An introduction

This is a semi-public place to dump text too flimsy to even become a blog post. I wouldn't recommend reading it unless you have a lot of time to waste. You'd be better off at my livejournal. I also have another blog, and write most of the French journal summaries at the Eurozine Review.

Why do I clutter up the internet with this stuff at all? Mainly because I'm trying to get into the habit of displaying as much as possible of what I'm doing in public. Also, Blogger is a decent interface for a notebook

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Erdos as a guest

Paul Erdos, Tom Waits, and women in Philosophy:

But he wasn’t just moving from one university or research center to the next in a restless quest for mathematical talent. He was on the move so much because he was holy hell as a house guest. —He “forsook all creature comforts—including a home—to pursue his lifelong study of numbers,” the blurbs will tell you. Bullshit. He forsook the bother and worry of creature comforts. Other people cooked his food. Other people washed his clothing. Other people kept him from wandering into traffic. Other people woke him in time for his “preaching” appointments. Other people filled out his paperwork.

Monday, December 28, 2009

Brecht: if sharks were men

Linked, because it has slipped my mind for almost a year, and because it's highly entertaining (if a little obvious). If sharks were men:

There would, of course, also be schools in the big boxes. In these schools the little fish would learn how to swim into the sharks' jaws. They would need to know geography, for example, so that they could find the big sharks, who lie idly around somewhere. The principal subject would, of course, be the moral education of the little fish. They would be taught that it would be the best and most beautiful thing in the world if a little fish sacrificed itself cheerfully...

More romantics: Wordsworth

Wordsworth, however, is a poet I've never been able to make mean something. The main reason, probably, is that I have no time for the pastoral. I'd rather see allusive intensity in the cities I love than in a natural world with which I find no connection.

But the above-linked article by Adam Kirsch turns up other reasons. Apparently "many of what we now see as the Victorian virtues—earnestness, mature optimism, easy authority—are first incarnated in his poetry". And, perceptively:

If his first readers turned against him because he was undignified, today we are more likely to turn away from him because he is too dignified. He knows what he knows so surely, so completely, that he cannot think against himself; no poet besides Milton is as devoid of humor.
....

His emergence as the great, challenging poet of natural sympathy and his subsequent decline into dull institutional benevolence form one of the key instructive dramas of modern poetry.

And then, there's the politics. Shelley embodied it with Queen Mab and the Masque of Anarchy. Byron died for it in Greece, and even Coleridge kept up some level of political involvement through his life. Wordsworth did absorb the afterglow of the French Revolution, but as a spectator rather than an actor. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive" is no attempt to change the world, just a thrilling to the work others were doing around him. And even here, argues Kirsch:

“The Prelude” was written as an act of convalescence from and penance for politics, which he finally comes to see as “a degradation” fortunately “transient”


[Kirsch, admittedly, then goes on to praise Wordsworth's "struggle to transcend the radicalism of his youth, to rescue its benevolent impulses while escaping its shallowness and intolerance".]

Celebrity duel: Kleist vs. Rilke

Have just emerged from reading Rilke's Letters to a young poet. Surprised by how much I like it, given that I've come to think of myself as basically unsympathetic to Romanticism. I'll chalk this one up to my general sensation of reverting to adolescence. But...

I tend to forget how late Rilke is. When he's writing, well over a century has passed since the revolution in France and Young Werther in Germany. The years since had been filled by the aftershocks and farcical imitations of one, and the gradual swelling and dissipation of the Romantic movement kick-started by the other. Kleist, for example, feels like he should be writing later than Rilke. just as Marx had seen and analyzed capitalism at the moment of its birth, perceiving and criticising the mechanisms of the next decades, so did Kleist perceive the opposition between Romanticism and the Enlightenment, and find their synthesis. I'm thinking of his essay on hte Marionette Theatre, which punctures the Romantic idealisation of youth and innocence, while describing how the essential Romantic intensity can be reborn through experience:

...grace itself returns when knowledge has as it were gone through an infinity. Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god.....we must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence


Rilke, in 1903, is still a believer in innocence. His advice to the young poet remains at the level of "to thine own self be true", never touching on the possibilities of schizophrenic self-invention which now endure as the only conceivable engine of intensity in a time of post-modernism.

Friday, December 25, 2009

The Arabs: a history

The Arabs: A history, by Eugene Rogan, has just been published in hardback. The various reviews present it as an important work, perhaps even as a successor to Hourani's History of the Arab Peoples -- respected, but now somewhat long in the tooth. Hourani was Rogan's "mentor", whatever that means, but the younger historian has concentrated mainly on media and historical circumstances, in contrast to Hourani's excursions into "demography, trading patterns and literature".

Sadly, the reviews in the Guardian and Telegraph concentrate on the Arabs' contact and conflict with the West. I'm hoping this is just an artefact of the British newspaper industry, not of a narrow focus in the book itself.

Thursday, December 24, 2009

My new favourite christmas tradition

BBC:

A giant straw goat - the traditional Scandinavian yuletide symbol - erected each Christmas in a Swedish town has been burned to the ground yet again.

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Kunduz

In September, a German military cock-up killed 142 people. mostly civilians. Here is a lengthy article covering not just the details of the incident, but how politicians on all sides downplayed it in the run-up to the election, knowing how opposed the German public were to the war:

"Not a single politician or senior military official told the public the full truth. The subject was to be kept off the radar during Germany's fall parliamentary election campaign, so as not to ruffle the feathers of an already skeptical electorate. Now the incident has been magnified to a far greater extent than would have been the case if those involved had decided to come clean with the public in the first place."


Much as I love Germany's political system of consensus and coalitions, it does tend to result in situations just like this -- where the political class stand together against public opinion, and nobody has much incentive to rock the boat.

Lukashenko


Alexander Lukashenko has often been referred to as Europe's last dictator. All of a sudden, though, he seems to be on a push to rapidly liberalize Belarus' economy and turn it into a high-tech paradise. But is this socialist island really ready to attract Western investors?
[Spiegel]


This is really simple. Business isn't the opposite of dictatorship; it's something almost orthogonal to it. If one man's whim completely changes the government of a country, then it's a dictatorship. Obviously I'm glad his current passions encompass encouraging business rather than staging purges, but that doesn't make Lukashenko any less a dictator.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Laïcite

Ah, the ever-flexible French obsession with laïcite -- now showing its good side, as the language in which to condemn a statement that "when there are more minarets than Cathedrals in France, it will no longer be France".

Monday, December 21, 2009

Cities, spirits and Possession

I've been reading AS Byatt's Possesion the last few weeks -- lingering over it, because it's a rich enough book to spend time over, and because I can't think of anything else that could have the same effect. This passage (p.395) is a little at odds with the rest, but feeds into a big unspoken (and not terribly original) rant of mine on urban mythology -- that mesh between Hobsbawm, Grant Morrison, Hogarth, Mike Davis, Erik Davis, and a whole lot more:

A spirit may speak to a peasant like Gode, because that is picturesque, she is surrounded by Romantic crags on the one hand and primitive enough huts and hearths on the other, and her house is lapped by real thick mortal dark. But if there are spirits, I do not see why they are not everywhere, or may not be presumed to be so. You could argue that their voices may well be muffled by solid brick walls and thick plush furnishings and house-proud antimacassars. But the mahogany-polishers and the drapers' clerks are as much in need of salvation-as much desirous of assurance of an afterlife-as poets or peasants, in the last resort. When they were sure in their unthinking faiths-when the Church was a solid presence in their midst, the Spirit sat docile enough behind the altar rails and the Souls kept-on the whole-to the churchyard and the vicinity of their stones. But now they fear they may not be raised, that their lids may not be lifted, that heaven and hell were no more than faded drawings on a few old church walls, with wax angels and gruesome bogies-they ask, what is there?

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Shocked to see some fire in the Independent:

The only part of this deal that anyone sane came close to welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it's now apparent that even this is largely made up of existing budgets, with no indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so that poorer countries can go green and adapt to climate change.


By Joss Garman, who is apparently involved in Greenpeace and in Plane Stupid. I like him!

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Idle Talk


Heidegger talks about how incessant chatter of culture and other public discourse harms and makes understanding difficult, because of its inauthenticity or "groundlessness", which he explains as talking about something "without previously making the thing one's own". [source]


The word you're looking for, Martin, is grok

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Ban

Der Spiegel, like everybody else, pulls apart Ban Ki-Moon

Jacob Heilbrunn, a commentator for the respected American journal Foreign Policy, called Ban "the world's most dangerous Korean." The moniker is a terrible insult, since by rights it belongs to Kim Jong Il, North Korea's erratic dictator. But it's also a gauge of the disappointment currently reigning in the United States. Heilbrunn fears the UN is rapidly becoming irrelevant under Ban's stewardship. Ban's sole achievement is having attained his post, Heilbrunn claims, calling the secretary-general a "nowhere man."

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Size limits on banks

Cutting the "too big to fail" knot: order that "no high-rolling investment bank can exceed 2% of GDP; no boring commercial bank can be bigger than 4% of GDP"

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Urban recovery after a recession

Le Monde points out that periods of recovery from recession are crucial in the growth, or decline, of inequality between districts. It is now that new businesses are created, or not, in depressed areas, and when they can most easily be nudged by state intervention.

C'est dans ces périodes, paradoxalement, que les écarts entre les territoires risquent de se creuser, entre ceux qui végètent et ceux qui rebondissent vite. Dans ces périodes, aussi, que le gouvernement, rassuré quant aux risques d'explosion sociale, peut être tenté de réduire les moyens, déjà limités, consacrés à la politique de la ville pour les redéployer sur d'autres priorités.

Monday, November 30, 2009

Sunday, November 29, 2009

CT Fantasy recommendations

Crooked Timber book recommendation threads are always, always worth reading. This time, fantasy, with an interesting number of people trying to worm some SF in one way or another. Why are there more people talking about ideas, people and society in an SF than a fantasy setting? Can we blame it all on Tolkein?

me dicen el clandestino / por no llevar papel

Ulrich Beck is writing a monthly column on 'Weltinnenpolitik' for the Franfurter Rundschau. His first piece is devoted to the political demands of sans-papiers. It's not a bad introduction to the issue, which apparently hasn't really come to the fore in Germany. Particularly, the extent to which entire industries and cultures depend on illegal workers.

Grumbling about theatre in Berlin

The Tagesspiegel has a good old rant about the caution and backwardness of Berlin theatre:

All das existiert bis heute, es ist die Avantgarde von gestern und vorgestern. Wie modrige Pilze. Die Formen und Mischformen erzeugen kaum mehr Reibung, sie werden mehr oder weniger aufregend recycelt.


You want to pat the author on the back, give him a pep-talk. I don't know nearly enough about the Berlin theatre scene to say whether it's accurate; certainly there are few people with a positive word to say about Berlin theatre at the moment. My feeling, though, is that the big and famous theatres are always boring, in every city. The interesting stuff is going to come through newer, smaller venues, of which the article avoids much mention. HAU, for instance, seems to be the epicentre of interesting theatre in Berlin, with a constantly-changing programme that puts the bigger places to shame.

On the other hand, much of HAU's content comes from touring companies; that might not make them the best advert for Berlin thetre.

Chinese art in Germany

Sign and Sight, in its weekly guide to the cultural pages of German newspapers, is keeping up a relentless focus on Chinese art. I'm struggling to figure out how much this is a reflection of a genuine trend in the German media, and how much it's just the interest of S&S's writers, editors or backers.

Photoshop labelling

The Telegraph:

A group of 50 politicians want a new law stating published images must have bold printed notice stating they have been digitally enhanced.
....
"It is not an attempt to damage creativity of photographers or publicity campaigns, but to advise the public on whether what they are seeing is real or not."


Well, yes. And that's before you get onto how unpleasantly inhuman all these doctored images look.

Also, I love that the term 'airbrushed' seems set to stick around long, long after every genuine airbrush has been consigned to the scrap-heap

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

What is culture?

From Art Goldhammer's lecture on French culture:

A Jew, Sartre said, is one who is a Jew for the anti-Semite. So let us say that Culture is that which is Culture
for the Other. And let us stipulate further that the Other of Culture is Power, with which it is
locked in mutual embrace

Possession

Just started reading A.S. Byatt's Possession, and am massively enjoying it. Somehow able to be excited by it even though all the characters are, so far, noticeably wet. Little understanding of why I like it, though -- or at least none I'll put in public on the web.

Two new blogs

Once upon a time there was an excellent blog called Volsunga. But its author got busy, or bored, and the blog vanished into the ether. It's now no longer even in the wayback machine, so far as I can see. But - the author has returned!.

Meanwhile, here is another new blog from another excellent person. I like this trend; the more blogs the better.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Tobias Rapp on Rammstein

Spiegel yet again, where Tobias "Easyjetset" Rapp has a delightfully cynical article on Rammstein finally getting their latest album (not quite) banned:

For the professional provocateurs it is almost a little offensive that a passé gay joke about homosexuals supposedly inserting hamsters into their bodies riled the censors more than earlier songs about the cannibal of Rotenburg and incest, or their Leni Riefenstahl video.


And he has the cultural situation of Neue Deutsche Härte precisely pinned down:


Rammstein, six East German musicians who played in various underground bands in East Germany, derived a successful business model from their understanding that there are no consequences for cultural rebellion in capitalism. Their recipe is simple: Cram sex and violence into a Dadaist vise (a technique that is probably most successful in "Pussy," with lines like "Blitzkrieg with the meat gun"), add layers of loud guitar music and synthesizer noise, and gurgle out the words in a deep, throaty voice.

MultiKulti fail

Also in Der Spiegel, polling of Turkish Germans:

Turks are the largest ethnic minority in Germany and make up almost 4 percent of the country's population. Yet only 21 percent of those polled feel happy to call Germany home.

Decline and fall

Paris-bashing is seeping gradually further into the mainstream:

"It is now well-known that Paris has lost all kind of European leadership to the benefit of towns such as London, Barcelona, Prague and Berlin, to which more and more French professional artists are going into exile,"

Monday, November 9, 2009

Gerry Adams and MLK

In a (month-old) interview with Gerry Adams, Johann Hari emphasises the similarity between Republican movements in Ireland and a cross-Atlantic counterpart:

.

Over the next few years, Catholics in Northern Ireland – stirred by the black civil rights movement in the US, and the dream of Martin Luther King – started to peacefully organise to demand equality.... "There was a sense of naiveté, of innocence almost, a feeling that the demands we were making were so reasonable that all we had to do was kick up a row and the establishment would give in," he says. But the civil rights marches were met with extraordinary ferocity. Protestant mobs attacked the demonstrators, and then the RUC swooped in to smash them up.


Following this line, the divergent outcomes for the two movements become a case study of the snowball effect of political choices. Also of the distortions of hindsight, which tends to elide the violent parts of the US civil rights movement, and the peaceful ends of Irish republicanism.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

'Liberation'


Bobbed, geometric haircuts. Chunky jewellery. Vegetarian diets. Saxophone playing. Breathing exercises. Painting. Carving. Snapping with brand new 35mm Leica cameras. Dressing in the artiest handmade clothes. Attending arty parties. Ninety years on from the founding of Walter Gropius's legendary art, craft and design school, the female students of the Bauhaus appear to have been as liberated as young women today.

--- the Guardian

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Trade secrets

I've just been reading an ancient JK Galbraith book. True to Galbraith's reputtion, it's packed with little facts and asides. I particularly love the British companies formed in the early 18th century, including one "for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is" [p.43]

Friday, October 16, 2009

Philip Pullman writing on Athensius Kircher (in the form of a book review) is a treat, lightly linking him to the post-pomo cultural melange, and the return of magic:

Kircher lived on the cusp between the magical world of the Middle Ages and the rational and scientific world of modernity – as perhaps we do again today, except that we're going in the other direction. His half-sceptical, half-credulous cast of mind is very much to our current taste.

Qiu Xiaolong

Qiu Xiaolong is a bestselling Chinese author of crime thrillers. But his depictions of Shanghai as a city of crime and corruption haven't gone down well with the authorities.
Le Monde Diplomatique is in deepening financial trouble

Thursday, October 15, 2009

German documents on wikileaks

Wikileaks seems to be getting a steady stream of German political documents, at the moment particularly concerning coalition talks. Unfortunately I'm no longer following German politics closely enough to figure out the backstory and meaning of the leaks.

New Europe

The Wall Street Journal is, judging by its website, one of the few media organizations to pay serious attention to Central and Eastern Europe. It's mostly paywalled, alas, but there is at least a dedicated [blog](http://blogs.wsj.com/new-europe/) for us shallow-pocketed types.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Class A blinkers

Simon Reynolds speaks truth:

one of my fiend heros (ex this parish) is said to have said that deconstruction did more damage to him than the drink and the drugs ever did.


My past life peddling MMORPGs to children made me deeply uncomfortable; I'd lump (some) online games in with twitter, religion, Marxist introspection and, yes, deconstruction as serious memetic dangers.

[written with a certain flippancy. Deconstruction has its uses, but too often it forms part of an inward-looking academic world unable to make much connection to the rest of reality. I'm very fond of those rare theorists who can harness deconstruction to achieve real-world ends]

media in spain

This is a notes-to-myself entry, in which I try to figure out the best online sources for Spanish news in English. There doesn't seem to be much, which I guess is useful encouragement to learn Spanish

Saturday, October 10, 2009

PS in the regions

The Parti Socialiste may be disintegrating at a national level, but according to AG it's much stronger at a regional level.

The second president

Forget who will be the first EU president. The more interesting question is, who will be the second? After 2+ years under the new constitution, what kind of figure would make a plausible president? Will interest groups trampled by the first president push for a low-key successor? Would the position -- having, as it does, few formal powers -- turn out to be of minor importance? Will the first president be re-elected again and again? (is that possible under the Treaty of Lisbon?) Will politicians start openly campaigning for the office, rather than putting up a public face of being surprised and honoured to be considered?

After the Irish referendum

This [via CT] is a good overview of the state of play on the Lisbon treaty:

But some diplomats say it is the foreign policy high representative who may emerge as the strongest figure in the new set-up.
....
The foreign policy chief will be powerful because he or she will not only speak on behalf of EU national governments but will also hold the title of Commission vice-president. The holder will oversee the EU’s multi-billion euro foreign aid budget and control a diplomatic service that will ultimately employ up to 3,000 officials.

Goth clubs in Berlin

[from a comment posted elsewhere]


There's a goth club listing at http://etoile.de/; Berlin is in the section 'PLZ-Bereich 1'. You can probably read through the genre descriptions and club addresses without needing much German.

The Kit Kat Club is -- well, if you've had it recommended, you probably have an idea. I like it, although I've not been since a couple of years ago, when it was in a different venue. [I stopped going after seeing a page on their site seemingly saying that they don't want Turks or feminists in the club. Probably it's just an unfortunately-worded page, but it didn't make me want to go back]

Also on the sex end of the spectrum, check out Insomnia. It's a fetish club, with a monthly goth night called 'angel in bondage'.

K17 is the largest and most regular goth club, with a big dose of metal and industrial. On a Friday or Saturday, they generally have four floors: one trad goth and 80s, one electro/industrial, and two small ones for metal. The venue is ugly as hell, but also huge.

If you fancy going out on a Monday night, Duncker is a lovely smallish club, with a lot of regulars and a friendly atmosphere. They (always?) have some kind of barbeque-type food in their back courtyard, and will keep going until Tuesday morning. I think there's also a small goth market there every other sunday afternoon (http://www.darkmarket.de/).

Other places: Kato is more rock-oriented, and has lots of smallish live gigs. ACUD and Sama-Cafe are squats (perhaps legalised; I'm not sure), which do goth/wave nights. They're incredibly cheap (to make them accessible to everybody; do pay a bit more if you can!). Expect plenty of shabby-looking punks and people out of their heads on (cheap) Sternberg beer.
Turkey and Armenia are set to normalize relations today. They're setting up a commission to establish the history of the Armenian Genocide (doubtless carefully skirting that term). Boy, that's going to be one of the most scarily politicised pieces of work going!

Hillary Clinton is witnessing the signing. Wonder if she's bringing with her Samanta Power, author of A Problem From Hell and once-and-future Obama advisor.

Friday, October 9, 2009

Le Figaro poll on whether Obama deserves the Nobel peace prize currently at 29% yes, 71% no.

Der Spiegel also pretty sceptical. Global Voices rounds up similarly bemused reactions from the rest of the world.

I like Obama, but this is ridiculous

Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize? I can only add to the chorus of WTF. Looking back over previous winners, I see a lot of unexciting, so-so awards, but not that many out-and-out fuckups. Dare I say it, I think this is even worse than Kissenger. With Kissenger (also Arafat/Rabin/Peres), at least they were recognizing a warmonger belatedly trying to wind down a war. The Obama nomination doesn't even have that excuse.

books

I've just arrived back at my mother's place in Oakham, with the plan of spending a couple of weeks quietly working. And now, I realise, also leafing through the piles of books that have accumulated here. Books once read and forgotten; books I've been itching to look at gain for months or years; reference books I never have in the right place to refer to them.

I'm very much looking forward to getting to know them again.

Monday, October 5, 2009

FT on the French integration debate

On the never-vanishing topic of Islam in France, this article in the FT is pretty good.

Farhad Khosrokhavar, director of research at France’s Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, estimates that 15 to 20 per cent of French Muslims do not practise Islam at all. Fasting during Ramadan is considered a basic duty of the religion, yet only about 70 per cent of French ­Muslims even claim to do it. In short, European Islam has many of the same problems as European Christianity.


Via Art Goldhammer, unsurprisingly

Sunday, October 4, 2009

This list of topics for a design magazine was composed in the year I was born. Nothing, it seems, has changed: they're still interesting, still important, still underexplored. Disappointing, that, it a way.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

A collective spasm of high-level excuse-making

I am, like Art Goldhammer somewhat baffled by the French government treating the Roman Polanski as a matter of artistic freedom, rather than rape. There aren't many situations in which I'm on the side of Law and Order, but this must be one of them.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Making lists for fun and profit

This, to my utter surprise, is not just usable but something I'm honest-to-God likely to use. Wonders will never cease.

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Looks like there's a new squat just outside Paris. Wouldn't count on it lasting more than a few days, but you never know.

Meanwhile I'm sat at home, already in bed (it's only 8:30), feeling uncertain and oddly morose. My life currently has a lot of moving parts, and I'm not entirely sure I have them all lined up. Alternatively, it could just be lack of sleep.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

I feel a little sorry for the Porguese parliament. Elections are coming up on Sunday, and I'm struggling to find a single article about them in the French or British press. The German media, on the other hand, is giving them a fair bit of attention. Why the difference in interest? I have not hte faintest idea. German elections are happening on the same day -- but if anything, I would have expected that to divert attention away from Portugal. Mysterious.

[I fully expect that some other European country is holding elections this week, and I haven't heard anything about it]

films

Am I just noticing films more at the moment, or are there a lot of good new films floating around? I'm thinking of the following -- none of which I've seen, all of which I want to see.

  • District 9 -- political commentary in the form of Science Fiction. i.e. what written SF has always been about, but with a budget.
  • Neuilly sa mère, a comedy about the class divide in Parisian suburbs
  • Inglorious basterds. The only WWII film I have any desire to watch

Momus in Paris

I seem to finally be running into a fair number of interesting places in Paris. So last night I finally saw Momus, the (currently Berlin-based) writer/singer, reading from the French edition of his new 'Book of Jokes'. The venue, La Société de Curiosités, is a comfortable looking one-room space. It's run as a private club, which I think is basically a legal hack so you're allowed to smoke there.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Poetry slams in Paris

Tonight I finally made it to the weekly French-language poetry slam at Culture Rapide in Belleville. Impressed. Very impressed. Aware that my being impressed counts somewhat less given the difficulty I had in following some of the French poetry.

Of everything I've seen in my 2+ months in Paris, this was the first event that really impressed me, that made me want to stay in town just to remain in its orbit.

Why did it take me so long to end up there? The same place also hosts a regular English-language slam, which I visited soon after I arrived. It wasn't actually bad -- just somewhat insipid, more like a poetry reading than the slams I'd come to love in Berlin. So I wasn't inspired to visit its French sister, at least not before August came and put everything interesting in Paris under wraps.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Accidental outing on facebook

Both important and unsurprising: your friendship network reveals your sexuality, with a pretty high accuracy.

Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction.


While George's work (among others) goes much, much further in pulling down illusions of privacy in networks. But sometimes we need the simple stuff to hammer home the basic point that it's more-or-less impossible to make your connections public, and still have any real form of anonymity.

[admittedly the first form, at least, is doing little more than mechanizing what happens socially in any case]

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Segolene Royal's new website has received plenty of much-deserved mockery in France, but not nearly enough from the rest of the world. Go, admire the purple!

104

Just back from a film/discussion about a violence and arrests at a demonstration in Paris last March. I was somewhat underwhelmed by the film itself: riot-porn shot in black and white, with the sound turned way down. i.e. making itself look arty without using a great deal of art.

The discussion that followed, though, was excellent. Sylvain George, who shot the film, led it, with enthusiastic comments from a small audience consisting in large part of people who had taken place in the protest. Despite being too confused and tongue-tied to contribute to it myself, I was cheered up to find some fervent opinions being expressed for once.

My main reason for going, though, was an excuse to visit the arts centre 104. It's much larger and more obviously government-funded than I'd imagined*. It reminds me a little of the Tate Modern: a massive, deliberately under-utilised space, a painfully clean industrial conversion. By the look of 104, I imagine it's a former rail station or similar. Like a lot of places in Paris, it initially rubbed me up the wrong way by being too clean, too expensive-looking. But the programme of events is impressive, they're mostly free or reasonably priced, and it seems to be providing space for artists to work rtaher than just strut. I'd feel considerably more at home there if it had a decent covering of grime, but that's just my personal neuroses making themselves known.

* Actually, I suspect I'd confused it with somewhere else, such as a more self-organized atelier, but I can't disentangle my memories. Such is the problem of using numbers as names.
Troy Kennedy Martin died last week. Not a name I knew -- but I had repeatedly heard tell of Edge of Darkness, an impressively well-regarded BBC series from the 80s, which he wrote. So I settled down to watch it. So far (2 episodes in), I'm pretty impressed. Some irritating artefacts of its era -- the slow pace, the constant drinking -- but the plot is fascinating. More later, maybe.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

This is a good case of why I'm occasionally uncomfortable with novels of ideas. Calvino's summary of logic vs. empiricism is neat -- but this is something I can read argued much more closely in textbooks and journal articles. Without the plot, what's the point.

[I'm aware that, between this and the last post, I seem to be arguing that thrillers are the only books worth reading. Maybe I should follow that...]

Twilight

A few weeks ago, I tried reading the first of the Twilight books. I fully expected to loathe it, and there are plenty of good reasons to do so. But there's something addictive about its fixation on a Mary Sue -- it becomes much more appealing than any non-cardboard characters would be.

In short, I enjoyed it. Had I been a neurotic teenager, it would probably have spoken more directly to me [as a neurotic twenty-something, the distance is generally a little too great].

But then, I also approved of the Da Vinci Code.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Penny Red starts her column in the morning star. Notable mainly for looking back to the 80s as a heyday of counter-culture. Given enough time, all things start to look good.

Friday, September 4, 2009

Videos to listen to

Things I've been listening to:
  • Bruce Sterling on Augmented Reality [50m] -- not much shocking content, by his Sterling's standards, but pleasantly upbeat

  • Lots of TED Talks. I've been unexpectedly disappointed by most of the recent ones. Possibly, as with OReilly conferences, my expectations are now so high that reality can only disappoint. Also, as John Robb speculates, corporate/financial backing may have steered them away from decent thinking on this year's Collapse Of Capitalism. [or perhaps, since we're currently in a hype-bubble of financial apocalypse, treating this as Just Another Recession is the forward-looking thing to do

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Beyond the reality-based community

The Yorkshire Ranter:

I occasionally make the point that after the Left invented post-modernism, the Right operationalised it and rolled it out as a coherent political-media-aesthetic package. If your politics depends on disagreeing with objective reality, and persuading people to vote against their interests, there is a huge opportunity in the realisation that it's possible to have multiple competing truths. Setting the limits of debate, and controlling the language in which it is carried out, is a valid and proven strategy for power.


Similarly it's not entirely bogus to link the collapse of the centre-left today to the collapse of the far left in the 90s (which in turn came about from the collapse of the USSR). Eurocommunists, as well as being useful idiots for the Kremlin, were crucially also outriders for the social democrats. The Trots may have been loathed by the moderates, and may have lost them numerous elections one way or another, but they also forced them to confront serious issues. Here's hoping the pirates, the greens, and the non-party activists can fulfill the same purpose today.

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Muslim-bashing

The inane, paranoid meme that Europe is about to be overrun by evil Muslims has somehow managed to burst out of the right-wing cul-de-sac in which it deserves to be confined, and spreading tentacles far more dangerously than is its purported target.
Of the resistance against obnoxious stupidity, this dissection of a recent book on the subject has deservedly got a lot of links. But the one I'm really enjoying is this article from the Guardian. It steps back slightly from the neverending claims and counter-claims, and gets a better view of the whole picture:


Ordinary Muslims in Europe, who suffer from the demoralisation caused by living as perennial objects of suspicion and contempt, are far from thinking of themselves as a politically powerful, or even cohesive, community, not to speak of conquerors of Europe. So what explains the rash of bestsellers with histrionic titles - While Europe Slept, America Alone, The Last Days of Europe?


It also raises a historical angle on the French veil debate which I hadn't previously been aware of:


The veil, fixed in the 19th century by the French as a symbol of Islam's primitive backwardness, was used to justify the brutal pacification of north African Muslims and to exclude them from full citizenship.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Attacking the poor in Sao Paulo

Jim Jay has an impressively wide reading list; he's always pointing out interesting articles I'd never have found otherwise.
A recent link from Jim Jay's impressively wide reading-list: violent slum clearance in an area of Sao Paulo called 'Capao Redondo'*.

This kind of thing is doubtless happening all the time; there's a general bubble that I almost always ignore. I only notice it now because I'm midway through Mike Davis' book 'planet of slums'. Davis does a particularly good job of taking slum settlement and clearances out of the falsely clear-cut world of legal vs. illegal, and pointing out the nexus of power and money -- tolerance of 'illegal' slums either because they are inevitable (the people have nowhere else to go) or even because squatters help prepare land which can then be developed privately.

*Not knowing anything about Brazil, I'm flummoxed the details. Wikipedia claims the population of Capåo Redondo as 300,000, but the eviction seems to be only of a far smaller area within that.

No embargo

Embargoes in journalism are dying, according to Owni -- various outlets including the Wall Street Journal have decided to ignore them. Blame internet-time.
danah, unfair but funny:

Best that I can tell, most universities are fundamentally real estate barons who gain public credibility by offering higher education

[incidentally, I was impressed to see danah's blog turn up on [French] Books magazine's list of essential reading about the internet, alongside much more established/institutionalized sources. Increased my respect for them, even if they did capitalize her name]

Friday, August 28, 2009

Digital rights and the German elections

It's good that Berlin's annual Freiheit statt Angst (freedom not fear) demonstration falls just a couple of weeks before the election; I can only hope it pushes digital rights onto the agenda. Here is a comparison of the various party positions on privacy &c. Unsurprisingly the pirate party comes out best, followed by Die Linke and Die Grüne -- none of them likely to make it into any ruling coalition, alas.

It'd be nice if the Piratenpartei could manage an upset comparable to what the Swedes pulled off in the European elections. I can't imagine it happening although, as with the growth of environmentalism into a broad political philosophy, it's not inconceivable that the pirates could become a serious political force over the years.

The worst way to follow German elections

Incidentally, twitter tags for the German elections: #wahl09, #btw09, #bundestagswahl. Doubt I'll be following them; I've repeatedly tried to gather information from twitter, and always found the signal-to-noise ratio atrocious. But perhaps I'll recant; if so, here are the links.

German elections

Germany has federal elections next month; polls are here. In accordance with this year's European theme of a centre-left utterly unable to take advantage of the economic crisis, the SPD are steadily losing support. Consequently the entire left-wing is on the back foot. The Left and the Greens aren't making up much ground -- and even if they were, it wouldn't affect the electoral maths. The only coalition able to challenge the CDU/FPD would be one uniting the SPD, Die Linke and Die Grüne. Many SPD leaders refuse to contemplate a coalition with Die Linke, seeing them as unreformed East German communists without any place in a democratic Germany. Some strands within Die Linke are equally reluctant to serve in such a coalition. A coalition isn't impossible -- but the SPD would probably prefer a few more uneventful years of Grand Coalition, rather than risking tearing it apart for the sake of an even more diverse coalition. The other outside possibility, an SPD/Green/FPD coalition, seems pretty implausible given the steady rightward movement of the FPD since the 80s. It could happen if the CDU somehow made themselves obnoxious partners, but that's outstandingly unlikely with compromise-loving Merkel at the helm.

There are things to be excited about in this election, but the national picture isn't one of them. While I'd love to see the CDU/CSU lose their 10+ point lead over the SDP, it seems pretty unlikely. The Greens and the Left might make some small gains, but the polls don't show any staggering motion. So, despite this being the federal election, I'm somewhat more interested to watch the changes at a local level, observing which parties are improving their machines. More on that -- well, when I can get round to writing about it. So, possibly never.

Liberal Conspiracy � Climate Camp: Watching the Watchers

Laurie dismisses Climate Camp as being overly concerned with self-image. Or at least that's how a bunch of irritated LibCon commenters see it, and manage a rousing defence of CC in the comments. Possibly there's a more interesting point being made about the Spectacle -- but if so, it's very well hidden

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Racism in the Mail

Some more from Nick Davies' Flat Earth News, this time him being particularly damning about the Mail:

Perhaps I have been unlucky, but hI have never come across a reporter from the Daily Mail who did not have some similar story, of black people being excluded from the paper because of their colour. A district reporter told me he would call up from Manchester to tell the news desk a story, 'and they would always ask: "Are they our kind of people?" i.e. "Are they white, middle class?" Or more often it would be: "Are they of the dusky hue?" And if they were of the dusky hue, then they didn't want the story.'
I mentioned this to another reporter, who has spent several decades on the Mail, and he immediately named the senior news executive who was most keen on the 'dusky hue' euphemism. And this is not a thing of the past. While I was writing this book, I spoke to a local news agency who had just had the Daily Mail news desk on the phone, checking out a murder on their patch and asking if the victim was white or black so that they could decide whether they wanted the story.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

My little town

Last month I mentioned Simon & Garfunkel's Richard Cory. Another Paul Simon song that I fell in love with around the same time, was My Little Town


This is another one where there is some beautifully underplayed anger behind the sweetness. Or so I imagined: looking back now, there's hardly anything to it:

And after it rains
Theres a rainbow
And all of the colors are black
Its not that the colors arent there
Its just imagin-ation they lack
...
I was just my fathers son
Saving my money
Dreaming of glory
Twitching like a finger
On the trigger of a gun
Leaving nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town

Sunday, March 29, 2009

The Sunday Times and the Lesbian Avengers, c. 1995

I've lately been reading Nick Davies' Flat Earth News, an excellent book-length attack on the dire state of British journalism. Grimly informative for the most part, it does turn up a few headslappingly ridiculous events. Like the aftermath of when a protest group called the 'Lesbian Avengers' invaded the Sunday Times offices:

Ellis, formerly of the Sun, was managing editor responsible for news and he really didn't like what the lesbian avengers had done, so he put his head together with a couple of other executives and decided that what was needed here was a bit of infiltration: they would put an undercover reporter in among these women and expose their evil ways. And no sooner was the idea agreed than the reporter was chosen. Ciaran Byrne would go in undercover. This was an odd choice because Ciaran Byrne was a trainee with little experience of reporting and none at all of working undercover, which is always demanding and sometimes dangerous. Furthermore, Ciaran Byrne is a man. That caused a little trouble.

Byrne didn't want to do it. The women would spot him immediately, as soon as he started to speak, he complained. No problem, said the executives: they'd get him a voice coach to teach him to sound likme a woman. And they would get a clothing coach to teach him to dress like a woman. Byrne protested that he still wouldn't look like a woman. But that wast he point, explained the executives: 'They're all so bloody ugly, they look like men!"


'Course, by picking up and propagating the most ridiculous passage in the book, despite the story not existing anywhere else on the internet, I'm doing exactly what Davies gets justifiably grumpy at the press for. Mea maxima culpa.

Friday, March 27, 2009

Richard Cory

The Guardian is asking readers to suggest songs about class.
This may seem odd, given the amount of punk I listen to, but the one that consistently catches me is from Simon & Garfunkel:


Their starting-point is a not-particularly brilliant poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean-favoured and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good Morning!" and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich, yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine -- we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet in his head.


Paul Simon takes this twee "it's tough being rich" piece of sap, and turn it upside down. It only works because of the last repetition of the chorus:


He freely gave to charity, he had the common touch,
And they were grateful for his patronage and thanked him very much,
So my mind was filled with wonder when the evening headlines read:
"Richard Cory went home last night and put a bullet through his head."

But I work in his factory
And I curse the life I'm living
And I curse my poverty
And I wish that I could be (x3)
Richard Cory.


Class warfare it ain't. Still, it got throughly under my skin when I was a teenager ashamed of my own cowardice in not killing myself, and has stuck there ever since.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

A night in Budapest

I've not written much about my time in Budapest. Partly because it was a fairly grim time - nothing wrong with the city, just not a pleasant place to be alone, not knowing anybody, and without the slightest ability to speak Hungarian. But, looking through old diaries, I come across a pretty nice account of an evening out there. So I'll repost it here, two and a half years later:

A good place to begin is last night. I get in about 9, Ali pops his head in the
door and syas he wants to go out to a disco. Fine - I've backed out twice before, and meeting people is good, so I agree. He spends the next hours getting ready, and we don't leave the flat until well gone midnight. By this point I'm pretty tired (I practically fell asleep over my book while I was waiting for him, and I would quite happily have gone to sleep at that point), and I'm somewhat pissed off at his idea of lateness.

As it turns out, he was in the right and I was in the wrong. It's not much before 1am when we arrive at B7, the club, and the place is still empty. The dance floor has an octet of girls on it, dancing really rather well. At least, they were outclassing just about any goth I've seen, with the exception of molotov bitch.

Like everywhere else in Hungary, this place has a yearning for 50s americana. But there's also a bit of an international feel with a small Korean (?) contingent, and a lot of English being spoken.
The oddest thing is the girl collecting phone numbers. She goes up to every guy on the dance floor, one at a time, looks cute at them, and asks for their phone number. Then she gives the phone back to her partner, a guy who seems entirely approving of her flirting with every man around.

So, this looks totally like a scam of some kind. But I can't work out why, I can't work out what. Is it some guerilla marketing for the phone, hoping that people will admire something while a beautiful girl is asking them to put their number into it? Is it collecting phone numbers for advertising of some kind? I could imagine that if you, say, collected a few thousand numbers of people in clubs, then you could promote events by SMS.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Rolling Stone has a surprisingly good line in long, serious articles about politics. As if Naomi Klein, there's also stuff like this on the politics and power-plays of the financial crisis:
The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab
....
As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.
....
The Democrats, tired of getting slaughtered in the fundraising arena by Republicans, decided to throw off their old reliance on unions and interest groups and become more "business-friendly." Wall Street responded by flooding Washington with money, buying allies in both parties.


The last third of the article is particularly excellent, raising things I haven't seen discussed much so far:

[from May 2008] the Fed had simply stopped using relatively transparent devices like repurchase agreements to pump its money into the hands of private companies. By early 2009, a whole series of new government operations had been invented to inject cash into the economy, most all of them completely secretive and with names you've never heard of. There is the Term Auction Facility, the Term Securities Lending Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and a monster called the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (boasting the chat-room horror-show acronym ABCPMMMFLF). For good measure, there's also something called a Money Market Investor Funding Facility, plus three facilities called Maiden Lane I, II and III to aid bailout recipients like Bear Stearns and AIG.

While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments).

People ask us why we don't use fly spray. Well, where's the sport in that?

Via Liberal Conspiracy comes news of an anti-mosquito laser gun. Granted, it's the kind of hilarious story that could only be the product of some very skilled PR, but it's just too fun to pass over. As LC say:
It’s a LASER BEAM that locates, targets and shoots down individual mosquitoes. There is nothing in that that isn’t cool.

And the very serious professional zoologists in my office have all agreed it has to look like an individual robot gun that spins on a dome-shaped turret, saying ‘target acquired’ in a little robot voice. Because what would be the point otherwise?


Meanwhile, I couldn't pass over the topic without a link to the obvious Monty Python skit:

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Asking for the moon

Also in the convention on modern liberty, George made (the germ of) an important point, about how the movement for rights hobbles itself by being so conservative in its demands. Talk is usually of defending and preserving liberties, not of claiming the ones we want. Rights are justified because we, supposedly, always had them, not because they are, well, right.

This conservative tendency is probably inherent in a lot of politicl movements. Think of how many English riots - not merely reactionary ones - were held under the banner of 'church and king'. One fringe benefit of the lack of a British written constitution is to keep a lid on this kind of obsession, compared to the American worship of the founding fathers. Appeals to Magna Carta can only happen on a purely emotional level, since so few of us have any idea what was in the thing.

Rhetorically useful as this trope may be, if we only demand the status quo that is the best we can get. That's perhaps enough for tories, but not for me.

The cute donkey theory of censorship

I love stories of people resisting censorship; bolshy muckrakers are my action heroes, fags and booze and cynicism included. So I loved listening to the press freedom panel from the Convention on Modern Liberty. Particularly the account of how the Pakistani press, when articles were censored, used to print blank spaces in their place - or, when that too was banned, pictures of donkeys.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Occupied dreams

This essay by Zadie Smith is a delight to read. It's about Pygmalion and Obama and Smith herself, about how people trim their speech and their actions to finesse multiple group identities, and how that is not always a bad thing. She pulls together some more examples -- do we need more? -- of how supremely articulate the President is, and how he is able to capture the speech of different groups. From his memoir, she picks up on this phrase:
"Even as that spell was broken," he writes, "and the worlds that they thought they'd left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been."
To occupy a dream, to exist in a dreamed space (conjured by both father and mother), is surely a quite different thing from simply inheriting a dream. It's more interesting.


I love this idea of 'occupied' dreams. It suggests re-purposing, the ability to take advantage of soemthing. It's a novel way of looking at how we inhabit and twist our parents' and our societies' expectations, find a way of being ourselves within the ideological framework of our upbringing. I'd go beyond occupation: what we're doing is squatting dreams.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Why no national outrage? Oh yes, the Mail

A failed asylum-seeker who returned to Darfur under a government repatriation scheme has been murdered by Sudanese security officers after they followed him home from the airport in Khartoum, The Independent has learnt. [source]

Not much you can say to top that, is there?

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Reykjavík Finance 101

Long article on Iceland's financial crisis by Michael Lewis, mainly built around gags and stereotypes:
I spoke to another hedge fund in London so perplexed by the many bad LBOs Icelandic banks were financing that it hired private investigators to figure out what was going on in the Icelandic financial system. The investigators produced a chart detailing a byzantine web of interlinked entities that boiled down to this: A handful of guys in Iceland, who had no experience of finance, were taking out tens of billions of dollars in short-term loans from abroad.


But also some wider points worth hammering home:
One of the hidden causes of the current global financial crisis is that the people who saw it coming had more to gain from it by taking short positions than they did by trying to publicize the problem.

...and throw away the key

According to this article:
There are more people serving open-ended or life sentences in jails in England and Wales than the whole of Europe

I'd take the figures with a large pinch of salt, given the difficulty of comparing figures across several dozen states, and the difficulty of interpreting "open-ended or life sentences". (e.g. a 150-year sentence presumably doesn't count). Still, I'd love to see the real figures behind it.

Criminal Defamation

On Monday, a LibDem MP is proposing an amendment on Monday to abolish the offence of 'criminal defamation'.

But...all I can find about it is from Richard Ingrams and a letter in The Times. so I assume this is a one-man crusade which won't be supported by the other parties, and so won't go anywhere.

Good on Evan Harris MP, anyway.

Friday, March 20, 2009

good news, from Munich to New Mexico

I'm liking the amount of good news I'm running into today, from fairly unexpected places. So from New Mexico comes the abolition of the death penalty in that state. This is part of a trend in the USA away from executions; New Mexico is the fifteenth state to end Death Row.

Then, Munich. Which, apparently, has a 500-strong Uighur community. And, better still, because of this the city is willing to take in 17 Uighurs who are currently being held in Guantanamo. Never again will I say that Berlin is the only place in Germany that I like.

Moldova

It's a pity that reporting from places like Moldova tends to come from news agencies, either directly or in thinly-veiled rewrites. This week, Dmitry Medvedev has been 'mediating' the dispute between Moldova and Transdnestria, one of the saddest and most pathetic situations in Europe. Reuters cover it, but with a news-agency style of being so placid as to be totally useless:


Russia is pressing hard for a resolution because that would show it still maintains influence in settling ex-Soviet conflicts after last year's war with Georgia damaged its reputation as an honest broker.
Medvedev will meet Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin in his Barvikha residence near Moscow, a Kremlin statement said. Separatist leader Igor Smirnov will join the talks later.


More spirited, and much more informative, is the commentary from Radio Free Europe:


As for Smirnov, he is always ready to participate in whatever meetings in whatever format Moscow dictates. He is a Russian citizen who was sent to Moldova in 1987 in order to foment and lead a separatist movement to counterbalance the nationalist movement that was emerging in Chisinau. And he accomplished this task brilliantly.


I don't see any reason to believe this meeting will count for anything - but if it has to be covered, I wish we could more easily get beyond the agencies' name-soup style.

Explanation and expiation

This follows my usual trend with anything I write, the problem of tricking myself into writing anything publicly, rather than beating myself into silence with the force of my unwillingness to write anything imperfect.

So...this blog is aiming for volume rather than quantity. I'm keeping it all private to begin with, although i may open it up in future. I'm hoping to use it mainly as a mine for future material, taking paragraphs from here and there, while building up enough momentum to eventually transfer into writing a frequently-updated blog of my own.