Smiling only encourages men to bore you
January 25, 2013 § Leave a comment
Q2390 Chair: You are a private body-correct?
Simon Thompson: We are a private body-an educational charity, in fact.
Q2391 Chair: A private body can make its own rules, so you can meet tomorrow to make a rule to give the board or a group the right to say, “We’d really rather not have you as a member.” The MCC can manage that; why can’t the banking institute?
Simon Thompson: We have rules which say that when an individual is found by a regulator-
Q2392 Chair: You’ve told us what the rules are. I’m asking you why you haven’t changed them already to enable you to take action.
Simon Thompson: Because we feel that the rules we have at the moment, which state that-well, I won’t repeat them, because you are aware of them. We feel that those rules are appropriate for a professional body that does not have investigatory and disciplinary powers of its own. We-
Q2393 Chair: Okay, so you think that the current rules you’ve got, which enable Fred Goodwin to remain a member, are satisfactory.
Simon Thompson: I think the current rules that we have need to be enhanced by a much greater independent regulator that looks at these cases, can take action against individuals and strike people off-
Q2394 Chair: But they are satisfactory, aren’t they? In your view, they are satisfactory.
Simon Thompson: I think our rules have put us in an uncomfortable situation.
Q2395 Chair: So they are not satisfactory.
Simon Thompson: I think without some form of statutory underpinning or much greater co-operation with a regulator, we are not able to take the action against individuals that we might wish to.
Q2396 Chair: It’s extraordinary. Every other private institution out there doesn’t sit around waiting to find out whether Parliament is going to legislate to help it to decide who is suitable to be a member.
Simon Thompson: I’m not sure I entirely agree with that, if I may-
Chair: It’s what you are suggesting.
Simon Thompson: After all, he is a qualified chartered accountant and a member of an accounting body with much greater investigatory and disciplinary powers than our own and he remains on the register.
Q2397 Chair: So he is a suitable person to be a member of the chartered institute, in your view. Is that what you’re saying? Is he suitable to be a member of the chartered institute?
Simon Thompson: My view is that-
Q2398 Chair: Try to answer the question, because the question is fairly straightforward. It is either a yes or a no, really, that one.
Simon Thompson: It is straightforward. I would like us to have the powers to take action against any individual, including Mr Goodwin, who would have breached our code of conduct.
Q2399 Chair: Given what we have just heard for the last five or six minutes, why do you think that the chartered institute can make much of a contribution in the field of improving banking standards? read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Lina S; BURN: Lucas Simões
When I hear a director speaking glibly of serving the author, of letting a play speak for itself, my suspicions are aroused
January 24, 2013 § Leave a comment
We perform digital analysis on literary texts not to answer questions, but to generate questions. The questions digital analysis can answer are generally not ‘interesting’ in a humanist sense: but the questions digital analysis provokes often are. And these questions have to be answered by ‘traditional’ literary methods…
If you look for absences of high-frequency items, you are using digital text analysis to do the things it does best compared to human reading: picking up absence, and analysing high-frequency items. Humans are good at spotting the presence of low frequency items, items that disrupt a pattern (outliers, in statistical terms) – but we are not good at noticing things that are not there (dogs that don’t bark in the night) and we are not good at seeing woods (we see trees, especially unusual trees).
The Hamlet results were pretty outstanding in this respect: very high up the list, with 3 stars, indicating very strong statistical significance, is a minus result for the pronoun ‘I’. A check across the figures shows that ‘I’ occurs in Hamlet about 184 times every 10,000 words (see the column headed ‘Analysis parts per 10,000′ – Hamlet is the ‘analysis text’ here), whereas in the rest of Shakespeare it occurs about 228 times every 10,000 words (see the column headed ‘Reference parts per 10,000) – the reference corpus is the rest of Shakespeare) – so every 10,000 words in Hamlet have about 40 fewer ‘I’ pronouns than we’d expect.
Or, to put it another way, Shakespeare normally uses ‘I’ 228 times every 10,000 words. Hamlet is about 30,000 words long, so we’d expect, all other things being equal, that Shakespeare would use ‘I’ 684 times. In fact, he uses it just 546 times – and Wordhoard checks the figures to see if we could expect this drop due to chance or normal variation. The three stars next to the log likelihood score for ‘I’ tell us that this figure is very unlikely to be due to chance – something is causing the drop.
Digital analysis can’t explain the cause of the drop: the only question it is answering here is, ‘How frequently does Shakespeare use “I” in Hamlet compared to his other plays?’. On its own, this is not a very interesting question. But the analysis provokes the much more interesting question, ‘Why does Shakespeare use “I” far less frequently in Hamlet than normal?’.
Given literary-critical claims that Hamlet marks the birth of the modern consciousness, it is surprising to find a drop in the frequency of first-person forms. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Teresa Queirós
He looked as if he would murder me and he did
January 23, 2013 § Leave a comment
In his 1973 essay “Sex, Cinema, and The Four-and-a-Half Mat Room,” Oshima addressed the problem of text versus subtext in his critique of Japanese roman poruno (romantic-pornographic) films, which, though allegedly subversive, still insisted upon the conventional and bourgeois separation of theme and subject matter, of subtext and text:
[T]he majority of Nikkatsu’s so-called roman poruno films take sex as their subject matter but not as their theme. The themes of their most highly regarded films tend to be something like adolescent rebellion; sex is merely the seasoning. This old method has been used for a long time; it is precisely why these films are attractive to superficial critics and young film buffs.
While Oshima may be oversimplifying — there are surely examples of roman poruno whose politics are more than merely adolescent rebellion — he nevertheless sums up the hypocrisy of films that purport to be radical but in fact regurgitate a bourgeois, nonconfrontational strategy of safely burying themes, sexual or political, in subtext. But what exactly are the themes of Gohatto? Because we automatically associate Oshima with rebellious sexual politics, even in early “sun tribe” films such as Cruel Story of Youth (1960) or The Sun’s Burial (1961), we may be tempted to equate the sexual unrest of the Shinsengumi compound with the political unrest of the antifeudal rebels they must quell, or posit that Kano’s transgressions of Shinsengumi law mirror the political transgressions of the Westernized Meiji rebels who would soon topple an ever-weakening Tokugawa Shogunate. But these equations seem far too pat, and to suggest, for example, that Kano’s boyish androgyny disrupts samurai orders of masculine power is to ignore the wakashu-nenja relationship that had been an institutionalized part of samurai history…
In an earlier 1970 essay, “Mishima Yukio, the Road to Defeat of One Lacking in Political Sense,” written as a sort of ironic elegy to Mishima after his senseless seppuku, Oshima laughs about Mishima’s comment that Oshima doesn’t use “beautiful men and women in [his] films.” “This is the limitation of Mishima’s aesthetic sense,” Oshima muses. “In other words, Mishima’s aesthetic sense was extremely conventional. That is the origin of Mishima’s worship of the spurious and artificial.” But are we now supposed to worship the spurious physical beauty of Gohatto just as Mishima worshipped a spurious right-wing politics? Are we now prisoners of Gohatto’s conventionalized cinematic beauty just as Mishima was a prisoner of his own conventionally muscular body? Is Oshima now following Mishima’s dictate of using “beautiful actors,” and making films for the “superficial critics” he once loathed? read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Alfred Eisenstaedt
See this man here? For three months he’s been eating nothing but peas
January 22, 2013 § Leave a comment
Although it trailed down areas like Wentworth Street that were residential, a lot of the prostitution took place in areas that were made up of warehouses and light industrial units. So when these got increasingly converted in loft apartments for yuppies, you found these new middle-class residents were adept at complaining to the cops about the stuff going on around their swanky conversions. The yuppies would also complain about the noise from long established businesses in the area, and I know of printing firms that had been there for years that had to move because they had so many restrictions slapped on them as regards working hours. So what happened was that things that hadn’t really been a problem to most of the working class population that lived in the area, suddenly got forced onto the council estates like the one I lived on. The yuppies really changed the character of the area and have made it a lot worse for the predominantly Muslim local population. At the same time I’d be reading stuff written by art critics in which they’d be going on about how gentrification had solved the problem of racism in the Brick Lane area. This was complete nonsense, since community self-defence against fascism had addressed the most blatantly criminal aspects of this. However, institutional racism remains a massive problem in the area and gentrification has exacerbated it in terms of housing and jobs. So it was this unpleasant process of gentrification that set me off on looking into the history of prostitution in the area between Bishopsgate and Brick Lane and attempting to rethink the way Marx uses prostitution as a metaphor for all human alienation and exploitation in capitalist societies. Since there is a rich literature about prostitution in this part of London going back at least 400 years, I found what I was assembling was also a way of looking at the representation of prostitution in English literature as a whole, and it simultaneously gave me an overview of the culturally constructed relationship between sex and death.
I’m still looking to write bad books as far as literary criticism goes since what I aim to do is go way beyond literature. The novel is a paradigmatically bourgeois cultural form, so a good novel is inherently reactionary – only bad books can be revolutionary. In Down & Out I begin by using odd elements of realism, and some of the incidents such as where I write about racist cops invading the estate to nick a burglar, were what was going on in my block as I wrote. However, this use of realist tropes becomes increasingly parodic as I move through the book and the emphasis shifts slowly from sex to death. So early in the book I am describing the actual streets used by prostitutes in the area, and I know them well because I would walk past the kerb crawlers picking up brass every night when I came home from the pub. However, as things progress rather than having the toms shifting around the streets they stood on as actually happened, I have them disguising themselves as grieving widows and soliciting in Tower Hamlets cemetery. So the book becomes utterly fantastic and this is one of the ways I accentuate my interest in the cultural construction of the relationship between sex and death. read more
STILL: Fritz Lang
A labyrinth made of all the paths one has taken
January 21, 2013 § Leave a comment
Dyson: If you spend time alone in the wilderness, you get very attuned to living things. I learned to spot the trails left by life. When I looked at the digital universe, I saw the tracks of organisms coming to life. I eventually came out of the Canadian rain forest to study this stuff because it was as wild as anything in the woods…
Wired: How did the MANIAC project get started?
Dyson: The von Neumann project was funded to do H-bomb calculations. It was a deal with the devil: If they designed this ultimate weapon, they could have this fantastic machine.
Wired: So the creation of digital life was rooted in death?
Dyson: In some creation myths, life arises out of the earth; in others, life falls out of the sky. The creation myth of the digital universe entails both metaphors. The hardware came out of the mud of World War II, and the code fell out of abstract mathematical concepts. Computation needs both physical stuff and a logical soul to bring it to life. These were young kids who had just come through World War II, who could repair the electronics on airplanes and get them flying the same day, and von Neumann put them together with mathematical logicians who could imagine a universe created entirely out of 0s and 1s…
Wired: Did you discover anything in your research that surprised you?
Dyson: I was surprised by the close calls between failure and success. The ENIAC was the American wartime computer project built to calculate ballistic trajectories. The two main guys who invented and built the original ENIAC, Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, formed their own company to build and sell computers. They were doing quite well and then mysteriously had their security clearance revoked, which cost them their government contracts and put them out of business—to the great benefit, eventually, of IBM. Success in technology was as unpredictable at the beginning as it is today.
Wired: Did they see computation in the quasi-biological ways you do?
Dyson: The moment von Neumann got the computing machine running, Nils Barricelli showed up, trying to evolve self-replicating, crossbreeding digital organisms. He encouraged strings of code to replicate with small variations to compete in solving a problem or a simple game. The winning code gained computing resources. Like biological life, no one designed them. Fifty years later, I went back to the basement storeroom where the project was started, which at the time was the institute’s main network server room. One of the servers was working full-time to keep out all the self-replicating computer viruses trying to get in. Barricelli’s vision had come true! read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Melanie Bonajo
It had come to the point really that they showed each other pale faces
January 18, 2013 § Leave a comment
You say you haven’t watched the 2005 documentary “Zizek!,“ which you star in. I watched it recently. There was a scene in it that struck me. It’s when you bring the director, Astra Taylor, into your kitchen — to show her that you store your socks there.
Yes, to shock her! It was a very naive thing that happened. I had mentioned that my socks were in my kitchen. She didn’t believe me. She thought: “Oh this is one of his postmodern extravaganzas.” I wanted to say: “No, fuck you; they’re really there!”
Some idiots made a lot of another clip from the film… Remember, when I’m lying in bed naked (from the waist up only, of course) giving an interview? Some idiots asked afterwards: Oh, what was the message in that?
It was so vulgar. [The director] was screwing me all day — screwing in the sense of annoying me — I was tired as a dog. She wanted to ask a few more questions. I said: “Listen, I will go to bed and you can shoot me for five more minutes.” That’s the origin of it.
Now, people look at it and say, “Oh what is the message that he’s half naked?” There’s no message. The message is that I was fucking tired.
But isn’t that what you do in much of your writing? Take the half-naked man on-screen and attribute meaning to his half-nakedness?
That’s true!
Let’s go back to the socks in the kitchen. Surely you understood that showing this to the director would contribute to her portrayal of you as a befuddled philosophe who can’t quite function in normal life?
No, no. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a well-organized person. I’m extremely organized. Up to the minute, everything is planned. This is how I achieve so much. Quantitatively. I’m not talking about quality.
I am very well-trained. I can work everywhere. And I learned that in the army.
I may look half abandoned, it’s true. Because I find it extremely obscene to buy things for myself: like trousers, jackets and so on. All my T-shirts are presents from different colloquia. All my socks are from business-class flights. Here I totally neglect myself.
But my apartment has to be clean; I am a control freak. That is why I was disappointed when I did my military service. It wasn’t that I was a confused philosopher and I couldn’t handle the discipline. My shock was that the old Yugoslav army was, beneath the surface of order and discipline, a chaotic society where nothing functioned. I was deeply, deeply disappointed with the army for being too chaotic.
My ideal would be to live in a monastery. read more
FILM: gazebotree
To materialists like us, Immingham is the second-largest port in the UK, and yet there are few ships, and we saw no seafarers
January 17, 2013 § Leave a comment
Read books that have nothing to do with literature…
I can only encourage you to steal as much as you can…
Look in older encyclopaedias. They have a different eye. They attempt to be complete and structured but in fact are completely random collected things that are supposed to represent our world.
It’s very good that you write through another text, a foil, so that you write out of it and make your work a palimpsest. You don’t have to declare it or tell where it’s from. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Daniel Ribar
Misunderstood by day) its instant own translator
January 16, 2013 § Leave a comment
You should know that the hacker, programmer, writer and activist Aaron Swartz has died of suicide at age 26. His body was found in his apartment on Friday. Aaron was one of those preternaturally brilliant, precocious hackers who, at the age of 14, co-developed the Really Simple Syndication or RSS web protocol that is the key component of much of the web’s entire publishing infrastructure…
You should also know that at the time of his death Aaron was being prosecuted by the federal government and threatened with up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines for the crime of — and I’m not exaggerating here — downloading too many free articles from the online database of scholarly work JSTOR. Aaron had allegedly used a simple computer script to use MIT’s network to massively download academic articles from the database that he himself had legitimate access to, almost 5 million in all, with the intent, prosecutors alleged, of making them freely available. You should know that despite JSTOR declining to press charges or pursue prosecution, federal prosecutors dropped a staggering 13 count felony indictment on Aaron for his alleged actions.
In a statement about his death Aaron’s family and partner wrote:
“Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death.” read more
STILL: Oshima Nagisa
Roads no longer merely lead to places; they are places
January 15, 2013 § Leave a comment
When I was 13, maybe 14, but probably thirteen, I had a conversation with an adult that changed my life, and possibly not for the better. I was asked to make decisions that I wasn’t emotionally equipped for, and which have had an impact for the rest of my life.
Choosing subjects for exams at the age of sixteen wasn’t supposed to be so stressful, but it was. I wanted to go to university and to keep a broad range of interests. My teachers wanted me out of their hair, and doubted my application, so I was channeled into non university sets, away from the sciences that fascinated me.
Now, thirty or so years on, I have a range of qualifications to post-graduate level and three jobs I adore, all the result of a decision when I was thirty to put my life to rights. If I ever ponder who I could have been if my teachers had believed in my potential it’s only in the sense of being an exploration of contingency, the way in which all our lives are shaped by choices and coincidences whose implications we cannot understand or predict.
I did not consent to what my teachers did, and, when I bumped into one recently, he admitted they’d probably been swayed by the fact that I was a challenging kid, always ready with a sharp remark or a pointed question, and harder work than someone more compliant or focused. Being caned for referring to the school summer fair as ‘A fete worse than death’ was a highwater mark or a low point, depending on your perspective.
Our school careers fair when I was 15 was a huge moment of discontinuity in my life, I wandered round, and watched my classmates sign up to be Army apprentices, or engineering apprentices in the same factory my dad had worked in. One cheerful, red faced chap reckoned that with my enquiring mind a career as a police cadet in the Met would suit me; when I told him it had worked out well for Whispering Bob Harris he didn’t get the reference. I stood and watched my classmates sign their lives away, to go and kill for Queen and country, or to while away lives of grim desperation in the tool shop making press dies, and I walked away.
Now don’t worry dear reader, I’m not going to cheat you. In the film of my life, shot in a grim Ken Loach kind of style, Big Country’s Chance would be playing on the soundtrack as I walked down the road from the school to the cottage in the council park where I would greedily suck off a middle aged man who smelled of tobacco, stale beer and a life less interesting. It never happens that smoothly in real life. I can’t remember what I did after that careers fair, but I do know that about that time, on any given night, there was a possibility that I was to be found having sex with someone who, unlike me, was over the age of consent, whether male or female. I also know that I knew, then, that there was something ludicrous about a society that wanted me to consent to apprentice contracts that would define my life for the foreseeable future, but wouldn’t let me consent to a fifteen minute fumble with someone grateful for my talents and even more isolated than I was. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan
I have sent and bene all this morning hunting for players, juglers & such kind of creaturs, but find them harde to finde
January 14, 2013 § Leave a comment
I want to propose that the dark side of the digital humanities is its bright side, its alleged promise: its alleged promise to save the humanities by making them and their graduates relevant, by giving their graduates technical skills that will allow them to thrive in a difficult and precarious job market. Speaking partly as a former engineer, this promise strikes me as bull: knowing GIS or basic statistics or basic scripting (or even server side scripting) is not going to make English majors competitive with engineers or CS geeks trained here or increasingly abroad (***straight up programming jobs are becoming increasingly less lucrative***)…
My main argument is this: the vapid embrace of the digital is a form of what Lauren Berlant has called “cruel optimism.”
So, the blind embrace of DH (***think here of “The Old Order Changeth***) allows us to believe that this time (once again) graduate students will get jobs. It allows us to believe that the problem facing our students and our profession is a lack of technical savvy rather than an economic system that undermines the future of our students…
Now, if the bright side of the digital humanities is the dark side, let me suggest that the dark side—what is now considered to be the dark side—may be where we need to be. The dark side, after all, is the side of passion…
This dark side also entails taking on our fears and biases to create deeper collaborations with the sciences and engineering. It entails forging joint (frictional and sometimes fractious) coalitions to take on problems such as education, global change etc.. It means realizing that the humanities don’t have a lock on creative or critical thinking and realizing that research in the sciences can be as useless as research in the humanities—and that this is a good thing. It’s called basic research.
It also entails realizing that what’s most interesting about the digital in general is perhaps not what has been touted as its promise, but rather what’s been discarded or decried as its trash (***think here of all those failed DH tools, which have still opened up new directions***). read more
ART: Andre Petterson
my nerves are bad to-night 