Category Archives: The big picture

Stand on Zanzibar

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My older son has been voraciously reading science fiction novels from the golden age of SF, namely the 1960s and 1970s. I say the golden age, because I was his age in the 1960s and at university in the 1970s, and read all the same novels.  I have more than once told him that I read almost all of the “good” or “important” SF and authors of that period.  My interests veered into fantasy of the Tolkien type, but at the same time the immense proliferation of second rate Tolkien copiers in the 1970s (think Terry Brooks: Shannara etc) led to me ceasing to try to read all the important authors as they were published.

I also got rid of much of my extensive SF library with time, keeping only a few authors that I particularly enjoyed (think Philip K. Dick, Philip Jose Farmer, Roger Zelazny….) and now I am buying my son SF novels from Amazon that I once used to own.

My son recently read “Stand on Zanzibar” by John Brunner and raved about it, said I had to read it. It has a huge reputation, made a big impact, and won the Hugo Award for Best Novel at the 27th World Science Fiction Convention in 1969, as well as the 1969 BSFA Award and the 1973 Prix Tour-Apollo Award. Fifty years after its first publication in 1968, it is considered one of the greatest SF novels of the period, and is still regularly reviewed and discussed.

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Ulysses and book burning in Australia

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Today the 16th June is Bloomsday, a celebration of the life and work of the Irish writer James Joyce. Joyce’s epic novel Ulysses is set on that day in 1904, the day of his first date with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle.

This lengthy novel has been highly controversial, and has been banned in various countries. It is written using a stream-of-consciousness technique, with careful structuring based on Homer’s Odyssey. Its revolutionary technique and experimental prose as well as its rich characterisation and broad humour, have led it to be regarded as one of the greatest literary works in history.

I read Ulysses as an undergraduate during my daily commutes by train to and from Sydney University. I was particularly taken with the final chapter of Ulysses in which Molly Bloom is lying in bed next to Leopold and her thoughts are reported as a stream-of-consciousness 42 pages in length. I think I read a paperback edition that belonged to my father. I remember him during that period quoting to me the following passage highlighting Leopold Bloom’s adoration for his wife Molly, because he loved the sound of the words:

“He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmelonous osculation.”
                James Joyce, Ulysses, Episode 17 “Ithaca”.

My father and before him my great-Uncle John (1895-1975) were book collectors and I have kept some of their books, including a copy of the first edition of Ulysses published by Shakespeare and Company in Paris. After the initial printing of 1000 numbered copies in 1922, my great-uncle acquired a copy in 1927 from the 8th print run of May 1926.

Title page

A publishing history of Ulysses can be found at antwerpjamesjoycecenter.com

I knew that Ulysses had been banned in Australia for some time and looked up the dates. it was not banned until 1929, then released in 1937, only to be restricted again in 1941 after pressure from Catholic organizations. This ban was lifted in 1953 after it was considered ineffectual considering how many copies were already in circulation.

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Latest data show accelerating rise in carbon dioxide

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A week ago I posted on climate change and Australian politics (Climate change) and included a graph of the Keeling curve showing the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. I was a week too early, as the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii has just released its latest results showing that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration hit 415 ppm on June 3rd (two days ago). This is the second highest annual rise in the past six decades.

May is the most significant month for global carbon dioxide concentrations because it is the peak value for the year, before the growth of vegetation in the northern hemisphere starts to absorb the gas from the air. The seasonal peak and fall can be seen in the Keeling curve, named after Charles Keeling, who started the observations on Mauna Loa in 1958 because of its isolation in the Pacific Ocean.

As recently as the 1990s, the average annual growth rate was about 1.5ppm, but in the past decade that has accelerated to 2.2ppm, and is now even higher. This brings the threshold of 450ppm closer sooner than had been anticipated. Concentrations of the gas have increased every year, reflecting our burning of fossil fuels.

Scientists have warned for more than a decade that concentrations of more than 450ppm risk triggering extreme weather events and temperature rises as high as 2C, beyond which the effects of global heating are likely to become catastrophic and essentially irreversible on a human time scale.

The Scripps Institute of Oceanography has a video animation showing the dramatic rise in carbon dioxide concentration from the mid-20th century. The screenshot below from the video shows that the carbon dioxide concentration was below 300 ppm for most of the last three centuries but started to rise dramatically after World War II.

The video then zooms out to show the Keeling curve for the last 800,000 years putting the accelerating rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide this century in stark perspective. For the evidence linking carbon dioxide rise to global warming refer to my previous post.

 

Climate change and Australian politics

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Australia recently held a Federal election in which all the opinion polls for months had shown that the Labor Party was going to win by 52% to 48% and the Liberal National Party (LNP – the coalition of conservative parties in Australia) would lose government. Over the last 6 years, the LNP government has abandoned the country’s policy for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, and effectively dropped its commitment to the 2015 Paris climate agreement (although it is pretending it will still meet the emissions-reduction target by use of misleading statistics).  The urgency of addressing climate change became a major issue, particularly for younger people, in the recent election campaign, and The Labor party ran with a much stronger set of policies to address climate change in the recent election campaign, and this issue was a principal issue for many urban and younger voters.

The Labor party also ran with a very detailed list of policies including getting rid of some tax breaks which predominantly favoured relatively rich investors, and some tax policies on ownership of second houses which had the impact of raising house prices to the disadvantage of first house buyers. The LPNP ran scare campaigns about Labor taxes (that were largely false) and together with the concern of working class voters particularly in rural areas where coal and other mining were important, this resulted in the loss for Labor.

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Myers-Briggs Personality Types

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The US housewife and writer Katharine Cook Briggs with her daughter Isabel, the eventual creator of the test, c1905

I first came across the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) around 30 years ago. The MBTI was developed by Isabel Myers, a layman, and her mother Katherine Briggs, around the middle of the twentieth century.  They developed a questionnaire  that classified people into 16 types based on Carl Jung’s theory of psychological types, along with their own considerable experience of observing people in action, and some inspirational speculation. Jung’s theory was based on differences in the way that we prefer to use our mental capacities to function in the world – and Myers and Briggs simplified this to identify four dimensions of functioning preferences.  Their questionnaire and most others classify people’s preferences on these four dimensions and assign a letter based to each dimension based on which side of the middle-point you fall. The combinations of these letters result in 16 so-called “personality types”.

The Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) has become extremely popular and is a very widely used tool in management training. There are many variants of the questionnaire and of the type classification available for free online, as well as copyrighted versions used by management training companies and others.  It is estimated that since the 1960s, when the test began to be rolled out across the corporate world, more than 50 million people around the world are estimated to have taken it (A).

There are many free online variants of the MBTI, of varying quality. I give links to several that I have found useful.

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12 Rules for Life (part 2)

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This is the second half of my review of “12 Rules for Life” by Jordan Peterson, the controversial Canadian psychologist who has become an internet sensation.  The first half of my review can be found at 12-rules-for-life-jordan-peterson

Rule 7. Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).

Peterson again turns to the Old Testament to the story of Paradise and the Fall as a guide to Being and right action. He prefaced this with a quite good explanation of how myths and legends encode guidance on Being, action and meaning based on human experience and behaviours that have evolved over a long period of time. But why he thinks Bronze Age myths are still our best source of understanding of these things, and ignores the important evolution of human societies and understanding in recent centuries, I don’t know.

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Avengers: Endgame

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I took my younger son to see Avengers: Endgame on the big IMAX 3D screen the day after it was released. The theatre was almost full, unusual for Geneva. My older son went later in the evening, and he and his friends got the last remaining seats in row A, only two or three metres from the screen.  He claims he enjoyed it and didn’t really notice he was almost in the action.

The movie is long at three hours, but we didn’t notice the passing of time. Lots of emotional scenes, if anything a bit overdone for my taste. But still satisfying, and overall, the movie certainly wraps up the entire arc of the Avengers cycle of movies in a deeply satisfying way. There are lots of good reviews out there and I won’t try to cover the same ground. Rotten Tomatoes has quite a few critics reviews and the Tomatometer has a score of 95% and audience score of 91%. IMDB has a rating of 9 out of 10.

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12 Rules for Life – Jordan Peterson (part 1)

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In the wake of the New Zealand mosque shootings, one major New Zealand bookshop, Whitcoulls, apparently removed Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules for Life” from its shelves. This was reported in a range of print and online media, particularly various right-wing sites. For example, the New Zealand Herald on  March, commented in an article mainly about the many positive responses to the massacre that “Contributions to our national wellbeing such as Whitcoulls’ removal of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life from its shelves, while Hitler’s Mein Kampf remains on sale, and shutting down debate on the UN’s Immigration Pact are tokenism, and misguided to boot.”

I checked six large New Zealand bookstores (either big chains or online) and indeed Whitcoulls is the only one which does not have 12 Rules for Life available for sale. It does have Mein Kampf, and the Collected Writings of Chairman Mao, as well as some other writings by Peterson. Earlier in February this year, a group called Auckland Peace Action, objected to Peterson’s planned visit to New Zealand, with a “press release” claiming that “Jordan Peterson Threatens Everything of Value in Our Society.”

If you are not aware, Jordan Peterson has become an internet phenomenon, with a massive following, particularly among young men, and there are lots of negative reactions to him from journalists and other commentators. My teenage son has been reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules and also watching various videos of Peterson interviews and lectures, and gave me a copy of “12 Rules for Life” for my birthday. So I am going to read it with interest, to see whether it does indeed threaten everything of value in our society, or should be banned as “extremely disturbing material”. As I make my way through the book, I will add review comments to this blog post, starting with the Introduction below.

s-l1000

 

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Free Solo – inspiring and disturbing

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Last week I took my boys to see Free Solo. In case you haven’t heard of it, it is a documentary about Alex Honnold’s attempt to become the first person to climb the 3000 foot cliff of El Capitan without any ropes or other protective equipment. One slip or missed hold and he would die. The documentary not only looks at Honnold the climber, his mindset and attitudes, his preparations and the actual climb itself, but also has two other main threads, the process of filming the feat and the moral dilemmas the filmmakers faced, and the very substantial stresses his loved ones have to deal with.

Alex Honnold free soloing El Capitan. Photo credit: National Geographic documentary Free Solo.

I had actually put the DVD in my shopping trolley at Amazon because it did not seem to be screening anywhere in Geneva, when a friend let me know there was a one night showing at Pathe Balexert. So I deleted my draft purchase and took the boys to see it. If you have a chance to see it, I highly recommend it. It is a gripping account of one of the greatest athletic feats of all time, but is also very thought-provoking. It won an Oscar this year for Best Documentary, and has a critics rating of 99% on Rotten Tomatoes.

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Barcroft Boake (1866-1892): Australian bush poet

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In an earlier post https://mountainsrivers.com/2015/10/26/ancestral-tales-a-theosophist-a-thief-and-an-indian-princess/ I wrote about my great-aunt Boodie (Florence Teasdale Smith) who was a theosophist, whose father was a bank robber and she was also descended from an Indian princess.  I mentioned in passing that her uncle was a famous Australian poet who committed suicide but did not give any details. So this post is about Barcroft Boake, an Australian bush poet, who committed suicide at the age of 26.

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