Book Review: "On Beauty" by Zadie Smith

I recently read this and enjoyed it a lot. The main thing I liked is that the characters are engaging and believable. It's about two families, one mixed race and one black, the fathers / husbands of which are both college professors. These two guys are at opposite ends of the political and critical (they are both art historians) spectrum and are involved in some kind of arguement, but the best bits of the book are not about them or their squabble; the best bits (and most of the book) are about the family of the white guy his mixed race family and a young rapper they come into contact with.

The book is about middle class black families living and working in a university town, and probably some people will find their lives a little easy. These people don't have real problems like some of the people they meet; they are protected from trouble by their wealth, but I still found Kiki, Zora, Levi, Jerome and Howard (the father) compelling, even when I was wincing at the things they put themselves through. Howard in particular, even though he's obviously a very intelligent guy, does some very stupid things, apparently designed to hurt those he loves and by proxy himself. Howard blunders around the book like a big bear, taking whatever is close by. There's a scene where the family are at a funeral and Howard decides he can't take it anymore, so he leaves the church and goes to visit his father, who he has not seen for several years. The two men can't communicate and in a very well observed scene Howard soon loses patience and walks out on his dad.

Zora and Levi are the two younger children and a lot of the book is about them and how they struggle with their contradictory lives. Levi wants to be a cool bro'. He meets some young haitians selling pirate dvds on the streets and soon he wants to bury himself in their cause, but he can't admit to them where he's from and pretends he's from the poorer part of town. Zora wants to be respected for her equality politics but her father is the professor. She campaigns for a young local black rapper to be allowed to attend the same poetry course as her, but she herself has been allowed on the course by means of political machination.

What makes all this such a great read is the understanding with which it's written. I felt these people could really exist and Zadie Smith had been living with them for months at a time, sharing their private thoughts and even when they made their stupid mistakes I could feel with them.

For the first few pages I wondered whether I was just going to find the book a flat farce about ridiculous people at university (it vaguely remined me of the Wilt books), but it soon got going and proved to be a lot better than that. We could have had more sympathetic treatment of Professor Kipps, Howard's reactionary nemesis, and his attractive daughter Victoria, but the one I would like to have heard more from was Jerome, Howard's christian son, who has gone to live and work with Professor Kipps and fallen in love with Victoria (thus a double betrayal of his father). Perhaps it's the false tone of the emails at the start of the book that let the book down to begin with, but I never got to feel for Jerome in the way that I did for the others; a pity, since the tension setup by his "betrayals" sets up the first great scene, where Howard shows up at the Kipps residence in an effort to sort the sorry business out. I get the feeling Zadie Smith doesn't empathise with christians very much, perhaps her talent led her to conjure up Jerome too easily - a stronger Jerome would have given the Belsy family more depth I feel. This is only a slight criticism of a very good book, which made me want to go back and read her others as soon as I can.

Nerdy Cartoon Nice Design Work

xkcd is a cartoon website that occasionally comes up with gems like this one. Lovely. Nice design work on Misprinted Typ e

Favourite Tracks from 2006

We (me, my partner and daughter) generally do a "best tracks of the year" excercise and this year came up with these:

Kanye West - Spaceship
Sufjan Stevens - Decatur
Trivium - Rain
Head Automatica - Please Please Please (Young Hollywood)
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Date With The Night
Manu Chao - Clandestino
Orchestre de la Pailotte - Kadia Blues
Novalima - Malato
Evanescence - Going Under
Toumani Diabate's Symmetric Orchestra - Ya Fama
Lost Prophets - A Town Called Hypocrisy

Actually some of these have been around for a while, but I guess some years we just don't discover a lot of new music. Last Christmas I got given Kanye West's "Late Registration" and this year I thought I'd buy the first one for my daughter but she doesn't like it much, so I'm listening to it. The Sufjan Stevens album "(Come on Feel the) Illinoise" was my favourite music last year and this Christmas I got another one by him. Trivium and Head Automatica are both my daughter's choices; Trivium in particular is a bit heavy for me. I like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs though, me and sprog can agree on that. We've been into Manu Chao for a while and learnt Clandestino together in the car driving around Wales this Christmas. Orchestre de la Pailotte and Novalima are my partner's choices, Novalima is great stuff, we've been playing that all year. Evanescence is another of the young lass's - that's the name that most people have recognised, I've been going round saying "Oh, this year is quite mixed, our tastes have diverged a bit", thinking the daughter's heavy stuff might be a bit over the top for most people, but Evanescence is the one everyone said they knew and liked. Toumani Diabate is a great african musician playing lovely music. We went to see him in Brighton this year and had a great time.

Giorgio de Chirico

One of the greatest Surrealist painters, de Chirico produced eerie masterpieces like these (strangely hosted at the Maths and Computer Science Department of California State University; somebody there knows a good thing) and these at the de Chirico Foundation. de Chirico was actually making these paintings before the First World War, whereas the Surrealists got together in the 1920s. He later painted much more traditional pictures, not very well.

Trying out Linux

I've just installed Ubuntu Linux and I'm starting to learn how it works and what I can do with it. So far I've been impressed, except the installation took several attempts. I have a 700mhz cpu, 256 MB RAM and a 10GB hard drive, so the server copy of Ubuntu that my boss gave me wasn't going to work. I had started to download the free version of RedHat Linux called CentOS, but I had only downloaded 1 out of 4 cds and I saw lots of stuff about Ubuntu and it was only one cd, so I decided to switch to that. I've a feeling that I'm not getting the best out of it yet though; there are some issues with the media player, but actually I've been pleasantly surprised at the applications and the ease of use. I had to try the installation several times, but I didn't get any difficult questions and most of what I need has worked without me having to make any changes. I've been able to play cds on the media player (called Sound Juicer), browse the Web with Firefox (which means the Operating System auto-configured my broadband router), play games... haven't done much work yet though – having too much fun. My printer installed without a problem and Ubuntu saw my usb stick itself.

Hopefully I'll be able to improve the performance a bit with some tweaking; the Word Processor is a bit slow to start, but it's quite easy to use and some of the most common shortcuts work fine. Surprisingly the dictionary doesn't include Firefox or shortcut (what are those several dictionaries?).

Adult wii news

There's an interesting story on the Opposable Thumbs site about how a porn site has added a "wii-friendly interface". It would be cool to have other ways of working with a website than a keyboard and mouse. You need a lot more room with a wii though. Here's a nice article on neatorama called "13 Photographs that Changed the World".

Breaking Taboos in Drag

I saw this story linked on Reddit. It's about Salim Ali, a drag artist in Pakistan who presents a television show. There's also a selection of clips from her shows on YouTube, e.g. this one. It reminded me of a South African comedian called Pieter-Dirk Uys, who lampooned the Apartheid Government as the socialite Evita Bezuidenhout. I also found an article at the BBC about a Zimbabwean drag artist called Kudah Samuriwo. Perhaps drag is particularly effective in macho countries, but these artists are obviously pretty brave with it; imagine the intimidation they get from their countrymen! The African girls seem more radical and have now shifted their fight as much against HIV/AIDS as their governments, whereas Salim Ali is more mainstream. She is able to do this by virtue of the ambiguity of being a man dressed as a woman; women would not be allowed to do the same thing, yet she can take on this role and flirt with her guests in a way that would otherwise be unacceptable.

Microsoft Digital Rights Management

Charlie Dimerjian at the Inquirer says Windows Vista is not an option because of the heavy-handed way it protects content. Karel Donk says maybe piracy is a better choice. In 2004 Cory Doctorow gave a talk about DRM to Microsoft in which he pleaded that they "turn the wheel on the old Buick". Peter Gutmann wrote an article about the performance overhead incurred by adding in DRM to the Operating System. So is this storm going to grow into a tempest for Vista?

Church Bloopers and Richard Dawkins

The Daily Nooz blog has posted some old "church bloopers" that were circulated by email years ago. My favourite is this one: The Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 P.M. Please use the back door. Made me laugh. This made me cheer (quietly) though. Richard Dawkins has been named "man of the year" by this blog.

Velcro Photo

Here's an amazing picture of velcro being pulled apart, magnified hugely. Wikipedia have a map showing countries that have the Death Penalty and those that don't.

Teaching method

I found this article about a method that an American professor used in his lectures in order to get the students to pay attention. Authorities in America have found that gift token cards (in the US they seem to be called gift cards) are being used as money-laundering devices, partly because they are not counted as legal tender when it comes to border crossing, so you can carry as much as you like in gift tokens across US borders.

Disease and Invasion in the Multiplayer Online World

Second Life and Word Of Warcraft are "virtual worlds" created by developers and open to anyone who wants to play. Players sign up and create avatars and then interact with the virtual world and other players. According to the Wikipedia page about Second Life, its use has exploded in the last few months, going from 1,000,000 users in October to double that in mid-December 2006. World of Warcraft is a little different from Second Life, because it comes from a tradition of "Role Playing Games" (RPGs), starting with Dungeons and Dragons. World of Warcraft is massive at 7,500,000 players. Another difference between the two games is the extent to which the game has objectives. In WOW the player can gain money, skill and experience through winning fights against other players, whereas in SL there are no such developments; you develop your own goals much like in real life. What I find interesting is the particular kind of digital problems that have affected these virtual worlds. Blizzard, the developers of WOW, created a virtual disease called "Corrupted Blood" in part of their world. The disease got out of hand, because malicious players, or "griefers" intentionally spread it and laid waste to large parts of the world until Blizzard restricted its effects more decisively. Second Life has its own particular problems. Since it allows free accounts and doesn't monitor processor usage by players and you can run scripts, hackers can get away with a lot; in particular they create objects that self-replicate continuously and overload servers. Because Second Life mimics real life (RL) - for instance the money earned can be exchanged for RL money - some people have started to take it more seriously, to treat it in a similar way to RL, whereas the greifers refuse to allow that to happen unchallenged. They disrupt events by invading with multiple phalluses and swastikas, grey goo and rings.

Update 15 January: The number of WoW players has just been reported as 8 million!

Temple Grandin

Horizon did a (video link) programme about Temple Grandin, an autistic American lady who gained an awareness about her condition and realised she had an affinity with animals. She's now very respected in the US meat industry because of the work she's done to reduce animal suffering, all because she can kind of understand how animals (she mostly works with cattle) experience the world. The programme suggests a metaphor for understanding how autism makes you different from non-autistic people - the parts of your brain don't have such good connections and this inhibits intuition about some very complex processes, e.g. social interaction. Temple describes her emotional life as very simple and consisting of just a few emotions, principally fear. She says a lot of her energy throughout her life has gone into avoiding situations that she would find difficult, but that other people would not think twice about. It's her insight that this is similar to the way animals live that has helped her to be so successful in her work with animals. I wrote earlier about the British autistic guy Stephen Wiltshire.

Saatchi Gallery

We went to the Saatchi Gallery in the 80s when it was in St. John's Wood. A few years ago it moved to the old GLC (Greater London Council) building and now it's in Chelsea. They have setup a virtual tour on their new website "Stuart" (sounds like a bit of a phoney name; Stu[dent]+Art??). The website's a sort of MySpace for artists. I like Julie Bennett's paintings

Photos Hangovers

Some nice photos of South Africa from a helicopter and a nice close-up of an insect (don't know what though). A good explanation of hangovers and hangover cures from the How Stuff Works website. They say the medical term for hangover, veisalgia, derives from the Norwegian word kveis, which means "uneasiness following debauchery", and algia, which is Greek for pain.

Psychopathy

I wrote here about the English psychopathic killer Peter Sutcliffe. Psychopathy is still little understood but there's an interesting article in Science News which looks at the work of Dr. Joseph Newman who views psychopathy as the product of attention deficiency.

Pat Robertson predicts major terrorist attack in late 2007

I've been checking No Se Nada at Science Blogs occasionally and saw this post about a prediction by Pat Robertson, the conservative christian. Mr. Robertson says God told him during a prayer meeting that there would be a major attack in America that would mean mass killings. He says this will happen in the later part of the year. He really provides a lot of good copy - the Wikipedia entry has a larger section on "Controversies and Criticisms" than the part that deals with his life and views. This guy ran for President in 1988! From reading the scurrilous Wikipedia entry you'd think this man's life was dominated by hilarious self-promotion, attacks on fellow christians, muslims and hindus and vague but bullying threats aimed at whole groups of people. Oh, and scandalous corruption. My favourite is the "Age-Defying Shake", which is not a convulsion brought on by a visit of the Holy Spirit, but a recipe for a refreshing drink that Pat uses, enabling him to leg-press 2000 pounds!

Inveneo Snowflake Bentley

Inveneo looks like an interesting organisation - They help developing communities access the Internet with open source solutions. I've posted about snowflakes before (they make cool pictures) and I just found this site about the man who first found that they were each unique - "Snowflake Bentley". I found that on my new favourite blog "The new shelton wet/dry"

American Paranoia Sheesh

Sheesh, there are apparently a lot of people in the Land Of The Free who think that their government cynically manufactured 9/11 (or stood by and watched it) so they could start a war in the Middle East. I don't believe it and I think it's amazing that so many Americans believe it. There is a video called "Loose Change" on Google that goes through some of the arguments, the main one being that the hole in the Pentagon looks too small for a large passenger jet to have crashed into it; it looks more like the hole a cruise missile might have made! OK the hole looks small, but the jump from there to the cruise missile theory is a bit of a leap. Here's a (video link of course!) copy of the same video with added comments from a disbeliever.

Chinese Police Shame Parade Backfired

Chinese police paraded prostitutes and their clients in an effort to shame them out of their behaviour. Here are some pictures of the event This is a tactic often used in China since the Cultural Revolution, but this time it backfired, because lots of citizens complained about the abuse of the privacy of the people involved. Lots of people stood up for the rights of these prostitutes and their clients!