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.
Thursday, 9 June 2016
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.'"
Wednesday, 25 May 2016
Interactive narrative: Lessons from Telltale
Ten years later, this confidence had largely collapsed, not merely because virtual reality was proving to be technically a more clunky affair then early enthusiasts had hoped, but because authors were finding it just too hard to write truly interactive narrative scenarios that anybody would actually want to play. They discovered what the writers of adventure games had known for some time: that you need to anticipate and provide for anything the player may decide to do – hard enough when dealing with physical objects, but mind-bogglingly complex when dealing with non-player characters and narrative storylines. If players are going to be able to take the story in any direction they want, then you can’t write something as dramatic as Hamlet, because if the player kills Claudius in Act I then the story either has to end there or else you need to have provided additional material to allow it to go somewhere else. Even if you limit the number of choices the player has at each stage, as long as each branch leads to further choices then the tree of potential storylines quickly grows to an impossibly large size. If you try to write discrete scenes which players can encounter in any order, then you never know what they’ve seen previously, which means that every scene needs to do its own exposition. limiting how far it can develop the story. Taken together, these problems meant that interactive narratives tended towards the bland and purposeless, with largely meaningless choices about which it was difficult for players to feel much investment.[3] The few interactive narratives which are generally reckoned to have succeeded (for example, Façade, Her Story [4]) operated within a very restricted setting; the remainder never got beyond the stage of experimental works and sunk into obscurity."Basically, I am assuming that this movement is analogous to the invention of the movie camera a hundred years ago, and asking: if the digital environment (multimedia, networked, desktop, VR, arcade, etc.) is the 'camera,' then what will be the equivalent of the 'movie'? The holodeck provides one provocative model."
(Interview with Michelle Ellen Green)
This is why it’s extraordinary that Telltale Games has become successful, both commercially and artistically, in producing interactive narratives. As Dan Connors the co- founder of Telltale has commented: “We just chose the four things that people had given up on: digital distribution, episodic gaming, licensed gaming, interactive narrative, and said: You know what, it CAN be done, and we're going to do it." (Documentary ‘Telltale Games: Story Mode’, quote at 0’32”.) Ignoring modernist ideas of non-linear narratives, they’ve focussed unapologetically on good old-fashioned story-telling. Their characters and settings are strong and dynamic, drawing on the proven dramatic possibilities of pre-existing media franchises: Back to the Future, Jurassic Park, The Walking Dead (their breakthrough title), Game of Thrones, The Wolf Among Us (based on a comic series), and Tales from the Borderlands (based on the Borderlands role-playing game). The storylines are exciting, with suspense and resolution and a dramatic ending to each episode – essential for motivating players to buy and download the next. And (it should go without saying) their writers, animators, voice artists and music composers are first-rate, all combining their efforts in the service of the story.
But what about the interactive element? How is playing a Telltale game different from watching an animated film? The first thing to be said is that their interactivity is quite limited.[4] Although as a player you have choices, some of which seem as though they have decisive significance, you cannot actually affect the overall storyline; even when it seems you have freedom of movement, you are in fact travelling on rails. But the second thing to be said is that the interactivity which the games do afford is precisely that which enriches and deepens your involvement with the story. In other words, rather than trying to provide for whatever the player might try to do – which would be impossible – Telltale have focused on providing what is most important in terms of its impact for the player.
By requiring you to respond to the non-player characters and their take on the unfolding drama, the game prompts you to express what you feel about them and the character you are playing, even though in most cases your choice only affects the next line or so of dialogue. However, some dialogue choices have consequences which are fed back to you later: the characters remember what you’ve said and done to them. For example, if as Rhys you choose to instruct Loaderbot to self-destruct during the fight with the bandits, when he later reappears and greets the other male characters with a fist-bump, he will pointedly not do so with you. It’s a painful moment of rejection, for Rhys and for you playing him, because you are implicated in his action. (You as Rhys have the opportunity to make it up with Loaderbot later.) Such choices are flagged to you as the player, after you have made them, with the onscreen message that the other character “will remember this,” thus notching up the emotional impact of the moment by promoting you to imagine what the implications of your decisions will be. The overall story requires that the main characters move from initial starting positions of mutual mistrust and caution to ones of trust and co-dependency, and your decisions do not change that, but your dialogue choices control the speed and manner in which this happens.
I have often made the analogy between games design and learning design (for example here and here), so what are the lessons for learning design from games such as Tales of the Borderlands? What Telltale have done is to abandon the fictional holodeck as a model for interactive narrative, rejecting the techno-fantasy of total freedom and total empowerment for the player / reader, which is neither possible nor desirable; they have returned to the traditional strengths of good story-telling, focusing on just those interactive features which deepen players’ involvement, increase their emotional stake, and give them a sense of agency in moving the story forward, The lessons of this for learning design, I believe, are that we do not have to apologise for the traditional strengths of good teaching – compelling topics, clear explanations, well-designed cognitive scaffolding - and that when we seek to enhance these with technology we should focus our efforts and resources on features which really increase value for the learner. Increasing value through cognitive effectiveness is familiar territory for us; for example, when designing simulations for learning, as I’ve previously observed, we focus on simulating those things which learners are most likely to get wrong, so that they can make those mistakes and learn from them. But another way of increasing value is to deepen learners’ involvement, emotionally as well as intellectually. The emotional aspects of learning, though present in our design practice, barely figure in our design thinking: we have an intuitive sense of what will be interesting for learners, what they will find fun or challenging, and how we can work the occasions for such emotions into the design of our learning experiences, but we do not have well-established ways of thinking and talking about this.
When I first started writing distance learning materials back in the 1990s, I was taught to plan my units in terms of a “storyline” or narrative sequence, which would put the necessary topics into a logical order and give a satisfying shape to the whole. This practice, which I believe originated at the Open University, seems to have fallen out of use, because I've not encountered it since. The metaphor of the narrative and the analogies between teaching and story-telling, between learning design and the design of a reader’s or player’s experience, are I think overdue for a revival.
Notes
[1] Star Trek’s holodeck was introduced in Encounter at Farpoint (Wesley Crusher falls into a stream) and further demonstrated in Code of Honour (Tasha Yar shows that a holographic opponent can throw you to the dojo floor). Captains Picard and Janeway were seen fantasy role-playing in The Big Goodbye and Persistence of Vision respectively. Many episodes showed the holodeck being used for training (for example, Chain of Command Part 1, Worst Case Scenario) or recreation (for example, Fair Haven), while introducing the more sinister possibilities of holodeck addiction (Hollow Pursuits, Pathfinder) and of being unable to distinguish between holodeck and reality (Ship in a Bottle, Projections). Some holodeck characters were or became self-aware: Professor Moriarty (Elementary, Dear Data), Vic Fontaine (His Way), the Emergency Medial Hologram (Caretaker), and Michael Sullivan (Spirit Folk). The holodeck also allowed the scriptwriters to indulge in genre spoofs: the Western (A Fistful of Datas), James Bond (Our Man Bashir), a French Resistance drama (The Killing Game), and Flash Gordon (Night, Bride of Chaotica!).
[2] See a review by John McLaughlin, and links to other reviews here. See also Murray’s ‘Inventing the Medium’, her introduction to the book New Media Reader.
[3] The problems with interactive narrative are summarised by Steven Johnson in Wired, 'Why no one clicked on the great hypertext story'and by Ernest W Adams in his 2005 lecture to Game Developers’ Conference ‘Interactive narratives revisited: ten years of research’. An academic article summarising the issues is Mark O. Riedel and Vadim Bulitko ‘Interactive narrative: an intelligent systems approach’ in AI Magazine 34 (2013), 67-77.
[4] In the celebrated Façade, you play a guest visiting the home of a couple who are on the edge of breaking up; the narrative is not disrupted by conversational non-sequiturs or failure to respond to your remarks, since the other characters are supposed to be bickering and preoccupied with their own thoughts. (See an article analysing its design by Alex J. Champanard.) In Her Story (many reviewers’ Game of the Year for 2015), you are viewing video clips of police interviews following a suspicious death; the game's interactivity is limited to providing you with clips on the basis of your keyword searches, but the construction of the narrative is entirely yours as you try to understand the story of the woman being interviewed. (See the short discussion in my Seen and Heard blog entry for September 2015, and reviews in Adventure Gamers, The Guardian, and Rock Paper Shotgun).
[5] Indeed, Adventure Gamers website, although reviewing the titles (very favourably), excluded them from their 2016 Adventure Game awards on the grounds that they were pure stories, including neither exploration nor puzzle-solving.
Sunday, 15 May 2016
Seen and heard: April 2016
Brave – Pixar film from 2012, watched off TV recording. The usual Pixar quality of animation, with great acting and pretty good gags, but something not quite right about the whole conception: it’s a story about adolescent relationship with parents, but adolescents are the last people who will want to watch a film like this, so who’s it for? Not one for the trophy cabinet.
The Durrells – surprisingly good and funny rendition of this bonkers bohemian family (middle-aged single mother and children respectively obsessed by animals, romance, guns and becoming a famous writer) in pre-tourist post-War Corfu, wisely (unlike the 1980s dramatization) taking the focus off the future naturalist Gerald.
Party political broadcast by the Green Party – definitely the funniest party political broadcast ever aired, with nursery-age children taking on the roles of mainstream party politicians: not just as a single joke, but worked out over a full five minutes.
The Jane Austen Book Club – interesting romcom with various unsatisfied women (and one man) forming a book club to (re-)read one Jane Austen novel a month. The running gag is the way their lives keep echoing tropes from the books, and if there’s a message I guess it’s about novels – Jane Austen novels in particular – as a route to emotional literacy, at least for men, if you can get them to read them.
Na zdrowie, from The Delayed Flute by Annette Ziegenmeyer – astonishing piece for solo recorder, written for the melodic line to be fed back with a half-second delay. Young Polly Bartlett played this in the Woodwind finals of BBC Young Musician, and though she didn’t win I thought her performance was better than the original recording by Ziegenmeyer herself.
Shakespeare Live at the RSC – very mixed bardfest celebrating Shakespeare 400, which started with a very ropey song and dance number from West Side Story but eventually delivered some tremendous items, including a hilarious sketch in which various famous actors argue about the right way to deliver Hamlet’s ‘To Be or Not To Be’ soliloquy, worth the licence fee on its own.
Hilma af Klint at The Serpentine Gallery – interesting rather than moving exhibition of works by this long-unknown artist, who is now celebrated for having invented abstract painting before the abstract painters. One of a group of Swedish women artists in the 1880s who used spiritualist techniques to channel the teaching of spirits (like Theosophists, though she herself was associated with Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy), most of her mainly monochrome drawings look to me like efforts to communicate the spiritual teachings she received. There are a lot of geometrical shapes, symbolic figures (male and female, snail shells, black and white swans), and writing of words or letters of apparent esoteric significance (such as the often repeated W U). I found them about as exciting as management diagrams. Much more powerful, to my mind, were the large colour and more purely abstract pieces: the ones they used in the exhibition publicity. Just as bonkers, no doubt, but trying to communicate less and hence, I think, actually saying more.
Photo credit. Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen Installation view Serpentine Gallery, London (3 March – 15 May 2016), Image © Jerry Hardman-Jones
The Durrells – surprisingly good and funny rendition of this bonkers bohemian family (middle-aged single mother and children respectively obsessed by animals, romance, guns and becoming a famous writer) in pre-tourist post-War Corfu, wisely (unlike the 1980s dramatization) taking the focus off the future naturalist Gerald.
Party political broadcast by the Green Party – definitely the funniest party political broadcast ever aired, with nursery-age children taking on the roles of mainstream party politicians: not just as a single joke, but worked out over a full five minutes.
The Jane Austen Book Club – interesting romcom with various unsatisfied women (and one man) forming a book club to (re-)read one Jane Austen novel a month. The running gag is the way their lives keep echoing tropes from the books, and if there’s a message I guess it’s about novels – Jane Austen novels in particular – as a route to emotional literacy, at least for men, if you can get them to read them.
Na zdrowie, from The Delayed Flute by Annette Ziegenmeyer – astonishing piece for solo recorder, written for the melodic line to be fed back with a half-second delay. Young Polly Bartlett played this in the Woodwind finals of BBC Young Musician, and though she didn’t win I thought her performance was better than the original recording by Ziegenmeyer herself.
Shakespeare Live at the RSC – very mixed bardfest celebrating Shakespeare 400, which started with a very ropey song and dance number from West Side Story but eventually delivered some tremendous items, including a hilarious sketch in which various famous actors argue about the right way to deliver Hamlet’s ‘To Be or Not To Be’ soliloquy, worth the licence fee on its own.
Photo credit. Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen Installation view Serpentine Gallery, London (3 March – 15 May 2016), Image © Jerry Hardman-Jones
Tuesday, 10 May 2016
Cuttings: April 2016
Social media as powerful method of learning: the evidence - blog post by Donald Clark, referenced in Harold Jarche's blog. "The fact that social media is an act of expression, reflection, elaboration, retrieval and practice is of interest to those of us who like to see concrete evidence for powerful learning and retention. I often feel as though I remember more when I use social media, indeed have stronger memories of the things I posted than the original exposure. Tweeting during a conference helps me consolidate my thoughts and capture key insights. Facebook helps me share resources. LinkedIn is a useful professional tool. However, it is blogging, such as this post, that is by far my strongest form of learning, as it involves a number of things that are all supported by researched learning theory, and which improve memory and recall: (1) Reflection, (2) Generation, (3) Elaboration, (4) Retrieval, (5) Interleaved and varied practice, (6) Spaced practice, (7) Imagery, (8) Archiving."
Leadership in an age of pervasive networks - blog post by Harold Jarche. "From the perspective of Marshall McLuhan’s famous media tetrad..., explained by Derrick de Kerkchove, co-author of McLuhan for Managers — every technology has four effects: 1. extends a human property (the car extends the foot); 2. obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or a form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports); 3. retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the knight); 4. flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (automobiles, when there are too many of them, create grid lock)."
Can two leftwing gurus save Europe? Chronicles by Thomas Piketty; And the Weak Suffer What They Must? by Yanis Varoufakis – reviews by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "To follow Piketty through the ups and downs of the post-Lehman era is to see an unwelcome issue for the left emerge. He asks: 'Will Europe manage to become the continental power and the space for democratic sovereignty that we’ll need in order to take control of a globalised capitalism gone mad?' Or will it facilitate the subjugation of governments to markets and, in the resulting chaos, fail? That sums up the left’s dilemma in 2016. It is posed in Britain through the Brexit referendum. In the rest of Europe it is posed, increasingly, by geopolitical pressure: the arrival of a million migrants; the swing to the authoritarian right in Poland; the surge of neo-Nazism in Hungary, Slovakia and France. And the ability of the bumbling despot in Ankara to dictate terms to an entire continent. ... Varoufakis [names] the danger that by going on the streets and influencing mainstream policy, the European far right has already achieved a position where it is 'in power but not in office'.... He concludes his book with an outline of his current project: to democratise Europe within 10 years or let the project lapse. Like Piketty, he retains an implicit 'optimism of the will', as Gramsci once put it, compared with a pessimism of the intellect."
It’s back to the future for Mashable - blog post by John Naughton. "[Quoting from Politico media website] 'As for the new direction of the company, Cashmore [Mashable’s CEO] hinted at the importance and influence of advertisers, noting that now advertisers are no longer separate from the story and want to be “telling stories with us”.' Well, well. Spool back to the early days of broadcast radio, when nobody could figure out a business model for the thing. I mean to say, you spend all that money setting up a station and creating ‘content’ and every Tom, Dick and Harry who had a radio receiver cold listen to it for free. And then along came Proctor and Gamble, a soap company, with the idea that if you sponsored compelling content — like a dramatic serial — and associated your name and brand with it, then good things would happen. Thus was born the ‘soap opera’. And this is the wheel that Mashable seems to have re-invented!"
The Abundance by Annie Dillard: a world of wonder, acutely observed - review by Gavin Francis in The Guardian. "For Annie Dillard there’s no realm of knowledge without its accompanying gasp of wonder; she has a mystic’s appreciation of the glory and plurality of the world, and a gift for communicating astonishment. This collection of essays has tremendous range: amoebae to the Andromeda galaxy; specks of dust to planetary motion; redemption to the brute facts of suffering. Dillard is a Pulitzer prize-winner with a huge following in the US, but her work has been something of a well-kept secret in the UK. With the release of this new volume, that should change.... The book opens with a quotation from the second sura of the Qur’an, explaining Dillard’s choice of title and demonstrating that it’s the spiritual dimension of her work that she is most at pains to convey: 'They will question thee concerning what they should expend. Say: The Abundance.' It’s in a passage from The Writing Life that the reasoning behind the collection’s title becomes clear: 'One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Don’t hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now ... Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.' ”
Forget mindfulness, stop trying to find yourself and start faking it - article by Michael Pueett and Christine Gross-Loh in The Guardian, based on their book The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life (Viking Penguin). "Unlike the philosophers we are more familiar with in the west, [classical] Chinese thinkers didn’t ask big questions. Theirs was an eminently pragmatic philosophy, based on deceptively small questions such as: 'How are you living your daily life?' These thinkers emphasised that great change only happens when we begin with the mundane and doable. Their teachings reveal that many of our most fundamental assumptions about how we ought to live have actually led us astray. So what are the ideas we hold dear, and what alternatives do Chinese philosophers offer in their place?... (1) Stop finding yourself. (2) Be inauthentic. (3) Do rituals. (4) See the world as capricious. (5) Stop deciding. (6) Be weak. (7) Don't play to your strengths. (8) Don't be mindful. (9) Rethink the traditional and the modern."
‘Why aren’t we earning enough to live?’: how [film] The Divide lays bare global inequality - article by Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian. "When The Spirit Level was published, it quickly attracted global attention to the ideas of its authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. It argued that income inequality is the key cause of most modern social ills – violence, obesity, drug abuse, depression, ' teenage pregnancies, ill health.... No one said: 'This would make a great movie!' Apart from [Katharine] Round. 'It was a totally mad idea to get a book of graphs and make it into a feature film,' she concedes, acknowledging moments of doubt over the years spent researching and raising money for a documentary based on a book that sweeps through 27 different countries and grapples with huge, abstract concepts of capitalism, globalisation and inequality. She persisted, raising more than £120,000 of the total budget, from a successful crowdfunding exercise. The finished film gives moving portraits of the lives of seven people, five in the US and two in the UK, illustrating how economic division creates another division socially, with dangerous consequences for everyone. Its scope is ambitious, looking back over 35 years at the political and economic decisions that have caused the widening divide. The film races from person to person, from one side of the Atlantic to the other, giving sharp snapshots of the problems people encounter as they scrape along in economically divided nations. The documentary attempts to answer the teasing question in the film’s subtitle: 'What happens when the rich get richer?'”
Jane Eyre by Sarah Waters, Margaret Drabble, Jeanette Winterson and others - article in The Guardian. Sarah Waters: "I first read Jane Eyre as a teenager, but have returned to it many times since; it is one of those novels that, with each rereading, only seems to grow richer. My favourite lines come just over halfway through, when Jane is engaged in one of her many wrangles with the teasing Mr Rochester. 'Do you think,' she asks him, 'because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!' The lines capture part of the appeal that the book has always had for me: the small, unglamorous, passionate figure staking her claim to equality, insisting on her right to feel, to act, to matter. Meanwhile, however, up on “the fateful third storey” of Thornfield Hall, the inconvenient first wife gives her 'goblin ha! ha!' … What I love most about Jane Eyre is the way it combines vastly different narrative registers, with mad Bertha Rochester prowling just below the realist surface and occasionally erupting though it to start a fire, bite a shoulder or rend a wedding veil. With her, Brontë created the sort of gothic icon – like Dracula or Mr Hyde – that it is now hard to imagine the world ever having been without."
Gillian Flynn: the book that inspired Gone Girl - article by Gillian Flynn in The Guardian. "Once a year, I read Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game, because its twisty, weird plot about a pair of sisters and the other occupants of their strange lakeside apartment block. It sucked me in when I read it for the first time as a kid and it has influenced all my novels in some small way.... how clever Raskin was in her plotting. The game of the title is an elaborate puzzle filled with wordplay, but with a glorious plan behind it that makes it less whimsical and more diabolical. An eccentric millionaire has died and left his fortune to two of his 16 relatives, organised by him into eight mismatched and fractious pairs. The pair that uncovers his killer will win both his money and control of his company.... the thing that impresses me most is how she has said she didn’t know the outcome until she wrote the final pages. In a sense, reader and writer are figuring things out together, which is why I think there’s such a grown-up feeling. The author wasn’t pedantically planting clues for readers to pick up; she was really following the storyline."
How to Avoid Empathy Burnout - article by Jamil Zaki in online magazine Nautlius, referenced in MindHacks blog. "[Emotional] contagion and concern—two dimensions of empathy—need not travel together. For one, they are only weakly associated across people. Individuals who report high levels of contagion do not necessarily say they are also high in concern, and vice versa. These states also inspire very different actions. In a classic series of studies done in the late 1980s, psychologist Dan Batson and his colleagues presented undergraduate psychology students with a video of another participant receiving mild electric shocks. Participants reported feeling distressed (related to contagion) when watching the person in pain and also concern for that student (expressed through terms such as 'moved' or 'sympathetic'). These states, however, were only weakly related across people, such that Batson could identify some people who predominantly felt concern, and others who predominantly felt distress. Batson then gave participants the chance to help the other student by trading places with her and “taking” the shocks on her behalf. Crucially, Batson set up the experiment so that some participants could easily avoid helping (for instance, if they chose not to help, they would be able to leave without watching the other student receive more shocks), whereas others could not. People who experienced more distress than concern avoided helping when they could, whereas people who experienced the opposite emotional profile helped in either case. It seems that immersing yourself in the pain of others can neutralize action as much as mobilize it. Batson argued that these data speak to the nature of empathy. In his view, distress points us inward, motivating us to feel better, whether by helping others or by avoiding them. Concern, though, keeps us focused outward. Nor is concern merely a diluted form of contagion. It drives us to approach others’ suffering even in cases where contagion would turn us away."
Not All Practice Makes Perfect - article by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool in Nautilus, excerpted from their book PEAK: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2016), referenced in MindHacks blog. "I have devoted my career to understanding exactly how practice works to create new and expanded capabilities, with a particular focus on those people who have used practice to become among the best in the world at what they do. And after several decades of studying these best of the best—these 'expert performers,' to use the technical term—I have found that no matter what field you study, music or sports or chess or something else, the most effective types of practice all follow the same set of general principles.... There are various sorts of practice that can be effective to one degree or another, but one particular form—which I named 'deliberate practice' back in the early 1990s—is the gold standard. It is the most effective and powerful form of practice that we know of, and applying the principles of deliberate practice is the best way to design practice methods in any area.... Purposeful practice has several characteristics that set it apart from what we might call 'naive practice,' which is essentially just doing something repeatedly, and expecting that the repetition alone will improve one’s performance.... Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals.... Purposeful practice is focused.... Purposeful practice involves feedback.... Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone."
Leadership in an age of pervasive networks - blog post by Harold Jarche. "From the perspective of Marshall McLuhan’s famous media tetrad..., explained by Derrick de Kerkchove, co-author of McLuhan for Managers — every technology has four effects: 1. extends a human property (the car extends the foot); 2. obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or a form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports); 3. retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the knight); 4. flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (automobiles, when there are too many of them, create grid lock)."
Can two leftwing gurus save Europe? Chronicles by Thomas Piketty; And the Weak Suffer What They Must? by Yanis Varoufakis – reviews by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "To follow Piketty through the ups and downs of the post-Lehman era is to see an unwelcome issue for the left emerge. He asks: 'Will Europe manage to become the continental power and the space for democratic sovereignty that we’ll need in order to take control of a globalised capitalism gone mad?' Or will it facilitate the subjugation of governments to markets and, in the resulting chaos, fail? That sums up the left’s dilemma in 2016. It is posed in Britain through the Brexit referendum. In the rest of Europe it is posed, increasingly, by geopolitical pressure: the arrival of a million migrants; the swing to the authoritarian right in Poland; the surge of neo-Nazism in Hungary, Slovakia and France. And the ability of the bumbling despot in Ankara to dictate terms to an entire continent. ... Varoufakis [names] the danger that by going on the streets and influencing mainstream policy, the European far right has already achieved a position where it is 'in power but not in office'.... He concludes his book with an outline of his current project: to democratise Europe within 10 years or let the project lapse. Like Piketty, he retains an implicit 'optimism of the will', as Gramsci once put it, compared with a pessimism of the intellect."
It’s back to the future for Mashable - blog post by John Naughton. "[Quoting from Politico media website] 'As for the new direction of the company, Cashmore [Mashable’s CEO] hinted at the importance and influence of advertisers, noting that now advertisers are no longer separate from the story and want to be “telling stories with us”.' Well, well. Spool back to the early days of broadcast radio, when nobody could figure out a business model for the thing. I mean to say, you spend all that money setting up a station and creating ‘content’ and every Tom, Dick and Harry who had a radio receiver cold listen to it for free. And then along came Proctor and Gamble, a soap company, with the idea that if you sponsored compelling content — like a dramatic serial — and associated your name and brand with it, then good things would happen. Thus was born the ‘soap opera’. And this is the wheel that Mashable seems to have re-invented!"
The Abundance by Annie Dillard: a world of wonder, acutely observed - review by Gavin Francis in The Guardian. "For Annie Dillard there’s no realm of knowledge without its accompanying gasp of wonder; she has a mystic’s appreciation of the glory and plurality of the world, and a gift for communicating astonishment. This collection of essays has tremendous range: amoebae to the Andromeda galaxy; specks of dust to planetary motion; redemption to the brute facts of suffering. Dillard is a Pulitzer prize-winner with a huge following in the US, but her work has been something of a well-kept secret in the UK. With the release of this new volume, that should change.... The book opens with a quotation from the second sura of the Qur’an, explaining Dillard’s choice of title and demonstrating that it’s the spiritual dimension of her work that she is most at pains to convey: 'They will question thee concerning what they should expend. Say: The Abundance.' It’s in a passage from The Writing Life that the reasoning behind the collection’s title becomes clear: 'One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Don’t hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now ... Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.' ”
Forget mindfulness, stop trying to find yourself and start faking it - article by Michael Pueett and Christine Gross-Loh in The Guardian, based on their book The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life (Viking Penguin). "Unlike the philosophers we are more familiar with in the west, [classical] Chinese thinkers didn’t ask big questions. Theirs was an eminently pragmatic philosophy, based on deceptively small questions such as: 'How are you living your daily life?' These thinkers emphasised that great change only happens when we begin with the mundane and doable. Their teachings reveal that many of our most fundamental assumptions about how we ought to live have actually led us astray. So what are the ideas we hold dear, and what alternatives do Chinese philosophers offer in their place?... (1) Stop finding yourself. (2) Be inauthentic. (3) Do rituals. (4) See the world as capricious. (5) Stop deciding. (6) Be weak. (7) Don't play to your strengths. (8) Don't be mindful. (9) Rethink the traditional and the modern."
‘Why aren’t we earning enough to live?’: how [film] The Divide lays bare global inequality - article by Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian. "When The Spirit Level was published, it quickly attracted global attention to the ideas of its authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. It argued that income inequality is the key cause of most modern social ills – violence, obesity, drug abuse, depression, ' teenage pregnancies, ill health.... No one said: 'This would make a great movie!' Apart from [Katharine] Round. 'It was a totally mad idea to get a book of graphs and make it into a feature film,' she concedes, acknowledging moments of doubt over the years spent researching and raising money for a documentary based on a book that sweeps through 27 different countries and grapples with huge, abstract concepts of capitalism, globalisation and inequality. She persisted, raising more than £120,000 of the total budget, from a successful crowdfunding exercise. The finished film gives moving portraits of the lives of seven people, five in the US and two in the UK, illustrating how economic division creates another division socially, with dangerous consequences for everyone. Its scope is ambitious, looking back over 35 years at the political and economic decisions that have caused the widening divide. The film races from person to person, from one side of the Atlantic to the other, giving sharp snapshots of the problems people encounter as they scrape along in economically divided nations. The documentary attempts to answer the teasing question in the film’s subtitle: 'What happens when the rich get richer?'”
Jane Eyre by Sarah Waters, Margaret Drabble, Jeanette Winterson and others - article in The Guardian. Sarah Waters: "I first read Jane Eyre as a teenager, but have returned to it many times since; it is one of those novels that, with each rereading, only seems to grow richer. My favourite lines come just over halfway through, when Jane is engaged in one of her many wrangles with the teasing Mr Rochester. 'Do you think,' she asks him, 'because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!' The lines capture part of the appeal that the book has always had for me: the small, unglamorous, passionate figure staking her claim to equality, insisting on her right to feel, to act, to matter. Meanwhile, however, up on “the fateful third storey” of Thornfield Hall, the inconvenient first wife gives her 'goblin ha! ha!' … What I love most about Jane Eyre is the way it combines vastly different narrative registers, with mad Bertha Rochester prowling just below the realist surface and occasionally erupting though it to start a fire, bite a shoulder or rend a wedding veil. With her, Brontë created the sort of gothic icon – like Dracula or Mr Hyde – that it is now hard to imagine the world ever having been without."
Gillian Flynn: the book that inspired Gone Girl - article by Gillian Flynn in The Guardian. "Once a year, I read Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game, because its twisty, weird plot about a pair of sisters and the other occupants of their strange lakeside apartment block. It sucked me in when I read it for the first time as a kid and it has influenced all my novels in some small way.... how clever Raskin was in her plotting. The game of the title is an elaborate puzzle filled with wordplay, but with a glorious plan behind it that makes it less whimsical and more diabolical. An eccentric millionaire has died and left his fortune to two of his 16 relatives, organised by him into eight mismatched and fractious pairs. The pair that uncovers his killer will win both his money and control of his company.... the thing that impresses me most is how she has said she didn’t know the outcome until she wrote the final pages. In a sense, reader and writer are figuring things out together, which is why I think there’s such a grown-up feeling. The author wasn’t pedantically planting clues for readers to pick up; she was really following the storyline."
How to Avoid Empathy Burnout - article by Jamil Zaki in online magazine Nautlius, referenced in MindHacks blog. "[Emotional] contagion and concern—two dimensions of empathy—need not travel together. For one, they are only weakly associated across people. Individuals who report high levels of contagion do not necessarily say they are also high in concern, and vice versa. These states also inspire very different actions. In a classic series of studies done in the late 1980s, psychologist Dan Batson and his colleagues presented undergraduate psychology students with a video of another participant receiving mild electric shocks. Participants reported feeling distressed (related to contagion) when watching the person in pain and also concern for that student (expressed through terms such as 'moved' or 'sympathetic'). These states, however, were only weakly related across people, such that Batson could identify some people who predominantly felt concern, and others who predominantly felt distress. Batson then gave participants the chance to help the other student by trading places with her and “taking” the shocks on her behalf. Crucially, Batson set up the experiment so that some participants could easily avoid helping (for instance, if they chose not to help, they would be able to leave without watching the other student receive more shocks), whereas others could not. People who experienced more distress than concern avoided helping when they could, whereas people who experienced the opposite emotional profile helped in either case. It seems that immersing yourself in the pain of others can neutralize action as much as mobilize it. Batson argued that these data speak to the nature of empathy. In his view, distress points us inward, motivating us to feel better, whether by helping others or by avoiding them. Concern, though, keeps us focused outward. Nor is concern merely a diluted form of contagion. It drives us to approach others’ suffering even in cases where contagion would turn us away."
Not All Practice Makes Perfect - article by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool in Nautilus, excerpted from their book PEAK: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2016), referenced in MindHacks blog. "I have devoted my career to understanding exactly how practice works to create new and expanded capabilities, with a particular focus on those people who have used practice to become among the best in the world at what they do. And after several decades of studying these best of the best—these 'expert performers,' to use the technical term—I have found that no matter what field you study, music or sports or chess or something else, the most effective types of practice all follow the same set of general principles.... There are various sorts of practice that can be effective to one degree or another, but one particular form—which I named 'deliberate practice' back in the early 1990s—is the gold standard. It is the most effective and powerful form of practice that we know of, and applying the principles of deliberate practice is the best way to design practice methods in any area.... Purposeful practice has several characteristics that set it apart from what we might call 'naive practice,' which is essentially just doing something repeatedly, and expecting that the repetition alone will improve one’s performance.... Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals.... Purposeful practice is focused.... Purposeful practice involves feedback.... Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone."
Sunday, 3 April 2016
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.]
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.]
Seen and heard: March 2016
The Mass on the World – meditation day led by our friend Lynne Scholefield on Teillhard de Chardin’s extraordinary work, conceived and first drafted when he was a stretcher bearer in the Great War: on my reconstruction, his spiritual response to the suffering and devastation but also the humanity and compassion which he witnessed. As a Jesuit priest, the strongest thing he could conceive to hold these extreme contradictions was the altar of the Mass; and so, at sunrise with no table, paten or chalice, he celebrates the Mass, offering instead the visualised presence of all the suffering and all the hope in the world. A very personal response, but one which has resonance now, as the world seems to be being torn apart once again.
The Art of Scandinavia – BBC TV series, with Andrew Graham-Dixon as our amiable guide around the history and art of Norway (lots of angst), Denmark (lots of bricks) and Sweden (lots of minimalist furniture).
Bridge of Spies – gripping and heart-warming Cold War spy film from Steven Spielberg, with great performances from Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance and an agreeably slow and measured pace not much seen in mainstream films these days.
The Passion – very moving staged performance of a skilfully-filleted version of Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion by Streetwise Opera, whose players are all homeless or formerly homeless people, and The Sixteen’s professional singers and instrumentalists. The amateur performers and market-place venue gave it the immediacy and groundedness of a medieval mystery play, with the the homeless people sharing amongst them the role of Jesus (Christ as Everyman?) – the rough-and-ready quality of their singing being more than out-weighed by the power and presence of their dramatic performances. The whole was held within the matrix of The Sixteen’s professional musicians, who performed whilst walking amongst the actors and audience as the story demanded, and the really fabulous dramatic narration from Joshua Ellicott as The Evangelist. A tremendous project, which I’m so glad has been documented and recorded.
Lines of thought – exhibition celebrating 600 years of the Cambridge University Library, with choice exhibits arranged in six historical lines: communication, scripture, gravity, genetics, history and anatomy. A chance to see a Newton manuscript, a Gutenberg bible, a Darwin notebook, and so on; but interesting rather than illuminating. Nice website and digital resources, though.
The Art of Scandinavia – BBC TV series, with Andrew Graham-Dixon as our amiable guide around the history and art of Norway (lots of angst), Denmark (lots of bricks) and Sweden (lots of minimalist furniture).
Bridge of Spies – gripping and heart-warming Cold War spy film from Steven Spielberg, with great performances from Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance and an agreeably slow and measured pace not much seen in mainstream films these days.
The Passion – very moving staged performance of a skilfully-filleted version of Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion by Streetwise Opera, whose players are all homeless or formerly homeless people, and The Sixteen’s professional singers and instrumentalists. The amateur performers and market-place venue gave it the immediacy and groundedness of a medieval mystery play, with the the homeless people sharing amongst them the role of Jesus (Christ as Everyman?) – the rough-and-ready quality of their singing being more than out-weighed by the power and presence of their dramatic performances. The whole was held within the matrix of The Sixteen’s professional musicians, who performed whilst walking amongst the actors and audience as the story demanded, and the really fabulous dramatic narration from Joshua Ellicott as The Evangelist. A tremendous project, which I’m so glad has been documented and recorded.
Lines of thought – exhibition celebrating 600 years of the Cambridge University Library, with choice exhibits arranged in six historical lines: communication, scripture, gravity, genetics, history and anatomy. A chance to see a Newton manuscript, a Gutenberg bible, a Darwin notebook, and so on; but interesting rather than illuminating. Nice website and digital resources, though.
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