Author: old_wp_importer

Adam Curtis, in an intriguing post about cruise ships, explains why so many ships sail under flags of convenience:

All this happens because of The Flag of Convenience. It was an idea that the Americans came up with in the early days of the second world war to allow them to send help to Britain. Roosevelt was worried that Hitler might declare war on the US – so a law was passed that allowed American ships to be registered either in Panama or in Liberia.

The Flag of Convenience was born out of altruism, but it is now used for purely selfish reasons. Many of the cruise companies register their ships in countries such as Panama and Liberia, this mean they do not have to pay corporate taxes in the US and aren’t bound by many labour regulations.

Charles Stross reports on the destruction of British libraries. As an author, he earns a few pence whenever a British library lends one of his books. Judging by this, his income has fallen by 27% in the past year:

Libraries are substantially but not exclusively used by children, the unemployed, and pensioners: mostly people without the discretionary spending power to shrug and go to a bookshop instead.

And note the first group I mentioned. I’m not a children/young adult author, but if the drop in my PLR loans reflects library closures, then we have just slammed the door in the face of a new generation of readers. I got my start reading fiction from my local library; the voracious reading habits of a bookish child aren’t easily supported from a family budget under strain from elsewhere during a time of cuts. I hate to think what the long term outcome of this short-term policy is going to be, but I don’t believe any good will come of it.

Academic publishers’ restrictions on usage are one of those things that wind up both outrageous and commonly accepted. Here, a Cambridge academic describes his project of mining the Chemistry literature and extracting structured information on the chemicals and reactions involved. This kind of work has

big

potential to improve research — but it also harms the short-term business model of Elsevier. Hence, it remains forbidden.

At the New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews two films filled with sex.


Shame

depicts the life of sex-obsessed Brandon, a New Yorker who fills every free moment with fucking. And in

Sleeping Beauty

, student Lucy earns cash by taking a sleeping pill and making her unconscious body available for the use of paying customers.

Though neither film is explicitly about fantasy, each describes a kind of fantasy. That of Sleeping Beauty — from the viewpoint of the client — is of easy control, availability. That of Shame is about extremes of emotion. It’s Apollo and Dionysius, transposed to a world where Apollo is getting in on sex.

Sex, here, isn’t necessarily sex — it’s a McGuffin which could stand for any activity which is coveted, or extreme, or intense. Anything which becomes an object of desire, which is fixated on and fantasized about, becomes twisted in a similar way. One kind of mind layers on organized parades of passive partners; another craves extremes of expressed emotion.

Nothing is so neat, of course. For a start, the taming of emotion has an apepal all of its own. Lane, coincidentally, suggests this of Shame director Steve McQueen. His earlier film Hunger:

was imperilled by the coolness of its own gaze. The wall of a jail cell, smeared with excrement as an act of protest, was filmed with such compositional care that it became, in effect, a work of abstract art, allowing us to forget what it actually was: human waste, applied with human rage, and surely unbearable to the human nose. McQueen could hardly be hipper, yet he remains, to an extent, an old-fashioned aesthete, drawn to extreme behavior in his characters not because of any trials of spirit that they undergo but because he is challenging himself to unleash the wildest material that he, wielding his camera, can then possess and tame.

And if the more you think about it, the convoluted all this gets. Not a breakdown, so much as epicycles upon epicycles, an Apollonian OCD trying to leave its grip on the chaos of human passion.

Momus argues that Berlin doesn’t even have the money for its subcultures to sell out:

Berlin sometimes seems like a museum of youth culture styles we invented in Britain: punk, goth, Spiral Tribe crusty. In Britain there’s a perpetual dialectic between alternative lifestyles and the money system, which means that within a couple of years any given subcultural style will have been turned into a big business club scene, and then, shortly after that, will be the soundtrack and the style of a bank commercial, and, just after that, will be utterly naff, dead and unmentionable. But in Berlin it seems that punk, goth, industrial and rave looks are adopted for life by people who live them as permanent subcultural styles, entirely apart from the money system. Nobody hypes them up, buys them out, and flogs them dead. The styles are “timeless and eternal”, the visual corollary of a life of protest and tolerated companionable deviance. Their adepts resemble post-protestant monks and nuns who’ve taken lifetime vows (“I will own two big dogs and make sculpture out of junk”). It’s touching but also somewhat appalling.

Momus:

Mediterranean cultures—and I’d include that whole tranche of peninsulas from Greece to France—tend to avoid the extremities of subcultural style, and I think it’s because these tend to originate in Protestant and Post-Protestant cultures (the US, UK, Holland, Germany) and be an expression of “protest” values, a permanent “reformation”. French, Portugese, Spanish, Italians, Greeks tend to be much more family-oriented and, as you say, conformist, either Catholic or Greek Orthodox culturally, Classical-Catholic rather than Romantic-Protestant.

during the past 12 months a black person was 29.7 times more likely to be stopped and searched than a white person. That figure was 26.6 the previous year.

In 2009, black people were 10.7 times more likely to be stopped than whites under the controversial “exceptional” power

— from the Guardian — which, typically, doesn’t link to it’s sources. As far as I can see it’s from a campaign group backed by the LSE and Soros’ Open Society Justice Initiative

Part of the glory of Norman Rush’s novel

Mating

is that it’s about loving by

doing

:

“Supposing we had met in the eighteen nineties, say, when there was nothing ambiguous about socialism being the answer to everything. It would have been obvious that the collective ownership fo the means of production was all that was needed to make us happy. That would have been a medium for us to embrace in. We would have been perfect militants”

Over the last few months, I’ve repeatedly headed to Tiger Beatdown, hoping to find something new from Sady Doyle. There never was.

I’d worried that she had stopped writing for some reason — job, depression, burnout, any of the usual downers. Gladly, it turns out the opposite is true — she’s found places to pay her for words.

In These Times, Rookie. Sady links these and others on twitter.

My favourite of her recent articles is about women in comedy:

They’re comedians; being pretty and nice is not their job.

What makes comedians transgressive, from Lucille Ball to Ken Jeong, is their willingness to look bad in public. Women have never been encouraged to cultivate this fearlessness. There are exceptions – Ball or Joan Rivers come to mind – but they tend to prove the rule. Lady Loser Comedy opens up the game. Women who have the profane deadpan of McCarthy, or the cool prickliness of Fey or the off-rhythm intensity of Wiig: They’re not excluded any more. They embarrass themselves, they’re completely inappropriate, and that’s fine; it’s comedy.

At the New Yorker, Evan Osnos has an entertaining round-up of how the online wags of China have responded to SOPA. Mostly, it seems, with humor:

At last, the planet is becoming unified: We are ahead of the whole world, and the ‘American imperialists’ are racing to catch up.”

“I’ve come up with a perfect solution: You can come to China to download all your pirated media, and we’ll go to America to discuss politically sensitive subjects.”