Category: Living

There is an ancient Indian story about a frog that lived in a well – Kūpamaṇḍūka – and for this frog the small well was all that was the case, it was the whole of the frog’s world.  When a visiting frog told of the vast size of the ocean, much greater than the little well, the frog in the well dismissed the story as a lie.  What the frog in the well did not know first-hand, the frog in the well could not conceive.  It is a good story, with plenty of contemporary resonance.   

We might describe the frog in the well as being provincial, meaning that it exhibited the character, and in particular the narrowness of view, that is associated with those who inhabit the provinces and lack the polish and sophistication of those who live in the metropole.  Along with conflict between the generations, this is one of literature’s great themes: the resistance of those who know very little of the world to the wisdom of those who know much more, and of the comfort that is to be had in living in a small well-like world in which everything is fixed and familiar.  Several books that I have recently read play with this theme, of the clash between those who are – or, at least, who think they are – sophisticated and cosmopolitan, and those who are –  knowingly or not – determinedly narrow and unpolished. 

Continue reading “Frog in a well”

A few months ago, a friend – who is a regular reader of this website – gave me a book: Smart Money (2024), by Alex Duff, is an account of the history of Brentford Football Club, and in particular their recent rise from the mediocrity of the lower divisions up into the top half of the most prestigious league in English football.   It is a good story and well told, describing the club’s founding in a thriving West London suburb in 1889, and their gradual rise into Division One in the 1930s, when they finished in the top six for three successive seasons.  In the post-war years, the local area fell into decline as wealth and industry moved elsewhere, and Brentford FC sank slowly into the oblivion of Division Four.   However since 2005, when a boyhood fan, who was making himself wealthy running a gambling company, decided to start investing in the club, eventually becoming its owner, Brentford FC’s progress has been impressive.  They were promoted into League One in 2009, into the Championship in 2014, and into the Premier League in 2021.  In the season that has just ended they finished 10th, one place above West London rivals Fulham, and one place below their 2023 ranking, which was their best league performance for 85 years.

The book is not just about the connection between money and success in football, but also about the role of data.  Brentford FC’s new owner – a physics graduate from Oxford – had worked in finance for a while, but then set up his own data analytics company, which gathers and organises vast amounts of information in order to make predictions about sports results.  The company makes most of its income through placing large stakes in the Asian betting markets.  Some of these profits have gone to fund the development of Brentford FC, but just as  importantly, the data gathered and analysed is also used to help the club achieve more with less: staff at the betting firm advise staff at the football club on how to spend money wisely on players, and how to optimise the club’s style of play to achieve the best results possible for a team of modest financial resources.  The club is both funded by data and managed through data.

Continue reading “Playing to win”

In a series of lectures given sixty years ago, Frank Kermode spoke of the connection between the stories we tell to understand our world and our conception of the nature of time, and how the structure of our fictions tends to mirror the structures we believe to be fact.  Some cultures view time as a series of repeating patterns, whereas others, notably the Western tradition influenced by Jewish and Christian thought, view time as having a definite beginning, middle, and end.  The Bible starts in a garden and ends in a city: the creation myth and the prophesy of the apocalypse are the twin narrative devices that have given our culture its strong underlying sense of progress, from time’s start to its finish. 

The theory that history is heading towards a terminal crisis, does not fit comfortably with the modern scientific perspective.  While the universe might have started with an intense bang and might be moving towards a uniformly entropic collapse, these moments are unimaginably remote from us in time and cannot provide a suitable frame of reference by which to understand our history: they might constitute a beginning and an end, but they are not our beginning or our end.  Having discovered a few hundred years ago that our planet is not the centre of its own solar system, we are slowly coming to terms with the knowledge that our history is not central to the story of the universe: is meaningful for us, but marginal in the wider context. 

Continue reading “A modest acceleration in the rate of gradual change”

I was never a great fan of David Bowie.  In the 1970s, I liked some of the songs – Rebel, Rebel for example – but not the glam rock clothes, the make-up, or the hair.  And I never understood what that eye-patch he wore was all about.  In the 1980s, he began wearing stylish suits which were more to my taste, but then his music was sounding too close to disco.  In retrospect, I appreciate his status as a significant influence on modern musical culture rather more than I appreciate the music itself: I do not dislike it, but still, I am not a fan.  My other favourite of his early songs is Life on Mars, and I recently discovered a wonderful cover version by Gail Ann Dorsey, who played bass guitar in Bowie’s band for many years.  He wrote this song in 1971, two years after Apollo 11 had landed on the moon, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had become the first humans to walk on the lunar surface. 

The year before the Apollo 11 mission, Stanley Kubrick released the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a futuristic space mission to Jupiter is disrupted by HAL, the on-board computer, leading to multiple deaths among the crew, both human and machine.  One of the movie’s great themes is that technological advancement does not of itself suppress human violence, but merely allows it to manifest itself in more compelling ways.  In the opening scene, among a group of early hominids, a large bone from a dead animal is transformed into a tool for killing, and this instrumentally violent act is replicated, millions of years later, by HAL’s calculated, digital murder.  Weapons evolve, but if our moral code does not then the outcomes will remain the same.  Kubrick seems to be reminding us that wherever we go in the universe we take our failings with us.

Continue reading “Life on Mars”

A few years ago, the various authors associated with this website ran an online book club, which lasted for a couple of years.  Back in August 2021, we read Capitalist Realism (2009) by Mark Fisher, an English author whose work ranges in style from academic aesthetic theory to popular commentary on the contemporary film and music scene, and who acquired a significant admiring readership among a subset of those who follow cultural criticism.  Fisher committed suicide in 2017 after suffering from depression for some years.  The bleak view of the world he presented in his work suggests that his decision to kill himself might in part have been to do with his discomfort at the many negative features of modern life he described, and not just the specific circumstances in which his own life was lived. 

The opening chapter of Capitalist Realism is titled, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.  It is a memorable statement, and it has achieved something of an iconic status within contemporary left-wing aesthetics of which Fisher was once an active participant.  However, it is not an idea that we encounter in the writings of the leading theoreticians of Marxist influenced aesthetics – Georg Lukács or Bertold Brecht, for example – who still believed in the possibility of a much better world, even if they became sceptical about its imminent arrival.  As the influence of Marxism on contemporary social theory has diminished, so too pessimism about alternatives to capitalism has flourished.  Post-modernism has mostly replaced hope with cynicism.

Continue reading “Lack of imagination”