The decision to name China as the guest country of the 2009 Book Fair made the clash of the economic-superpower-China and the repressive-Communist-regime China virtually inevitable. Both images are simplistic and little more than caricatures of the complexities embodied by contemporary China. It is discomforting to see, then, how easily an otherwise well-informed European public could be taken hostage by images so crude and superficial.
Informed observers, including those from the academic community, have tried for years to emphasize the diversity of contemporary China and the complexity of its cultural sphere, but as the tumultuous symposium shows, they seem to have made little headway in communicating this more nuanced understanding to the public at large, which all too readily looks at China through the lens of Stalinist Eastern Germany.
...the conceptualization of the event reads like a public demonstration of a European brand of tolerance and dialogue that never took place. A stage-managed confrontation of different opinions has little to do with the commitment to nuance and mutual respect that real dialogue requires.
The public is unlikely to be served any better unless decision makers such as those in charge of the Book Fair take into serious account the significant amount of expertise on China that is available in Europe, and develop a more nuanced understanding of China that goes beyond the economic-powerhouse and repressive-Communist-regime dichotomy.
5:55 PM basti: Bebel Gilberto is pretty good. I haven't listened to her stuff in a while. But there is some nice vocalisation here.
me: you mean Astrud?
basti: No, Bebel Astrud has much less polished vocalisation than Bebel.
me: yes, but it is intentional English is not Astrud's native tongue
5:57 PM basti: I think that she just didn't undergo the same degree of formal training. The result, of course, is spectacular. But even in Portuguese, her vocalisation is less polished.
me: and you get all these terrible anime song tracks try to imitate her (Astrud's) style (a la "Fly Me to the Moon" of Evangelion horridness)
basti: Japanese pop music often has too much polish. It is too formalised. It lacks texture and genuineness.
But ‘Tanto Tempo’ and ‘Aganjú’ are very beautiful songs. (‘Tanto Tempo’ benefits from the contribution of Amon Tobin.)
It was 1988, and I was just finishing a D.Phil at Oxford University on the topic of "Nietzsche and German Idealism". The annual recruiting season had long since gone. My life savings had dwindled into three digits. It came to me in a pub, over a game of pool. I was losing badly to a pair of undergraduates who had recently received offers from a prestigious management consulting firm. They were about 22-years-old; I was going on 26. As I gazed at the pool balls ricocheting around the table, it hit me that, instead of spending the next year watching daytime TV, I too, could earn some ready cash by offering strategy tips to CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.
The more I thought about it, the grander it seemed. The next morning, I sent out 10 CVs. One ended up in the hands of the founding partner of a small and enlightened consultancy firm based in New York. I landed the job by providing a credible response to this question: How many pubs are there in Great Britain? The purpose of that question, I realised after the interview, was to see how easily I could talk about a subject of which I knew almost nothing, on the basis of facts that were almost entirely fictional. It was an excellent introduction to management consulting.
Fool’s Gold begins in a conference room in Nice in spring 2005. Tett admits that at that point she was baffled by the technical language – ‘Gaussian copula’, ‘attachment point’, ‘delta hedging’ – used by the participants. However, before joining the FT she had conducted fieldwork in Soviet Tajikistan for a PhD in social anthropology, and the ethnographer in her was now reawakened. The conference reminded her of a Tajik wedding. Those attending it were forging social links and celebrating a tacit world-view – in this case, one in which ‘it was perfectly valid to discuss money in abstract, mathematical, ultra-complex terms, without any reference to tangible human beings.’
Thursday, August 20, 2009
"I don't know," she said rather artlessly, hinting at a personal depth that is perhaps too painful to understand.
Most of the authors were British, but covered world civilization, culture and history, and world politics. They were largely experts in their fields, rather than men and women of letters. But in trying to visualize the future they found themselves writing fiction, and often science fiction, in the manner of H. G. Wells, to whom many of them inevitably refer. Their futurology thus represents another kind of interface between science and humanities, in that it can be seen as apply-inthe methods of speculative fiction to scientific or sociological fact.
9/5/2009 I haven't been able to watch the youtube version since late August, BBC enforcing its copyright by pulling the video has put another hole in the cultural subconsciousness
As well.... Turkish TV shows coup d’etat in Honduras, including scenes of the Honduras military confronting Honduran protesters, as well as the Honduran president-in-exile’s airplane and its attempt to land in the capitol and pass them off completely as footage of race riots in China.
Then you have the ‘big four’ accountancy firms – KPMG, Ernst and Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte – whose expertise is indispensable for anyone hoping to diminish their tax exposure. Writing in an Irish magazine, a KPMG partner spelled out the mindset:
A worrying tendency seems to have emerged among external stakeholders to make ‘moral’ judgements about tax planning and to expect companies to manage their tax affairs in a ‘moral’ way . . . Let’s be clear about this. Tax is a cost to business. As with any other cost, the board members owe their shareholders a duty to manage that cost by the legal means afforded to them.
KPMG gave us a sense of its attitude to legality when it paid a fine of $456m in the US for ‘designing, marketing and implementing illegal tax shelters’. The big four have now set up a body to regulate themselves called the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). Not only do the accountancy firms appoint representatives to the IASB’s committees, they actually fund it themselves – through a foundation registered in a tax haven.
Civil war is an unpleasant business and the story that unfolds in the letters and diaries of Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, the Canadian diplomat with whom she was in love for more than thirty years, is not a happy one. This was not so much what the publishers are pleased to call on the dust jacket ‘the love affair of a lifetime’, more like a fight to the death. Not that theirs was a tempestuous relationship in the usual sense. There were occasional scenes and some quarrels, but not, apparently, many. The struggle was between two complex and internally divided natures at war with themselves as much as with each other and constrained by circumstances largely of their own making. After her death Ritchie destroyed his letters to Bowen and some of hers to him. We are left, therefore, with her remaining letters and his diaries: she talks to him and he talks to himself. Like two soliloquists just within earshot of one another they seem sometimes to fall into dialogue and at others to be taking part in completely different dramas.
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