An Italian in Madrid – one of three numbers in a show by the Richard Alston Dance Company at Northampton Derngate, Sensitive and beautiful dancing to the music of Scarlatti – the titular Italian – featuring as guest dancer the very wonderful Vidya Patel, a finalist in the BBC Young Dancer competition 2015 (see her performing). So good we immediately booked to see it again at the next opportunity, unfortunately not till February 2017. I was also inspired to buy a CD of the Scarlatti sonatas, choosing a performance by Angela Hewitt, after having been blown away by her rendition of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and I was not disappointed.
Vitreus Art Gallery and Craft Workshop – beautiful stained glass as domestic decoration, being made before your eyes, with a wide variety of other crafts on sale, publicised as part of a South Northamptonshire week-long arts trail of open studios. A lovely Saturday afternoon, rounded off by tea and cake at the on-site tea room.
Kew Gardens – my first visit, and much bigger and more beautiful than I’d anticipated, only having seen fragments on TV. You could forget you’re in London, if it weren’t for the planes passing overhead every two minutes. Highlights: (1) the Marianne North Gallery, built to showcase the botanical paintings of the Victorian traveller, recently featured in the BBC programme Kew’s Forgotten Queen (the paintings themselves are reproduced on the ArtUK website); (2) the Hive, a sculpture installation, dynamically linked to an actual beehive, so its lighting and sound reflect real-time bee activity. Both of these, plus the memory of the excellent EPIC Ireland museum in Dublin (see previous post), made me reflect on the importance, now that information is so readily available on the internet, of galleries and installations which add value from a sense of immersion or being in a space. All three of these are great places to be, not just to find out stuff.
Hypernormalisation – new documentary by Adam Curtis, his usual provocative and startling reflection on how we got to the mess we’re in, this time taking in Donald Trump, the failure of the West’s Middle East policy, and the dawn of a post-truth world.
Cats – a new version (I saw the original London production in the 1980s, with Brian Blessed as Old Deuteronomy), which marked our delighted grand-daughter’s introduction to musical theatre. Packed full of great music and great dancing, and some strong performances,
Polymnia 10th anniversary concert, with Lesley Garrett – a pleasure and an honour to perform alongside her.
Words are my matter – new collection of essays and talks by Ursula Le Guin. I particularly liked the following: “Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It’s an act: you do it. You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling shouting rush of the media. You take in what you can and want to take in, not what they shove at you fast and hard and loud in order to overwhelm and control you…. And though you’re usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another mind. You aren’t being brainwashed or co-opted or used; you’ve joined in an act of the imagination.… Reading is a means of listening…. Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time, and silence.” So obvious, and yet (as I've previously posted) some of my colleagues continue to categorise reading as an “essentially passive” form of learning activity. What terribly dull and boring texts they must be reading. Or writing.
Thursday, 17 November 2016
Tuesday, 15 November 2016
Cuttings: October: 2016
A Little History of Religion by Richard Holloway: God versus oppression - review by Tim Whitmarsh in The Guardian. "This history is 'little' not in the sense of being compact, punchy or condensed, but in the way that you might say 'that’s a nice little house', or 'I’ll just have a little cup of coffee”'. It is a 'little history' because it is written from a comfortable armchair. Holloway’s is an unashamedly, but apparently unselfconsciously, Protestant account. He takes it for granted that the only religious experience that matters is divine revelation, when God talks directly to human beings: none of that ritual mumbo-jumbo that bothers the anthropologists. So we race past entire areas of human experience. He explicitly states that Shinto, ancient Greek polytheist and native American beliefs aren’t proper religion; presumably he would say the same about the indigenous cultures of Africa or South America, since he never mentions them.... Holloway is at his best in the closing chapters, where he explores the meaning for us today of thousands of years of reflection on religion, this most peculiar aspect of human culture. Here he captures sympathetically and undogmatically the impasse that we have reached, where science, liberal values, secularism, religious conservatism, global diversity, postcolonialism and fundamentalism are on a terrifying collision course. His diagnosis of the situation is spot-on. If there is a solution to be found, however, it will lie not in partisan 'little histories' like this, but in an expansive, generous, self-aware and intellectually sophisticated understanding of how we ended up here."
‘Oh Excellent Air Bag!’: two centuries of laughing gas - review by Frances Wilson in The Guardian. "This exuberant anthology of responses to nitrous oxide, edited with wit and imagination by Adam Green, begins with extracts from Davy’s Researches and ends with a one-act play by Theodore Dreiser called Laughing Gas (1916).... The press that has brought us this heavenly volume is the publishing wing of the Public Domain Review, an internet journal dedicated to releasing out of copyright material from the history of ideas. An Aladdin’s cave of curiosities, it is for me the best thing on the web, and '"Oh Excellent Air Bag!"' has all the generosity, waywardness and rollicking spirit of the online project. How many other books furnish their reader with an 'Index of Exclamations and Similes'?"
In the age of the algorithm, the human gatekeeper is back - article by Michael Bhaskar in The Guardian. "The more we have, the more we rely on algorithms and automated recommendation systems. Hence the unstoppable march of algorithmic recommendations, machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data into the cultural sphere. Yet this isn’t the end of the story. Search, for example, tells us what we want to know, but can’t help if we don’t already know what we want. Far from disappearing, human curation and sensibilities have a new value in the age of algorithms.... Curation can be a clumsy, sometimes maligned word, but with its Latin root curare (to take care of), it captures this irreplaceable human touch. We want to be surprised. We want expertise, distinctive aesthetic judgments, clear expenditure of time and effort. We relish the messy reality of another’s taste and a trusted personal connection. We don’t just want correlations – we want a why, a narrative, which machines can’t provide. Even if we define curation as selecting and arranging, this won’t be left solely to algorithms. Unlike so many sectors experiencing technological disruption, from self-driving cars to automated accountancy, the cultural sphere will always value human choice, the unique perspective."
The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin - article by Julie Phillips in The New Yorker. "The history of America is one of conflicting fantasies: clashes over what stories are told and who gets to tell them. If the Bundy brothers [the armed anti-government agitators who occupied an Eastern Oregon wildlife refuge] were in love with one side of the American dream—stories of wars fought and won, land taken and tamed—Le Guin has spent a career exploring another, distinctly less triumphalist side. She sees herself as a Western writer, though her work has had a wide range of settings, from the Oregon coast to an anarchist utopia and a California that exists in the future but resembles the past. Keeping an ambivalent distance from the centers of literary power, she makes room in her work for other voices. She has always defended the fantastic, by which she means not formulaic fantasy or 'McMagic' but the imagination as a subversive force. 'Imagination, working at full strength, can shake us out of our fatal, adoring self-absorption,' she has written, 'and make us look up and see—with terror or with relief—that the world does not in fact belong to us at all.'”
How we got to The Girl on the Train: the rise of the psychological thriller - article by John Mullan in The Guardian. "Calling a thriller 'psychological' credits it with a kind of literary complexity. The very first recorded use of the term 'psychological thriller' was in an admiring review of Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil in 1925. Most dictionaries of literary terms lack an entry for this genre, as if it were a figment of reviewers’ or publishers’ imaginations.... In one way these stories are the opposite of the serial killer fantasies with which we have been diverting ourselves for several decades. In the psychological thriller the killer is not a dedicated monster, it is someone close to us, someone familiar. The genre thrives in domestic settings.... In his great novels of the 1860s, [Wilkie] Collins invented a series of narrative tricks and peculiar plot elements that thriller writers still draw on. The Girl on the Train depends on the fact that one of its narrators, Rachel, suffers from alcohol-induced memory loss. She struggles through the book to recover the memories that might explain a woman’s mysterious disappearance. She even wonders whether she might somehow be responsible. It was Collins who introduced to the English novel this strangest of possibilities: that a person might not know what they know – might not even know what they have done.... [Collins] pioneered the use of multiple narrators. His preface to The Woman in White declared, 'An experiment is attempted in this novel, which has not (so far as I know) been hitherto tried in fiction. The story of the book is told throughout by the characters of the book.' Collins made it possible that a narrator might even be a culprit. He showed how to extract thrills from narrative unease."
The History Thieves by Ian Cobain: how Britain covered up its imperial crimes - review by Ian Jack in The Guardian. "Britain’s retreat from empire is remembered in a popular iconography that contains only a little violence.... For a postwar generation like mine, too young for national service and a troopship to the colonies, most of it happened inside the local Regal or Odeon. Movietone footage would show Princess X or Prince Y standing on a podium to witness a ceremony of national independence, smiling at the native dancers as fireworks explode overhead. This book supplies a more troubling image: as the sun sets on the greatest empire the world has ever seen, long columns of smoke fill the tropical skies. In a thousand bonfires, Britain is burning the historical evidence... This purging of the record happened across the world, in British Guiana, Aden, Malta, North Borneo, Belize, the West Indies, Kenya, Uganda – wherever Britain ruled. In the words of Ian Cobain, it was a subversion of the Public Record Acts on an industrial scale, involving hundreds if not thousands of colonial officials, as well as MI5 and Special Branch officers and men and women from army, navy and air force. All of them, whether they knew it or not, were breaking a legal obligation to preserve important official papers for the historical record, in the expectation that most would eventually be declassified. The British government took extraordinary measures to make sure that the fate of these papers remained a secret, whether they had been 'migrated' to the UK or destroyed abroad."
This Faithful Machine - article by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in The Paris Review, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Gag pieces advertising pencils or fountain pens as feature-laden 'word processors' became a staple of the 1980s computer press. Peter McWilliams stretched the joke to a short book about the fictitious McWilliams II Word Processor (Portable! User friendly! Prints characters from every known language!). Users of all stripes were coming to grips with the strange new ontology of writing on the screen. 'Writing with light' was the phrase authors invoked over and over again. 'It seemed like the future,' Peter Straub said of his own IBM Displaywriter, bought to collaborate long-distance on The Talisman with Stephen King, who had at the time what he delighted in referring to as his 'great big Wang.' But writing with light had its perils, too: notoriously temperamental floppy disks were given to spawning 'bad sectors,' a phenomenon so rampant that Amy Tan founded a Kaypro computer-support group with that name shortly before the start of her own fiction career in San Francisco. Other writers worried what would happen when their words slid off of the edge of the glowing glass screen—the manual accompanying Perfect Writer, the Kaypro’s default software, came with a fanciful visual aid to illustrate the principle behind the scrolling mechanism, the better to reassure anxious users."
Virtual reality: the Guardian's 6x9 is shown at the White House - article by Francesca Panetta in the online members only section of The Guardian. "Some of you may have seen 6x9: a virtual experience of solitary confinement, which we launched on theguardian.com in April. For those of you unfamiliar with the project, you can watch it on your smartphone by downloading an app, and using a pair of goggles such as the affordable Google Cardboard or a Gear VR. Once 6x9 begins, you are transported into a room that measures six foot by nine foot – the average size of so-called “supermax” isolation cells in the US. There are between 80,000 and 100,000 people in solitary confinement in the US, and the piece gives a glimpse from the inside: the claustrophobia; the inhumane conditions where you live next to your toilet while your food arrives on a tray through a slot twice a day; the psychological disturbances that can result from sensory deprivation. In 6x9, you get a very real sense of the disturbances experienced by the formerly incarcerated prisoners who feature in the piece. You hallucinate, float to the ceiling, your vision begins to blur. Before its White House appearance, 6x9 travelled from the Sundance festival in Utah to the Tribeca festival (where it was watched by, among others, Robert de Niro) in New York. But South by South Lawn was particularly important because of the event’s aims. With 6x9, we wanted to allow our audience to feel what it is like to be in solitary confinement, but we also wanted to effect change." (See also video.)
The Terranauts by TC Boyle: ‘an ark to save humanity’ - review by M. John Haarrison in The Guardian. "Hermetically sealed under three-eighths of an inch of armoured glass in the remote Arizona desert, Ecosphere 2 contains several artificial biomes, including savanna, a rainforest and a bijou sea with its own coral reef. Internal air pressure is controlled by vast mechanical lungs. Two thousand sensors gauge 'everything from soil respiration to ocean salinity'. The whole contraption burns thousands of kilowatt-hours of energy a day to support the eight human beings who live inside. Their aim? To survive for two years, sustained only by what they produce. Nothing in, nothing out. ... Life inside is hard, but sometimes idyllic. Much of the time they’re exhausted.... They dream about food, and they remember in detail the food they ate in the days before the door closed on the real world, which they call Ecosphere 1, or E1. They argue about who’s working the hardest. When they aren’t arguing, they have sex. They have a lot of sex, and it’s sex that, inevitably, blows the whole thing up; at which point all their barely veiled resentments are dragged to the surface like fish from the ecosphere pond.... Based on a similar experiment in the Arizona desert in the 1990s [Biosphere 2], Terranauts is funny, but not always in a way you can laugh at."
Do students know what’s good for them? - article by Tom Stafford in MindHacks blog. "Of course they do, and of course they don’t. Putting a student at the centre of their own learning seems like fundamental pedagogy. The Constructivist approach to education emphasises the need for knowledge to reassemble in the mind of the learner, and the related impossibility of its direct transmission from the mind of the teacher. Believe this, and student input into how they learn must follow.... Obviously we learn best when motivated, and when learning is fun, and allowing us to explore our curiosity is a way to allow both. However, putting the trajectory of their experience into students’ hands can go awry. One reason is false beliefs about how much we know, or how we learn best. Psychologists studying memory have long documented such metacognitive errors, which include overconfidence, and a mistaken reliance on our familiarity with a thing as a guide to how well we understand it, or how well we’ll be able to recall it when tested (recognition and recall are in fact different cognitive processes).... Education scholars have reacted against pure student-led or discovery learning, with one review summarising the findings from multiple distinct research programmes taking place over three decades: 'In each case, guided discovery was more effective than pure discovery in helping students learn and transfer'."
Video games where people matter? The strange future of emotional AI - article by Keith Stuart in The Guardian. "If you’re a video game fan of a certain age, you may remember Edge magazine’s controversial review of the bloody sci-fi shooting game, Doom. ... 'if only you could talk to these creatures, then perhaps you could try and make friends with them, form alliances … Now that would be interesting.' Of course, we all know what happened. There would be no room in the Doom series, nor any subsequent first-person blast-’em-up, for such socio-psychological niceties. Instead, we enjoyed 20 years of shooting, bludgeoning and stabbing, the ludicrous idea of diplomacy cast roughly aside. But during this era, something else was happening in game design, and in academic thinking around video games and artificial intelligence. Buoyed by advances in AI research and aided by increasingly powerful computer processors, developers were beginning to think about the possibilities of non-player characters (NPCs) who could think and act in a more complex and human way – who could provide the emotional feedback that the Edge reviewer was thinking about."
‘Oh Excellent Air Bag!’: two centuries of laughing gas - review by Frances Wilson in The Guardian. "This exuberant anthology of responses to nitrous oxide, edited with wit and imagination by Adam Green, begins with extracts from Davy’s Researches and ends with a one-act play by Theodore Dreiser called Laughing Gas (1916).... The press that has brought us this heavenly volume is the publishing wing of the Public Domain Review, an internet journal dedicated to releasing out of copyright material from the history of ideas. An Aladdin’s cave of curiosities, it is for me the best thing on the web, and '"Oh Excellent Air Bag!"' has all the generosity, waywardness and rollicking spirit of the online project. How many other books furnish their reader with an 'Index of Exclamations and Similes'?"
In the age of the algorithm, the human gatekeeper is back - article by Michael Bhaskar in The Guardian. "The more we have, the more we rely on algorithms and automated recommendation systems. Hence the unstoppable march of algorithmic recommendations, machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data into the cultural sphere. Yet this isn’t the end of the story. Search, for example, tells us what we want to know, but can’t help if we don’t already know what we want. Far from disappearing, human curation and sensibilities have a new value in the age of algorithms.... Curation can be a clumsy, sometimes maligned word, but with its Latin root curare (to take care of), it captures this irreplaceable human touch. We want to be surprised. We want expertise, distinctive aesthetic judgments, clear expenditure of time and effort. We relish the messy reality of another’s taste and a trusted personal connection. We don’t just want correlations – we want a why, a narrative, which machines can’t provide. Even if we define curation as selecting and arranging, this won’t be left solely to algorithms. Unlike so many sectors experiencing technological disruption, from self-driving cars to automated accountancy, the cultural sphere will always value human choice, the unique perspective."
The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin - article by Julie Phillips in The New Yorker. "The history of America is one of conflicting fantasies: clashes over what stories are told and who gets to tell them. If the Bundy brothers [the armed anti-government agitators who occupied an Eastern Oregon wildlife refuge] were in love with one side of the American dream—stories of wars fought and won, land taken and tamed—Le Guin has spent a career exploring another, distinctly less triumphalist side. She sees herself as a Western writer, though her work has had a wide range of settings, from the Oregon coast to an anarchist utopia and a California that exists in the future but resembles the past. Keeping an ambivalent distance from the centers of literary power, she makes room in her work for other voices. She has always defended the fantastic, by which she means not formulaic fantasy or 'McMagic' but the imagination as a subversive force. 'Imagination, working at full strength, can shake us out of our fatal, adoring self-absorption,' she has written, 'and make us look up and see—with terror or with relief—that the world does not in fact belong to us at all.'”
How we got to The Girl on the Train: the rise of the psychological thriller - article by John Mullan in The Guardian. "Calling a thriller 'psychological' credits it with a kind of literary complexity. The very first recorded use of the term 'psychological thriller' was in an admiring review of Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil in 1925. Most dictionaries of literary terms lack an entry for this genre, as if it were a figment of reviewers’ or publishers’ imaginations.... In one way these stories are the opposite of the serial killer fantasies with which we have been diverting ourselves for several decades. In the psychological thriller the killer is not a dedicated monster, it is someone close to us, someone familiar. The genre thrives in domestic settings.... In his great novels of the 1860s, [Wilkie] Collins invented a series of narrative tricks and peculiar plot elements that thriller writers still draw on. The Girl on the Train depends on the fact that one of its narrators, Rachel, suffers from alcohol-induced memory loss. She struggles through the book to recover the memories that might explain a woman’s mysterious disappearance. She even wonders whether she might somehow be responsible. It was Collins who introduced to the English novel this strangest of possibilities: that a person might not know what they know – might not even know what they have done.... [Collins] pioneered the use of multiple narrators. His preface to The Woman in White declared, 'An experiment is attempted in this novel, which has not (so far as I know) been hitherto tried in fiction. The story of the book is told throughout by the characters of the book.' Collins made it possible that a narrator might even be a culprit. He showed how to extract thrills from narrative unease."
The History Thieves by Ian Cobain: how Britain covered up its imperial crimes - review by Ian Jack in The Guardian. "Britain’s retreat from empire is remembered in a popular iconography that contains only a little violence.... For a postwar generation like mine, too young for national service and a troopship to the colonies, most of it happened inside the local Regal or Odeon. Movietone footage would show Princess X or Prince Y standing on a podium to witness a ceremony of national independence, smiling at the native dancers as fireworks explode overhead. This book supplies a more troubling image: as the sun sets on the greatest empire the world has ever seen, long columns of smoke fill the tropical skies. In a thousand bonfires, Britain is burning the historical evidence... This purging of the record happened across the world, in British Guiana, Aden, Malta, North Borneo, Belize, the West Indies, Kenya, Uganda – wherever Britain ruled. In the words of Ian Cobain, it was a subversion of the Public Record Acts on an industrial scale, involving hundreds if not thousands of colonial officials, as well as MI5 and Special Branch officers and men and women from army, navy and air force. All of them, whether they knew it or not, were breaking a legal obligation to preserve important official papers for the historical record, in the expectation that most would eventually be declassified. The British government took extraordinary measures to make sure that the fate of these papers remained a secret, whether they had been 'migrated' to the UK or destroyed abroad."
This Faithful Machine - article by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in The Paris Review, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Gag pieces advertising pencils or fountain pens as feature-laden 'word processors' became a staple of the 1980s computer press. Peter McWilliams stretched the joke to a short book about the fictitious McWilliams II Word Processor (Portable! User friendly! Prints characters from every known language!). Users of all stripes were coming to grips with the strange new ontology of writing on the screen. 'Writing with light' was the phrase authors invoked over and over again. 'It seemed like the future,' Peter Straub said of his own IBM Displaywriter, bought to collaborate long-distance on The Talisman with Stephen King, who had at the time what he delighted in referring to as his 'great big Wang.' But writing with light had its perils, too: notoriously temperamental floppy disks were given to spawning 'bad sectors,' a phenomenon so rampant that Amy Tan founded a Kaypro computer-support group with that name shortly before the start of her own fiction career in San Francisco. Other writers worried what would happen when their words slid off of the edge of the glowing glass screen—the manual accompanying Perfect Writer, the Kaypro’s default software, came with a fanciful visual aid to illustrate the principle behind the scrolling mechanism, the better to reassure anxious users."
Virtual reality: the Guardian's 6x9 is shown at the White House - article by Francesca Panetta in the online members only section of The Guardian. "Some of you may have seen 6x9: a virtual experience of solitary confinement, which we launched on theguardian.com in April. For those of you unfamiliar with the project, you can watch it on your smartphone by downloading an app, and using a pair of goggles such as the affordable Google Cardboard or a Gear VR. Once 6x9 begins, you are transported into a room that measures six foot by nine foot – the average size of so-called “supermax” isolation cells in the US. There are between 80,000 and 100,000 people in solitary confinement in the US, and the piece gives a glimpse from the inside: the claustrophobia; the inhumane conditions where you live next to your toilet while your food arrives on a tray through a slot twice a day; the psychological disturbances that can result from sensory deprivation. In 6x9, you get a very real sense of the disturbances experienced by the formerly incarcerated prisoners who feature in the piece. You hallucinate, float to the ceiling, your vision begins to blur. Before its White House appearance, 6x9 travelled from the Sundance festival in Utah to the Tribeca festival (where it was watched by, among others, Robert de Niro) in New York. But South by South Lawn was particularly important because of the event’s aims. With 6x9, we wanted to allow our audience to feel what it is like to be in solitary confinement, but we also wanted to effect change." (See also video.)
The Terranauts by TC Boyle: ‘an ark to save humanity’ - review by M. John Haarrison in The Guardian. "Hermetically sealed under three-eighths of an inch of armoured glass in the remote Arizona desert, Ecosphere 2 contains several artificial biomes, including savanna, a rainforest and a bijou sea with its own coral reef. Internal air pressure is controlled by vast mechanical lungs. Two thousand sensors gauge 'everything from soil respiration to ocean salinity'. The whole contraption burns thousands of kilowatt-hours of energy a day to support the eight human beings who live inside. Their aim? To survive for two years, sustained only by what they produce. Nothing in, nothing out. ... Life inside is hard, but sometimes idyllic. Much of the time they’re exhausted.... They dream about food, and they remember in detail the food they ate in the days before the door closed on the real world, which they call Ecosphere 1, or E1. They argue about who’s working the hardest. When they aren’t arguing, they have sex. They have a lot of sex, and it’s sex that, inevitably, blows the whole thing up; at which point all their barely veiled resentments are dragged to the surface like fish from the ecosphere pond.... Based on a similar experiment in the Arizona desert in the 1990s [Biosphere 2], Terranauts is funny, but not always in a way you can laugh at."
Do students know what’s good for them? - article by Tom Stafford in MindHacks blog. "Of course they do, and of course they don’t. Putting a student at the centre of their own learning seems like fundamental pedagogy. The Constructivist approach to education emphasises the need for knowledge to reassemble in the mind of the learner, and the related impossibility of its direct transmission from the mind of the teacher. Believe this, and student input into how they learn must follow.... Obviously we learn best when motivated, and when learning is fun, and allowing us to explore our curiosity is a way to allow both. However, putting the trajectory of their experience into students’ hands can go awry. One reason is false beliefs about how much we know, or how we learn best. Psychologists studying memory have long documented such metacognitive errors, which include overconfidence, and a mistaken reliance on our familiarity with a thing as a guide to how well we understand it, or how well we’ll be able to recall it when tested (recognition and recall are in fact different cognitive processes).... Education scholars have reacted against pure student-led or discovery learning, with one review summarising the findings from multiple distinct research programmes taking place over three decades: 'In each case, guided discovery was more effective than pure discovery in helping students learn and transfer'."
Video games where people matter? The strange future of emotional AI - article by Keith Stuart in The Guardian. "If you’re a video game fan of a certain age, you may remember Edge magazine’s controversial review of the bloody sci-fi shooting game, Doom. ... 'if only you could talk to these creatures, then perhaps you could try and make friends with them, form alliances … Now that would be interesting.' Of course, we all know what happened. There would be no room in the Doom series, nor any subsequent first-person blast-’em-up, for such socio-psychological niceties. Instead, we enjoyed 20 years of shooting, bludgeoning and stabbing, the ludicrous idea of diplomacy cast roughly aside. But during this era, something else was happening in game design, and in academic thinking around video games and artificial intelligence. Buoyed by advances in AI research and aided by increasingly powerful computer processors, developers were beginning to think about the possibilities of non-player characters (NPCs) who could think and act in a more complex and human way – who could provide the emotional feedback that the Edge reviewer was thinking about."
Wednesday, 9 November 2016
A fable from Europolis
A travelling salesman was advertising his wares. He was selling weapons and armour. One day he came to a village where a great soldier lived.You can see the story told in this walkthrough video, at timecode 4:50. In the near-future dystopian city of Europolis, Zoe comes across her friend Baruti, the election campaign manager for the Social Democrats, being threatened by the gangster's thugs. If (as in this walkthrough) Zoe chooses to intervene, this is the story which the gangster tells her as his warning.
"This shield," said the salesman "is so strong that nothing can pierce it. It will resist any impact. It will protect a warrior from all harm."
"This spear," said the salesman, "is so sharp that it will pierce any armour, killing your opponent instantly."
"How can it be," answered the great soldier, "that you have a shield that cannot be pierced and a spear that can pierce anything? The two cannot possibly co-exist."
So the salesman grabbed the shield and the spear. "It does not matter whether the two can or can not co-exist. m****rf****r", he said, running the great soldier through, killing him, "when I'm the one wielding both."
Thursday, 13 October 2016
Seen and heard: September 2016
The Sky Road – mountains on one side, bogs and loughs and inlets on the other: the Connemara landscape is stunning. And on this road, you do really as though you’re climbing into the sky.
Kylemore Abbey – “Forget Hogwarts,” said the tourist guide, “this is where I’d have liked to go to school.” And until 2010 you could, if you were a girl (and your parents could muster the cash), because the Benedictine nuns here used to run a small but high-powered girls boarding school. Now they produce hand-made chocolates instead. (And maintain the divine offices of course.) A beautiful building in an idyllic location (amidst the mountains, beside a lough, within many acres of landscaped estate), built as the forever home of an Irish-Manchester Victorian industrialist and his new bride, whose life was tragically cut short by dysentery on a foreign trip. A great place to visit, but the nuns really do need more and better space of their own away from all us international tourists.
Anam Cara – recorded talks by the late lamented spiritual writer John O’Donohue. Coming from the Celtic tradition, he is strong on seeing God as imminent in the natural world, so it felt only proper to listen to his recorded talks in that part of Ireland from whence he sprung. Hearing him talk about the spirituality of the senses, while driving through the rich and raw Connemara landscape with a good breakfast in my belly and the taste of damn fine coffee in my mouth, it was easy to feel the wisdom of his words.
EPIC Ireland – brand new exhibition centre in Dublin docklands, about the Irish diaspora, but really easy to relate to and making you feel proud to be Irish (even if you’re not). (EPIC is supposed to stand for Every Person Is Connected.) I think this is the best designed exhibition I’ve ever seen: every gallery, every exhibit, allowing engagement at multiple levels – aesthetic, emotional, intellectual, seriously specialist – with very good use of touch-screen interactivity. Coupled with a visit to the Irish Family History Centre, where the super-friendly staff helped my wife with tracing her Irish ancestry. I wonder what an equivalent exhibition for the Chinese diaspora would be like?
The Deer’s Cry – The Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimage, performing at Church of Christ the Cornerstone, Milton Keynes. The usual sensational performance, this time unusually combining William Byrd and Arvo Pärt. Two particular take-aways this time. (1) Pärt’s setting of The Deer’s Cry: basically what’s better known as St Patrick’s Breastplate, but this form of words is more suggestive of the uncertainty and potential danger of the world, in which the protection of Christ is sought. And why “The Deer’s Cry” anyway? Isn’t a deer usually silent, so its crying out is significant? (My wife reminds me that the deer, or the hart, is a medieval symbol for the soul which makes sense.) (2) The proximity it’s now possible to feel between the world of the Psalmist and our own: for example, “Set free my soul from the lying mouth and from the deceitful tongue”, and “I spoke of peace, and they called out for war” (Psalm 120). Of course Byrd’s time too was characterised by wars and persecutions, and the pre-concert talk pointed out how his music conveys the pain and insecurity of which he had personal experience.
Kylemore Abbey – “Forget Hogwarts,” said the tourist guide, “this is where I’d have liked to go to school.” And until 2010 you could, if you were a girl (and your parents could muster the cash), because the Benedictine nuns here used to run a small but high-powered girls boarding school. Now they produce hand-made chocolates instead. (And maintain the divine offices of course.) A beautiful building in an idyllic location (amidst the mountains, beside a lough, within many acres of landscaped estate), built as the forever home of an Irish-Manchester Victorian industrialist and his new bride, whose life was tragically cut short by dysentery on a foreign trip. A great place to visit, but the nuns really do need more and better space of their own away from all us international tourists.
Anam Cara – recorded talks by the late lamented spiritual writer John O’Donohue. Coming from the Celtic tradition, he is strong on seeing God as imminent in the natural world, so it felt only proper to listen to his recorded talks in that part of Ireland from whence he sprung. Hearing him talk about the spirituality of the senses, while driving through the rich and raw Connemara landscape with a good breakfast in my belly and the taste of damn fine coffee in my mouth, it was easy to feel the wisdom of his words.
EPIC Ireland – brand new exhibition centre in Dublin docklands, about the Irish diaspora, but really easy to relate to and making you feel proud to be Irish (even if you’re not). (EPIC is supposed to stand for Every Person Is Connected.) I think this is the best designed exhibition I’ve ever seen: every gallery, every exhibit, allowing engagement at multiple levels – aesthetic, emotional, intellectual, seriously specialist – with very good use of touch-screen interactivity. Coupled with a visit to the Irish Family History Centre, where the super-friendly staff helped my wife with tracing her Irish ancestry. I wonder what an equivalent exhibition for the Chinese diaspora would be like?
The Deer’s Cry – The Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimage, performing at Church of Christ the Cornerstone, Milton Keynes. The usual sensational performance, this time unusually combining William Byrd and Arvo Pärt. Two particular take-aways this time. (1) Pärt’s setting of The Deer’s Cry: basically what’s better known as St Patrick’s Breastplate, but this form of words is more suggestive of the uncertainty and potential danger of the world, in which the protection of Christ is sought. And why “The Deer’s Cry” anyway? Isn’t a deer usually silent, so its crying out is significant? (My wife reminds me that the deer, or the hart, is a medieval symbol for the soul which makes sense.) (2) The proximity it’s now possible to feel between the world of the Psalmist and our own: for example, “Set free my soul from the lying mouth and from the deceitful tongue”, and “I spoke of peace, and they called out for war” (Psalm 120). Of course Byrd’s time too was characterised by wars and persecutions, and the pre-concert talk pointed out how his music conveys the pain and insecurity of which he had personal experience.
Cuttings: September 2016
Why Tim Berners-Lee is no friend of Facebook - column by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "If there were a Nobel prize for hypocrisy, then its first recipient ought to be Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook boss. On 23 August, all his 1.7 billion users were greeted by this message: 'Celebrating 25 years of connecting people. The web opened up to the world 25 years ago today! We thank Sir Tim Berners-Lee and other internet pioneers for making the world more open and connected.'... What Zuck conveniently omits to mention, though, is that he is embarked upon a commercial project whose sole aim is to make the world more 'connected' but less open.... An open platform is one on which anyone can build whatever they like. It’s what enabled a young Harvard sophomore, name of Zuckerberg, to take an idea lifted from two nice-but-dim oarsmen, translate it into computer code and launch it on an unsuspecting world.... The open web enabled Zuckerberg to do this. But – guess what? – the Facebook founder has no intention of allowing anyone to build anything on his platform that does not have his express approval. Having profited mightily from the openness of the web, in other words, he has kicked away the ladder that elevated him to his current eminence. And the whole thrust of his company’s strategy is to persuade billions of future users that Facebook is the only bit of the internet they really need."
How to actually talk to a woman wearing headphones - article by Martha Mills in The Guardian's Brain flapping blog. "An article has surfaced from the quagmire of bilge that is The Internet and it has caused, not without reason, a small tornado of outrage. Written as dating advice for 'The Modern Man' (a misnomer if ever there were one), it promises a solution to the hot ‘n’ horny down-on-their-luck young bucks of the world who face the tedious obstacle of a woman wearing headphones, because how dare she. ... Here’s how it plays out in real life. Trust me, I’ve been it, seen it and spoken to the survivors: Him: I see you don’t want to be talked to but I find you physically attractive and I’m making that your problem. Her: Please leave me alone. Him: F*** YOU, YOU STUCK UP B****, I DIDN’T FANCY YOU ANYWAY. With 'advice' like this out there, it’s hardly any surprise, is it? These lonely men so desperately in search of conquests have been given permission, blessed with the entitlement to go forth and pluck their bounty using but five humble steps. So imagine their horror and indignation when that which has been promised doesn’t want to be plucked and tells them to sling their greasy hook."
Trump, Erdoğan, Farage: The attractions of populism for politicians, the dangers for democracy - article by Jan-Werner Müller in The Guardian, extracted from his book What is Populism? (University of Pennsylvania). "Populist politicians are not like other politicians in a democracy. But the difference is not that they are somehow closer to the 'masses' who, according to the self-declared non-establishment thinker John Gray, are everywhere in 'revolt'. It is also not that they want direct, as opposed to representative, democracy. Populists are fine with the idea of representation, as long as they get to represent who they consider to be the real people.... The crucial difference is that populists deny, or wish away, the pluralism of contemporary societies. When they say equality, they mean sameness, which is to say: conforming to some ideal of Middle America, Little England, or whatever a symbolic representation of real peoplehood comes down to for them.... The notion that populists in power are bound to fail one way or another is comforting. It’s also an illusion. For one thing, while populist parties necessarily protest against elites, this does not mean that populism in government will become self-contradictory. All failures of populists in government can still be blamed on elites acting behind the scenes, whether at home or abroad."
David Hare on writing nothing but the truth about a Holocaust denier - article by David Hare in The Guardian, concerning his screenplay for the film 'Denial'. "In 2000 the British historian David Irving, whose writing had frequently offered a sympathetic account of the second world war from the Nazi point of view, had sued Lipstadt in the high court in London, claiming that her description of him as a denier in her previous book Denying the Holocaust had done damage to his reputation.... In 2010 I was first approached by the BBC and by Participant Media to adapt Deborah Lipstadt’s book History on Trial for the screen... It was clear from the start that this film would be a defence of historical truth. It would be arguing that although historians have the right to interpret facts differently, they do not have the right knowingly to misrepresent those facts. But if such integrity was necessary for historians, then it surely had to apply to screenwriters too. If I planned to offer an account of the trial and of Irving’s behaviour, I would enjoy none of the film writer’s usual licence to speculate or invent. From the trial itself there were 32 days of transcript, which took me weeks to read thoroughly. Not only would I refuse to write scenes which offered any hokey psychological explanation for Irving’s character outside the court, I would also be bound to stick rigidly to the exact words used inside it. I could not allow any neo-fascist critic later to claim that I had re-written the testimony. Nor did I want to. The trial scenes are verbatim.... During the early days of the Renaissance, Copernicus and Galileo would have scoffed at the idea that there was any such thing as authority. A sceptical approach to life is a fine thing and one which has powered revolutionary change and high ideals. But a sceptical approach to scientific fact is rather less admirable. It is dangerous. As Lipstadt says in my screenplay, certain things are true. Elvis is dead. The icecaps are melting. And the Holocaust did happen. Millions of Jews went to their deaths in camps and open pits in a brutal genocide which was sanctioned and operated by the leaders of the Third Reich. There are some subjects about which two points of view are not equally valid. We are entering, in politics especially, a post-factual era in which it is apparently permissible for public figures to assert things without evidence, and then to justify their assertions by adding 'Well, that’s my opinion' – as though that in itself was some kind of justification. It isn’t. And such charlatans need to learn it isn’t. Contemplating the Lipstadt/Irving trial may help them to that end."
Whodunnit and whowroteit: the strange case of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor - article by Jonathan Coe in The Guardian. "The author of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor was only 22 years old when it was published and just four years earlier he had barely been able to speak a word of English. His name was Ernst Wilhelm Julius Bornemann – subsequently anglicized to Ernest Borneman – and he had arrived in London as a communist refugee from Nazi Germany in 1933. In Berlin he had already made the acquaintance of Bertolt Brecht and worked for Wilhelm Reich’s Socialist Association for Sexual Counselling and Research. Somewhere along the way, either in Germany or London or both, he also worked as a film editor and acquired a reputation as a virtuoso of the cutting room.... Graham MacInnes’s memoir One Man’s Documentary gives a vivid portrait of Borneman at work as a film editor. Watching him make sense of the vast mass of footage assembled for a naval documentary called Action Stations, MacInnes [wrote:]... 'To see his wavy blond head bent rigidly over a hand viewer; his strong but elegant hands ripping “outs” of film backward like gravel flung behind a bone-digging dog; his swift, frenzied but orderly snatching of “takes” from bins; his skilled manipulation, without getting them twisted or torn, of half a dozen shots; his mouth full of clips, his shirt-sleeved figure draped with film like a raised bronze statue with Aegean seaweed: this was to see a Laocoon writhing in the agony of creation."
Are the rules better off broken? - column by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "The thing most people find hardest to believe about the Simple Sabotage Field Manual is that it isn’t a joke. It really was a top-secret document, created in 1944 by the predecessor to the CIA, and it really was distributed to agents working behind enemy lines in the second world war.... The manual is a guide to the art of 'purposeful stupidity' – easy ways in which the citizens of occupied Europe might be encouraged to lower morale and wreak havoc in their workplaces, thereby helping bring down the Axis powers. What’s amazing is that it reads like a description of every modern jobsworth you’ve ever encountered. 'Insist on doing everything through "channels",' one section advises. 'Never permit shortcuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.' When possible, 'refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration". Attempt to make the committee as large as possible – never less than five.' Misfile papers. Give out wrong phone numbers. Haggle over the wording of documents. And if there’s truly critical work to be done? Hold a conference instead. ... The really telling thing about the Simple Sabotage manual, as Galford et al point out [in their 2015 book also called Simple Sabotage], is how many of its prescriptions for sowing chaos resemble not disobedience but extreme obedience – following procedures to the letter, obsessing about perfect accuracy, chewing over every detail. ... Too often, managers assume the key to improvement must be clearer procedures and standards, more exactingly enforced. But when your management philosophy encourages the kind of behaviour that US intelligence services once sincerely believed might cause the collapse of nations, perhaps it’s time to reconsider. One way rules go wrong is when people don’t follow them. But another is what happens when they do."
So who put the cyber into cybersex? - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Where did the 'cyber' in 'cyberspace' come from? Most people, when asked, will probably credit William Gibson, who famously introduced the term in his celebrated 1984 novel, Neuromancer.... But the cyber- prefix actually goes back a long way before Gibson – to the late 1940s and Norbert Wiener’s book, Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, which was published in 1948....As a 'transdiscipline' that cuts across traditional fields such as physics, chemistry and biology, cybernetics had a brief and largely unsuccessful existence: few of the world’s universities now have departments of cybernetics. But as Thomas Rid’s absorbing new book, The Rise of the Machines: The Lost History of Cybernetics shows, it has had a long afterglow as a source of mythic inspiration that endures to the present day. ... Rid has effectively had to compose an alternative history of computing.... For him, the modern world of technology begins not with the early digital computers developed at Bletchley Park, Harvard, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania but with the interactive artillery systems developed for the US armed forces by the Sperry gyroscope company in the early 1940s. From this unexpected beginning, Rid weaves an interesting and original story. The seed crystal from which it grows is the idea that the Sperry gun-control system was essentially a way of augmenting the human gunner’s capabilities to cope with the task of hitting fast-moving targets. And it turns out that this dream of technology as a way of augmenting human capabilities is a persistent – but often overlooked – theme in the evolution of computing."
We're the Superhumans: meet the stars of Channel 4’s Paralympics trailer - article by Homa Khaleeli in The Guardian. "The extraordindary clip, which has been watched by millions, pays tribute to 140 people with disabilities – from a man who drums with his feet to a record-breaking wheelchair racer..."
Writing for an audience: doing history in public - article by Carys Brown (First Year PhD student) in [Cambridge University] History Faculty Newsletter Issue 7 August 2016. "When I joined the editorial team of the Faculty’s graduate blog, Doing History in Public (https://doinghistoryinpublic.org), in 2015, it was mainly because of an interest in public history. What I did not expect was that editing and writing for an online blog would change the way I thought about my academic writing.... The most frightening difference for me, to start with, was the absence of footnotes.... Without them I felt like I was making it all up. I wasn’t, but my reaction did make me reflect more carefully on the power of claims I was making.... A further temptation in academic writing is the use of complex language.... Even specialist readers have a low tolerance for unnecessarily long or complex sentences. Personally, I know that the more subordinate clauses my sentences have, the more confused I am.... For me, ... trying to write outside my academic comfort zone continues to be a great help as I undertake my research, and one which I would recommend to anyone."
A creative writing lesson from the ‘God of Story’ - interview article by Tim Lott in The Guardian. "An intensive inquiry into the nature and structure of narrative, McKee’s 'Story seminar' has been running in one form or another since he first gave the lecture at the University of Southern California in 1983. McKee credits himself with inventing the language of Hollywood – with its talk of the 'mid-point climax', the 'inciting incident' and the 'negation of the negation', a phrase that originated with Hegel, but in movies means something like “the ultimate negative”: a fallen hero who is not merely defeated but wants to die, or a character who doesn’t simply lose faith in God but begins to hate God. His claim is not an empty boast. So prominent is McKee in film-making circles that he had the rare honour, for a writing teacher, to be depicted at some length – satirically, but not without tenderness – by Brian Cox in the Charlie Kaufman-written film Adaptation. Kaufman, not incidentally, also distrusts 'craft'...."
Why a forgotten 1930s critique of capitalism is back in fashion - article by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. "The leading lights of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer, never lived to develop social media profiles, but they would have seen much of what the internet offers as confirmation of their view that the culture industry allows the 'freedom to choose what is always the same'. 'Culture appears more monolithic than ever, with a few gigantic corporations – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon – presiding over unprecedented monopolies,' argues Ross. 'Internet discourse has become tighter, more coercive.' In the late 1990s, as an arts editor at the Guardian, I commissioned an article to explore the perils of customised culture. The idea was to question the tailoring of cultural products to your tastes, the whole 'If you liked that, you’ll love this' thing. Wasn’t the point of art, I thought then, to blast through the continuum of one’s tastes rather than pander to them? John Reith, the BBC’s first director general, once said that good broadcasting gives people what they do not yet know they need. When the piece came in, several of my colleagues wondered: what is so very bad about customised culture? Isn’t getting more of what we know we like a good thing? But, I wailed, good broadcasting and great art offer a kind of serendipity that expands your horizons rather than keeping you in an eternal feedback loop."
Play All by Clive James: how box sets saved us from reality TV and Hollywood - review by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "With this book – after a few decades spent making TV shows, writing poetry, cultural criticism and memoir, and translating Dante – Clive James returns to the field he made his own. From 1972 to 1982, on the back page of the Observer Review, he turned the witty television column into an art form.... James has always been a generous critic – not in the sense of letting bad work off the hook, or in showering good work with superlatives, but in giving munificently of his time, and in using it to pay careful attention.... What he loves about box-set drama is that, even though it isn’t always great, it is made by people who believe in the product. 'There never was, and never will be, a successful entertainment fuelled by pure cynicism,' he writes – a description that could also apply to his own work. He shares with these serial dramas a fiercely intelligent populism, a willingness to play to the crowd while trusting that they will be able to keep up without too much plot summary or hand-holding. To despise the crowd-pleasing impulse of Game of Thrones, he writes, 'you have to imagine you aren’t part of the crowd. But you are: the lesson that the 20th century should have taught all intellectuals. Now it is a different century, and they must go on being taught.'"
Star Trek at 50: myths, maidens and flirting on the final frontier - article by Michael Newton in The Guardian. "It is one of the strengths of Star Trek that it can imagine a technological futurity where whatever it is that makes us human not only survives, but flourishes. In Space Seed, Khan, a eugenically-engineered superman cryogenically frozen since the 1990s, declares, 'I am surprised how little improvement there has been in human evolution. Oh, there has been technical advancement, but how little Man himself has changed!' Well, good. In The Ultimate Computer, Kirk faces the prospect of being replaced as captain by artificial intelligence. The future’s automated world looks set to lose its last human element. Only, of course, it doesn’t: the new supercomputer turns murderous; the human touch remains indispensable. Out there, in eternity, the human version of living stands as one of the richest, valuable in its capacity for imagination and spontaneity, gentleness and courage."
The greatest record sleeves, as chosen by the designers - interviews by Dave Simpson in The Guardian. Peter Saville on the cover to Autobhan (1974) by Kraftwerk: "Autobahn was the first album I ever bought, after I heard the single on the radio. In 1974, as a teenager who had never been abroad, listening to the full 22-minute title track while staring at the autobahn symbol on the sleeve felt like being taken on a journey. I was on a European highway, in a soundscape crafted by classically trained musicians, seeing cathedrals and power stations, villages and skyscrapers, ancient and modern, in time as well as distance. It was a continental tour – from gothic to postmodern, from the dark ages to Brigitte Bardot – with the pulsebeat of a speeding vehicle. All defined in a simple symbol. As a fledgling visual artist, this was my first lesson in semiotics. I realised that visual codes acted as keys to unlock the huge range of potential awareness in an audience."
Missing the Zeitgeist - article by Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times, quoted by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Fox News succeeded because it was brilliant enough to identify a market failure, not because it was sleazy enough to cause one. Murdoch, Ailes and those who build up Fox News did so by identifying a group of news consumers who were being ignored by news producers. It is only now, in the election season of 2016, that we can see how dire a problem this snub revealed, not just for the media but for the whole political system. It was a sign than the informed opinions of the broad public had ceased to count in American political and social life. The Fox News people understood that you can’t solve this problem by being 'more objective'. When it is being ignored by elites, the broad public prefers opinions to facts — because while everyone has opinions, as the saying goes, facts are increasingly things that get handed down by experts. In short, Fox News bet 20 years ago that the 'objectivity' of a nation’s elites could be a kind of bias. The past year’s events in the US show that it has won that bet."
How to actually talk to a woman wearing headphones - article by Martha Mills in The Guardian's Brain flapping blog. "An article has surfaced from the quagmire of bilge that is The Internet and it has caused, not without reason, a small tornado of outrage. Written as dating advice for 'The Modern Man' (a misnomer if ever there were one), it promises a solution to the hot ‘n’ horny down-on-their-luck young bucks of the world who face the tedious obstacle of a woman wearing headphones, because how dare she. ... Here’s how it plays out in real life. Trust me, I’ve been it, seen it and spoken to the survivors: Him: I see you don’t want to be talked to but I find you physically attractive and I’m making that your problem. Her: Please leave me alone. Him: F*** YOU, YOU STUCK UP B****, I DIDN’T FANCY YOU ANYWAY. With 'advice' like this out there, it’s hardly any surprise, is it? These lonely men so desperately in search of conquests have been given permission, blessed with the entitlement to go forth and pluck their bounty using but five humble steps. So imagine their horror and indignation when that which has been promised doesn’t want to be plucked and tells them to sling their greasy hook."
Trump, Erdoğan, Farage: The attractions of populism for politicians, the dangers for democracy - article by Jan-Werner Müller in The Guardian, extracted from his book What is Populism? (University of Pennsylvania). "Populist politicians are not like other politicians in a democracy. But the difference is not that they are somehow closer to the 'masses' who, according to the self-declared non-establishment thinker John Gray, are everywhere in 'revolt'. It is also not that they want direct, as opposed to representative, democracy. Populists are fine with the idea of representation, as long as they get to represent who they consider to be the real people.... The crucial difference is that populists deny, or wish away, the pluralism of contemporary societies. When they say equality, they mean sameness, which is to say: conforming to some ideal of Middle America, Little England, or whatever a symbolic representation of real peoplehood comes down to for them.... The notion that populists in power are bound to fail one way or another is comforting. It’s also an illusion. For one thing, while populist parties necessarily protest against elites, this does not mean that populism in government will become self-contradictory. All failures of populists in government can still be blamed on elites acting behind the scenes, whether at home or abroad."
David Hare on writing nothing but the truth about a Holocaust denier - article by David Hare in The Guardian, concerning his screenplay for the film 'Denial'. "In 2000 the British historian David Irving, whose writing had frequently offered a sympathetic account of the second world war from the Nazi point of view, had sued Lipstadt in the high court in London, claiming that her description of him as a denier in her previous book Denying the Holocaust had done damage to his reputation.... In 2010 I was first approached by the BBC and by Participant Media to adapt Deborah Lipstadt’s book History on Trial for the screen... It was clear from the start that this film would be a defence of historical truth. It would be arguing that although historians have the right to interpret facts differently, they do not have the right knowingly to misrepresent those facts. But if such integrity was necessary for historians, then it surely had to apply to screenwriters too. If I planned to offer an account of the trial and of Irving’s behaviour, I would enjoy none of the film writer’s usual licence to speculate or invent. From the trial itself there were 32 days of transcript, which took me weeks to read thoroughly. Not only would I refuse to write scenes which offered any hokey psychological explanation for Irving’s character outside the court, I would also be bound to stick rigidly to the exact words used inside it. I could not allow any neo-fascist critic later to claim that I had re-written the testimony. Nor did I want to. The trial scenes are verbatim.... During the early days of the Renaissance, Copernicus and Galileo would have scoffed at the idea that there was any such thing as authority. A sceptical approach to life is a fine thing and one which has powered revolutionary change and high ideals. But a sceptical approach to scientific fact is rather less admirable. It is dangerous. As Lipstadt says in my screenplay, certain things are true. Elvis is dead. The icecaps are melting. And the Holocaust did happen. Millions of Jews went to their deaths in camps and open pits in a brutal genocide which was sanctioned and operated by the leaders of the Third Reich. There are some subjects about which two points of view are not equally valid. We are entering, in politics especially, a post-factual era in which it is apparently permissible for public figures to assert things without evidence, and then to justify their assertions by adding 'Well, that’s my opinion' – as though that in itself was some kind of justification. It isn’t. And such charlatans need to learn it isn’t. Contemplating the Lipstadt/Irving trial may help them to that end."
Whodunnit and whowroteit: the strange case of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor - article by Jonathan Coe in The Guardian. "The author of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor was only 22 years old when it was published and just four years earlier he had barely been able to speak a word of English. His name was Ernst Wilhelm Julius Bornemann – subsequently anglicized to Ernest Borneman – and he had arrived in London as a communist refugee from Nazi Germany in 1933. In Berlin he had already made the acquaintance of Bertolt Brecht and worked for Wilhelm Reich’s Socialist Association for Sexual Counselling and Research. Somewhere along the way, either in Germany or London or both, he also worked as a film editor and acquired a reputation as a virtuoso of the cutting room.... Graham MacInnes’s memoir One Man’s Documentary gives a vivid portrait of Borneman at work as a film editor. Watching him make sense of the vast mass of footage assembled for a naval documentary called Action Stations, MacInnes [wrote:]... 'To see his wavy blond head bent rigidly over a hand viewer; his strong but elegant hands ripping “outs” of film backward like gravel flung behind a bone-digging dog; his swift, frenzied but orderly snatching of “takes” from bins; his skilled manipulation, without getting them twisted or torn, of half a dozen shots; his mouth full of clips, his shirt-sleeved figure draped with film like a raised bronze statue with Aegean seaweed: this was to see a Laocoon writhing in the agony of creation."
Are the rules better off broken? - column by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "The thing most people find hardest to believe about the Simple Sabotage Field Manual is that it isn’t a joke. It really was a top-secret document, created in 1944 by the predecessor to the CIA, and it really was distributed to agents working behind enemy lines in the second world war.... The manual is a guide to the art of 'purposeful stupidity' – easy ways in which the citizens of occupied Europe might be encouraged to lower morale and wreak havoc in their workplaces, thereby helping bring down the Axis powers. What’s amazing is that it reads like a description of every modern jobsworth you’ve ever encountered. 'Insist on doing everything through "channels",' one section advises. 'Never permit shortcuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.' When possible, 'refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration". Attempt to make the committee as large as possible – never less than five.' Misfile papers. Give out wrong phone numbers. Haggle over the wording of documents. And if there’s truly critical work to be done? Hold a conference instead. ... The really telling thing about the Simple Sabotage manual, as Galford et al point out [in their 2015 book also called Simple Sabotage], is how many of its prescriptions for sowing chaos resemble not disobedience but extreme obedience – following procedures to the letter, obsessing about perfect accuracy, chewing over every detail. ... Too often, managers assume the key to improvement must be clearer procedures and standards, more exactingly enforced. But when your management philosophy encourages the kind of behaviour that US intelligence services once sincerely believed might cause the collapse of nations, perhaps it’s time to reconsider. One way rules go wrong is when people don’t follow them. But another is what happens when they do."
So who put the cyber into cybersex? - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Where did the 'cyber' in 'cyberspace' come from? Most people, when asked, will probably credit William Gibson, who famously introduced the term in his celebrated 1984 novel, Neuromancer.... But the cyber- prefix actually goes back a long way before Gibson – to the late 1940s and Norbert Wiener’s book, Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, which was published in 1948....As a 'transdiscipline' that cuts across traditional fields such as physics, chemistry and biology, cybernetics had a brief and largely unsuccessful existence: few of the world’s universities now have departments of cybernetics. But as Thomas Rid’s absorbing new book, The Rise of the Machines: The Lost History of Cybernetics shows, it has had a long afterglow as a source of mythic inspiration that endures to the present day. ... Rid has effectively had to compose an alternative history of computing.... For him, the modern world of technology begins not with the early digital computers developed at Bletchley Park, Harvard, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania but with the interactive artillery systems developed for the US armed forces by the Sperry gyroscope company in the early 1940s. From this unexpected beginning, Rid weaves an interesting and original story. The seed crystal from which it grows is the idea that the Sperry gun-control system was essentially a way of augmenting the human gunner’s capabilities to cope with the task of hitting fast-moving targets. And it turns out that this dream of technology as a way of augmenting human capabilities is a persistent – but often overlooked – theme in the evolution of computing."
We're the Superhumans: meet the stars of Channel 4’s Paralympics trailer - article by Homa Khaleeli in The Guardian. "The extraordindary clip, which has been watched by millions, pays tribute to 140 people with disabilities – from a man who drums with his feet to a record-breaking wheelchair racer..."
Writing for an audience: doing history in public - article by Carys Brown (First Year PhD student) in [Cambridge University] History Faculty Newsletter Issue 7 August 2016. "When I joined the editorial team of the Faculty’s graduate blog, Doing History in Public (https://doinghistoryinpublic.org), in 2015, it was mainly because of an interest in public history. What I did not expect was that editing and writing for an online blog would change the way I thought about my academic writing.... The most frightening difference for me, to start with, was the absence of footnotes.... Without them I felt like I was making it all up. I wasn’t, but my reaction did make me reflect more carefully on the power of claims I was making.... A further temptation in academic writing is the use of complex language.... Even specialist readers have a low tolerance for unnecessarily long or complex sentences. Personally, I know that the more subordinate clauses my sentences have, the more confused I am.... For me, ... trying to write outside my academic comfort zone continues to be a great help as I undertake my research, and one which I would recommend to anyone."
A creative writing lesson from the ‘God of Story’ - interview article by Tim Lott in The Guardian. "An intensive inquiry into the nature and structure of narrative, McKee’s 'Story seminar' has been running in one form or another since he first gave the lecture at the University of Southern California in 1983. McKee credits himself with inventing the language of Hollywood – with its talk of the 'mid-point climax', the 'inciting incident' and the 'negation of the negation', a phrase that originated with Hegel, but in movies means something like “the ultimate negative”: a fallen hero who is not merely defeated but wants to die, or a character who doesn’t simply lose faith in God but begins to hate God. His claim is not an empty boast. So prominent is McKee in film-making circles that he had the rare honour, for a writing teacher, to be depicted at some length – satirically, but not without tenderness – by Brian Cox in the Charlie Kaufman-written film Adaptation. Kaufman, not incidentally, also distrusts 'craft'...."
Why a forgotten 1930s critique of capitalism is back in fashion - article by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. "The leading lights of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer, never lived to develop social media profiles, but they would have seen much of what the internet offers as confirmation of their view that the culture industry allows the 'freedom to choose what is always the same'. 'Culture appears more monolithic than ever, with a few gigantic corporations – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon – presiding over unprecedented monopolies,' argues Ross. 'Internet discourse has become tighter, more coercive.' In the late 1990s, as an arts editor at the Guardian, I commissioned an article to explore the perils of customised culture. The idea was to question the tailoring of cultural products to your tastes, the whole 'If you liked that, you’ll love this' thing. Wasn’t the point of art, I thought then, to blast through the continuum of one’s tastes rather than pander to them? John Reith, the BBC’s first director general, once said that good broadcasting gives people what they do not yet know they need. When the piece came in, several of my colleagues wondered: what is so very bad about customised culture? Isn’t getting more of what we know we like a good thing? But, I wailed, good broadcasting and great art offer a kind of serendipity that expands your horizons rather than keeping you in an eternal feedback loop."
Play All by Clive James: how box sets saved us from reality TV and Hollywood - review by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "With this book – after a few decades spent making TV shows, writing poetry, cultural criticism and memoir, and translating Dante – Clive James returns to the field he made his own. From 1972 to 1982, on the back page of the Observer Review, he turned the witty television column into an art form.... James has always been a generous critic – not in the sense of letting bad work off the hook, or in showering good work with superlatives, but in giving munificently of his time, and in using it to pay careful attention.... What he loves about box-set drama is that, even though it isn’t always great, it is made by people who believe in the product. 'There never was, and never will be, a successful entertainment fuelled by pure cynicism,' he writes – a description that could also apply to his own work. He shares with these serial dramas a fiercely intelligent populism, a willingness to play to the crowd while trusting that they will be able to keep up without too much plot summary or hand-holding. To despise the crowd-pleasing impulse of Game of Thrones, he writes, 'you have to imagine you aren’t part of the crowd. But you are: the lesson that the 20th century should have taught all intellectuals. Now it is a different century, and they must go on being taught.'"
Star Trek at 50: myths, maidens and flirting on the final frontier - article by Michael Newton in The Guardian. "It is one of the strengths of Star Trek that it can imagine a technological futurity where whatever it is that makes us human not only survives, but flourishes. In Space Seed, Khan, a eugenically-engineered superman cryogenically frozen since the 1990s, declares, 'I am surprised how little improvement there has been in human evolution. Oh, there has been technical advancement, but how little Man himself has changed!' Well, good. In The Ultimate Computer, Kirk faces the prospect of being replaced as captain by artificial intelligence. The future’s automated world looks set to lose its last human element. Only, of course, it doesn’t: the new supercomputer turns murderous; the human touch remains indispensable. Out there, in eternity, the human version of living stands as one of the richest, valuable in its capacity for imagination and spontaneity, gentleness and courage."
The greatest record sleeves, as chosen by the designers - interviews by Dave Simpson in The Guardian. Peter Saville on the cover to Autobhan (1974) by Kraftwerk: "Autobahn was the first album I ever bought, after I heard the single on the radio. In 1974, as a teenager who had never been abroad, listening to the full 22-minute title track while staring at the autobahn symbol on the sleeve felt like being taken on a journey. I was on a European highway, in a soundscape crafted by classically trained musicians, seeing cathedrals and power stations, villages and skyscrapers, ancient and modern, in time as well as distance. It was a continental tour – from gothic to postmodern, from the dark ages to Brigitte Bardot – with the pulsebeat of a speeding vehicle. All defined in a simple symbol. As a fledgling visual artist, this was my first lesson in semiotics. I realised that visual codes acted as keys to unlock the huge range of potential awareness in an audience."
Missing the Zeitgeist - article by Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times, quoted by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Fox News succeeded because it was brilliant enough to identify a market failure, not because it was sleazy enough to cause one. Murdoch, Ailes and those who build up Fox News did so by identifying a group of news consumers who were being ignored by news producers. It is only now, in the election season of 2016, that we can see how dire a problem this snub revealed, not just for the media but for the whole political system. It was a sign than the informed opinions of the broad public had ceased to count in American political and social life. The Fox News people understood that you can’t solve this problem by being 'more objective'. When it is being ignored by elites, the broad public prefers opinions to facts — because while everyone has opinions, as the saying goes, facts are increasingly things that get handed down by experts. In short, Fox News bet 20 years ago that the 'objectivity' of a nation’s elites could be a kind of bias. The past year’s events in the US show that it has won that bet."
Monday, 19 September 2016
Seen and heard: July 2016
The Strictly Prom – tremendous TV, with pro dancers from Strictly Come Dancing strutting their stuff to classical and light music numbers given the big BBC Symphony Orchestra treatment. Needs the visuals, however, to capture the excitement of the performance; not so good with sound only on the radio, except for the irrepressible 1920 and '30s numbers.
We're the Superhumans (Yes I can) – sensational promotional video for the Paralympics, showcasing ability rather than disability, including a death-defying wheelchair stunt at the end. Truly superhuman.
One Night in 2012 – fascinating documentary following the preparation for the single night smash hit opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games, which unexpectedly brought the nation together in a warm glow of positive feeling towards the Games and towards ourselves. Especially interesting to get an insight into the logistics of organising so many volunteer members of the public, called upon to play Brunels, nurses, nannies, teenagers, and so on. It wasn’t just chance and wishful thinking that made (nearly) everything go right on the night.
Frosta del sol – the summer “beach” or super-sandpit at our local garden centre, which turned out to be a great place to take the toddler members of our family for an entire afternoon’s peace and quiet (for us): buckets and spades and moulds and sieves and balls provided, along with two first rate playworkers, and even a carousel for variety. Best of all, the beach was located right next to the garden centre tea room, enabling us to keep an eye on the kids from our tea table. Very good value.
Powerplay – psychotherapy and spirituality day at Turvey Monastery. Enriching and inspirational as usual, my main take-away memory this time being the provokation to consider the possible positive connotations of the word “powerplay”, usually used in a negative sense, if you go deeper into the possible meanings of the component “play”.
Magic Carpet – stunning audio-visual interactive display in the Milton Keynes shopping mall, as part of the MK International Festival. The shifting and changing projected patterns on the floor fascinated our two-year-old grandson, although he was just as interested by the floor-mounted access hatches and a cabinet of fire extinguishers. We couldn’t let him hold one of the sound-producing eggs, unfortunately: too much risk of his dropping or throwing it.
The 80s with Domenic Sandbrook – a fun TV trip through the popular culture and politics of the decade, although Sandbrook’s right-wing orientation is more evident here than in his previous explorations. It’s all very well to minimise the role of Margaret Thatcher and observe how the changes of the 1980s were supported or even driven by ordinary people rather than politicians or cultural leaders, but that’s rather like saying that Nazi Germany would have happened without Hitler: probably true but not necessarily helpful to understanding unless you go a great deal deeper into the socio-politics than Sandbrook (who I imagine is not a Marxist historian) would be prepared to go.
Fauré Requiem, sung by The Sixteen, accompanied by the Academy of Ancient Music, which I played for my mother during her final hour on 30 July 2016. Thank you to the staff of Bletchley House Care Home for their support.
We're the Superhumans (Yes I can) – sensational promotional video for the Paralympics, showcasing ability rather than disability, including a death-defying wheelchair stunt at the end. Truly superhuman.
One Night in 2012 – fascinating documentary following the preparation for the single night smash hit opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games, which unexpectedly brought the nation together in a warm glow of positive feeling towards the Games and towards ourselves. Especially interesting to get an insight into the logistics of organising so many volunteer members of the public, called upon to play Brunels, nurses, nannies, teenagers, and so on. It wasn’t just chance and wishful thinking that made (nearly) everything go right on the night.
Frosta del sol – the summer “beach” or super-sandpit at our local garden centre, which turned out to be a great place to take the toddler members of our family for an entire afternoon’s peace and quiet (for us): buckets and spades and moulds and sieves and balls provided, along with two first rate playworkers, and even a carousel for variety. Best of all, the beach was located right next to the garden centre tea room, enabling us to keep an eye on the kids from our tea table. Very good value.
Powerplay – psychotherapy and spirituality day at Turvey Monastery. Enriching and inspirational as usual, my main take-away memory this time being the provokation to consider the possible positive connotations of the word “powerplay”, usually used in a negative sense, if you go deeper into the possible meanings of the component “play”.
Magic Carpet – stunning audio-visual interactive display in the Milton Keynes shopping mall, as part of the MK International Festival. The shifting and changing projected patterns on the floor fascinated our two-year-old grandson, although he was just as interested by the floor-mounted access hatches and a cabinet of fire extinguishers. We couldn’t let him hold one of the sound-producing eggs, unfortunately: too much risk of his dropping or throwing it.
The 80s with Domenic Sandbrook – a fun TV trip through the popular culture and politics of the decade, although Sandbrook’s right-wing orientation is more evident here than in his previous explorations. It’s all very well to minimise the role of Margaret Thatcher and observe how the changes of the 1980s were supported or even driven by ordinary people rather than politicians or cultural leaders, but that’s rather like saying that Nazi Germany would have happened without Hitler: probably true but not necessarily helpful to understanding unless you go a great deal deeper into the socio-politics than Sandbrook (who I imagine is not a Marxist historian) would be prepared to go.
Fauré Requiem, sung by The Sixteen, accompanied by the Academy of Ancient Music, which I played for my mother during her final hour on 30 July 2016. Thank you to the staff of Bletchley House Care Home for their support.
Sunday, 18 September 2016
Seen and heard: August 2016
Gershwin Gala, The John Wilson Orchestra Prom – every John Wilson Orchestra concert is a treat, and this one, featuring the songs of George and Ira Gershwin, especially so: not only blisteringly wonderful performances of the film versions – now the definitive versions – of familiar songs but an introduction to many less famous numbers also, such as The Babbitt and The Bromide mercilessly making fun of the poverty of man-to-man conversation.
Woburn Safari Park – a return visit with both our grandchildren, highlights including rhinos sauntering by our car at near-touching distance, swan boats on the lake, and a zebra crossing :) (I must be the millionth person to make that joke, which come to think of it I first heard in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.)
Ana Moura – a wonderful fado singer, to whom we were referred by my wife’s elder son, to whom he in turn had been referred by Spotify.
Shardlight – sad, atmospheric, dystopian adventure game from Dave Gilbert and Wadjet Eye. The protagonist is an engineer in a post-apocalyptic society, in which an aristocratic elite (dressed in ancien regime frippery) hoard the vaccine for the deadly green lung disease while the majority of the population live in poverty, the dominant religion being the cult of the death-bringing Reaper, whose arrival is prefigured by the appearance of ravens. A good yarn, but the endings – there are three alternatives – are understandably unconvincing, especially the “best” one.
Woburn Safari Park – a return visit with both our grandchildren, highlights including rhinos sauntering by our car at near-touching distance, swan boats on the lake, and a zebra crossing :) (I must be the millionth person to make that joke, which come to think of it I first heard in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.)
Ana Moura – a wonderful fado singer, to whom we were referred by my wife’s elder son, to whom he in turn had been referred by Spotify.
Shardlight – sad, atmospheric, dystopian adventure game from Dave Gilbert and Wadjet Eye. The protagonist is an engineer in a post-apocalyptic society, in which an aristocratic elite (dressed in ancien regime frippery) hoard the vaccine for the deadly green lung disease while the majority of the population live in poverty, the dominant religion being the cult of the death-bringing Reaper, whose arrival is prefigured by the appearance of ravens. A good yarn, but the endings – there are three alternatives – are understandably unconvincing, especially the “best” one.
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