We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I’ve just discovered, while reading a Guardian piece about and against censorship by Nick Cohen, that Salman Rushdie has just published an autobiographical work about what his life has been like for the last decade or so, while being subjected to the calculatedly frenzied threats of the Islamist hordes following the publication of The Satanic Verses.
I have never regretted for a single second purchasing my copy of The Satanic Verses, and I still have it. But like many others who voted thus with their wallets, I soon gave up with actually reading the thing.
Joseph Anton, on the other hand, looks like it might be quite a page turner. As a general rule I far prefer reading autobiographies by award-winning literary novelists to reading their award-winning literary novels. Whether I enjoy reading Joseph Anton or not, I won’t regret buying that either. Which I just did.
I have yet to discover why it is called Joseph Anton, but I’ll find out soon enough. And … I just did. While inserting that “page turner” link above, I found myself reading this:
Rushdie’s new memoir, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, takes its title from the name he used while in hiding – which was a combination of the first names of two of his favourite writers, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.
So there we are.
Bloody hell, I also just found out: 656 pages! That’s a lot of pages to be turning. Maybe just bits of it, eh?
Joan Brady, a previous winner of the Whitbread literary prize, writes:
Costa Coffee should keep out of book prizes – and town centres
In 1993 I became the first woman to win the Whitbread Prize, and it changed my life. Money! One winner blew it all on a swimming pool for the family’s French villa. Not me. Mine paid off my debts: there are few joys in life to beat clearing the slate.
I suppose I should have given some thought to where the money came from. I didn’t. The shortlist was awarded at the Whitbread brewery –which meant I could hardly avoid knowing it had something to do with beer – but how was I to know that Whitbread saw the whole excitement as just an advertising gimmick?
I liked the comment by scepticalhawkeye:
Most of us would have thought that the executives of a brewery at heart saw their life’s work as promoting English Literature.
Joan Brady appears upset that Whitbread has taken over the Costa Coffee chain, so instead of authors being given dosh by noble brewers they are getting it from effete caffeine-fiends. For a moment the flame of hope flickered within me that Ms Brady might be emulating the staunch heroes of of God Emperor of Didcot, in which mighty vows are made that never more shall the arm of the honest tea drinker be made limp by the latte of foreign oppressors! Alas, she just has a thing against Costa:
Costa is strong-arming its multinational way into small towns and villages all over Britain and plonking down its identical coffee shops even though local people in overwhelming numbers – from Southwold in East Anglia to Cottingham in Yorkshire to Totnes in Devon – make it clear they aren’t wanted.
I lived in Totnes for 30 years, and Totnes outdid itself. Three quarters of its population protested against Costa: Totnes already has more than 40 independent coffee shops. That many people agreeing on anything approaches a miracle, a landslide of public opinion. Costa isn’t bothered. It hasn’t bothered with the populations of other protesting towns either. But isn’t this supposed to be a democracy? Here’s a corporate giant flouting the fully expressed will of local people. And for what? To boost a profit margin that’ll go to build more coffee shops in Russia and Egypt – Costa’s largest is in Dubai – at the expense of UK shopkeepers.
As every second comment says, if local people in overwhelming numbers do not want Costa Coffee then Ms Brady’s problem will not persist long. Local people in overwhelming numbers won’t go there, and Costa will cut their losses and go.
In fact there is an issue worth discussing here. I cannot help wondering what Ms Brady would say if local people in overwhelming numbers expressed the view that they did not want immigrants of a different race, Egyptians for instance, setting up shop in their town and making a profit “at the expense of” UK shopkeepers. Would opposition to incomers on those grounds still count as the “fully expressed will of the people” and if not, why not? Isn’t this supposed to be a democracy? Perhaps if she reads the many pointed comments, the CiF crowd being on the right side for once, Ms Brady will be prompted to question the limits of majoritarianism.
Perhaps she will also be prompted to do as so many of the commenters suggest and send Whitbread / Costa back their money. Given that she thinks that only the involuntary contributions of taxpayers are pure enough to fund a literary prize, that would be the principled course of action.
“Nowadays I seldom go to the cinema, and this isn’t only because there are few where I live. It’s because, judging from reviews, there is very little I want to see. It’s also partly because I have the impression that directors now despise dialogue, or resent the need for it, and so often have it muttered just out of earshot, or smothered by music. But the real reason goes deeper, and is also why cinema is in terminal artistic decline.”
– Allan Massie.
Is he right? I would be interested if commenters could give examples of where they think there are still films getting made that are packed with dialogue. As Brian Micklethwait wrote earlier this year about the film, Margin Call, there are still films getting made that are designed for intelligent people who don’t require lots of car chases to hold their interest. (Not that there is anything wrong with a car chase or a straightforward race, such as when Steve McQueen is involved.)
To make a more philosophical point, assuming that Massie is correct – and I think he probably is – does the decline in dialogue mainly reflect the changing demographics of film audiiences? It might do so. The sort of more intelligent material that holds lots of dialogue, credible plots and so on is now increasingly getting made for television, especially in the US. Think of shows (I am not saying they are all good, by the way) such as Mad Men, The West Wing, CSI, 24, Grey’s Anatomy, The Sopranos, etc. And of course another factor is how, as humans, we tend to remember the good stuff and forget, or try to forget, the old 80-20 rule: 80 per cent or so of most stuff that ever gets made is utter crap. Even most Elizabethan plays were probably not all that good. But we remember Shakespeare.
I’m at least a week late with this picture (illness blah blah), but it remains one of my favourite Olympics images, snapped by one of my favourite bloggers, Mick Hartley:
Suddenly I heard myself asking: Yes, why couldn’t those damn rioters have waited until the Olympics? Not really, but I did think it. (What I really think is that rioters shouldn’t. And before anyone says, it’s different if all you do is call yourselves a Riot and play noisy tunes.)
But to take my question seriously, I suppose rioters can tell when they’ll be allowed to run riot for a little while, and when they absolutely will not. Had they tried anything seriously wicked during the Olympics, they would have been crushed without mercy, the crushing egged on by the very people who, during and after the actual riots, were most sympathetic towards the rioters.
Interestingly, a little two-part BBC2 TV show about the riots was billed in the Radio Times to be shown just before the Olympics. But then it was postponed.
Photoed by me in Vauxhall Bridge Road, earlier this week:
I liked this enough when I first set eyes on it to snap it up, and that was two days before I even noticed the “we’ve got one ‘ere” bit. Like I always say, my camera regularly sees more than I do.
Website here.
I was surprised to discover today (unless I have been more than usually let down by my internet searching “skills”) that this, by Douglas Adams, has never been mentioned here at Samizdata before:
“On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”
“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”
“I did,” said Ford. “It is.”
“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?”
“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”
“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”
“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”
“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in.”
That’s from So Long And Thanks For All The Fish. In the place I found it on the www (see the link above), it does not say on what page.
I was reminded about this snatch of dialogue by a recent episode of the BBC Radio 4 show Quote Unquote. A lady participant said she thought Douglas Adams very wise and very funny, this quote in particular. I post it here as a corrective to today’s SQotD, below, in which Paul Ryan says something good, thereby proving himself to be a more likeable lizard than nasty lizard Obama and his lizard gang.
But, alert readers will note that this is a classic example of a piece of writing that will have everyone nodding, but each thinking his own thing. It’s like if you say you favour “common sense”, “principled government”, or “democracy“. Each person listening to you agrees. Each has his own distinct idea about what each phrase means, in ways that often wildly contradict the ideas in the heads of his nodding neighbours. All agree, that these are fine things. Far fewer actually do agree about anything of substance.
For some, reading the Adams quote above, the lizards in charge of us are too capitalist inclined, for others they are insufficiently capitalist inclined. Some want the lizards to be keener on policy X, others curse the lizards for being insufficiently opposed to policy X. All agree only in being unsatisfied with the rule of the lizards, and that the lizards are indeed lizards.
Which is one reason why the lizards usually survive and thrive. We, their victims, can so very rarely agree amongst ourselves about what species, or indeed if any species, ought to replace them.
No long review.
Just whose fault the peril Gotham (not New York – honest) was. Indeed the peril of Western civilization.
Many people – but three billionaires spring to mind
One obsessed with money – no honour, good sense undermined by greed (leading to consequences he did NOT want). Jamie Dimon and so many others who supported for Obama for corporate welfare?
One with utterly perverted idealism – the George Soros figure. Secretly financing and organizing the Occupy Movement (and worse).
And the good billionaire – who has given up on the world, hiding with his bad memories in his house (thus leaving the world to the evil).
Greed.
Collectivism.
Despair.
Call me selfish, but the only life I want to ruin is my own.
– A rather (I think) noble sentiment, expressed in a recently-shown-on-Brit-TV episode of the show by one of the 2 Broke Girls, the dark haired one who has always been poor as opposed the blond one who used to be rich.
Find a bit more of the conversation during which this was said, by scrolling down here, to where it says “Brokeback Girls”. Lesbians eh? Wherever they look, they see more lesbians. Mind you, the brunette character is called “Max”.
Who’s the coolest? Terry Deary, the author of “Horrible Histories” or Lars the Emo Kid?
Deary: “Attack the elite. Overturn the hierarchy.”
Lars: “I’ve got so much passion in my body that I just wanna … kill you!”
Deary: “I started challenging authority at school, really, and just kind of never stopped.”
Lars: “I’m just so complicated that you’d never understand me.”
Deary: “It’s why I’m dangerous; inculcating rebel ideas into the minds of innocent young people using humour.”
Lars: “I got the cops called in on me last week because I walked outside with a gun and professed my love to a flower.”
Thanks for doing Horrible Histories, Mr Deary. As I said in 2005, when my then eight year old son asked me “Who is your favourite Habsburg?”, I knew that was £200 we could afford after all. He literally read those magazines to pieces; we still have them in their free cardboard holders, and the best-loved issues are reduced to stacks of flaky individual sheets of paper, like illustrated filo pastry.
Furthermore, Mr Deary, I have a lot of sympathy with your views on education and its ruination by twonks in government, or would if I thought you meant them, though could I just add that it is not without the bounds of human variety for trigonometry, chemistry or French to turn out to be “the skills you are going to need.” Now please stop being such a poseur. You are not Han Solo. Lars is cooler than you.
Earlier this week I watched a television show which was advertised as being about London’s underground railway system, and the technology that made it possible, but which was really about underground railways in general.
I really, really enjoyed it, when it was first shown on Wednesday night. And I am writing this in some haste because the show is being shown again tonight, at 7pm, Channel 5. If you love stuff about high tech engineering and the extraordinary ingenuity and cunning and (not least) bravery and physical endurance that goes into it, then watch it. Or (if you have a life) set your video, or whatever videos are called these days. (Or be twenty first century about it and watch it on the www, which I can’t do because of something about my computer blocking adverts.)
My favourite bit was when they explained how a noted French engineer with the delightful name of Fulgence Bienvenue put a tunnel through the bank of the River Seine in Paris. Problem: the bank was not made of proper earth. It was made of mud. How do you drill a big tube through mud? Answer: you freeze the mud, and then drill through it, insert the tube, and … well, job done. By the time the … I was going to say permafrost, but make that tempafrost … has turned back into mud, the tube is in there and train-ready.
Another major engineer whom I’d never heard of until now also got a well deserved pat on the back from the television. This was an American called Sprague:
Hailed during his lifetime as the “Father of Electric Traction” by leaders in the fields of science, engineering and industry, Frank Julian Sprague’s achievements in horizontal transportation were paralleled by equally remarkable achievements in vertical transportation.
In other words, Sprague didn’t just make underground trains work far better by replacing one massive steam engine at the front with lots of far smaller electric engines all the way along the train, which as I am sure you can imagine worked far better, not just because of all that steam, but also because it meant the trains could be as long as you want. He also pioneered electric engines for lifts, as we call them over here. As a result of Sprague’s elevator engines, skyscrapers scraped the sky a lot more than hitherto, as was well explained in this TV show.
The bit at the end about how they squirted a new concrete foundation under Big Ben, to stop it falling over when they were sticking the Jubilee Line extension right next to it, was not so epoch-making. But it was fun.
Greg Beato at Reason magazine (the July edition) has this nice item, “The Internet vs the NEA”, about how innovative ways to fund creative projects in the arts have become such a hit that they are annoying the advocates for the publicly subsidised (ie, from taxes) sector. He is talking about a crowd-funding project in the US known as Kickstarter:
Current NEA funding amounts to about $1 per U.S. taxpayer each year. Yet the program is controversial and likely will remain so because those who contribute to it have no say in how their dollar is applied. Kickstarter, by contrast, gives people that control. It turns arts patronage from an abstract, opaque, disconnected, possibly involuntary act into one of dynamic engagement, where creators get to pitch supporters instead of faceless institutions and supporters feel as if they have a personal stake in helping creators realize their visions.
Kickstarter increases the pool and variety of funding sources for creators and allows people who are not wealthy to act as patrons. Artists can seek levels of financing that the NEA isn’t designed to accommodate on either end of the spectrum, from a few hundred dollars to a few million. And the chances of success are greater for Kickstarter applicants: In Fiscal Year 2011, 5,574 individuals and organizations applied for NEA grants across six program categories, and 2,350, or 42 percent, obtained them.
It is certainly too early to say that Kickstarter has made the NEA superfluous. At the same time, it may also turn out that Yancey Strickler’s reservations about rivaling the U.S. government are far too modest. Last year Kickstarter funded more than three times as many projects as the YEA did, in a wider range of disciplines. So far, at least, Kickstarter works just as well for hot dog cart entrepreneurs and 3D printer manufacturers as it does for documentary filmmakers and oddball literary magazines. Perhaps Strickler should start preparing himself for the burden of making, say, the Department of Agriculture’s Market Access Program (MAP) unnecessary too.
Such a business model for funding artists and so forth might also demonstrate how people can get certain creative ideas off the ground without the largesse of a single patron, be it a state or person. And because contributions to ventures such as Kickstarter are voluntary, it also means that the donors – many thousands of them – are far more likely to be engaged and interested in what gets created. By contrast, if you were to ask a person on the street about what they thought their tax pounds were used for in funding the arts, some might have a general idea, but many would not have a clue, and certainly not down the level of fine detail. For example, how many of any readers of this blog could quickly come up with ideas on what new sculptors got funding this year?
I just watched a late night TV show done by, and about, the ventriloquist Nina Conti, who is completely new to me. Very good. Such are the wonders of the internet that I can immediately now share my pleasure with you, complete with a link to a much shorter but equally funny video. That’s her and the monkey doing the Montreal Comedy Festival.
What I find so funny about Ms. Conti is that her personality on stage is so unstagey, so unshowbizzy, so un-actressy, just precisely as self-consciously embarrassed, yet gigglingly entertained, as she would be if she were talking to an actual monkey, on a stage, in front of lots of people. Yet what she is doing is the oldest of old school showbizz. Brilliant, I think. Acting of the highest quality.
She is very ambitious. Not willing to be a regular old school ventriloquist. She will either take the ancient art to new heights, or fall off the mountain trying. Very admirable.
Favourite line in the short video:
“Stop pretending it’s not your fault.”
Also good:
“Jim Henson knew his place.”
The monkey sounds ever so slightly Welsh. I wonder why.
“Let’s go home and get some therapy.”
She seems totally sane. Apart, that is to say, from having an imaginary monkey attached to her arm. Does that make her mad? Or does it keep her sane?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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