debt and morals

John Holbo on markets and morality:

the Plato I was teaching was, to a surprising extent, about debt, reciprocity and, generally, the convertability of moral into monetary categories, and vice versa. Euthyphro on piety. It’s ‘care of the gods’, which – this is his final suggestion – turns out to be the capacity to enter into healthy exchange relations. Meno on whether being good boils down to getting your hands on the goods. Cephalus, the old man, launches the mighty ship, Republic, with the thought that justice is ‘speaking truth and paying debts’, which morphs into the lex talionis thought that justice is payback – doing good to friends and harm to enemies. Plato, like Graeber, is really really concerned to shred this stuff, if he can.

Penny Gaffs

"Penny Gaffs" were small, informal theatres which became very popular in English slums from the 1820s:

The pieces which would be presented here can be related to several of the dramatic forms which developed mostly outside the patent theatres, and which could evolve and be critical to degrees forbidden to "straight" plays: these included burletta and assorted dramatic pieces presented at the minor theatres and fairgrounds, pantomime, and the entertainments of strolling players.... A penny gaff was usually a shop adapted as a theatre in which an entertainment comprising sketches, songs, farces and drag acts would be presented when enough people were assembled.

Most of the internet is recycling a small set of eyewitness accounts. Here is a trio of full articles:

It was not a commodious building, nor particularly handsome, the only attempt at embellishmentappearing at the stage end, where for the space of a few feet the plaster wall was covered with ordinary wall paper of a grape vine pattern, and further ornamented by coloured and spangled portraits of Mrs. Douglas Fitzbruce in her celebrated characters of "Cupid" and "Lady Godiva."

Here's another overview.

Self-doubt: placed by culture, removed by mad science

Brain manipulation via electricity.
Sally Adee does what makes Wired actually good, underneath the manic trend-jumping and the boosting of dubious shiny gadgets. She takes a cyberpunk-seeming story, explains it is already happening, and points out social implications.

The cyberpunk story goes like this. Putting some electrodes on your brain can double the rate at which you learn. Why? Because it turns off the inner voice that constantly tells you how much a mess you're making of life:

Me without self-doubt was a revelation. There was suddenly this incredible silence in my head; I'eve experienced something close to it during 2-hour Iyengar yoga classes, but the fragile peace in my head would be shattered almost the second I set foot outside the calm of the studio. I had certainly never experienced instant zen in the frustrating middle of something I was terrible at.

And once you realise how much self-doubt drags us back, you can't help but wonder where it comes from:

could school-age girls use the zappy cap while studying math to drown out the voices that tell them they can't do math because they're girls? How many studies have found a link between invasive stereotypes and poor test performance?

Crazy bastard Lyotard

Apparently at some point Lyotard was channeling Warren Ellis:

The English unemployed did not have to become workers to survive, they – hang on tight and spit on me – enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body

Blacklists in the construction industry

Shocking. The UK's major construction firms maintained a blacklist of troublemakers to be denied work -- radicals, trade unionists, or simply workers who pointed out on-site safety issues. According to the investigator at the Information Commissioner's Office:

the relationship between the Consulting Association [which maintained the blacklist] and the police and security services appeared to have been nurtured when the organisation went under an earlier guise as the Economic League, at a time when the state was keen to liaise with major building firms to discover as much as it could about Irish construction workers amid the threat of IRA terrorism.

Of course this stuff just gets easier and easier as time goes by. I'd bet money that some counterpart to the Consulting Association is right now identifying troublemakers from facebook or linkedin, selling their names to one employer or another. Perhaps the police are collaborating, perhaps they aren't -- it maybe matters less than it once did, as police records are only one information source among many.

Community organizing in London

Community Organizing, a system of social campaigining, concentrates attention on linking local residents into a political group, identifying their common interests and turning these into the goals of campaigning.

It is most associated with the civil rights movement in the United States, where the work of Saul Alinksy was crucial in giving it shape, both through his direct involvement in campaigning and through books such as Rules for Radicals. More recently, Barack Obama's involvement gave it greater prominence.

Unlike many USian ideas, this went decades without really taking root in the UK. Perhaps this is a result of it targetting local communities, rather than the free-floating trend-following activist international. Perhaps not.

But now it's starting to change. Citizens UK are pushing community organizing in London and beyond. They've had impressive success in forcing the Living Wage onto the political agenda. There's even a MA Course at Queen Mary.

For me to judge community organizing based on books and the internet seems entirely alien to its principles. Still, I can't deny loving some Alinsky's combination of community-building with tactically-planned attacks on the powers that be. In his words, "The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength."

The vampire before Dracula

I had always assumed that Dracula was the first vampire story. I was wrong.
When it was published in 1897, vampires had already spent a half-century or more in the public eye.

Most prominently, there was Varney the Vampire, a penny dreadful in 1847-9. And before that was John Polidori's The Vampyre -- a book written in the same holiday when Mary Shelley dreamt up Frankenstein.

Religion and the decline of concert-hall applause

Old essay by Alex Ross on the sacralization of classical music, particularly the decline of applause after each movement.

I have a rosy image of the hubbub of pre-20th century concert halls as a creative benefit, something which would naturally be appreciated by musicians and composers.

Not so. Many apparently loathed it. Musicians would plant people in the audience to applaud their solo. To prevent this, Gustav Mahler went so far as "hiring detectives to patrol the theater".

But for entirely eliminating applause after each movement, Ross blames conductor Leopold Stokowski. Stokowski dreamt of the concert-hall as a "Temple of Music", where the audience should " listen in spiritual silence and then return home refreshed and strengthened" [not his words]