Archive for June, 2009
Flash Dance
June 30th, 2009 popscience
The male, flying around, releases a certain pattern of flashes–a single one second pulse followed by a five second in the case of Photinus pyralis, for one example. And if a female P. pyralis, sitting on a blade of grass, likes what she sees, she responds three seconds later. Not one. Not six. Three. If she responds at the right interval, he knows he’s found a female of his own species and zeroes in, sending more flashes. She may also be signalling other males at the same time; which male she chooses may come down to subtle features of the flash pattern–for example, a rapid series of pulses as opposed to a slow one.
On Reading
June 28th, 2009 Uncategorized
The older I am, the lesser time I spend reading. It isn’t because of competing entertainments but that there is always something else to do – not better – but a person, an object, wanting attention.
A book is a pathway inside another person’s head….you have few deep relationships, maybe no real emotional connections with others at all. …A novel is an opportunity to really listen to another human being…. To disconnect. To finally feel alone…
2009 Reith Lectures: Prof Michael Sandel Part 2
June 28th, 2009 radio
The second lecture is more interesting than the first. It starts off from the idea that the personal is political. Sandel believes that to separate politics from the personal by ignoring the moral and religious opinions of the public is mistaken
…for two reasons: first, it’s not always possible to decide questions of justice and rights without resolving substantive moral questions…Arguments about justice and rights are unavoidably arguments about the moral meaning of the goods at stake. The second reason is that even where it may be possible, it may not be desirable.
But I don’t know if that is quite as practical. Ideally, all opinions (including moral and religious, etc) of all the people in a democracy must be considered carefully before deciding policy. In SG, what I’ve always found irritating is that instead of active debate to include all opinions in terms of policy making, politicians immediately create policies that lean towards the morality of the ‘conservative public’. Yes, can’t fault the party for not listening to the ‘conservative public’ but I’m not sure this ‘conservative public’ exists at all. I’m thinking that it’s the get-out-of-awkward-debate-card that gets waved about when there are slightly troublesome questions arise.
(Catch them all here.)
Almost Project 365
June 28th, 2009 PicturesTags: Project 365
20090628 Lunch
20090628 The Third Ant
20090626 Huddle
20090625 Rose bush Nankin Row
20090623 Hello cat!
20090621 Temple in Tanjong Pagar
20090621 A successful marriage
Middle Class Men
June 24th, 2009 radio
We are so worried about Alexander’s behaviour. His father even had to say, Alexander, can you stop doing that please. And we don’t like to speak harshly to him, like that, and undermine his confidence because it’s not as if he’s a girl. And I don’t think he’s disruptive, in a way that boys from the estate clearly are. Why, he’s just bored because he’s very bright. I don’t think you’re stretching him to reach his full potential and that’s the problem. I think he’s much brighter than the other children and that’s why he’s set fire to them.
The fact, of course, is that Alexander will do fine at school because he’s middle class. Get his GCSEs and his A levels, go to university and go on to do some bollocks job that he hates for the rest of his life. And his parents will be proud because he works indoors and earn a decent wage and they won’t notice that by the age of 25 he’s become corpulent, looks uncomfortable in casual clothes and socialises with men 30 years his senior and at lunch time he says, “Well stoked yeoman, shall we adjourn to our neighbouring hostelry and quaff some fine ale?” and “We work hard but we play hard” which means that by the time they get off work, it’s too late to go home, get changed and go out with real friends, so they just hit a wine bar with the guys from marketing who are “a bunch of absolute nutters” because one of them once did something that was slightly unexpected.
Their dreams go on a back burner. But eventually the back burner is full so their dreams go into the freezer never to be microwaved. And they liven up their working lives by changing the amount of hair gel they use.
– From Jeremy Hardy Speaks To The Nation “How To Be Young”
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
June 22nd, 2009 books
Never thought I would find another writer whom I would obsess over the way I read Greene…
Meanwhile Molly, talented in so many directions, danced a little — but she really did not have the build for a ballerina; did a song and dance act in a revue — decided it was too frivolous; took drawing lessons, gave them up when the war started when she worked as a journalist; gave up journalism to work in one of the cultural outworks of the Communist Party; left for the same reason everyone of her type did — she could not stand the deadly boredom of it; became a minor actress, and had reconciled herself, after much unhappiness, to the fact that she was essentially a dilettante. Her source of self-respect was that she had not — as she put it — given up and crawled into safety somewhere. Into a safe marriage.
Anna said: ‘You’re not going to get anywhere if you two go on like this.’ She sounded angry; she tried to right it with a joke: ‘What it amounts to is, you two should never have married, but you did, or at least you shouldn’t have had a child, but you did —’ Her voice sounded angry again, and again she softened it, saying, ‘Do you realize you two have been saying the same things over and over for years? Why don’t you accept that you’ll never agree about anything and be done with it?’
‘All right, I’m not tactful. Why should I be? Richard says my life isn’t up to much, well I agree with him, but what’s his? Your poor Marion, treated like a housewife or a hostess, but never as a human being. Your boys, being put through the upper-class mill simply because you want it, given no choice. Your stupid little affairs. Why am I supposed to be impressed?’
‘Perhaps it would have been better if you had in fact chosen a stupid and insensitive woman?’ suggested Molly. ‘Or you shouldn’t have always let her know what you were doing? Stupid! She’s a thousand times better than you are.’
‘In short, I couldn’t get a hard on with Marion. Is that clear enough for you? And we’ve been back for a week. So far she’s all right. I’ve been home every evening, like a dutiful husband, and we sit and are polite with each other. She’s careful not to ask me what I’ve been doing or who I’ve been seeing. And I’m careful not to watch the level in the whisky bottle. But when she’s not in the room I look at the bottle, and I can hear her brain ticking over, he must have been with some woman because he doesn’t want me. It’s hell, it really is. Well all right,’ he cried, leaning forward, desperate with sincerity, ‘all right, Molly. But you can’t have it both ways. You two go on about marriage, well you may be right. You probably are. I haven’t seen a marriage yet that came anywhere near what it’s supposed to be. All right. But you’re careful to keep out of it. It’s a hell of an institution, I agree. But I’m involved in it, and you’re preaching from some pretty safe sidelines.’
‘I’d rather be a failure, like you, than succeed and all that sort of thing. But I’m not saying I’m choosing failure. I mean, one doesn’t choose failure, does one? I know what I don’t want, but not what I do want.’
Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness. The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means towards it. Inside this country, Britain, the middle-class have no knowledge of the lives of the working-people, and vice-versa; and reports and articles and novels are sold across the frontiers, are read as if savage tribes were being investigated.
Yet now what interests me is precisely this — why did I not write an account of what had happened, instead of shaping a ‘story’ which had nothing to do with the material that fuelled it. Of course, the straight, simple, formless account would not have been a ‘novel’, and would not have got published, but I was genuinely not interested in ‘being a writer’ or even in making money. I am not talking now of that game writers play with themselves when writing, the psychological game — that written incident came from that real incident, that character was transposed from that one in life, this relationship was the psychological twin of that. I am simply asking myself: Why a story at all — not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?
The battles and conflicts and debates inside our group which might have driven it into growth, had we not been an alien body, without roots, destroyed us very fast. Inside a year our group was split, equipped with sub-groups, traitors, and a loyal hard core whose personnel, save for one or two men, kept changing. Because we did not understand the process, it sapped our emotional energy. But while I know that the process of self-destruction began almost at birth, I can’t quite pinpoint that moment when the tone of our talk and behaviour changed. We were working as hard, but it was to the accompaniment of a steadily deepening cynicism. And our jokes, outside the formal meetings, were contrary to what we said, and thought we believed in. It is from that period of my life that I know how to watch the jokes people make. A slightly malicious tone, a cynical edge to a voice, can have developed inside ten years into a cancer that has destroyed a whole personality. I’ve seen it often, and in many other places than political or communist organizations.
…
The two groups agreed to continue to work together — so much sanity remained to us; but we had different policies. I want to laugh out of a kind of despair even now — it was all so irrelevant, the truth was the group was like a group of exiles, with exiles’ fevered bitterness over trifles.
For years my life seems to have consisted of activities I began to do provisionally, temporarily, with half a heart, and which I then stayed with.
I did not like Willi. He did not like me. Yet we began to live together, or as much as is possible in a small town where everyone knows what you do. We had rooms in the same hotel and shared meals. We were together for nearly three years. Yet we neither liked nor understood each other. We did not even enjoy sleeping together. Of course then I was inexperienced, having slept only with Steven, and that briefly. But even then I knew, as Willi knew, that we were incompatible. Having learned about sex since, I know that the word incompatible means something very real. It doesn’t mean, not being in love, or not being in sympathy, or not being patient, or being ignorant. Two people can be sexually incompatible who are perfectly happy in bed with other people, as if the very chemical structures of their bodies were hostile. Well, Willi and I understood this so well that our vanity wasn’t involved. Our emotions were, about this point only. We had a kind of pity for each other; we were both afflicted permanently with a feeling of sad helplessness because we were unable to make each other happy in this way. But nothing stopped us from choosing other partners. We did not. That I did not, isn’t surprising, because of that quality in me I call lethargy, or curiosity, which always keeps me in a situation long after I should leave it.
But really what I discovered, though I didn’t know it then, was that in describing any personality all these words are meaningless. To describe a person one says: ‘Willi, sitting stiffly at the head of the table, allowed his round spectacles to glitter at the people watching him and said, formally, but with a gruff clumsy humour:’ Something like that. But the point is, and it is the point that obsesses me (and how odd this obsession should be showing itself, so long ago, in helpless lists of opposing words, not knowing what it would develop into), once I say that words like good/bad, strong/weak, are irrelevant, I am accepting amorality, and I do accept it the moment I start to write ‘a story’, ‘a novel’, because I simply don’t care. All I care about is that I should describe Willi and Maryrose so that a reader can feel their reality.
We were all very tired. I don’t think people who have never been part of a left movement understand how hard the dedicated socialists do work, day in and day out; year in, year out. After all, we all earned our livings, and the men in the camps, at least the men actually being trained, were under continuous nervous stress. Every evening we were organizing meetings, discussion groups, debates. We all read a great deal. More often than not we were up till four or five in the morning. In addition to this we were all curers of souls. Ted took to extremes an attitude we all had, that anyone in any sort of trouble was our responsibility. And part of our duty was to explain to anyone with any kind of a spark that life was a glorious adventure. Looking back I should imagine that of all the appallingly hard work we did, the only part of it that achieved anything was this personal proselytizing. I doubt whether any of the people we took on will forget the sheer exuberance of our conviction in the gloriousness of life, for if we didn’t have it by temperament we had it on principle. All kinds of incidents come back — for instance Willi, who after some days of wondering what to do for a woman who was unhappy because her husband was unfaithful to her, decided to offer her The Golden Bough because, ‘when one is personally unhappy the correct course is to take a historical view of the matter.’ She returned the book, apologetically, saying it was above her head and that in any case she had decided to leave her husband because she had decided he was more trouble than he was worth. But she wrote to Willi regularly when she left our town, polite, touching, grateful letters. I remember the terrible words: ‘I’ll never forget that you were kind enough to take an interest in me.’ (They didn’t strike me at the time, though.)
Almost Project 365
June 22nd, 2009 PicturesTags: Project 365
20090621 From Right to Left: "I fancy you" "Will you date me" "..." "Oh I See"
Almost Project 365
June 18th, 2009 PicturesTags: Project 365
I am not dead yet, I can do the highland fling.
Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store
June 16th, 2009 Uncategorized
Then she said, “Have you thought about doing a time-series visualization?”
This sounded like a nerd’s way of asking another nerd out on a date, so I said I hadn’t, but that I was super interested. We made plans to meet at Supply and Demand the next day.
