2014 — 20 January: Monday
I seem to have succeeded in talking myself out of the need to go shooting out to the (fresh food) shop "first thing" for the time being1 — so I can enjoy my cuppa while BBC Radio 3 washes over me.
Meanwhile...
... while I very much enjoyed the book by William Deresiewicz ...
... I mentioned here. And while I must admit I was rather less taken by the more recent book by Michael Suk-Young ...
... which (I noted) had been somewhat debunked by Leon Wieseltier, I have to smile when I now see Deresiewicz weighing-in against (and rather effectively demolishing) it. Source and snippet:
What we really get, once we fight through Chwe's meandering, ponderous, frequently self-contradictory argument, is only the claim that Austen wants her characters to think in
game-theoretic ways: to reflect upon the likely consequences of their choices, to plan out how to reach their goals, to try to intuit what the people around them are thinking and how
they in turn are likely to act...
Chwe runs through a series of alternatives — emotions, instincts, habits, rules, social factors, ideology, intoxication (not being in your right mind), the constraints of
circumstance — claiming to show that Austen rejects them as possible sources of action. But Austen wasn't dumb enough to think that people never act out of habit or instinct or
sudden emotion. All Chwe really shows is that she thought they shouldn't. Austen knew, in other words, that human motivation is enormously complex. Reducing it to any single
factor — well, for that you need a social scientist.
Ouch! Come back, CP Snow. What was that remark about the viciousness of academic politics by that horrible chap, Henry Kissinger? :-)
Mind you, this piece by Taki is every bit as vicious, and funny to (put the) boot (in).
Call me a...
... suspicious, distrustful old git if you like, but this...
... strikes me as an extremely dubious idea and a rather dismal development for UK society. I wonder how much overtime was claimed by the industry lobbyists? Their champagne bill alone doesn't bear thinking about.
In happier news...
... I was able to thank my Birmingham cousins for their generous Xmas gift (an Amazon certificate) that I managed to put to jolly good use last night, after a long, thoughtful — some might even say "arduous" — web-browsing session :-)
- The biggest single item is a Blu-ray boxed set of Seasons #1 to #3 of "Game of Thrones". Enough people have told me this is good for me to start to feel I'm terribly deprived without it.
- A remastered double CD of Blue Nile's "A walk across the rooftops". 1983? Can you believe it??
- A DVD of three programmes about Benoit Mandelbrot, the IBM guy who gave us all fractals and the Mandelbrot and Julia sets. Music by David Gilmour of Pink Floyd.
- A DVD of Stephen Fry's investigations into bipolar, or manic-depressive, individuals.
- A Blu-ray documentary film called "Sound City" about a legendary recording studio in Los Angeles.
- A DVD called "Museum of Life" which was a BBC series all about the mostly non-public bits of the Natural History Museum.
As I told them: That will feed the few remaining brain cells for a while longer, I hope. Thank you both so much.