Nobel-prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro is also a fan of History Professor Yuval Harari

I'm about to start Kazuo Ishiguro's "Klara and the Sun" Apparently the nobel-prize winner, Kazuo Ishiguro is also a fan of History Prof. Yuval Harari and popular futurist Yuval Harari:

Ten years ago, Harari was an obscure history professor at a university in Israel. Today he is the world’s most famous public intellectual and science writer: with a fan base that includes Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Kazuo Ishiguro. His books Sapiens and Homo Deus have sold millions worldwide, and he is courted by the …

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2177119-yuval-noah-harari-why-the-reluctant-guru-is-upsetting-scientists/#ixzz6tccaT39v 

It is not just that I (like much of the rest of the world) profoundly connect to the clarity of ideas in Harari's history books. His books and public speaking events are now enormously popular. He has the rare ability to reach out and talk to all side, rich and poor, powerful and weak. 

Yuval Harari has gone on to be an extremely popular "futurist" and public speaker, he always appears very calm and sympathetic, also he is not pulling back from asking the "big tough questions":

1) I'm passionate about protecting the environment, a paid-up member of the green party for the last 15 years. Yuval Harari sees tackling global warming as one of humanity's top priorities. For those of you going "duh of course everyone knows about global warming", however there are still a lot of climate-sceptics out there…, especially within my family!? Fortunately, Harari doesn't seem to think it is already too late "for humanity" but he highlights the consequences are going to hit the poorest parts of the world first and hardest plus we really need to act quickly, otherwise the consequences are going to be even more extreme, especially for the poorest countries and communities.

2) I'm also passionate about tackling inequality, Yuval Harari speaks strongly on how the growing inequality in the "west democracies" is already undermining the basis of our societies. Again our model he emphasises that our western liberal democracy are not yet dead, but it does appear to be going into crisis and the growing inequality is an underlying threat. This is another contentious idea, atleast within my family, who still seem to believe in the Regan/Thatcherite revolution in the 80s as a 'generally very good thing', a source of friction at family reunions ;)

3) Yuval Hurari is also now best known as the "surprise darling of silicon valley": he warnings around avoiding an AI arms race, which is rapidly heating up between the US and China. Hurari sees the 2016 election scandals (both Trump and Brexit) as a wake-up call. I was shocked by the corporate (Cambridge Analytica/Facebook) and foreign state (Russia) interference in these elections, but Harari seems to think that the worst is still potentially to come in the rapidly evolving fields of AI and Surveillance Capitalism, The next generation of biometric tracking devices, while offering some amazing health benefits (why so many of us geeks have adopted them already), they also make us even more hackable! He also takes a gentle approach on Facebook, which is now trying to do the right thing, for example Mark Zuckerberg 2019 U-turn: praising Europe's GDPR data privacy laws! Very nice to see some praise for EU leadership and good governance. To be honest, I was less concerned about AI but then 2016 was a wake up call for me. AI is also the topic Ishiguro's new novel:  "Klara and the Sun is the eighth novel by the Nobel Prize-winning British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, published on March 2, 2021. It is a dystopian science fiction story"

The above three reasons are probably the ones that resonate with the vast majority of millions & millions of other people who have read his books, attended his talks, follow his youtube channel… his following is just enormous now.

However, I also love Yuval Harari for the above reasons plus a few of extra reasons:

1) For most of my adult life I have followed a vegetarian or vegan diet. Again my family are resistant/mocking, back in the 90s I was mocked and warned that it was unhealthy to be vegetarian (unless you are fastidious about making sure you get enough protein). Vegan diets were just a fad too far, and there were dire stories about what would happen to me if I was foolish enough to follow my vegan ways… Over the last two decades, the more I've read and learnt about nutrition & health, the more I've learned about who a whole-good plant-based diet is critical for good health. I'm now in my 50s and in relatively good health, which I partly attribute to my almost vegan diet. So I LOVE that one of the greatest intellectuals of our time is vegan.

2) Next I really like that Harari meditates for two hours every day and goes on long retreats every year, again respect! Personally, I struggle to meditate even 10 or 20 minutes per day and almost never go on any retreats (unfortunately I'm a bit of a workaholic). Personally, I equate prayer with meditation which is an idea that Harari sometimes touches on, he also pushes back against any black & white thinking with regards to religion, he argues that religion has severed a critical role in the evolution of all modern civilizations and that some people with "religious beliefs" are more open and less dogmatic than some of the more modern secularists? Although I do see Harari as more sceptical about religion than myself,  I still LOVE the idea of meditating for a couple of hours per day, I tend to see this as an act of devotion.

3) Lastly he is openly gay, when I grew up being gay was at best very unfortunate, a sickness/abnormality which was barely tolerated. It is easy for many to forget the open-homophobia of the 1980s. Matthew Todd's "Straight Jacket" is also a shocking reminder of the disgusting prejudice of the UK government of the 1980s i.e. Mrs Thatcher, who started down the road of re-criminalisation of gay men (i.e. section 28 legalisation which made it illegal to talk about gay people in a normal way in front of children), even more shocking were the rank and file Tory MPs and their out-spoken hatred of gay's, they advocated camps and refused to even criticize the fire-bomb and arson attacks on gay organisations!!! Tory MP Kellett-Bowman responded to these life-threatening attacks on gay men with "I am quite prepared to affirm that it is quite right that there should be an intolerance of evil", shortly after this utter disgusting statement in the House of Commons (yes it is even in Hansard), that witch Mrs Thatcher made Kellett-Bowman a Dame of the British Empire i.e. well done you're a good egg. I don't want to dwell too long on the sorry mistakes and hatred of the Tories in the 1980s, but personally, I'm delighted that Harari is openly gay and this just isn't an issue for anyone in the UK (I guess it is still a problem in some countries in Africa and Asia).

 

Emma, Jane Fairfax and Austen's magnum opus

Over the last five years, I've finally completed all six Austen major novels(1) and Emma is now my favourite. There also seems to be a few differences between the original texts and some of the modern adaptations...

While Pride and Prejudice is probably now Austen's most popular novel, I suspect that might be partly because of some of the slightly sexy film and TV adaptations in recent decades. Interestingly according to one highly acclaimed Austen scholar: ASU Professeur Devoney Looser mentions the Pride and Prejudice adaptation trend with "hunky Mr Darcy's" (my words not hers), started much earlier with the theatre and then film adaptation in the first half of the 20th century i.e. an interpretation of Pride and Prejudice which has grown in popularity over the last 100 years! So maybe the Colin Firth 1995 (BBC TV mini-series) wasn't the first Darcy-female-heart-throb (women's fantasy lover) but is part of a much longer tradition? I need to re-read Devoney Looser's wonderful The Making of Jane Austen. 

Anyway, I'm a bit with Fay Weldon here: okay I wouldn't dare be quite as rude about the Pride and Prejudice plot as Fay Weldon was in "Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen", but Fay Weldon is a very distinguished writer (plus FRSL & CBE). Still, I also find Emma's plot more engaging and Fay Weldon cites other key critics claiming Emma as "Austen's masterpiece". I do sense Emma is Jane Austen's magnum opus: although I'm sure many will cite other Austen books as their favourites, Persuasion seems very popular with many modern Janeites? (2)

I've recently had the pleasure of a double-dose of Emma with two almost back-to-back book club events in May 2021 :
* May 4th, the Amsterdam English Classics read Emma this month; this is my regular book club

* May 11th, the London Jane Austen book club also discussed Emma this month focusing on the perspective of one of the minor but key characters: Jane Fairfax. With covid-19 most bookclub's are still online, so I was grateful to be invited to this event.

Jane Fairfax's character is a useful contrast to Emma's, Jane Fairfax is charming and talented but also a poor relation to Miss Bates (another key character) while Emma is wealthy, lazy, unaccomplished but comfortably established at the top of Highbury society. Jane Fairfax is also sometimes pushed around and bullied by the more noisy and bossy elements of the upper-classes in Highbury (the village just south of London where the novel is set). Jane Fairfax is talked down to by the insufferable Mrs Elton (a bit pantomime villain and friend to the slave trade). However Jane Fairfax is stoical and her eventual reward is marriage to a wealthy, handsome Frank Churchill, who can both sing & dance, so what more could a girl want!?

Well, I'm not 100% sure the story has a happy ending for Jane Fairfax, as the somewhat feckless Frank Churchill is both egotistical and so insensitive he is verging on cruel. Points heavily emphasised in key Jane Fairfax scenes, which we discussed at some length this week's London book-club event with a focus on the "Emma [the novel] from Jane Fairfax's point of view".

Although I didn't get that much traction with my suggestion that the novel has a distinctly dubious ending for Jane Fairfax; I do see others online who share my concerns. This essay from North American Jane Austen society (one of the oldest and largest Austen fan-clubs) stood out to me:

Jane Fairfax, perhaps even more than the minor characters in Austen’s other five novels, provides the author the opportunity to portray “the difference of woman’s destiny” (384).  By considering the focus of Jane Fairfax’s education and the grim financial as well as psychosocial reality of her future life as a governess, contrasted with her ultimate choice to marry a man who acts contrary to social norms and treats her with disrespect, Austen exposes the limitations faced by a poor woman with a genteel upbringing.  Austen shows us that women’s choices are grim:  they must be sold in one market or the other...

Since Austen shows that Frank Churchill is not a good choice for a woman who can choose, she may also be showing that choosing such a man is really the last resort for a woman who has few choices—and that this lack of choice is a social problem.

 http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol28no1/hall.htm

Anyway, Jane Fairfax does eventually marry a wealthy and handsome young man, the classic Austen ending and I'm very grateful to the London club for organizing the Jane Fairfax-focused event, plus the all-round lively & insightful discussion we had this week.

Finally checking on Wikipedia, I also see more claims that Emma is Austen's greatest novel

Although Austen's Pride and Prejudice is the most popular of her novels, critics such as Robert McCrum suggest that "Emma is her masterpiece, mixing the sparkle of her early books with a deep sensibility"

Notes

(1) The six major

(2) Janeite's are hardcore Jame Austen, according to Wikipedia there is often a negative connotation "term of opprobrium", but there is also a more jocular interpretation: Janeitism is "the self-consciously idolatrous enthusiasm for 'Jane' and every detail relative to her".

Ref:

• https://www.meetup.com/English-Classics-Lovers-Club/events/276855632
• https://www.meetup.com/The-Season-A-London-Jane-Austen-Meetup/events/277405142
• http://www.makingjaneausten.com/ Just how did Jane Austen become the celebrity author and inspiration for generations of loyal fans she's become today? ASU (Arizona State University) Prof Devoney Looser's The Making of Jane Austen.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fay_Weldon
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_British_Empire (CBE - Captain of the British Empire)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society_of_Literature (FRSL - Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_to_Alice:_On_First_Reading_Jane_Austen
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_(novel)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janeite

Why I loved "My Brother’s Name is Jessica" by John Boyne

 

"My Brother’s Name is Jessica", a controversial book for some but I definitely enjoyed it: it is very good-humoured i.e. plenty of comedy moments, plenty of interesting (English) historical details and an original perspective on our journey towards greater transgender acceptance.

Straight off the bat, the first things to know about this book is that it is a bit controversial:

John Boyne, the author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, has hit back at those who criticised him for writing about a boy struggling to cope with the transitioning of his sibling. Boyne’s new novel for young readers, My Brother’s Name is Jessica, was attacked on social media and the novelist was criticised for writing about an issue with which he is unfamiliar. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/31/john-boyne-hits-back-at-critics-of-transgender-novel 

and YES he is tackling one of the defining questions for our age: over my lifetime acceptance of Gays and Lesbians has got dramatically better: when I grew up (80s) being gay was still vilified in the mainstream media: that aids was a "gay plague" and senior politicians were happy to full the "moral panic" affirming that we deserved to die in hell. This is from 1987 Hansard records (official report of all Parliamentary debates):

"On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I heard the honourable Member for Lancaster (Kellett-Bowman) say that it was quite right that Capital Gay should have been fire—", at which point he was interrupted by a point of order. Kellett-Bowman responded, "I am quite prepared to affirm that it is quite right that there should be an intolerance of evil." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaine_Kellett-Bowman#Capital_Gay_arson_attack

and is one of several low points for LGBTQIA+ acceptance in the homophobic backlash of the late 80s. I hope in 2021 this sort of shameful statement would be illegal under Hate speech laws?

However, the 1980s were very different times and Mrs. Thatcher's reaction was to show her support for Kellett-Bowman by making her a DBE (Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire). Still, while gay and lesbians in the UK are now much more wildly tolerated, the progress for the bisexual and transgender community seems a lot slower. Many people are deeply sceptical and hostile about transgender teenagers, this seems as controversial as being gay was in the 80s!? For myself, the most charming character in this novel is the confused dyslexic Sam, the younger brother: less popular and less athletic, plus struggling with his own identity as well as his Jessica's new gender identity. His journey through confusion, denial, acceptance and finally embracing the amazing diversity of life, love and humanity... is the main arc of this novel. Generally, his parents are largely preoccupied with their careers "getting to the top of the greasy pole" i.e. Sam's mother has ambitions to become the PM (Prime Minister). I was drawn towards Sam, often wanting to give a hug and reassure him that everything will be okay, things will get better: either his family need to become more understanding or he needs to break out and meet some more liberal-minded people (like his loveable and empathic hippy Aunt Rose). I can imagine that many people will see this novel as having "too many thinly drawn caricatures". I was recently hosting an Evelyn Waugh book club event (Decline and Fall - 1928) and this was also a complaint i.e. that Waugh's book has too many thinly drawn caricatures. This was a surprise to me as Evelyn Waugh, as I thought Waugh is now seen as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century? It is true his character is quickly drawn caricatures but for me, Waugh manages to "hits a nerve", he can be very funny and also shines a light on upper-middle English society in his time "warts and all". I think John Boyne's characters are also quickly drawn caricatures (this is a teen novel) but his brilliance is that he also captures the essence of these people and our time.. Sam's parents were believable and even reminded me of a former time (25 years ago) when I was teaching the daughter of an ambitious cabinet secretary who was regular in the news and possibly had her "eye on the top job"! Also, some of the best moments in the books are when John Boyne plays with our expectation and characters break out from our stereotyped imagination: I particularly enjoyed the football coach and the school nurse, who both show humanity and remind us that there is "there's nowt so queer as folk". I was at a recent DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) event and the closing comment resonated with me "remember to be kind and gentle", the underlying questions and choices in this YA (young adult) novel are tough for many and it is important to remember some people are more uncomfortable with change, myself included sometimes even if the rest of my family regard me as "extremely woke". I think the author of "My Brother’s Name is Jessica" has written a novel with the intention of reconciliation and to help all sides move forward, an ambitious target for a book, but he carries off with some humour and some aplomb. 

Crazy and the joy of video editting

One of the more fun things I've done in the last year is to learn video editing, specifically Adobe Premiere Pro.

For the last couple of years, my husband Thomas has been studying music production (Amsterdam has any talented musician and music producers) and is using Logic Pro and is producing one EDM track per week (sometimes with my vocals!).

We have a ThomasDave youtube channel as well as a regular website https://thomasdave.eu/

Here are some details for our latest video crazy, respect to cottonbro for sharing their amazing shots and video

Sometimes you go too crazy, and only your special guy can save you from yourself. Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/4BhJ9u...​ iTunes: https://music.apple.com/nl/album/craz...​ Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Crazy/dp/B0915...​ Bandcamp: https://thomasdave.bandcamp.com/track...​ For more of our songs, check out https://ThomasDave.eu/​ Attribution: shots by cottonbro, https://omycotton.com/​ and https://www.pexels.com/@cottonbro​ Video edited by Dave Pitts.

Johnson, hubris, greek methology and covid19

Earlier in April 2020 ... I was sadly lamenting the UK governments mismanagement of covid19 i.e. they were too slow to act and sent a very dangerous message playing down the risks in late Feb / early Mar ... with Johnson in his normal braggadocious manner claiming it was okay to still shake hands, even with confirmed coronavirus patients (i.e. "don't panic, business as normal"). 

Clearly and strategically this has backfired with PM being hospitalized and then moved to intensive care this week.

Discussing this with my husband Thomas, hubris was the word that came to mind

hubris

/ˈhjuːbrɪs/

Learn to pronounce

noun

1. excessive pride or self-confidence.

   "the self-assured hubris among economists was shaken in the late 1980s"

   Similar:

   arrogance

   conceit

   conceitedness

   haughtiness

   pride

   vanity

   self-importance

   self-conceit

   pomposity

   superciliousness

   feeling of superiority

   hauteur

   uppitiness

   big-headedness

   Opposite:

   modesty

   • (in Greek tragedy) excessive pride towards or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis.

Malka for President - Revenge of the Technocrats and the looming US 2020 elections

I was delighted last week when at the last minute I learned that Malka Older, the author of Infomocracy (2016) would be dropping in at this month's Amsterdam SciFi bookclub. As you can imagine this generated quite a lot of excitement.

From my perspective, the last few years have been tough for old fashioned liberals, social democrats, and progressives. The center ground seems to be strangely squeezed between the harder left i.e. the Corbynistas in the UK, and the harder right (Brexit, Trump, Boris …).

Everyone seems to be still talking about the creepy side of the 2016 elections. For example, this week Jill Lepore was discussing "The Destructive Power of Tech" with David Runciman on Talking Politics, giving a historical background of algorithms to predict and influence politics over the last 50 years. She was particularly critical of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2016 in a jocular manner, although David did qualify that there is also a lot of hucksterism out there amongst the data-driven political algorithms:

"holy crap this is completely unethical… this could break democracy… we could make a lot of money"

I did particularly enjoy all her references to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the farcical side of much of this work. However, she tells a pretty bleak portrait of how "wildly out of control technology" is and influencing our national politics.

So getting back to Infomocracy, this was surprisingly much more a vision of the future of politics. I was surprised by reviewers who tagged this book as dystopian, and so I was pleased when Malka emphasized that it is much more utopian. Yes, surveillance is scary, but this isn't Sci-Fi... it's a modern reality. We read The Age of Surveillance Capitalis (2018) by Shoshana Zuboff for the Amsterdam non-fiction book club last year.  One idea which I particularly liked about Malka's political future, is that political power seems to have been somewhat rebalanced back to local centenals (blocks 100,000 units of voters). I believe people would feel more connected to their politicals leaders if more key resources and choices were made locally. 

Infomocracy is not a light read. It is quite involved, and I found myself looking at Goodreads to see if other people had comments, difficulties, or inspirations. This was probably my favourite review:

"I feel like a good portion of this book went over my head, and it took me several weeks to finish it. That's several weeks of googling political and economic terms side-by-side with the novel. That DOES NOT MEAN I DIDN'T LOVE IT. I love working hard for an enjoyable reading experience if the experience is actually worth it, which this was."

 

Yes it is not always to follow, and yes, I would like a little more clarity, and for certain elements of these new world's political systems and machinations to be more spelled out. Still, it is well worth the extra effort, and I'm keen to read further into her "brave new world". But getting back to the heavy emphasis on more local democracy, one of my questions to Malka was the relationship they would have with larger states. I like the idea of people voting along more fluid dimensions i.e. business, practical and focused parties, heritage and conservative, but does this mean the end of the traditional nation-states? How does this work? Local political divisions are aggregated up into a super-majority but it was not clear to me how these larger political structures worked. Malka responded that she gets this sort of question a lot and that she factored that into her 2nd and 3rd volumes, i.e. to help flesh out this new political world for the reader.

The other significant political event of my last week was organized by Wadham College for its alumni. Over the years I have tended to skip over such Oxford alumni, based on the famous Groucho Marx line "I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." However, as I get older and more sentimental, my attitudes are softening, plus I was really interested in the two speakers:

• Lissa Muscatine was Chief Speechwriter for Hillary Clinton.
• Ambassador James Warlick who has walked away from serving under a Trump administration but still runs a very successful legal practice. 

It was an interesting evening. The speaker laid out the talks with great clarity. She detailed why the Democrats appear to be ahead and should win a "fair fight", but expressed concern about voter suppression and the possibility of chaos this November. There is a significant chance that we are heading towards a 2000 electoral situation, where Florida voter suppression was a hot topic for the New Yorker politics podcast earlier this week. The question I wished I had asked after that alumni event was around "crooked Hilary" and the largely bogus, but very effective smear campaign which Trump and his affiliates ran in 2016. I'm expecting the same sort of hard-hitting smear campaign in 2020. They will probably be saved for the run-up. Things are going to get ugly again.

Returning to Infomocracy, I would also highlight these three GoodRead comments and reviews:

"I hate election years, and I know I’m not alone. I hate them because every day brings horrible new campaigning, the good guys are often indistinguishable from the bad guys, and social media is a 24/7 garbage fire."

"Malka Older is a prescient über educated marvel and her debut novel reflects this. A tale of election fraud released in 2016? Genius."

"So...great ideas, but... the story is heavy on show don't tell to the point where I still don't understand how the multitude of micro-democracies--most countries no longer exist--work. Or when or how often elections like the one taking place in the novel, occur. Clearly several "governments" are vying for Supermajority."

 

The one question I wish I'd asked Malka was around her choice of locations:  I liked all the exotic locations in the novel. In this near-future world, the balance of power hangs in key geographical locations, some of which I had to google e.g. Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia) & Ryukyu Islands (Japan). However, the location which intrigued me the most was Chennai, a vibrant and very rapidly growing Indian city that I frequently visit for my job. I always enjoy visiting Chennai which is the most intensely busy and noisy major city I've ever visited, but I do worry about the future of this city, with its pollution and water shortages. I'm glad to see Malka painting a positive perspective, and I can buy into her vision of the middle-class technocrats slowly taking over. The world would then become an efficient and well-organized democracy where the political powers are rebalanced and we have far greater local democracy and power.

The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem (1965)

Earlier this month, my partners asked me to blog under his Glaxay RTS website: to promote gay-themed compute/web-based game, which is still under-development but I can promise you there are particularly handsome men.

My first posted was about The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem (1965), which we were reading for the Amsterdam SciFi bookclub. Given the target Galaxy RTS audience is LGBTQ, I was trying to pull out the gay themes, which was hard as this book was written under strict censorship i.e. of 1960s cold-war Poland. Still, I had a little fun with my blog post and used a bit of imagination :

Are Trurl and Klapaucius a bit gay?  

https://www.galaxyrts.com/2019/08/the-cyberiad.html

I did enjoy that Klapaucius knew exactly where to tickle Trurl (so maybe they were gay) but to be frank none of the characters in the novel had significant "romantic love interests", yes there is the femfatalatron but that wast just pure fantasy ;)

When we discussed this at book club, other people also picked up that The Hitchhiker's Guide the Galaxy, which written in 1974 came just after The Cyberiad. and seems to have been lightly skimmed many of the best ideas. Still, while the sparkling prose in The Cyberiad out classes Hitchiker's, the advantages Hitchiker's has is that there is a stronger storyline and narrative arch. Ultimately as a collection of futuristic SciFi fables, most of us agreed that The Cyberiad is fantastic writing but not the sort of book you want to read cover to cover