Author: old_wp_importer

Bracewell’s “England is Mine” turns out to be excellent page by page, but a bit of a letdown overall. He’s taken as his basic thesis something entirely vagye and anodyne, namely nostalgia for the countryside within English culture and pop music. He calls this “Arcadia”, although it’s unclear what makes this a peculiarly English form different from the adoration of an imagined countryside that is present in just about every country in the world. Likewise, the breadth and commonness of the subject makes it hard to trace any intellectual ancestry for the views he describes: who is to say whether different longings for “Arcadia” are directly related, or just parallel expressions of the same common human urge?

That said, I’m only on page 37; all this could well be resolved later.

remember, every time Cameron talks about disillusionment with politics, what he’s really saying is “lefties, don’t bother coming out to vote”. I’d bet money that this is a conscious strategy to keep the left home on May 6th.

Or, as Helen puts it:

Your goal for this election period is to challenge apathetic non-voters. This has got to stop being a socially acceptable position to take.

Rereading the start of Charles Stross’ Accelerando. It’s exhilerating, because of how familiar it is: each year, the CCC is filled with proto-Macxs — Stross is just giving the present a shot of narrative adrenaline. And lovingly mocking reality while he’s at it — samba-punk, clothing tics and all.

The later chapters are also good, but I stop caring when it stops becoming recognizably human. Guess I’m a near-future kind of guy, for the same reasons I’m a reformer and not a revolutionary: the utopia that appeals is the one attainable by nudging the present in the right way.

There’s a snowclone in the form of “The X that ate Y”, where Y is usually a city. Examples, mainly via Google:

“The painting that ate Paris”

“The blog that ate Manhattan”

“The cars that ate Paris”

“The database that ate American business”

“The genetic algorithm that ate Calcutta”

“The blob that ate everyone”

Can anybody tell me what the original version is?

Is

there an original?

[asked for no reason beyond idle curiosity]

Prospect gives Richard Florida a healthy battering:

Florida does not ignore the downsides of the shifts he describes; he just accepts them with a Panglossian shrug. Is income inequality increasing? Well, that’s because the upper echelon benefits from “creativity,” when in fact Florida’s “creative class” is defined to include essentially everyone in the highest-earning third of the work force — including the titans of finance, whose “creativity” has turned out to be deeply destructive. Are good factory jobs melting away? Sure, but that just means the country needs to make service jobs better paying and more fulfilling.

Dealing with shrinking cities in eastern Germany:

One of the IBA’s more radical ideas is that of “city islands” in Dessau-Rosslau. The planners have “kind of disassembled the city into pixels and put it back together again using a cut-and-paste method,” as Brückner explains. According to the concept, Dessau-Rosslau would abandon the model of a more compact central city, leaving only islands of houses. “Buildings will be cut out and in the empty spaces we will insert countryside,” Brückner explains.