We walked together through the Olympic Park in east London, about a month ago, on a bright October morning, talking, as we often do, about the books we had recently read. In my case, Another Country, a James Baldwin novel from the early 1960s which I had greatly enjoyed. In his case the plays of Bertolt Brecht. He was also reading some secondary literature on the German author and he mentioned that some critics consider Brecht’s best work to be his poetry. Like many people who read only in English, I think of him primarily as a dramatist, one of the best from the previous century. However, our conversation prompted me to recall a review of the new English translation of his Collected Poems, which came out a couple of years ago, which stressed the centrality of poetry to his oeuvre. At well over one thousand pages, it is an intimidatingly large body of work, which I have yet to engage with, although I know that I have a shorter selection of his poems on one of my many bookshelves, awaiting my attention.
Continue reading “Translating myself”Social distancing
We are being encouraged – in some cases, instructed – to maintain social distance. In London, this currently means: wash your hands regularly, wear a mask in shops, and try to keep at least two metres away from others, unless they are part of your household group, which is limited to six people. The rules change frequently and somewhat arbitrarily, depending on whether the government feels a greater need to assuage its libertarian or paternalist critics. The population response varies according to temperament, tolerance for risk, propensity to follow rules, and the extent to which paid work necessitates direct rather then mediated contact with others. Some have made radical changes to their patterns of work, travel, family life, and social interactions, while others have hardly changed their lifestyles at all.
Continue reading “Social distancing”Securing our future
In June of this year, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo Securities led managed a Aaa-rated securitised Social Bond issue, on behalf of the Ford Foundation. The deal raised $1billion, consisting of $300m thirty-year bonds and $700m fifty-year bonds. A decade ago, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the securitisation market faced significant criticism from regulators, policy makers, and many loud voices in the media, who charged that these structures were too complex for investors properly to understand and that securitised bonds spread risk widely and irresponsibly within the financial system. Nowadays, such views have come to be seen as hasty and ill-informed, an over-reaction, a paradigm case of blaming the message-bearer for bringing unwelcome news.
Continue reading “Securing our future”Robots at the opera
Conflict between humans and machines has become a fertile theme for futurist science fiction. The Matrix films explore some philosophical issues about personal and political freedom, within the context of a brutal struggle between the subterranean community of human survivors and, at surface level, the tyrannical empire ruled by their electronic adversaries. By contrast, the Blade Runner films imagine a world in which ‘replicants’, designed and made by powerful corporations, serve humans through their work – mostly collaboratively, but sometimes not – while lacking the status and rights of ‘people’. If Matrix suggests a war for human survival once the machines have taken over, Blade Runner suggests a civil rights campaign for machines, in a world run by humans.
Continue reading “Robots at the opera”Books
How many books have you read, a friend asked, in your life?
Not an easy question to answer, having neglected to keep a list. In the absence of documentary evidence, I resort to a process of estimation. This will require some clarification of each of the terms of the question. Continue reading “Books”