Icelandic Review reports that China and Iceland are marking 45 years of diplomatic relations with recognition for a prizewinning 2015 book by Einar Már Guðmundsson called Hundadagar (‘Dog Days’), named by the Chinese as one of the best foreign-language novels of the year.
Storytelling is baked into the Icelanders' culture. Readers of the thousand-year-old Icelandic sagas will be struck by how very modern they are - pithy dialogue, graphic violence. Perfect noir. And the current vogue for Nordic crime fiction includes successful Icelandic writers such as Arnaldur Indriðason, one of my wife's favourites.
This latest announcement is timed to coincide with the island's annual jólabókaflóð ("Yule book flood") - the custom of giving books as Christmas presents.
Hundadagar is a historical novel featuring Joseph Banks, the great plant-collector who accompanied Captain Cook to the South Seas. It seems Banks also collected Icelandic manuscripts.
Everything is connected to everything else.
It seems books of the right kind (pornography such as Fifty Shades is banned) may have a huge market among China's 1.3 billion people:
http://theliteraryplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/05/The_Publishing_Landscape_in_China_2015.pdf
http://publishingperspectives.com/2013/05/chinas-emerging-english-language-book-market/#.WGTKCtSLSt8
- provided you can maintain your copyright.
The market works both ways, e.g. the growth of Chinese science fiction, as the generation-long superfast economic growth of China stimulates the imagination as to what could come next:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_science_fiction
Online publication also has enormous potential, though there are issues around State control:
http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=fa85e3a8-21d4-445c-85bb-2d7b66b57262
We live in interesting times. Maybe, despite the distractions of electronic toys, authors and publishers do still have a future.
Thursday, December 29, 2016
Tuesday, December 27, 2016
Boiling candy floss
Recently, Nick Drew of Capitalists@Work introduced us to an essay in The New Enquiry entitled "The Scapegoating Machine" (http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-scapegoating-machine/).
The writer, Geoff Shullenberger, refers to Peter Thiel, a hedge fund manager (and founder of PayPal) who is now on the executive committee of President-elect Donald Trump's transition team, and links Thiel's thinking to that of his former professor and "philosophical mentor" René Girard.
There may be some good ideas in the article but they are couched in that horrid jumble of jargon from sociology, psychology, Marxism etc that resembles a parody of mediaeval scholastic theology, bristling with unnecessary references and appeals to allegedly established authority. My reaction is typical of the Anglo-Saxon attitude to Continental theoreticians: we like our abstractions to be more concrete.
In my schooldays the way to determine whether there was any substance was to do a précis. Typically this would cut down the original word count to, say, 40%. But one can be much more radical with guffmeisters such as Russell Brand - I got him down to less than 8% (http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/kaking-sense-of-russell-brands.html)
I challenged Nick to do the same for this latest, reducing the 3,445 words of the original to no more than 250. Heroically, he has done so. I now challenge the reader to see if it could be boiled down even further, and then challenged on logic and fact!
___________________________________
Humans desire things because others desire those things, and we unconsciously mimic them. By having the object of desire, the Other makes us desire it, but also makes us resent the Other’s having it: mimetic desire and violence are inextricable. Desire is potentially a source of conflict (especially when the desire is for something intangible such as honor, status, respect, recognition) - a basic problem for human societies.
The ancient solution was substitution of the scapegoat for the rival - the original “breakthrough” moment of human progress, breaking the cyclical repetition of mimetic violence. Religion ritualized the scapegoat mechanism into sacrifices - symbolic acts that created gods, myths and hierarchies.
The rise of techno-scientific rationality and secular governance correlates with the decline of the sacred. But since religion has been the primary form of regulating violence, its displacement raises the possibility of uncontained violence and a panicked return to violent forms of religion.
The imitative basis of desire can explain the success of social media, which intensify universalized competition, feeding rivalry and ressentiment. They also create the space for new modes of scapegoating. Bullying and “forming communities” are connected: scapegoating is the cement of group identities. Voters in demographic decline turn against the Other. “The 99% vs. the 1%” is modern-day scapegoating.
Developers of technology need to accomplish something comparable to what religions did: the creation of superstructures that blunt the tendencies toward dissolution currently threatening global society.
The writer, Geoff Shullenberger, refers to Peter Thiel, a hedge fund manager (and founder of PayPal) who is now on the executive committee of President-elect Donald Trump's transition team, and links Thiel's thinking to that of his former professor and "philosophical mentor" René Girard.
There may be some good ideas in the article but they are couched in that horrid jumble of jargon from sociology, psychology, Marxism etc that resembles a parody of mediaeval scholastic theology, bristling with unnecessary references and appeals to allegedly established authority. My reaction is typical of the Anglo-Saxon attitude to Continental theoreticians: we like our abstractions to be more concrete.
In my schooldays the way to determine whether there was any substance was to do a précis. Typically this would cut down the original word count to, say, 40%. But one can be much more radical with guffmeisters such as Russell Brand - I got him down to less than 8% (http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/kaking-sense-of-russell-brands.html)
I challenged Nick to do the same for this latest, reducing the 3,445 words of the original to no more than 250. Heroically, he has done so. I now challenge the reader to see if it could be boiled down even further, and then challenged on logic and fact!
___________________________________
Humans desire things because others desire those things, and we unconsciously mimic them. By having the object of desire, the Other makes us desire it, but also makes us resent the Other’s having it: mimetic desire and violence are inextricable. Desire is potentially a source of conflict (especially when the desire is for something intangible such as honor, status, respect, recognition) - a basic problem for human societies.
The ancient solution was substitution of the scapegoat for the rival - the original “breakthrough” moment of human progress, breaking the cyclical repetition of mimetic violence. Religion ritualized the scapegoat mechanism into sacrifices - symbolic acts that created gods, myths and hierarchies.
The rise of techno-scientific rationality and secular governance correlates with the decline of the sacred. But since religion has been the primary form of regulating violence, its displacement raises the possibility of uncontained violence and a panicked return to violent forms of religion.
The imitative basis of desire can explain the success of social media, which intensify universalized competition, feeding rivalry and ressentiment. They also create the space for new modes of scapegoating. Bullying and “forming communities” are connected: scapegoating is the cement of group identities. Voters in demographic decline turn against the Other. “The 99% vs. the 1%” is modern-day scapegoating.
Developers of technology need to accomplish something comparable to what religions did: the creation of superstructures that blunt the tendencies toward dissolution currently threatening global society.
Monday, December 26, 2016
The Mind is Flat
Nick Chater again. Many people won't like the ideas he promotes here because they cast aside traditional notions of how our minds work. I find the framework convincing enough to have spent far more time on it than just this video. Chater's framework explains too much to be fundamentally wrong.
However, it is worth pointing out that the flat mind idea is probably not convincing if one simply views Chater's experiments and rationale from a traditional outlook. The video definitely requires a willingness to change perspective, but once that is done the elegant simplicity of it becomes clear.
We are improvisers - we do not have mental depth to draw on in the traditional sense. We improvise our current behaviour, thoughts and opinions within the context of current situations and a need to be consistent with our perceived personality. One might almost say our current personality.
At first sight it all sounds too fluid and unstable to be satisfactory. Surely our personalities are more stable than Chater suggests? To sweeten the pill this approach does allow us to tie in the creative aspects of human life. To improvise is to create. We must improvise so we must create. We cannot stop. Not necessarily a good thing because we may improvise honestly or dishonestly, but worth remembering if you choose to watch the whole thing.
Here's the video introduction.
This talk presents the case that there are no hidden depths, whether evolutionary, psychological, or economic, from which the real motivations for human behaviour emerge. Motives are, indeed, astonishingly shallow, with the illusion of depth sustained by our mental projection of meaning into the actions of ourselves and other. But the illusion of depth is of crucial importance: it helps us reign in our behaviour, which would otherwise be even more capricious and inconsistent. This thesis has implications for theories in psychology, economics, and ethics which are explicitly, or implicitly, committed to "deep" motivations underpinning human life. It also provides a new framework for thinking about how to make choices, whether as individuals, in business, or in public policy.
However, it is worth pointing out that the flat mind idea is probably not convincing if one simply views Chater's experiments and rationale from a traditional outlook. The video definitely requires a willingness to change perspective, but once that is done the elegant simplicity of it becomes clear.
We are improvisers - we do not have mental depth to draw on in the traditional sense. We improvise our current behaviour, thoughts and opinions within the context of current situations and a need to be consistent with our perceived personality. One might almost say our current personality.
At first sight it all sounds too fluid and unstable to be satisfactory. Surely our personalities are more stable than Chater suggests? To sweeten the pill this approach does allow us to tie in the creative aspects of human life. To improvise is to create. We must improvise so we must create. We cannot stop. Not necessarily a good thing because we may improvise honestly or dishonestly, but worth remembering if you choose to watch the whole thing.
Here's the video introduction.
This talk presents the case that there are no hidden depths, whether evolutionary, psychological, or economic, from which the real motivations for human behaviour emerge. Motives are, indeed, astonishingly shallow, with the illusion of depth sustained by our mental projection of meaning into the actions of ourselves and other. But the illusion of depth is of crucial importance: it helps us reign in our behaviour, which would otherwise be even more capricious and inconsistent. This thesis has implications for theories in psychology, economics, and ethics which are explicitly, or implicitly, committed to "deep" motivations underpinning human life. It also provides a new framework for thinking about how to make choices, whether as individuals, in business, or in public policy.
Friday, December 23, 2016
Friday Night Is Music Night: JD's Christmas Box 2
Lifting out the first tray, we come to a fresh selection from JD, who says:
"Music for this week is a continuation of Christmas festivities and Nollaig Chridheil, feliz Navidad, joyeux Noël, Fröhliche Weihnachten, Bo Nadal, счастливого Рождества, क्रिसमस की बधाई, Eguberri on, buon Natale, Nollaig Shona to one and all!"
Feliz Navidad!
"Music for this week is a continuation of Christmas festivities and Nollaig Chridheil, feliz Navidad, joyeux Noël, Fröhliche Weihnachten, Bo Nadal, счастливого Рождества, क्रिसमस की बधाई, Eguberri on, buon Natale, Nollaig Shona to one and all!"
Feliz Navidad!
Tuesday, December 20, 2016
Friday, December 16, 2016
Friday Night Is Music Night: JD's Early Christmas Box
JD writes: A very mixed musical miscellany to lead us up to Christmas-
Feliz Navidad!
Feliz Navidad!
Friday, December 09, 2016
Friday Night Is Music Night: It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing!
A JD compilation to brighten these dark evenings:
This week's musical offering features some 'new style' swing music -
- plus a last-minute bonus:
This week's musical offering features some 'new style' swing music -
- plus a last-minute bonus:
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