Paretsky by Sarah Crown in The Guardian. "The year was 1971, and Paretsky was heavily involved in second-wave feminism; so enraged was she by Chandler’s depiction of women that she vowed to 'write a crime novel ... that would turn the tables on the dominant views of women in fiction and in society'. With the 1982 publication of Indemnity Only, in which her tough-minded, big-hearted, fiercely self-reliant private investigator VI Warshawski strides on stage, she did just that; five years later, she instigated the social change she had dreamed of by founding Sisters in Crime, an organisation committed to 'helping women who write, review, buy or sell crime fiction'. 'Without her example,' said Val McDermid, speaking at this year’s Theakston’s Old Peculier crime writing festival, where Paretsky was presented with the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction award, 'many of us wouldn’t be where we are today.'"
The arts, the law and freedom of speech - article by Julia Farrington in The Guardian. "We have a problem. The heckler’s veto is working. When faced with a noisy demonstration, the police have shown that they will all too often take the path of least resistance and advise closure of whatever is provoking the protest. Arts organisations may have prepared well, and yet still find themselves facing the closure of a piece of work. This sends out a disturbing message to artists and arts bodies – that the right to protest is trumping the right to freedom of artistic expression. As things stand, in the trigger-happy age of social media where calls for work that offends to be shut down are easily made and quickly amplified, the arts cannot count on police protection to manage both the right to protest and to artistic expression."
Ford Madox Ford: as scary as HP Lovecraft? - article by Ned Beauman in The Guardian. "Ford and Lovecraft are not often discussed in the same breath. But in fact they are very similar. The difference is that Lovecraft appears to be writing about cosmic horror but is really writing about sex, whereas Ford appears to be writing about sex but is really writing about cosmic horror. Another way of putting it is that they are writing about exactly the same thing: the feeling that if you peel back the skin of everyday reality, what you will see underneath is something so alien that it will burn away all your sanity points in an instant."
Ebooks are changing the way we read, and the way novelists write - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "In Words Onscreen, published this year, the American linguist Naomi Baron surveyed the change in reading patterns that digital publishing has wrought. Where the impact can be measured, it consists primarily of a propensity to summarise. We read webpages in an 'F' pattern: the top line, scroll down a bit, have another read, scroll down. Academics have reacted to the increased volume of digitally published papers by skim-reading them. As for books, both anecdotal and survey evidence suggests that English literature students are skim-reading set works by default. The attention span has shortened not just because ebooks consist of a continuous, searchable digital text, but because they are being read on devices we use for other things. Baron reports that a large percentage of young people read ebooks on their cellphones – dipping into them in the coffee queue or on public transport, but then checking their work email or their online love life, a thumbswipe away."
PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future by Paul Mason - review by David Runciman in The Guardian. "The problem is that any contradictions at the heart of capitalism have always generated contradictory political responses from its opponents. Should a fatally flawed system be allowed to destroy itself or should it be overthrown by force? Can its failings be corrected by taking it over or should socialists opt out altogether and create their own alternative communities? You will get very different answers depending on whether you start with Fourier or Marx, Chartism or Leninism. By touching base with all these approaches and more, Mason seems to indicate that anything goes. He wants more cooperative schemes of free exchange – a 'sharing' economy to replace a predatory one – and more collective ownership as well. He wants the state to do more to tame private finance and individuals to do more to bypass it. The eclecticism of Mason’s approach to economics only produces confusion when it comes to politics."
Blogs Aren’t Better Than Journal Assignments, They’re Just Different - article by Casey Fabris in The Chronicle of Higher Education. "Although some instructors are phasing out journal-keeping assignments in favor of a class blog, a study has found that blogs are not inherently better instructional tools.... With all the hype about blogging, [Drew] Foster ...compared more than 2,000 blog posts and journal entries from intro-sociology classes at [the University of] Michigan. He expected the blogs to yield reflections that were more thoughtful, but that wasn’t what he found. It’s not that one format is better than the other, he discovered, it’s that they’re different. Public blogs encourage students to take intellectual risks, and private journals encourage them to take personal ones."
Living in the age of permawar - article by Mohsin Hamid in The Guardian. "So you are a reader, a writer, in this, the time of the permawar, searching, among other things, for empathy, for transcendence, for encounters that need not divide us into clans, for stories that can be told around a campfire generous enough for 7 billion, stories that transcend divisions, question the self and the boundaries of groups, stories that are a shared endeavour not at the level of the tribe, but of the human, that remind us we are not adversaries, we are in it together, the great mass murderer, Death, has us all in its sights, and we would do well not to allow ourselves willingly to be its instruments, but instead to recognise one another with compassion, not as predatory cannibals, but as meals for the same shark, each with a limited, precious time to abide, a time that deserves our respect and our wonder, a time that is a story, each of us a story, each of them a story, and each of these other stories, quite possibly, just as unique, just as frightened, as tiny, as vast, as made up as our own."
Banksy's Dismaland: 'amusements and anarchism' in artist’s biggest project yet - review by Mark Brown in The Guardian. (See pictures.) "He describes it as a 'family theme park unsuitable for small children' – and with the Grim Reaper whooping it up on the dodgems and Cinderella horribly mangled in a pumpkin carriage crash, it is easy to see why. In one tent would-be anarchists can find out how to unlock the Adshel posters seen at bus stops. For £5 people can buy the tools to break into them, replacing the official posters with any propaganda they please.... Across the way is a 'pocket money loans' shop offering money to children at an interest rate of 5,000%. In front of its counter is a small trampet so children can bounce up to read the outrageous small print drawn up by artist Darren Cullen. ... Other highlights include the Jeffrey Archer Memorial Fire Pit where visitors can warm themselves around a daily burning of the local lord’s books; a model boat pond with dead bodies and overly crowded boats full of asylum seekers; and a puppet revue show constructed from the contents of Hackney skips. In the moat around the castle is an armour-plated riot control vehicle built to serve in Northern Ireland which is now a children’s slide. Banksy himself has created 10 new works, including the Cinderella crash in a large castle. Visitors walk in to discover the pumpkin carriage crashed, Cinderella and horses dead, and paparazzi madly taking photos."
Anita Sarkeesian: 'The word "troll" feels too childish. This is abuse' - interview by Jessica Valenti in The Guardian. "Sarkeesian began making videos that took on pop culture, from television shows to the Twilight series. In 2012, she decided to dedicate a series of videos to the topic of computer games. She launched a Kickstarter project to fund her Tropes vs Women In Video Games web series, with a modest goal of $6,000. The target was met in 24 hours, and within two weeks she had raised nearly four times that much. That’s when the harassment started: people vandalised her Wikipedia page with gender-based slurs, and her YouTube videos were hit with a barrage of abuse....
For the uninitiated, GamerGate is a Twitter hashtag, which became an online movement that purported to be about journalistic ethics, but which actually focuses on attacking and harassing women such as Sarkeesian.... The truth, Sarkeesian says, is that GamerGate existed for years before it had a name: the same core players, the same harassment, the same abuse. The hashtag just put a name on this 'loosely organised mob' that attacked women in gaming, she tells me."
The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett: the much-loved author’s last Discworld novel - review by A.S. Byatt in The Guardian. "Terry Pratchett’s final novel has an unexpected dedication to one of his own characters: 'For Esmerelda Weatherwax – mind how you go.' Granny Weatherwax, who became more and more complex in the long series of Discworld novels in which she appears, was one of Pratchett’s most-loved creations. She is sharp and harsh as well as strong and wise, fearsome as well as resourceful. The beginning of The Shepherd’s Crown is an account of her death, which, being a witch, she is able to foresee accurately and to prepare for. Death, when he comes to fetch her, speaks his admiration. Her fellow witches bury her in a wicker cradle in a forest clearing, and the wizard Ridcully arrives weeping on a broomstick. Everything is changed. And the world of witches rearranges itself, with Tiffany Aching at its centre. I’ve been thinking of that phrase 'Mind how you go', and the difference between Terry Pratchett’s death and the end of Granny Weatherwax. She will indeed go on. But we have lost him. Like her, he made the world a better and livelier and more complicated place. We shall miss him. Very much."
Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech? by Mick Hume – review by Galen Strawsen in The Guardian. "In Hume’s typology: a 'but-head' [is] someone who says, 'I believe in freedom of speech, but … ' Anyone who says 'but' must deny that the right to free speech is 'indivisible'. Hume thinks that’s a fatal mistake: if you allow any exceptions, the dividing line between permitted and forbidden is no longer perfectly sharp, and you’re on a slippery slope, risking more and more restrictions. I disagree: the line is no longer sharp, but it’s not true that we’re on a slippery slope. The first amendment of the US constitution states categorically that 'Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press' (Hume calls it “the global gold standard” of free speech). The court’s defence of the first amendment over the years shows how the line can be held even after exceptions are allowed, for it does place limits on free speech – for example, on 'fighting words', deliberately intended and likely to incite 'imminent lawless action'; on explicit threats against specific targets; and on false shouts of 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre. Hume admits these exceptions to unrestricted free speech, and then makes a rationalisation that he condemns elsewhere: he says they’re 'not cases of free speech', 'not about free speech at all'. Yet each states quite plainly and correctly that you can’t say what you like, where you like, when you like: they place a limit on speech."
How JB Priestley’s Inspector first called on the USSR - article by Valerie Grove in The Guardian. "An Inspector Calls, set in 1912 in the household of a prosperous northern manufacturer, Arthur Birling, had been germinating in Priestley’s mind since before the war. A mysterious stranger arrives during a family dinner and insists on interrogating each of the diners about the suicide of a young girl. Guilty secrets are revealed, and a heavy moral message is conveyed about communal responsibility. Priestley finished the play in the winter of 1944-5. It was bold of him to have his first postwar play premiered in Russia as he was already considered a dangerous leftie in some quarters. In his wartime Postscripts for the BBC, hadn’t he used the line “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” when calling for a better postwar world? The gleeful Tory rumour was that his new play had been rejected, but the truth was no suitable London theatre was available. His Russian translator approached Russian theatres, and it was snapped up."
Typewriter, you're fired! How writers learned to love the computer - article by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "Writers are fetishistic about their writerly tools. In The Writer and the Word Processor, a guide for authors by Ray Hammond published in 1984, a year before the Amstrad launched, the computer refusenik Fay Weldon was quoted as saying that 'there is some mystical connection between the brain and the actual act of writing in longhand'. Iris Murdoch agreed: 'Why not use one’s mind in the old way, instead of dazzling one’s eyes staring at a glass square which separates one from one’s thoughts and gives them a premature air of completeness?' Writers either felt that their muse flowed through the natural loops of their handwriting, or they had grown used to the tactile rituals of typewriting: that click of the ratchet as you fed in the paper, the Kalashnikov sound of the keys, the ping of the carriage-return bell and the final whoosh when you pulled out the paper, which by then was smothered with little raised areas of correction fluid so it looked, in Diana Athill’s words, 'like a London pavement partly thawed after a snowstorm'. All this gave you a sense of industry, as if you were actually making writing, as tangibly as someone weaving cloth. The Amstrad changed all this, for the simple reason that it cost £399, word-processing program and dot-matrix printer included, while an Apple Mac or IBM system cost four times as much. The Amstrad’s price lured in those writers who were beginning to realise that, on their Smith Coronas and Olivettis, they were spending as much time retyping as typing. A critical mass formed."
Yes Please by Amy Poehler: a "non-book" - review by Laura Miller in The Guardian. "Yes Please arrives on printed pages sandwiched between cardboard covers, so technically, it is a book. However, it's the type of title the publishing business sometimes refers to as a 'non-book', meaning that it has few of the qualities bookish people like to think of as exmplifying the form. It is not a coherent, well-knit piece of writing organised around a central narrative or argument. It is hard to imagine anyone making sense of parts of it, let alone wanting to read the whole thing, if they aren't already familiar with Amy Poehler's work in film, TV and improv comedy. It is meant for those people who, on hearing Poehler's name, explain, 'Oh, I love her!' Not that there aren't many reasons to love Poehler, who manages to be very funny and fundamentally decent at the same time..."
I believe in an authority greater than David Cameron’s. Am I an extremist? - 'Loose canon' column by Giles Fraser in The Guardian. "The Church of England is the longest-running prevent strategy in history. If not from its inception, then certainly from the end of the English civil war, the big idea of the C of E was to prevent radicalisation – precisely the sort of radicalisation that led to religious people butchering each other throughout the 1630s and 40s. ... Increasingly suspicious of theological dispute, the idea was to kill off God – or at least God-talk – with religion. ...Religion itself – going to church and so on – was reclaimable as a part of the much-needed project of national togetherness.... But God had to be kept out of it as much as possible. ...And then along comes Islam – and, thankfully, it disrupts this absurd game and refuses to play by the rules. Its practitioners want to talk about God, sex and politics rather than mortgages, school places and the latest Boden catalogue. ... But David Cameron’s whole attack upon 'non-violent extremism', his upping the ante on the Prevent agenda, is an attempt to replay that clapped-out C of E strategy of stopping people talking about God in a way that might have social or political consequences."
Inside Out: what universities can learn from Pixar about emotions - article in The Conversation by Emma Jones. "In Inside Out, it is emotions which are guiding Riley’s every waking moment and even influencing her dreams.... But for centuries, stemming from the work of philosophers such as Plato and Descartes, emotions have been viewed largely as a series of reckless impulses that were unthinking and potentially destructive..... If Inside Out’s producer, Pete Docter, had subscribed to this theory, the five emotions would have been relegated to a small broom cupboard in the far corner of 'headquarters' and the console guiding Riley would have been firmly in the control of a large, overbearing figure known as cognition or reason....Inside Out follows more recent philosophical and scientific thinking in ascribing a value and importance to emotions.... However, the world of higher education has not yet caught up with contemporary thinking on emotions. There is still a tendency for individual disciplines and departments to focus on developing their own academic character and traditions with emotions viewed as belonging solely in the pastoral domain."
Headings Are Pick-Up Lines: 5 Tips for Writing Headlines That Convert - article on Nielsen/Norman Group website by Hoa Loranger. "A headline is often the first piece of content people read. And often it is the ONLY thing people read. If you want to make your encounters with people to be successful, make sure to write solid headlines.... Below are 5 tips for writing engaging headlines:
1. Make sure the headline works out of context.... 2. Tell readers something useful.... 3. Don't succumb to cute or faddish vocabulary.... 4. Omit nonessential words.... 5. Front-load headings with strong keywords."
American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism by Matthew Avery Sutton - review by Nicholae Guyatt in The Guardian. "Christian fundamentalism was born in the big cities of Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, funded by wealthy businessmen such as Lyman Stewart, a California oil tycoon who bankrolled The Fundamentals (1910-15), the book series that gave the movement its name.... The central paradox of Sutton’s book, which he acknowledges but never quite resolves, is why anyone expecting Armageddon would waste time on politics. For more than a century, prophecy adherents have largely agreed on the end times sequence: war in the Middle East, world government and the rise of the antichrist will mark a seven-year period known as the tribulation. Jews will suffer particular torture, but will ultimately find refuge in Christ. Evangelicals can afford to be sanguine about this because they think God will teleport them to heaven just before things turn bad.... The idea of impending doom has always allowed outsiders to make a virtue of their marginalisation. We can see this in the in the 20s and 30s, when American evangelicals struggled to break into the political mainstream. It seems less true of the period after the second world war as Christian fundamentalism found a foothold in the Republican party. The most iconic postwar evangelicals – Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson – occasionally predicted that the end times were approaching, but focused their energies on mending a broken world. The religious right rejected the idea that vice and godlessness would sweep the US towards apocalypse, looking to mobilise a 'moral majority' behind conservative principles."
Return: A Palestinian Memoir by Ghada Karmi - review by Avi Schalim in The Guardian. "In 2005, Karmi returned to her homeland not as a tourist but as a consultant to the ministry of media and communications of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. She wanted to be at the heart of things, to be part of the community, to make her contribution to state-building.... Karmi’s entire life had centred on the fundamental facts of the catastrophe of 1948, from which all else was derivative. By her own estimation, she is one of the custodians of Palestinian history. So it came as a bit of a shock to discover that for the Palestinians in the occupied territories, people like her are irrelevant, far removed from the immediate reality of the extraordinarily harsh conditions imposed on them by the Israelis, their army and their settlements. It was not that the past was another country. But the locals were more preoccupied with the daily struggle for survival against a brutal oppressor than with the grand Palestinian narrative of the past."
‘I start each VI Warshawski book convinced I can’t do it’ - interview with Sara Paretsky by Sarah Crown in The Guardian. "The year was 1971, and Paretsky was heavily involved in second-wave feminism; so enraged was she by Chandler’s depiction of women that she vowed to 'write a crime novel ... that would turn the tables on the dominant views of women in fiction and in society'. With the 1982 publication of Indemnity Only, in which her tough-minded, big-hearted, fiercely self-reliant private investigator VI Warshawski strides on stage, she did just that; five years later, she instigated the social change she had dreamed of by founding Sisters in Crime, an organisation committed to 'helping women who write, review, buy or sell crime fiction'. 'Without her example,' said Val McDermid, speaking at this year’s Theakston’s Old Peculier crime writing festival, where Paretsky was presented with the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction award, 'many of us wouldn’t be where we are today.'"
The arts, the law and freedom of speech - article by Julia Farrington in The Guardian. "We have a problem. The heckler’s veto is working. When faced with a noisy demonstration, the police have shown that they will all too often take the path of least resistance and advise closure of whatever is provoking the protest. Arts organisations may have prepared well, and yet still find themselves facing the closure of a piece of work. This sends out a disturbing message to artists and arts bodies – that the right to protest is trumping the right to freedom of artistic expression. As things stand, in the trigger-happy age of social media where calls for work that offends to be shut down are easily made and quickly amplified, the arts cannot count on police protection to manage both the right to protest and to artistic expression."
Ford Madox Ford: as scary as HP Lovecraft? - article by Ned Beauman in The Guardian. "Ford and Lovecraft are not often discussed in the same breath. But in fact they are very similar. The difference is that Lovecraft appears to be writing about cosmic horror but is really writing about sex, whereas Ford appears to be writing about sex but is really writing about cosmic horror. Another way of putting it is that they are writing about exactly the same thing: the feeling that if you peel back the skin of everyday reality, what you will see underneath is something so alien that it will burn away all your sanity points in an instant."
Ebooks are changing the way we read, and the way novelists write - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "In Words Onscreen, published this year, the American linguist Naomi Baron surveyed the change in reading patterns that digital publishing has wrought. Where the impact can be measured, it consists primarily of a propensity to summarise. We read webpages in an 'F' pattern: the top line, scroll down a bit, have another read, scroll down. Academics have reacted to the increased volume of digitally published papers by skim-reading them. As for books, both anecdotal and survey evidence suggests that English literature students are skim-reading set works by default. The attention span has shortened not just because ebooks consist of a continuous, searchable digital text, but because they are being read on devices we use for other things. Baron reports that a large percentage of young people read ebooks on their cellphones – dipping into them in the coffee queue or on public transport, but then checking their work email or their online love life, a thumbswipe away."
PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future by Paul Mason - review by David Runciman in The Guardian. "The problem is that any contradictions at the heart of capitalism have always generated contradictory political responses from its opponents. Should a fatally flawed system be allowed to destroy itself or should it be overthrown by force? Can its failings be corrected by taking it over or should socialists opt out altogether and create their own alternative communities? You will get very different answers depending on whether you start with Fourier or Marx, Chartism or Leninism. By touching base with all these approaches and more, Mason seems to indicate that anything goes. He wants more cooperative schemes of free exchange – a 'sharing' economy to replace a predatory one – and more collective ownership as well. He wants the state to do more to tame private finance and individuals to do more to bypass it. The eclecticism of Mason’s approach to economics only produces confusion when it comes to politics."
Blogs Aren’t Better Than Journal Assignments, They’re Just Different - article by Casey Fabris in The Chronicle of Higher Education. "Although some instructors are phasing out journal-keeping assignments in favor of a class blog, a study has found that blogs are not inherently better instructional tools.... With all the hype about blogging, [Drew] Foster ...compared more than 2,000 blog posts and journal entries from intro-sociology classes at [the University of] Michigan. He expected the blogs to yield reflections that were more thoughtful, but that wasn’t what he found. It’s not that one format is better than the other, he discovered, it’s that they’re different. Public blogs encourage students to take intellectual risks, and private journals encourage them to take personal ones."
Living in the age of permawar - article by Mohsin Hamid in The Guardian. "So you are a reader, a writer, in this, the time of the permawar, searching, among other things, for empathy, for transcendence, for encounters that need not divide us into clans, for stories that can be told around a campfire generous enough for 7 billion, stories that transcend divisions, question the self and the boundaries of groups, stories that are a shared endeavour not at the level of the tribe, but of the human, that remind us we are not adversaries, we are in it together, the great mass murderer, Death, has us all in its sights, and we would do well not to allow ourselves willingly to be its instruments, but instead to recognise one another with compassion, not as predatory cannibals, but as meals for the same shark, each with a limited, precious time to abide, a time that deserves our respect and our wonder, a time that is a story, each of us a story, each of them a story, and each of these other stories, quite possibly, just as unique, just as frightened, as tiny, as vast, as made up as our own."
Banksy's Dismaland: 'amusements and anarchism' in artist’s biggest project yet - review by Mark Brown in The Guardian. (See pictures.) "He describes it as a 'family theme park unsuitable for small children' – and with the Grim Reaper whooping it up on the dodgems and Cinderella horribly mangled in a pumpkin carriage crash, it is easy to see why. In one tent would-be anarchists can find out how to unlock the Adshel posters seen at bus stops. For £5 people can buy the tools to break into them, replacing the official posters with any propaganda they please.... Across the way is a 'pocket money loans' shop offering money to children at an interest rate of 5,000%. In front of its counter is a small trampet so children can bounce up to read the outrageous small print drawn up by artist Darren Cullen. ... Other highlights include the Jeffrey Archer Memorial Fire Pit where visitors can warm themselves around a daily burning of the local lord’s books; a model boat pond with dead bodies and overly crowded boats full of asylum seekers; and a puppet revue show constructed from the contents of Hackney skips. In the moat around the castle is an armour-plated riot control vehicle built to serve in Northern Ireland which is now a children’s slide. Banksy himself has created 10 new works, including the Cinderella crash in a large castle. Visitors walk in to discover the pumpkin carriage crashed, Cinderella and horses dead, and paparazzi madly taking photos."
Anita Sarkeesian: 'The word "troll" feels too childish. This is abuse' - interview by Jessica Valenti in The Guardian. "Sarkeesian began making videos that took on pop culture, from television shows to the Twilight series. In 2012, she decided to dedicate a series of videos to the topic of computer games. She launched a Kickstarter project to fund her Tropes vs Women In Video Games web series, with a modest goal of $6,000. The target was met in 24 hours, and within two weeks she had raised nearly four times that much. That’s when the harassment started: people vandalised her Wikipedia page with gender-based slurs, and her YouTube videos were hit with a barrage of abuse....
For the uninitiated, GamerGate is a Twitter hashtag, which became an online movement that purported to be about journalistic ethics, but which actually focuses on attacking and harassing women such as Sarkeesian.... The truth, Sarkeesian says, is that GamerGate existed for years before it had a name: the same core players, the same harassment, the same abuse. The hashtag just put a name on this 'loosely organised mob' that attacked women in gaming, she tells me."
The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett: the much-loved author’s last Discworld novel - review by A.S. Byatt in The Guardian. "Terry Pratchett’s final novel has an unexpected dedication to one of his own characters: 'For Esmerelda Weatherwax – mind how you go.' Granny Weatherwax, who became more and more complex in the long series of Discworld novels in which she appears, was one of Pratchett’s most-loved creations. She is sharp and harsh as well as strong and wise, fearsome as well as resourceful. The beginning of The Shepherd’s Crown is an account of her death, which, being a witch, she is able to foresee accurately and to prepare for. Death, when he comes to fetch her, speaks his admiration. Her fellow witches bury her in a wicker cradle in a forest clearing, and the wizard Ridcully arrives weeping on a broomstick. Everything is changed. And the world of witches rearranges itself, with Tiffany Aching at its centre. I’ve been thinking of that phrase 'Mind how you go', and the difference between Terry Pratchett’s death and the end of Granny Weatherwax. She will indeed go on. But we have lost him. Like her, he made the world a better and livelier and more complicated place. We shall miss him. Very much."
Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech? by Mick Hume – review by Galen Strawsen in The Guardian. "In Hume’s typology: a 'but-head' [is] someone who says, 'I believe in freedom of speech, but … ' Anyone who says 'but' must deny that the right to free speech is 'indivisible'. Hume thinks that’s a fatal mistake: if you allow any exceptions, the dividing line between permitted and forbidden is no longer perfectly sharp, and you’re on a slippery slope, risking more and more restrictions. I disagree: the line is no longer sharp, but it’s not true that we’re on a slippery slope. The first amendment of the US constitution states categorically that 'Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press' (Hume calls it “the global gold standard” of free speech). The court’s defence of the first amendment over the years shows how the line can be held even after exceptions are allowed, for it does place limits on free speech – for example, on 'fighting words', deliberately intended and likely to incite 'imminent lawless action'; on explicit threats against specific targets; and on false shouts of 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre. Hume admits these exceptions to unrestricted free speech, and then makes a rationalisation that he condemns elsewhere: he says they’re 'not cases of free speech', 'not about free speech at all'. Yet each states quite plainly and correctly that you can’t say what you like, where you like, when you like: they place a limit on speech."
How JB Priestley’s Inspector first called on the USSR - article by Valerie Grove in The Guardian. "An Inspector Calls, set in 1912 in the household of a prosperous northern manufacturer, Arthur Birling, had been germinating in Priestley’s mind since before the war. A mysterious stranger arrives during a family dinner and insists on interrogating each of the diners about the suicide of a young girl. Guilty secrets are revealed, and a heavy moral message is conveyed about communal responsibility. Priestley finished the play in the winter of 1944-5. It was bold of him to have his first postwar play premiered in Russia as he was already considered a dangerous leftie in some quarters. In his wartime Postscripts for the BBC, hadn’t he used the line “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” when calling for a better postwar world? The gleeful Tory rumour was that his new play had been rejected, but the truth was no suitable London theatre was available. His Russian translator approached Russian theatres, and it was snapped up."
Typewriter, you're fired! How writers learned to love the computer - article by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "Writers are fetishistic about their writerly tools. In The Writer and the Word Processor, a guide for authors by Ray Hammond published in 1984, a year before the Amstrad launched, the computer refusenik Fay Weldon was quoted as saying that 'there is some mystical connection between the brain and the actual act of writing in longhand'. Iris Murdoch agreed: 'Why not use one’s mind in the old way, instead of dazzling one’s eyes staring at a glass square which separates one from one’s thoughts and gives them a premature air of completeness?' Writers either felt that their muse flowed through the natural loops of their handwriting, or they had grown used to the tactile rituals of typewriting: that click of the ratchet as you fed in the paper, the Kalashnikov sound of the keys, the ping of the carriage-return bell and the final whoosh when you pulled out the paper, which by then was smothered with little raised areas of correction fluid so it looked, in Diana Athill’s words, 'like a London pavement partly thawed after a snowstorm'. All this gave you a sense of industry, as if you were actually making writing, as tangibly as someone weaving cloth. The Amstrad changed all this, for the simple reason that it cost £399, word-processing program and dot-matrix printer included, while an Apple Mac or IBM system cost four times as much. The Amstrad’s price lured in those writers who were beginning to realise that, on their Smith Coronas and Olivettis, they were spending as much time retyping as typing. A critical mass formed."
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