Architect-speak
Jonathan Meades · Let’s go to Croydon · LRB 13 April 2023
Architects’ dialect comprises delusional boasts that cast them as philosophers and their trade as at best a social service, at worst a particularly dodgy branch of alternative medicine or new age bunk: sustainabulous, green, responsible, liminal, wellness, community, performative, holistic, participatory, community (again). Mind mange? Ghosts in the infrastructure? Boney’s or Bogey’s or the Bears’ advance through the gaps between the paving stones? Architecture will get it sorted. As Reinier de Graaf noted of a speech by Richard Rogers: ‘With each new sentence a new location, topic or domain is added to the theoretical competence of architecture.’
Vaclav Havel
There is always something suspicious about an intellectual on the winning side.
Makes me feel better already. I used to read Havel a lot, but this line had fallen from my RAM. Sadly, not applicable to rugby.
Not all can be learned
The fertile hatred had dried up in Grosz’s headlong attempt transform himself into an American and get into the spirit of the place. ‘Nobody really needs art anymore, since everybody is practising it,’he wrote in his autobiography. ‘I really love the American optimistic believe that everything can be learned; but I don’t quite believe it.’
Thomas Meaney on the artist, George Grosz, in the London Review of Books, 16th of February 2023
The trouble with computers
“The trouble with computers is that all they give you is answers.”
Pablo Picasso
Via Ian Leslie: Answer Machines – by Ian Leslie – The Ruffian
Ands the gods looked on
As far as Toby was concerned, Jay Crispin was your normal, rootless, amoral, plausible, half-educated, nicely spoken frozen adolescent in a bespoke suit, with an unappeasable craving for money, power and respect, regardless of where he got them from.
And from there, he wandered off into an argument with Friedrich Schiller’s grandiose statement that human stupidity was what the gods fought in vain. Not so, in Toby’s opinion, and no excuse for anybody, whether god or man. What the gods and all reasonable humans fought in vain wasn’t stupidity at all. It was sheer, wanton, bloody indifference to anybody’s interests but their own.
A Delicate Truth, John le Carré
YMMV, but for me, one of his very best.
Ain’t no rock’n roll star
Do you really want to live to be 100? | Financial Times
Sarah O’Connor in today’s FT
I’m one of life’s optimists. When I think about living to be 100 years old, I picture a birthday party where I am surrounded by my devoted descendants, perhaps followed by a commercial space flight as a celebratory treat.
But I’m in the minority here. A lot of people would rather be dead. In a recent UK poll by Ipsos, only 35 per cent of people said they wanted to become centenarians.
Simplicity beyond complexity
Monday 17 May, 2022 – by John Naughton – Memex 1.1
John Naughton’s Quote of the Day
”If people don’t believe mathematics is simple, it is only because they don’t realise how complicated life is.”
John von Neumann
They just can’t help sharing it
Debt is the sexually transmitted disease of finance. People won’t discuss it in public.
Rich People’s Problems: My debt is becoming an albatross | Financial Times
Confusion reigns over us
F Scott Fitzgerald remains correct that first-class minds can handle ambiguity and contradiction. The rest of us need structure.
No grand theory can explain the Ukraine crisis | Financial Times
Via John Naughton
”Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.” Anthony Trollope
He would know. According to some reports, he paid a servant an extra £5 a year to wake him up at 5:30 am every morning and get him a cup of coffee. Trollope would then work on a novel for three hours. The first half hour was spent reading over what he had already written, and after that he wrote at a pace of 250 words per 15 minutes. So, over three hours, he would write approximately 2,500 words.
And he did that while holding down a serious job in the Post Office. Infuriating, isn’t it? [JN]
Indeed…
But they are my own failures
Is the age of ambition over? | Financial Times
Here’s the second thing I learnt: it’s still better to be disappointed by your own dreams than shaped by the dreams of others. Patrick Freyne
Was my own research philosophy. I would rather my own less-than-perfect experiments than be a cog.
A worthy thought for the New Year
Endemic civil disorder could be America’s future | Financial Times
There are several reasons to worry about the future. One is the past.
Janan Ganesh in the FT.
Kind words: an obituary
Doc Searls Weblog · Remembering Kim Cameron
We all get our closing parentheses. I’ve gone longer without closing mine than Kim did before closing his. That also makes me sad, not that I’m in a hurry. Being old means knowing you’re in the exit line, but okay with others cutting in. I just wish this time it wasn’t Kim.
Britt Blaser says life is like a loaf of bread. It’s one loaf no matter how many slices are in it. Some people get a few slices, others many. For the sake of us all, I wish Kim had more.
I am reminded of what a friend said of Amos Tversky, another genius of seemingly boundless vitality who died too soon: “Death is unrepresentative of him.”
Tennis rules
John Lanchester · As the Lock Rattles · LRB 4 December 2021
The story of the UK is not the whole story of the global pandemic, but it is worth taking a moment to look at the local specifics. We could take as a benchmark the All England Club, which manages Wimbledon. In 2003, having learned from the experience of Sars, Wimbledon began paying around £1.5 million a year to insure against the cost of a pandemic. As a result, when Covid hit, the club trousered cheques totalling £174 million to cover the cost of the cancelled 2020 tournament. That is what competent governance looks like. What would the UK response have looked like if the All England Club had been in charge? What would the Wimbledon number – the death toll assuming competent government – have been?
Instead we are left with:
In other words, the UK is crowded, old, fat, cramped, unequal and much visited, and all of those things increase the impact of Covid.
Twin miseries
It was not deliberate policy; it simply seemed to be only men who applied, usually refugees from the twin miseries of academia: low salaries and high tables.
The Fear Index. Robert Harris
Line manager
Every time I hear the term line-manager used by or about an academic, retirement gets a day closer.
I once wrote.
A university is a gym not a hotel
(source ?)
Keyboard warriors and the reverse Voltaire
We are living through a time of online outrage and increasing irrationalism, and the combination has not been a happy one for public discussion. Generally, shallow emotion seems to be in the driving seat for many keyboard warriors: not the slow burn of genuine anger that fuels the prolonged, difficult pursuit of a worthwhile goal, but rather a feel-good performative outrage whose main expression is typing furious snark onto a computer screen before switching over to Netflix. [emphasis added]
Material Girls, by Kathleen Stock.
And applicable to a lot more than the topic of her excellent book. Sometimes, it takes a philosopher to spell out exactly what people are saying. She also introduced me to the reverse Voltaire from Mary Leng
I agree with what you have to say, but will fight to the death to prevent you from saying it.
On the late Chick Corea
The Economist | Music without limits
As ever, some beautiful cadences in an obituary in the Economist. This one is of Chick Corea.
Sometimes he wrote phrases down, or composed at a keyboard so they were stored. All too often, though, he couldn’t catch them. Music, like a waterfall, never stayed still, and nor did bands. But that was good. Every change of players brought in something fresh.
He treated music more like a swimming pool, where he just jumped in and had fun.
In short, he was not to be tied down, not even to success
Owen Bennett-Jones · Pissing on Pedestrians: A Great Unravelling · LRB 1 April 2021
According to Tom Bower, who has written more on him than anyone else, [Robert] Maxwell once lost his temper with Ghislaine after she provided him with what he considered an inadequate account of a dinner she had attended on his behalf. Having been reduced to tears by his outburst, she wrote a memo: ‘I should have expressed to you at the start of our conversation that I was merely presenting you with a preliminary report of the evening and a full written report was to follow.’ She went on to list everyone at the dinner who had praised him, adding that she herself had been honoured to represent him.
By the end, the man who had always been able to turn on the charm at will was so egotistical that his company was unbearable. Cruel, grandiose, self-absorbed and ludicrously boastful, he lived in a flat at the top of Maxwell House, his appetites, sexual and otherwise, serviced only by people he paid. His need for food became so excessive that on one occasion he broke into a locked larder and ate a pound of cheese, a jar of peanut butter, two jars of caviar, a loaf of bread and a whole chicken in a single sitting. True, when he picked up the phone, the world’s most powerful people would take his call. But, for all that, he ate his last meal sitting on his own in the corner of an empty dining room in a Tenerife hotel.
Words fail.
Dani Garavelli · Diary: Salmond v. Sturgeon · LRB 19 March 2021
Dani Garavelli is the LRB.
MSPs are fixated on these meetings because a breach of the ministerial code would trigger an automatic resignation, or did in the days before Priti Patel. But the public doesn’t seem to care about exactly when Sturgeon knew, and you can understand why. Pan out and what do you see? A woman who refused to bow to pressure to help a friend when other women made sexual harassment complaints against him: ‘As first minister I refused to follow the age old pattern of allowing a powerful man to use his status and connections to get what he wants.’
The SNP’s problems are not all linked to the Salmond allegations. After nearly fourteen years in power, the party is exhausted. But, with or without Sturgeon at the helm, there is no effective opposition (the Tories’ Scottish leader isn’t even in the Scottish Parliament, and Scottish Labour’s leader, Anas Sarwar, its sixth in the last decade, has only just been elected). The polls were predicting that on 6 May the SNP would regain the majority it won in 2011 (despite a PR system that was supposed to prevent absolute majorities) and lost in 2016, but now a hung parliament is being forecast (and a drop to 49 per cent support for independence). I find it hard to imagine that the spirit of 2014 will ever be rekindled. Defeat back then was strangely energising. Were the SNP to secure another referendum, could a truce be called in the party’s civil war? What shared idea of Scotland would Yes supporters unite behind now? It’s been a long six years.
Only now do I get it.
Michael Chabon writing in the NYRB in eight years ago:
[The Film Worlds of Wes Anderson | by Michael Chabon | The New York Review of Books](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/03/07/film-worlds-wes-anderson/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Saturday%20Longread%20215&utm_content=Saturday%20Longread%20215+Version+B+CID_6bde7e16baa8a5fb9813ae90820b9f63&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Keep%20reading)
The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.”
There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The feeling haunts people all their lives.
Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes: What to do with the pieces? Some people hunker down atop the local pile of ruins and make do, Bedouin tending their goats in the shade of shattered giants. Others set about breaking what remains of the world into bits ever smaller and more jagged, kicking through the rubble like kids running through piles of leaves. And some people, passing among the scattered pieces of that great overturned jigsaw puzzle, start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about putting the thing back together again.
Kieran, Please Come Over For Gay Sex
Excellent summary of recent discoveries in human evolution by John Lanchester in the LRB1. Lucid writing. When I worked on the evolution of skin and hair colour, I was always puzzled about the way a single find of skeletal remains could pivot a whole narrative of how we got here. N-of-1s, are tricky. In recent years many remains have been discovered and, amazingly (because it is amazing), using DNA we can literally spy on the past, not quite in real time, but in a way that when I was a medical student would have seemed like science fiction.
Another thing that I never understood was why these remains were often found in caves. Is that where the action was? John Lanchester put me right — to an extent.
In the case of the Neanderthals, the sense of distance and the sense of strangeness are stronger; empathy seems both more necessary and more remote, harder to access. I have stood at the site of a Neanderthal shelter at Buoux in the South of France and been hit by an overwhelmingly strong feeling of remoteness, the idea that these people, these similar-but-different humans, were so far from anywhere human and place-like that they must have been hiding from something. Their very existence — we now know there were only a few tens of thousands of Neanderthals alive at any one time — seems contingent and marginal. What were they trying to get away from?
But that’s bollocks. That sense of remoteness, of distance from and hiddenness, are a side effect of humanity’s planetary domination: the only places where traces of the deep past remain are places we haven’t built over or crushed underfoot. There could be Neanderthal remains all around where I’m writing this, but I live in London and those traces, if they ever existed, are long and permanently lost. We find evidence mainly in caves because they’re the only places where remains haven’t been washed away by time and the human present. This is the same reason the far past continues to make news: we are constructing knowledge from scraps and fragments, and big new discoveries have the potential to rewrite the story.
Bollocks, as he says. As for my title, well, the best mnemonics at medical school tended to be rude. Lanchester writes
If you’re having trouble remembering the sequence of kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, I can recommend the mnemonic ‘Kieran, Please Come Over For Gay Sex.
In truth, mnemonics never did much for me.
‘Fellatio, Masochism, Politics and Love’. And Hwyl…
The above was the title of a book by Leo Abse, the Labour MP for Pontypool when I was growing up in Cardiff. I do remember my parents mentioning his name, although I am not certain what their views of him were. As the Economist writes.
A little after 10pm on Monday July 3rd 1967, just as most sensible Britons were turning in for the night, the member for Pontypool was warming up. Leo Abse (pronounced Ab-zee) had been working the tea rooms of the House of Commons all day, charming and cajoling his fellow MPs in his rococo tones—a little flattery here, a white lie there. Now he slipped into the chamber, turning heads as always in spite of his short frame. Settling in his usual perch on the Labour government’s benches, his mischievous eyes darted about the place, searching out both his “stout fellows” and his foes. If his bill were ever to get through, tonight was surely the night.
His bill, printed on the green pages each MP clutched, was plain enough: that, in England and Wales, “a homosexual act in private shall not be an offence provided that the parties consent thereto and have attained the age of twenty-one years”
Abse what a colourful character in all sorts of ways. His WikiP entry gives you some flavour. His second marriage was to Ania Czepulkowska, in 2000, when Abse was 83, and she fifty years younger. A bust of him was unveiled in 2009 at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, but his nomination for a seat in the House of Lords had been vetoed by Margaret Thatcher. What would you expect?
- The title of the article is Twenty Types of Human: Among the Neanderthals and he is reviewing Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes. Bloomsbury, 400 pp., £20, August, 978 1 4729 3749 0 ↩
Nicely put
Capitalism on the way up, and socialism on the way down is cronyism.
Inside the Leviathan
“I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.”
John Maynard Keynes, 1917, in a letter to Duncan Grant.
The above quote via John Naughton who commented
I wonder how many officials in the US and UK governments currently feel the same way.
From this week’s Economist | Breaking through
Yet nowhere too little capital is being channelled into innovation. Spending on R&D has three main sources: venture capital, governments and energy companies. Their combined annual investment into technology and innovative companies focused on the climate is over $80bn. For comparison, that is a bit more than twice the R&D spending of a single tech firm, Amazon.
Market and state failure may go together. Which brings me back to Stewart Brand’s idea of Pace Layering
Education is intellectual infrastructure. So is science. They have very high yield, but delayed payback. Hasty societies that can’t span those delays will lose out over time to societies that can. On the other hand, cultures too hidebound to allow education to advance at infrastructural pace also lose out.
Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning
I won’t even mention COVID-19.
It remains overwhelmingly likely that Scotland will vote in September to remain part of the union. But it is also more likely that the UK is sleepwalking towards disintegration — not in this vote but in the next. Political leaders were wrong to think they would bind the UK together through devolution, and they are probably wrong to believe giving more power to Edinburgh will now have that effect. These moves only strengthen the sense of a distinct Scottish identity. They need instead to make being British something to be proud of.— John Kay writing in the FT in 2014…
Doesn’t look good, does it?
They always put me on hold. Thank You for Being Expendable
Years after I first returned from Iraq and started having thoughts and visions of killing myself, I’d call the Department of Veterans Affairs. They always put me on hold.
‘Statisticians have already overrun every branch of science with a rapidity of conquest rivalled only by Attila, Mohammed, and the Colorado beetle’
Maurice Kendall (1942): On the future of statistics. JRSA 105; 69-80.
Yes, that Maurice Kendall.
It seems to me that when it comes to statistics — and the powerful role of statistics in understanding both the natural and the unnatural world — that the old guys thought harder and deeper, understanding the world better than many of their more vocal successors. And that is without mentioning the barking of the medic-would-be-statistician brigade.
“Like the rest of the leadership of the ANC, he was blindsided by the collapse of socialism worldwide; the party had no philosophical resistance to put up against a new, predatory economic rationalism. Mandela’s personal and political authority had its basis in his principled defense of armed resistance to apartheid and in the harsh punishment he suffered for that resistance. It was given further backbone by his aristocratic mien, which was not without a gracious common touch, and his old-fashioned education, which held before him Victorian ideals of personal integrity and devotion to public service…
… He was, and by the time of his death was universally held to be, a great man; he may well be the last of the great men, as the concept of greatness retires into the historical shadows.”