Zadie Smith limns the line between pleasure and joy, a bit of an unclear distinction, for sure, but one that she characterises as the difference between the background melody of life and the high crescendo. For clarity, joy is the latter, pleasure the former.
The special particle of 'joy' she experienced six times - half in states of love and twice on drugs - and she meanders a bit after that, and does not pass judgement on one or the other, except to say that her take on the collapse of joy into mourning after a loss (she quotes Julian Barnes, 'it hurts just as much as it is worth') made me think of the Harvard Brain Scientist (mark the Capitals) who under a joyful coma came to copy and paste the vague ether he felt into a fuzzy faith.
Quite why 'final joy' tends to lead to strange cold arms is unclear to me, but I'm sure Harvard have their best brains on it. Russia is preparing, are you?
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Papyrus Peaked
Is e-reading really reading? So asks Andrew Piper, arguing that because our veins and skin-folds partake in the act of turning a page, or reaching for a dusty volume over a step ladder, it is something that the electric form, encased behind its glass wall, can never really equal. And perhaps he is right.
Even for basic things seemingly well suited for the electric world, like study texts, I still find myself returning to the bulky, impractical-to-transport paper version, and not the iPad-ready alternative. Added to this is the idea that Amazon seem to view the electronic purchase of a book as a kind of perpetual loan from them to you, and not as something that you can, say, distribute to next-of-kin on death, or keep if your account status might later change. And if the company were to fold, what then for the labyrinth of personalised cloud libraries developed up to now?
These are good questions to ask, and in his article Piper migrates from Augustine and the codex to Braille and our own ability to 'grasp' the essence of a text. However, in a review of the same Andrew Martin makes a great observation on the comparative ubiquity of thoughts on this issue (here included):
Even for basic things seemingly well suited for the electric world, like study texts, I still find myself returning to the bulky, impractical-to-transport paper version, and not the iPad-ready alternative. Added to this is the idea that Amazon seem to view the electronic purchase of a book as a kind of perpetual loan from them to you, and not as something that you can, say, distribute to next-of-kin on death, or keep if your account status might later change. And if the company were to fold, what then for the labyrinth of personalised cloud libraries developed up to now?
These are good questions to ask, and in his article Piper migrates from Augustine and the codex to Braille and our own ability to 'grasp' the essence of a text. However, in a review of the same Andrew Martin makes a great observation on the comparative ubiquity of thoughts on this issue (here included):
Fortunately we writers, being writers, can write about this. Whereas I don’t believe I have read a single work by a milkman lamenting that most people now buy their milk from a shop instead of having it delivered, books fretting over the death of print form one of the genres of the moment.
So perhaps in the end we should leave it to the market itself to tell, and if a full migration happens then people must prefer that, so let it be...
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Old Joy
Via 3QuarksDaily, an interesting defense of varied methods of intoxication. I liked especially a quote from Omar Khayyam, a learned Medieval Persian, who extols wine as letting him 'divorce absolutely reason and religion'. Lewis Lapham, the author, and now in his seventies, has led a clear and fascinating life, and there is a great deal of knowledge behind his words.
Monday, December 10, 2012
Aping Automatons
For the more technically-minded who read Paul Krugman's piece on the rise of automatons yesterday (Robots and Robber Barons), he offers up a more detailed analysis here (beware!). Economists are struggling to come to terms with the fact that automatons may render a growing part of of the working population permanently redundant, and it is key, therefore, that academics highlight this issue. The capital-labor dichotomy was not just Marxist politicking, but is, as Krugman shows, a simple explanation for this recent landscape shift.
Sunday, December 9, 2012
Australian Pranks and Kant
In the rush to pin blame onto one party or another in the Australian radio prank controversy, and in the degree of hindsight bias and the repetition of the mistakes they themselves condemn, the social-media complex has really shown itself a ferocious beast.
A nurse in a London hospital directs a prank call to Kate Middleton's room, subsequently broadcast web-ward, leading (according to the bewildered fingers of twitter) to her suicide. The two DJ's who played the prank have endured a torrent of abuse from all over the globe, abuse far more vociferous than the media attention that led to the nurse's untimely death. And there the inversion dwells.
In Kantian terms an action should be judged by its intent, not consequences, and if these presenters were not the pin-up villain's of the True Path prior to this unpredictable suicide, then they should not be assigned that role afterward, either. A suicide is usually down to a combination of things, seen and unseen.
And if the rambling outrage of the twitter-verse leads ultimately to the suicide of one of the presenters, then the media complex will probably stop, sputter a bit, and then invert the Narrative again with an attack on all social media. Those who tweeted or posted borderline violent messages against the radio hosts will be hauled before the courts, and we do the dance again.
A nurse in a London hospital directs a prank call to Kate Middleton's room, subsequently broadcast web-ward, leading (according to the bewildered fingers of twitter) to her suicide. The two DJ's who played the prank have endured a torrent of abuse from all over the globe, abuse far more vociferous than the media attention that led to the nurse's untimely death. And there the inversion dwells.
In Kantian terms an action should be judged by its intent, not consequences, and if these presenters were not the pin-up villain's of the True Path prior to this unpredictable suicide, then they should not be assigned that role afterward, either. A suicide is usually down to a combination of things, seen and unseen.
And if the rambling outrage of the twitter-verse leads ultimately to the suicide of one of the presenters, then the media complex will probably stop, sputter a bit, and then invert the Narrative again with an attack on all social media. Those who tweeted or posted borderline violent messages against the radio hosts will be hauled before the courts, and we do the dance again.
The triumph of the nerds revisited: a review of Tyler Cowen's 'The Age of the Infovore'
One of the more interesting parts of the modern world and status structure is the recent elevation to not only commercial but also cultural triumph of a subset of (usually) male personality types, the 'nerd' in common jargon. The world now is run in one way or another by nerds, from Bill Gates to Sergey Brin and the late Mr Jobs, and even old stodgy outposts of a prior personality type, like investment banking, have been replaced by a similar brain trust.
As Bill Gates once said, Microsoft's main competitor in the 90's was not another software company, but Goldman Sachs, in the war for elusive, contemplative 'talent'. This rearrangement has been felt in the structure of our economy - very depersonalised, hyper rational - although not as yet in our politics (where smiles and handshakes and glistening teeth still rule the day).
Tyler Cowen, a cultured economist whose blog I follow a lot, wrote a broad book on the subject, available here, and looked at this special personality type that acts as transmission grid for the modern world. It crosses a wide range of internal, psychological, and even aesthetic areas. He argues that the modern world is girded largely by information, or more particularly by the structuring of information in little towers or bits.
To pyramid our information, and ourselves, therefore - from iPod playlists to facebook friends, to interests and time, is the elusive goal of much economic output. After a discussion of the autistic/aspergers personality type, and its elegant intertwining with our world, he goes on to give a cute and unusually unique interpretation of modern culture.
He makes three observations, 'Culture is much cheaper and more accessible than before; we engage in more and more cultural sampling; and many intelligent people complain about how ugly contemporary culture has become.'
The second point about cultural sampling was the most interesting to me, because I had not heard it mentioned before. In the modern world, with so many cultural trends and types, books, movies, art, etc, we are inundated with sampling opportunities, and therefore we take from this miasma our own, filtered, cultural 'bits'. We structure our cultural intake, tailoring it to ourselves, and our personalities, and then in turn display it 'worldward'.
As Cowen says, 'When access is easy, we tend to favour the short, the sweet, and the bitty. When access is difficult, we tend to look for large scale productions, extravaganzas, and masterpieces.' Or does the Internet usher in an era of sampling everything but understanding nothing? The rise of blogging and twitter and the noticeable condensing of newspaper articles over the past decade he points to as evidence that we are getting our cultural injection in smaller but quicker chunks than before.
And he makes a cogent case for multitasking, describing it as 'a strategy to keep ourselves interested', and also shows that algorithmising our information means less time wasted leafing through encyclopedias and so forth. Cowen confronts the simplifying argument by delineating peak from regular but positive emotional states, showing that the experience through history of high or low culture - for example a concert or performance - was not regular, or available at every moment, and that this led to a sudden spurt of cultural ingestion for one brief window, followed by a much larger downtime where nothing much happened. The ratio was skewed, and not smoothed out over a proper time frame. But now we are able to dip into the cultural pool more often, leading to a smoother intake, with less peaks and troughs.
An ominous delving into Tibetan Buddhism in Chapter 5 - something I certainly did not expect from Cowen - turned out to be quite a good exploration of the autistic persona, and even edges in a debate on the 'Inclusionist' vs the 'Deletist' philosophy in the growth of Wikipedia (self explanatory), and then into a debate on education.
This is what I meant when I described at the start the book as broad, with a lot thrown into different chapters. Indeed it is intrinsically disordered, and yet flows, and this is what I like about the blog as well.
As Bill Gates once said, Microsoft's main competitor in the 90's was not another software company, but Goldman Sachs, in the war for elusive, contemplative 'talent'. This rearrangement has been felt in the structure of our economy - very depersonalised, hyper rational - although not as yet in our politics (where smiles and handshakes and glistening teeth still rule the day).
Tyler Cowen, a cultured economist whose blog I follow a lot, wrote a broad book on the subject, available here, and looked at this special personality type that acts as transmission grid for the modern world. It crosses a wide range of internal, psychological, and even aesthetic areas. He argues that the modern world is girded largely by information, or more particularly by the structuring of information in little towers or bits.
To pyramid our information, and ourselves, therefore - from iPod playlists to facebook friends, to interests and time, is the elusive goal of much economic output. After a discussion of the autistic/aspergers personality type, and its elegant intertwining with our world, he goes on to give a cute and unusually unique interpretation of modern culture.
He makes three observations, 'Culture is much cheaper and more accessible than before; we engage in more and more cultural sampling; and many intelligent people complain about how ugly contemporary culture has become.'
The second point about cultural sampling was the most interesting to me, because I had not heard it mentioned before. In the modern world, with so many cultural trends and types, books, movies, art, etc, we are inundated with sampling opportunities, and therefore we take from this miasma our own, filtered, cultural 'bits'. We structure our cultural intake, tailoring it to ourselves, and our personalities, and then in turn display it 'worldward'.
As Cowen says, 'When access is easy, we tend to favour the short, the sweet, and the bitty. When access is difficult, we tend to look for large scale productions, extravaganzas, and masterpieces.' Or does the Internet usher in an era of sampling everything but understanding nothing? The rise of blogging and twitter and the noticeable condensing of newspaper articles over the past decade he points to as evidence that we are getting our cultural injection in smaller but quicker chunks than before.
And he makes a cogent case for multitasking, describing it as 'a strategy to keep ourselves interested', and also shows that algorithmising our information means less time wasted leafing through encyclopedias and so forth. Cowen confronts the simplifying argument by delineating peak from regular but positive emotional states, showing that the experience through history of high or low culture - for example a concert or performance - was not regular, or available at every moment, and that this led to a sudden spurt of cultural ingestion for one brief window, followed by a much larger downtime where nothing much happened. The ratio was skewed, and not smoothed out over a proper time frame. But now we are able to dip into the cultural pool more often, leading to a smoother intake, with less peaks and troughs.
An ominous delving into Tibetan Buddhism in Chapter 5 - something I certainly did not expect from Cowen - turned out to be quite a good exploration of the autistic persona, and even edges in a debate on the 'Inclusionist' vs the 'Deletist' philosophy in the growth of Wikipedia (self explanatory), and then into a debate on education.
This is what I meant when I described at the start the book as broad, with a lot thrown into different chapters. Indeed it is intrinsically disordered, and yet flows, and this is what I like about the blog as well.
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