Flying Saucer
A light suspended from the ceiling over a dining table.
Quote of the Day
”Fashion is the performance of leisure.”
- Thorstein Veblen
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Richard Wagner | Prelude to Lohengrin | Simon Rattle
Mesmerising.
Long Read of the Day
The Heated Debate In Europe Over Air Conditioning
Given the heat dome that we have been living in, this essay by Nathan Gardels is interesting and timely.
Recently, Elon Musk stirred controversy across a sweltering Europe simply by tweeting on X that Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, was a “genius” because he had the vision to see that introducing air conditioning would entirely change what was possible in the post-colonial tropics and make the city-state he ruled as prosperous as the imperial West.
The biting subtext of Musk’s post was ridicule of the Continent’s general anti-tech sentiment even when facing heat-stroke temperatures of 100-plus degrees. In France, where only 25% of homes have air conditioning, compared to 90% in the United States, the issue of adopting AC or not has divided the body politic between climate adapters and cultural traditionalists — despite the fact that the country is largely powered by the most technologically advanced renewable resource, nuclear energy. No doubt, stiff preservation rules and renovation red tape play a role in stalling updates in a centuries-old built environment.
European reticence seems grounded in the notion that the climate is natural while conditioning it is the kind of tech fix associated with big-living Texas trillionaires who admire authoritarian leaders and the extravagant overconsumption of Americans. AC, in the minds of some, appears to be a proxy for all that is wrong with America.
Musk was quoting from an interview I did with Lee back in the 1990s…
Do read on.
My Commonplace booklet
From Dave Pell…
Sam Altman shared a parenting idea on social media the other day. “cool use case of chatgpt work i heard last night: connect your family calendars and explain your kids’ interests. every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid’s soccer game that afternoon, one kid’s upcoming birthday, some news, etc.” Most of the responses were like the one from TV creator Alex Hirsch, who asked: “What if you just talked to your children?”
This struck me because I wrote the other day about how Silicon Valley bros seem to be unconnected to the real world as inhabited by you and me.
The Odyssey corner
Christopher Nolan’s mega-epic is the gift that keeps on giving. I’m intrigued by the discourse that surrounds the movie and readers keep pointing me to interesting essays, critiques, reviews of it.
Two examples from this week.
First, a witty poem poem by Bridget Pratt, looking at the saga from the viewpoint of Penelope, Odysseus’s long-suffering wife. It’s partly inspired by C.P. Cavafy’s poem, Ithaka . Here’s a sample:
Ithaka, I’m sick of ya!
Of course they were wild, my own lad included!
I thought Yules was too clever to be so deluded
As to sail off to sea and lay siege against Troy .
Damn it! Nell was a beauty, Parry just a spoiled boy!
So, there’s me with a baby to raise on my own
Never guessed Yules would leave me till I was a crone
… Well, not quite a crone, babe! I’m still hot and good looking
The lovely young suitors’ libidos are cooking…
Yes, I look shy and virtuous and lower my eyes
While they jostle and brag and compete for the prize
(That’s Ithaka and me, if the penny’s not dropped)
So of course, my son Telly said it had to be stopped
I must stick to my tapestry, keep them all waiting
To be honest though, babe, I’d much rather be dating
The cute little blond with the muscly pecs
If I’m truthful, in fact, I’d quite like some hot sex!
It’s years since Yules left, what was I s’posed to do?
Read on. It’s sharp.
And then there’s Emily Wilson’s LRB review of the movie. That’s special because she’s the author of the knock-out translation of the text that my wife and I are currently reading (and that I believe Nolan used when creating the script).
Here’s a snippet:
Christopher Nolan’s $250 million action movie version of Homer’s ancient Greek poem is an entertaining way to hide from the high temperatures for a few hours. Nolan’s trademark jumps and twists in the narrative structure are relatively easy to follow, and appropriate for The Odyssey, a narrative of tales nested in tales. My teenagers had a good time. Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely. It’s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display – and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.
As in his previous films, Nolan is interested in the discontinuities of space and time, in magic, tricks, craft, technology, rivalry, substitution, masks, miscommunication, what we remember and what we choose to forget. Yet again, survival is portrayed as a kind of triumph. Yet again, there are long, claustrophobic scenes of drowning and near-drowning, and technically impressive episodes in which buildings are engulfed in flames and vehicles explode. Yet again, we watch a male character’s desperate quest to recover and/or avenge a female love object. I had hoped that Nolan’s affinity with these Homeric themes might push him to new creative heights, and enable him to conjure more believable characters. But The Odyssey features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality. Without a tub of wax for my ears – which Himesh Patel’s ever anxious Eurylochus, Odysseus’s doomed right-hand man, uses to sail safely past the Sirens – I was exposed to the full din of thumping sticks, staffs, swords and clashing armour, thunderbolts, crashing waves, grunts, screams, toppling palaces and burning temples. But unlike Matt Damon, the wax-free Odysseus who is tied to the mast as he is conveyed past the Sirens (naked ladies reclining on some uncomfortable-looking rocks), I gazed at the shipwrecks and bloodbaths without any agony of emotion. My eyes stayed dry, even for Argos the dog – whose adorableness as a puppy is predictably amped up to suit our animal-loving times. If only the human characters had been treated with such serious attention…
Great stuff.
Feedback
- From Geoff Stead…
By fabulous coincidence we were camping at Knepp last week too (Thursday night only). It was fascinating – we loved it. Especially those wheeling storks.
We heard a slightly different version of their origin story though. They didn’t just find Knepp. They were brought there.
Original parents were injured birds from Poland who can no longer fly. They live in pens at Knepp and also Cotswold wildlife park to produce the next generations. These fledglings are the birds that return (after a few years) to set up home at Knepp.
The youngsters we saw wheeling around were a mix of local youth, and 40-ish that had been recently donated from Cotswold WP. They didn’t yet have nests and are busy imprinting, mapping the area so that they can find their way back again in a few years!
- From Janet Cobb
Knepp started a huge national movement:
Heal Rewilding https://www.healrewilding.org.uk/ Boothby Wildlands https://www.boothbywildland.com/ https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/rewilding-network/projects
Smaller initiatives existing everywhere including Middle Marches CLT (Community Land Trust) in Shropshire https://middlemarchescommunitylandtrust.org.uk/
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