thesaurus

take a large sample of text. Run it through NLT, looking for passages with multiple adjectives describing the same noun. or, to keep it simple, just passages like a *big*, *strong* man.

For each such coincidence, record a link between the two adjectives. big and strong go together

[my initial thought was to do this geometrically. imagine an n-dimensional space, where n is the number of adjectives in the english language. Place each word at 1 in its own dimension, and for every other dimension/word at the point given by some function of how often the two co-occur.

but that seems silly. It's more like a standard regression data-mining kind of thing.

Anyway, a project for a rainy day. And there's still need for some usable dictionary/thesaurus based on data-mining

Is it true that neoliberalism and new forms of religious fundamentalism appeared simultaneously? If so, why? (cf. here)

It's the economy of fear, stupid

Al-Qaeda (Yemen) claims it's sufficient for the West to disintegrate into paranoia -- killings aren't necessary:

"It is such a good bargain for us to spread fear amongst the enemy and keep him on his toes in exchange of a few months of work and a few thousand bucks," the statement said.

"We are laying out for our enemies our plan in advance because as we stated earlier our objective is not maximum kill but to cause [damage] in the aviation industry, an industry that is so vital for trade and transportation between the US and Europe".

AQAP said: "Two Nokia mobiles, $150 each, two HP printers, $300 each, plus shipping, transportation and other miscellaneous expenses add up to a total bill of $4,200. We will continue with similar operations and we do not mind at all in this stage if they are intercepted.

"To bring down America we need not strike big."

Granted, this is largely putting a good face on their inability to do more than mail parcels.

Lemuel @CT on non-electoral activism:

More pacifically, I would like to see a National Debtor’s Union that would organize collective mortgage strikes, destigmatize bankruptcy, block evictions from foreclosed houses, etc. There is no reason for the banksters to agree to any meaningful financial reform, or any more stimulus, until there is a plausible alternative that looks much worse for them.

dolboeb: Alcoholism is scarier than fascism. Survey asks Russians what issue most concerns them:

• 56%: inflation


• 53%: alcoholim and drug use


• 46%: unemployment


• 44%: standard of living


• 15%: economic crisis


• 13%: salary

Liz Phair on Keith Richards' autobiography

Pulled by the poppy and pushed by cocaine, Keith acquires a taste for working unholy hours in the studio that damn near kill his colleagues. He goes round the clock and considers it mutiny if anyone toiling with him leaves the deck. “I realized, I’m running on fuel and everybody else isn’t. They’re trying to keep up with me and I’m just burning. I can keep going because I’m on pure cocaine . . . I’m running on high octane, and if I feel I’m pushing it a little bit, need to relax it, have a little bump of smack.”

duranorak:

When someone writes the definitive essay on fandom - I mean, when someone sits down and explains the insanity of it, the way it is a black hole of time that means I sit here for long, long minutes trying not to grin so hard my face hurts and simultaneously cry like a child for no real reason, the way it can make total strangers loathe or adore each other in a way very few other things can, the fragmenting into groups, the shipping (WHY DO WE DO THIS. WHY. I was born doing it, and don't understand), the giddiness, the stars in my stupid hopeless eyes, the conventions, the cosplay, the meta, the joy and pain it's possible to experience through reading one sentence connected to one's current whatever-it-is - when someone writes that, will you let me know, so I can read it, and understand?

Ha! Is this really true? Harry Rowohlt is perhaps Germany's best-known translator from English, and also sports a beard that could compete with Alan Moore or Richard Stallman. Apparently he moonlights on the soap Lindenstrasse, playing a hobo? Brilliant :)

Hegemann

Not only is Helene Hegemann a bona fide genius, but she can put together a delightfully sharp response to her (many, 90% stupid) critics:

Im Januar wurde mein Roman Axolotl Roadkill veröffentlicht. In diesem Roman geht es nicht primär um Drogen oder Sex oder eine bestimmte Generation. Schon gar nicht geht es um Grenzen zwischen Generationen, Geschlechtern, Altersgruppen oder sozialen Schichten. Wenn es überhaupt um irgendeine Grenze geht, und das muss es ja in einer alles und jedem bestimmte Wertesysteme und Raster überstülpenden Gesellschaft, geht es um eine Grenze, die sich durch jeden Menschen zieht. Und um eine Gruppe von Leuten, die ihr Leben dieser Grenze, diesem Riss, dieser Widersprüchlichkeit verschreiben, anstatt das abzulaufen, was unter glatter »Normalität« verstanden wird und genauso wenig funktioniert wie »Asozialität« oder »Verwahrlosung«.

Aber, obwohl wir 2010 haben: Rebellion ist eben doch nicht bloß die leere Geste, die sich insgeheim eigentlich alle aus Bequemlichkeit erhoffen. Wir sind an einem Punkt angekommen, an dem sich nicht mehr gegen konkret abzusteckende Altersgruppen rebellieren lässt und an dem sich sowohl 13-Jährige als auch 60-Jährige als »linksalternative Spinner« und »rechtskonservative Wichser« beschuldigen oder sich streiten, weil einer von ihnen bloß Black Metal hört und der andere, wie nennt man das, Indiemusik und natürlich so Sachen von früher. Na ja.

Art as efficiency-porn

In recent weeks, I've been becoming increasingly dependent on art to get me through the day. My actual life is bland and featureless; working on things I believe in and care about intellectually, but boring myself silly doing it. The only way to con myself into concentrating is with a kick of words or music or pictures. Then 20 minutes of hand-waving ecstasy, settling down to a lingering vague sense of meaningfulness, that can easily be transferred to whatever dreary task I'm supposed to be working on. It feels somehow nastier than achieving the same effect with caffeine or self-discipline; like using manuscripts as firelighters or something.

Particularly useful is anything implying that the current moment is somehow important, that there's some reason to be emotionally focussed on now, rather than listlessly comparing it to tomorrow. So there's the line from _Possession_, for example:
"when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere."

And when that's too bleakly romantic for me, I look back to Alba De Cespedes' poems of love in Paris '68, in a last night of closeness before normality is restored:

Encore un soir, le dernier, nous serons entre nous: les fous d'amour et de révolte. Cette rive sera encore la nôtre; à nous seuls, prison, ghetto, léproserie.

One more night, the last, we'll be together: delerious with love and revolt. This bank will still be ours, ours alone: prison, ghetto, lepers' colony

Similarly, on Sunday I went to see a friend playing in a small band. What really shook me were the support band. And then not musically, but because the singer was obviously in the midst of some fairly serious depression**. Being able to spend an hour staring at somebody in that state was -- terrifying? powerful? horrifying? All the little traits that I can normally only see in isolation, blending together into self-reinforcing patterns.

* necessary guilt-disclaimer that, for all this talk about work, I'm not in fact doing a huge amount of it.

** or yes, maybe it was all an act. If so it was simultaneously an impressive feat of acting and not at all suitable for a gig.

A woman walks into a gym

My squeamishness about violence and competition doesn't stop me enjoying martial arts films. I skip quickly through the big fights, and concentrate on what I'm really there for: the training scenes. There's place in my heart for anything that fetishises hard work and long hours: the West Wing, the Devil Wears Prada and Press Gang all fit the bill. But martial arts is the only film genre to really place this on a pedestal (with other sports films coming in a distant second).

I've just discovered Million Dollar Baby, a boxing film with a particularly harsh light on the training process. Maggie Fitzgerald is a female boxer, who with difficulty persuades washed-up coach Frankie to train her.

Frankie's gym has the low-rent grubbiness typical of boxing films. So as Frankie starts to clock up the hours -- training late into the night after everybody else has left -- she's doing so in an impressively unglamorous environment. Just a punching bag, a dim pool of light, and Frankie.

We don't rely on gritted teeth or fixed stares to show how determined she is. Because determination -- here and in reality -- is present less in the moments of peak work, than in months and years of hard work and sacrifice. It's present in her diet of leftovers filched from the diner where she works, in the monastic environment of her home, in the dollars saved for boxing equipment. Above all it's in that late-night pool of light, the activities she returns to because she doesn't have -- doesn't believe she _can_ have -- anything else in her life.

To make a fighter, you gotta strip 'em down to bare wood. You can't just tell 'em "forget everything you know", you gotta make 'em forget it in their bones. Make 'em so tired they only listen to you, only hear your voice, only do what you say, and nothing else.

the Global War on Terror (the officially retired title soldiers on in popular usage, despite the Obama administration’s weird new appellation “Overseas Contingency Operation”)

Bolaño

"purportedly, Bolano used to write for 20, 40 hours at a time before passing out and then waking up and doing it all over again"

[source otherwise uninteresting]

and from a profile in the NYT -- nicely-crafted but again underwhelming:

His subjects are sex, poetry, death, solitude, violent crime and the desperate glimmers of transcendence that sometimes attend them. The prose is dark, intimate and sneakily touching

Nalanda

The Independent reports on plans for the re-establishment of Nalanda. It has all the markers of a 'flagship' project that will mainly serve to fluff politicians' egos and divert large amounts of money towards elites. Still, I can't bring myself to be entirely grudging about it.

Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel, Paypal co-founder and early Facebook investor, on politics and women:

Thiel announced: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." The public, he says, doesn't support unregulated, winner-take-all capitalism and so he doesn't support the public making decisions. This anti-democratic proclamation comes with some curious historical analysis. Thiel says that the Roaring 20s were the last period when it was possible for supporters of freedom like him to be optimistic about politics. "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron," he writes.

[from a delightfully vicious Slate profile]

It's scary to think that this guy's wealth and power are orders of magnitude above anything I could ever come close to attaining.

Another piece of regressive crisis-response, this time by the German government. They're reducing the eco-tax, and in place increasing cigarette taxes (TAZ. In other words, tax the poor and let polluting big business get away unaffected.

Tiger Beatdown:

One of the things that’s really important in this life, and in any form of political engagement, is to be aware that no-one is actually “one of ours.” Which is to say: The instinct you have to protect someone who seems to side with you, and to gloss over their crimes, is a bad one.

LRB on Blair's memoirs

He faced two serious and determined enemies during his time in Downing Street: al-Qaida and Gordon Brown. One, he concluded, represented a force so strong and rooted that it had to be uprooted and destroyed, since confrontation was inevitable; the only question was when and how. The other had to be contained, because stepping over the line would have been crazy and made war inevitable. But why on earth did he think that al-Qaida was an example of the first, and Gordon Brown of the second, rather than the other way round?

Cute Cthulhu is the scariest Cthulhu of all:

Part of this horrible obscenity lies in the ability of cute to undermine human reason and agency. The return of the Great Old Ones will reduce every human being unlucky enough to be alive to utter helplessness. But so too do we all become drooling sock-puppets of mammalian algorithms when confronted with furry exteriors, chirpy voices, disproportionately large eyes and heads, charming reductions of scale, and goofy facial expressions.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

What I don't understand about this, is why Chomsky chose such a lousy phrase to make his point. Only somebody who's never had a nightmare could deny the possibility of sleeping furiously, while you could easily describe the output of some environmental think-tank as 'colorless green ideas'. On another tack: what is Cthulhu, if not a 'green idea sleeping furiously'?

257 is 257 + 0

A python gotcha I never knew of before:

Python 2.6.5 (release26-maint, Aug 20 2010, 17:50:24)
[GCC 4.4.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 0 is 0 + 0
True
>>> 256 is 256 + 0
True
>>> 257 is 257 + 0
False
>>>

The Guardian don't really explain their reasoning on this, but apparently an "Unemployed lorry driver living with his wife and three children in inner London, paying £320 a week rent" stands to lose 7,136 from the cuts.

WTF:

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements.

Great article about the lifetracking movement -- finding the call to arms buried unconsciously deep within the movement.

Eric Boyd, for example, cobbled together a buzzing compass that attaches to his ankle and vibrates when he faces north. Tracking his orientation has translated into an intrinsic sense of direction, he says.

Alien Tort Statute

The Alien Tort Statute provided a roundabout method by which US corporations could be sued for their actions abroad, including by non-US citizens.

The US courts have just closed that loophole, in their usual style of walking backwards into significant legal changes. The Second Circuit court of appeals has ruled that the Alien Tort Statute applies only to individuals, not to corporations.

Mark Morford: I love you, but your tantrism is not my tantrism

The ancient Tantric masters, however, tell a different kind of story. They say it's all a bit of a sham, this extremism, a grand and ongoing tragedy, that such behavior is what happens when you get so far away from Self, from calm and self-reflective center, to the extent that only the most extreme experience and loudest screaming will keep you awake and interested in going on living.

That is to say, it's a sign of severe spiritual lack, of the most tormented, enraged and furiously demanding ego that only the most painful, excessive human experience -- bizarre sex, excessive drugs, physical brutality, body torment, violent religious belief, rage, gross-out food, you name it -- will make you feel, well, anything at all. The relationship is inverse, downward spiraling: The further away you are from true Self, the more extreme experience is required just to feel a pulse.

Kasyanov's party

The formation of the latest coalition among the Russian opposition seems to have inspired little other than cynical pessimism. The men behind it -- Mikhail Kasyanov, Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Ryzhkov and Vladimir Milov -- are reasonably prominent, and seem potentially capable of working together, but nobody seems to hold out much hope for them.

BBC Monitoring reports Stanislav Belikovsky talking on Echo Moskvy, with understandabe cynicism:

The so-called pro-democracy forces are uniting for the 127th time. We still see the same figures, and it is at least too early for them to start looking for supporters the very next day, or at least to demand loyalty. At first they need to produce results: register their party, form its list (of candidates), and at least enter the parliamentary campaign with this list, not to mention subsequent actions in the form of putting forward a single candidate (for the presidential election). [via JRL]

Meanwhile a pundit interviewed in Russia Today has this to say:

Nemtsov and Ryzhkov will fiercely criticize Putin, as well as Medvedev to a lesser degree. They are also going to bash the ruling United Russia. Chances are the administration might need just that. After all, if there is no conflict in a play, there is no action. A play without “bad guys” always flops with viewers. This is why “bad guys” may come in handy. If they are registered, the election campaign will go like this: they will bark at Putin, while others will bark at them. They will be the sort of whipping boys, which is good for them as well, as it attracts more attention. A party like that would give an edge to the entire campaign. Their worst enemy will be the Yabloko party, as this is a matter of survival for Yabloko, which currently monopolizes the liberal flank.

I don’t think that today anybody in the United States believes that these people can become a serious political force. I think that there are fewer Americans who believe in that than members of our own administration. I also think that at the moment Russia’s present rulers who will continue to stay in power are suiting the United States.

Reviewers: Ted Gioia

Have been looking at various highly-regarded book reviewers, trying to figure out which I can trust. First up, Ted Giola.

This is the review that makes me distrust Ted: a positive review of a book I loved, but one that totally misses the point. Compare him to Sheila O'Malley. Ted:

But the most masterful aspect of the plot is the superimposition of
the two love stories, the 20th century one involving Mitchell and his
accomplice Dr. Maud Bailey, a famous LaMotte scholar, and the
19th century romance between Ash and LaMotte. The contrast is
not just one of couples, but also social mores, etiquette and gender
roles. Byatt is in complete control as she juxtaposes the pacing and
complications of these side-by-side stories.

Sheila:

Byatt doesn’t write about people who live in their subjective experience of life. She writes about academics and writers and research assistants – whose “love” for life is expressed through their driving obsession for whatever topic – people who spend their whole lives researching one minor female Victorian poet … and any real love that comes into the life of a person like that will either have to take a back seat, OR somehow inform and deepen that other obsession.
...
A.S. Byatt writes in this realm like no one’s business. She is the heir of George Eliot (someone she openly emulates). Life is BIG, and important – and it is not just our personal lives that give it resonance – but our passions, obsessions, intellectual pursuits and the wider culture and how it informs how we live.

Which one has managed to get inside the novel, and give you a reason to pick it up? No question, is there?

Sarrazin

The most depressing thing about the Sarrazin affair? The amazon.de reviews -- almost all positive. What a hideous collection of knuckle-draggers.

And even in Berlin, there's are apparently still venues willing to give Sarrazin a platform. Among them Urania, to its shame.

Spiegel/ ЖЖ

Der Spiegel recently had a 2-page spread on the Russian blogosphere. Nothing especially insightful, I must admit, but there's no harm in having a little introduction.

Indeed, these days, it's usually bloggers -- rather than members of the traditional media -- who expose scandals and give voice to grievances. Blog reports by a student on conditions at a nursing home near Moscow, for example, led to the firing of its corrupt director. And, this spring, when a Mercedes belonging to a high-level manager at the oil giant Lukoil sped into a car in the opposite lane and killed two women, crime scene photographs published online exposed police attempts at a cover-up.

Drugoi got picked out as exemplar; his readers' reactions here

on Badiou

Splintering Bone Ashes on Badiou:

This was precisely what I had been looking for, motivated in a political sense not by a desire to prevent the suffering of the poor, but to unblock the lock on the new, this impassable impasse, THAT was to be the imperative of thought.

Sheila O'Malley

Random googling has just confronted me with Sheila O'Malley, and she's won herself an instant position as my second-favourite source of book reviews. On a slight tangent, here's something that should be ingested by any blogger:

My ideal reader is someone who shares my sense of humor, who “gets it”, someone who doesn’t roll their eyes at excitement or enthusiasm, someone who loves to get fired up about this or that, who isn’t put off by a grown woman blithering like a 13 year old. My ideal reader is someone who likes to go deep. Who isn’t afraid to go deep. My ideal reader is not the kind of person who needs to make a joke, nervously, when the mood gets serious.

AS Byatt on religion, realism and social media

The Guardian has a wonderful interview with AS Byatt, in which she takes a decent shot at a combined critique of social realism in novels, the narcissism of facebook and big brother, and the death of God. There doesn't seem yet to be any transcript or article published, alas. Some (possibly inaccurate) quotes:

• on realism: "My life as it really is consists of reading Shakespeare in bed at one in the morning" (i.e. this and other shared, commonplace activities are at least as real as the grittier horrors)


• 
  "I don't believe in God. I believe in Wallace Stevens" -- partly for the thoughtful way she comes out with it, partly because (when she explains what she means) it's not just a throwaway line
  


• /"interest in life as it is has supplanted religion"
  

And all this with a roll of sellotape balanced on her knee. I can't figure out if this is a carefully-placed detail, in either the style of Old Masters portraiture or ARGs, or just One Of Those Things that happens when you're focussed on sharing ideas.

Buck Rogers

Ah, nostalgia. The internet currently seems to function as an enormous engine for encouraging and amplifying nostalgia, providing endless information with which to peer into every crevice of our upbringing.

Music, today. Grooveshark and some light googling helped me recover Buck Rogers, which was ubiquitous around my school in 2001*. The kind of thing that was once ubiquitous and I now hardly ever hear. G has said that trance is her Volksmusic, having been all over Israel as she grew up (and still, I suppose). Certain kinds of rock are in a similar position for me: not actually very good, but psychologically imprinted at a particular moment.

Now, looking back at it, I get to puzzle over the details you don't notice until you stop and look from afar. Why is it called 'Buck Rogers'? What is with the lyrics? Even songmeanings can't make much out of it.

* actually, I'd imagined it being a few years earlier than that, but I trust wikipedia more than i trust my memory.

Chroniques de la rentrée littéraire are again trying to crowdsource reviews of all* the French novels published this autumn.

* 'all' being understandably somewhat limited. No space here, for instance, for Dmitri Bortnikov's novel of the Territory.

BooksWeLike seems now to be entirely dead. Pity. I guess Library Thing is now occupying much the same space, and better. Still, I have a bunch of reviews in there, and it's always sad to see sites vanish when you turn your back for a couple of years. Sic transit gloria mundi, I guess.

"Heute abend findet am Berliner Hauptbahnhof so etwas wie ein Flash Mop statt."

[maybe it's how you clean up after a flash flood?

Spiky park benches

Anybody remember the benches in Transmetropolitan, that heated themselves overnight to stop people sleeping on them? Somewhere in China has gone one step further:

Park officials in China have found a way to stop people from hogging their benches for too long - by fitting steel spikes on a coin-operated timer.

If visitors at the Yantai Park in Shangdong province, eastern China, linger too long without feeding the meter, dozens of sharp spikes shoot through the seat.

[Caution about the limited reliability of 'funny old world' type stories about China, of course]

RHPS as religion

Just been to a RHPS showing. Remain somewhat astonished by how unknown it is in Berlin; it's the kind of import you would expect to be overdeveloped here compared to its condition in country of origin. Not so.

Still, even here it has the makings of a secular ritual. The music, the comforting ritual, the morality almost as screwy as the Old Testament. Or maybe that's just me :)

cross-generational love

Once again, Rhian speaks truth about the silliness of intergenerational warfare, which IMO is only one step above blaming immigrants for everything.

I am indescribably hard-pushed to feel a shred of sympathy for any ‘generation’ I might be part of. My generation is wildly overprivileged, entitled, solipsistic and drowning in conspicuous consumption, and the majority of us have done absolutely nothing but take what we have for granted.