Wednesday, October 08, 2003
Listening to Roger Waters, there's an interesting parallel that can be traced on our perception of war through the last fifteen years or so. In 1986, Waters wrote "When the wind blows"; it was all about the madness of cold war, and money war:
Ooooh, the lonely boys, in their towers of faith. The lonely boys, locked in their towers of faith.
The prophet reclined in the Golan Heights, he said "This land is my land" to the Shiites, and Jehova looked up from the sea of Galilee beneath. He said "I see you, you thief! This land is my land, and this sand is my sand, and this band is my band"
Lookin' over their shoulder, checkin' out every boulder in the park, where the gates are closed from hate after dark.
And the Pope rolled up in his armored van, he fell on his knees and kissed the land. He said something that I did not understand (it was in Polish). Then up stepped an aide, he said "I will translate; here is what His Holiness said: 'I am the Chief Jesuit. This land is Jesus' land, and that is all, all that there is to it.'"
And in New York City, the business man in his mohair suit, in the world trade center, puffs on his cheroot. And he said "well, I don't care who owns the desert sands, my brief is with the hydrocarbons underneath."
And the sea of battle rages around the ancient tombs, and mother nature licks her wounds, and the lonely boys locked in their towers of faith, who are nervous in the park when the gates are closed after dark.
It is still terribly actual, isn't it? 16 years ago. Reagan, Bush.
our lives in the hands of a second-rate actor, holding the high ground on some old stage.
Remember when Bush Jr. wanted to erase Afghanistan from the map? He was worldwide caricatured as a cowboy. Again Waters in "Folded Flags":
Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand? You can take your revenge, but you'll still feel bad. Bring down the curtain, the show must close before the cold wind blows
Could be written in 2001, but it would have been politically incorrect. But after that, a spark of hope appeared. Eco wrote that humanity had changed, and in the modern and civilized world people couldn't think about war anymore. In 1987, the lyrics of Waters began to reflect that:
I used to look in on the children at night in the glow of their Donald Duck light, and frighten myself with the thought of my little ones burning. But oh, the tide is turning.
And as a challenge to the war culture,
I'm not saying that the battle is won, but on Saturday night all those kids in the sun wrested technology's sword from the hand of the War Lords. Oh, the tide is turning, the tide is turning Sylvester.
That Sylvester was Stallone, of course. In Morse code, in the very end of the song, we can decipher:
"Now the past is over but you are not alone. Together we'll fight Sylvester Stallone; we will not be dragged down in his South China Sea of macho bullshit and mediocrity"
On July 21th, 1990, he played that very song in the end of the wall of Berlin concert. The cold war was over, and he was really happy, full of hopes. There was still the ghost of the Gulf war, and that was somehow in his Radio KAOS album:
When the cowboys and Arabs draw down on each other at noon, in the cool dusty air of the city boardroom, will you stand by a passive spectator of the market dictators? Will you discreetly withdraw with your ear pressed to the boardroom door? Will you hear when the lion within you roars?
But on 1991, he finally understood that war was something that humans don't easily forget. Not without anger, he asked what God wants: "God wants war, God wants famine, God wants chain stores". Such enumeration is not casual:
Can't you see? It all makes perfect sense, expressed in dollars and cents, pounds shillings and pence. Can't you see? It all makes perfect sense.
The last song, "Each small candle", after years of silence, comes back not without bitterness:
Each small candle lights a corner of the dark: and the wheel of pain stops turning, and the branding iron stops burning, and the children can be children, when the desperados weaken, when the tide rolls in to greet them, and the natural law of science greets the humble and the mighty, and a billion candles burning light the dark side of every human mind. Each small candle lights a corner of the dark.
Ooooh, the lonely boys, in their towers of faith. The lonely boys, locked in their towers of faith.
The prophet reclined in the Golan Heights, he said "This land is my land" to the Shiites, and Jehova looked up from the sea of Galilee beneath. He said "I see you, you thief! This land is my land, and this sand is my sand, and this band is my band"
Lookin' over their shoulder, checkin' out every boulder in the park, where the gates are closed from hate after dark.
And the Pope rolled up in his armored van, he fell on his knees and kissed the land. He said something that I did not understand (it was in Polish). Then up stepped an aide, he said "I will translate; here is what His Holiness said: 'I am the Chief Jesuit. This land is Jesus' land, and that is all, all that there is to it.'"
And in New York City, the business man in his mohair suit, in the world trade center, puffs on his cheroot. And he said "well, I don't care who owns the desert sands, my brief is with the hydrocarbons underneath."
And the sea of battle rages around the ancient tombs, and mother nature licks her wounds, and the lonely boys locked in their towers of faith, who are nervous in the park when the gates are closed after dark.
It is still terribly actual, isn't it? 16 years ago. Reagan, Bush.
our lives in the hands of a second-rate actor, holding the high ground on some old stage.
Remember when Bush Jr. wanted to erase Afghanistan from the map? He was worldwide caricatured as a cowboy. Again Waters in "Folded Flags":
Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand? You can take your revenge, but you'll still feel bad. Bring down the curtain, the show must close before the cold wind blows
Could be written in 2001, but it would have been politically incorrect. But after that, a spark of hope appeared. Eco wrote that humanity had changed, and in the modern and civilized world people couldn't think about war anymore. In 1987, the lyrics of Waters began to reflect that:
I used to look in on the children at night in the glow of their Donald Duck light, and frighten myself with the thought of my little ones burning. But oh, the tide is turning.
And as a challenge to the war culture,
I'm not saying that the battle is won, but on Saturday night all those kids in the sun wrested technology's sword from the hand of the War Lords. Oh, the tide is turning, the tide is turning Sylvester.
That Sylvester was Stallone, of course. In Morse code, in the very end of the song, we can decipher:
"Now the past is over but you are not alone. Together we'll fight Sylvester Stallone; we will not be dragged down in his South China Sea of macho bullshit and mediocrity"
On July 21th, 1990, he played that very song in the end of the wall of Berlin concert. The cold war was over, and he was really happy, full of hopes. There was still the ghost of the Gulf war, and that was somehow in his Radio KAOS album:
When the cowboys and Arabs draw down on each other at noon, in the cool dusty air of the city boardroom, will you stand by a passive spectator of the market dictators? Will you discreetly withdraw with your ear pressed to the boardroom door? Will you hear when the lion within you roars?
But on 1991, he finally understood that war was something that humans don't easily forget. Not without anger, he asked what God wants: "God wants war, God wants famine, God wants chain stores". Such enumeration is not casual:
Can't you see? It all makes perfect sense, expressed in dollars and cents, pounds shillings and pence. Can't you see? It all makes perfect sense.
The last song, "Each small candle", after years of silence, comes back not without bitterness:
Each small candle lights a corner of the dark: and the wheel of pain stops turning, and the branding iron stops burning, and the children can be children, when the desperados weaken, when the tide rolls in to greet them, and the natural law of science greets the humble and the mighty, and a billion candles burning light the dark side of every human mind. Each small candle lights a corner of the dark.
Finally, Transparency International showed the results of their 2003 World Corruption Index. Argentina every year is more corrupt, according to them. Which is really strange, as for us, Argentineans, the corruption level is lowering. The years we remember as the most corrupt are those of the Menem presidence, during the nineties. Now we feel the last governments were cleaner, but nevertheless according to TI, we are much more corrupts than in times of Menem. Really curious...
The report warns that urgently it is necessary to help the developing countries: nine out of ten are very corrupt. It also highlights Argentina as an example of a worsening. Naturally, those that value the corruption level of a country are not journalists or intellectuals, they are just executives of important companies. They must know better than us.
The report warns that urgently it is necessary to help the developing countries: nine out of ten are very corrupt. It also highlights Argentina as an example of a worsening. Naturally, those that value the corruption level of a country are not journalists or intellectuals, they are just executives of important companies. They must know better than us.
Tuesday, October 07, 2003
Having just read Umberto Eco's "Secondo Diario Minimo", there's a mix in my head of Eco, Borges and Google. I know, I know, I seem to be obsessed with Google. And with Borges. And with Eco. OK, let me explain a little.
Some years ago, Argentina was still young and productive. As a teenager full of energy, the country gave birth to Jorge Luis Borges, a very singular person. The side of this writer I'm interested in at the moment of writing this is his knowledge, his vast memory. He seemed to remember everything. He was blind, and yet he could quote by heart every book he was read. The amount of information he could handle was beyond the wildest fantasy. He imagined the paradise with the form of a library, and as I wrote here once, a particular vision of hell was a library where every possible book was included, even the false ones, and those that had not meaning at all. Combinatorial art: just like the Old Hebrews, by changing letters ad infinitum you could produce literally every book, even those that are still not written, and those that are lost forever. Umberto Eco, a Borges admirer, took that idea to construct the library of the Name of the Rose, and hid Jorge Luis Borges there, under the shape of the blind Jorge de Burgos. The name of the rose was written in a Borges poem long before Eco's book: "in the letters of rose is the rose", we can read in "The Golem". That poem, about the Jewish Kabalah, could be one of the sources for Eco's next book, Il pendolo di Foucault. "The Golem" is quoted in the sixth chapter: "Juda Loew devoted himself to permutations of letters and complex variations and finally said the Name which is the Key, the Door, the Echo, the Guest and the Palace...". So we already have the name of the Rose and the name of Eco. Enter the second on the list.
If Borges knew a lot, Umberto Eco knew just too much, like Chesterton's character. Nobody can reasonably handle Foucault's amount of data. Anything I can tell you about that book is an oversimplification. I cannot say that Eco is a literature genius, as Borges was. But he wrote those baroque books that seem to contain the Library of Babel itself, such is the sum of information he has. To a lot of people I know who read his books, that amount equals to nothing. They just run away, they can't get anything useful from that. When you have it all, you don't have nothing. You can say that such thing only happens to normal people like us, who can't retain much more than a few telephone numbers, and the name of our close relatives. But even Eco himself was overwhelmed, by... the internet. Enter the final guest, Google.
Patrick Coppock, in early 1995, interviewed Eco. This part is interesting:
"Professor Eco, you're a man of letters, a writer, philosopher, a historian. On the desk beside you is a computer. Is modern computer technology actually functional for you as an author and literary researcher?"
Eco glances over at the computer, smiles, then nods thoughtfully:
"Yes, but sometimes the computer can also give paralysing results. I will give you an example: I was invited by Jerusalem University to a symposium whose theme was the image of Jerusalem and the temple as an image through the centuries. I did not know what to do on this particular topic. Then I said to myself, well OK, I have worked with stuff from the beginning of the Middle Ages; my dissertation was on Thomas Aquinas."
He points to the rows of well-filled bookshelves on my left...
"Here I have all the works of Thomas Aquinas with a reasonably good index, and I looked there to see how many times he quoted Jerusalem and tried to say what use he made of the image of Jerusalem. Now, if I only had these books - well, that index is a reasonable index which focuses only on the larger, more intensive treatments of the word 'Jerusalem' - I would have found say 10 or 15 tokens of 'Jerusalem' which I would have been able to examine. Unfortunately I now have the Aquinas hypertext..."
He glances again at the computer in the corner...
"and there I found, that there were - well I don't remember the exact number - but there were round 11,000 or so tokens... Well at that point I quit! Yes, that's far too much material at one time, obviously."
Perhaps it's useful to remember that on 1995, internet was just a small network compared to what it is now. February 1995, when Coppock met Eco, Windows 95 still wasn't alive. We were just in times of Windows 3.11, and some of us still in DOS 6.2. Who among us would speak about internet? Even Internet Explorer didn't exist by then. Eco again:
Once upon a time, if I needed a bibliography on Norway and semiotics, I went to a library and probably found four items. I took notes and found other bibliographical references. Now with the Internet I can have 10.000 items. At this point I become paralysed. I simply have to choose another topic.
If that was his impression in 1995, what would he say today, eight centuries later, in terms of internet technology and expansion? Coppock and Eco discussed afterwards lengthily about how to filter that excess of information. Eco suggested to automate his own method of filtering, based on biblography and other scholar tricks. Those things can't be done today with a computer, it's far too hazy, too fuzzy.
The information is still growing out there in the internet, but we still don't have a proper tool to access it. I repeat to myself those verses in "The Golem": "and finally said the Name which is the Key, the Door, the Echo, the Guest and the Palace..." That name is not Google. The statistic engine I use to determine the search engine queries they used to find my webpage tells me that. I cannot name all the wrong queries that led to my page. People go to Google and ask questions: "how do I know the name of the rose?", "what's wrong with me?", etc. Those are the worst queries for Google, and according to the reports given to me, the most common. Nobody quotes phrases, nobody excludes keywords. We the techies do that; common people just ask Google as if it were some kind of oracle. If I go and ask Google "where's the key to my door?", probably this page will show up eventually, as those words are included in this text (besides that very sentence, naturally: I'm not in the mood for recursive questions today).
So there you have Google, Eco and Borges; lack of information and excess of information, the Library of Babel again, and a false oracle as popular as was Delphi in its time. And as accurate.
Some years ago, Argentina was still young and productive. As a teenager full of energy, the country gave birth to Jorge Luis Borges, a very singular person. The side of this writer I'm interested in at the moment of writing this is his knowledge, his vast memory. He seemed to remember everything. He was blind, and yet he could quote by heart every book he was read. The amount of information he could handle was beyond the wildest fantasy. He imagined the paradise with the form of a library, and as I wrote here once, a particular vision of hell was a library where every possible book was included, even the false ones, and those that had not meaning at all. Combinatorial art: just like the Old Hebrews, by changing letters ad infinitum you could produce literally every book, even those that are still not written, and those that are lost forever. Umberto Eco, a Borges admirer, took that idea to construct the library of the Name of the Rose, and hid Jorge Luis Borges there, under the shape of the blind Jorge de Burgos. The name of the rose was written in a Borges poem long before Eco's book: "in the letters of rose is the rose", we can read in "The Golem". That poem, about the Jewish Kabalah, could be one of the sources for Eco's next book, Il pendolo di Foucault. "The Golem" is quoted in the sixth chapter: "Juda Loew devoted himself to permutations of letters and complex variations and finally said the Name which is the Key, the Door, the Echo, the Guest and the Palace...". So we already have the name of the Rose and the name of Eco. Enter the second on the list.
If Borges knew a lot, Umberto Eco knew just too much, like Chesterton's character. Nobody can reasonably handle Foucault's amount of data. Anything I can tell you about that book is an oversimplification. I cannot say that Eco is a literature genius, as Borges was. But he wrote those baroque books that seem to contain the Library of Babel itself, such is the sum of information he has. To a lot of people I know who read his books, that amount equals to nothing. They just run away, they can't get anything useful from that. When you have it all, you don't have nothing. You can say that such thing only happens to normal people like us, who can't retain much more than a few telephone numbers, and the name of our close relatives. But even Eco himself was overwhelmed, by... the internet. Enter the final guest, Google.
Patrick Coppock, in early 1995, interviewed Eco. This part is interesting:
"Professor Eco, you're a man of letters, a writer, philosopher, a historian. On the desk beside you is a computer. Is modern computer technology actually functional for you as an author and literary researcher?"
Eco glances over at the computer, smiles, then nods thoughtfully:
"Yes, but sometimes the computer can also give paralysing results. I will give you an example: I was invited by Jerusalem University to a symposium whose theme was the image of Jerusalem and the temple as an image through the centuries. I did not know what to do on this particular topic. Then I said to myself, well OK, I have worked with stuff from the beginning of the Middle Ages; my dissertation was on Thomas Aquinas."
He points to the rows of well-filled bookshelves on my left...
"Here I have all the works of Thomas Aquinas with a reasonably good index, and I looked there to see how many times he quoted Jerusalem and tried to say what use he made of the image of Jerusalem. Now, if I only had these books - well, that index is a reasonable index which focuses only on the larger, more intensive treatments of the word 'Jerusalem' - I would have found say 10 or 15 tokens of 'Jerusalem' which I would have been able to examine. Unfortunately I now have the Aquinas hypertext..."
He glances again at the computer in the corner...
"and there I found, that there were - well I don't remember the exact number - but there were round 11,000 or so tokens... Well at that point I quit! Yes, that's far too much material at one time, obviously."
Perhaps it's useful to remember that on 1995, internet was just a small network compared to what it is now. February 1995, when Coppock met Eco, Windows 95 still wasn't alive. We were just in times of Windows 3.11, and some of us still in DOS 6.2. Who among us would speak about internet? Even Internet Explorer didn't exist by then. Eco again:
Once upon a time, if I needed a bibliography on Norway and semiotics, I went to a library and probably found four items. I took notes and found other bibliographical references. Now with the Internet I can have 10.000 items. At this point I become paralysed. I simply have to choose another topic.
If that was his impression in 1995, what would he say today, eight centuries later, in terms of internet technology and expansion? Coppock and Eco discussed afterwards lengthily about how to filter that excess of information. Eco suggested to automate his own method of filtering, based on biblography and other scholar tricks. Those things can't be done today with a computer, it's far too hazy, too fuzzy.
The information is still growing out there in the internet, but we still don't have a proper tool to access it. I repeat to myself those verses in "The Golem": "and finally said the Name which is the Key, the Door, the Echo, the Guest and the Palace..." That name is not Google. The statistic engine I use to determine the search engine queries they used to find my webpage tells me that. I cannot name all the wrong queries that led to my page. People go to Google and ask questions: "how do I know the name of the rose?", "what's wrong with me?", etc. Those are the worst queries for Google, and according to the reports given to me, the most common. Nobody quotes phrases, nobody excludes keywords. We the techies do that; common people just ask Google as if it were some kind of oracle. If I go and ask Google "where's the key to my door?", probably this page will show up eventually, as those words are included in this text (besides that very sentence, naturally: I'm not in the mood for recursive questions today).
So there you have Google, Eco and Borges; lack of information and excess of information, the Library of Babel again, and a false oracle as popular as was Delphi in its time. And as accurate.
Monday, October 06, 2003
There's a new book by Michael Moore out there, called "Dude, where's my country?". Basically it's a book against Bush. He asks seven questions to the American president:
1) Is it true that the Bin Ladens have had business relations with you and your family off and on for the past 25 years?
2) What is the 'special relationship' between the Bushes and the Saudi royal family?
3) Who attacked the US on September 11 - a guy on dialysis from a cave in Afghanistan, or your friend, Saudi Arabia?
4) Why did you allow a private Saudi jet to fly around the US in the days after September 11 and pick up members of the Bin Laden family and fly them out of the country without a proper investigation by the FBI?
5) Why are you protecting the Second Amendment rights of potential terrorists?
6) Were you aware that, while you were governor of Texas, the Taliban travelled to Texas to meet with your oil and gas company friends?
7) What exactly was that look on your face in the Florida classroom on the morning of September 11 when your chief of staff told you, 'America is under attack'?
If those were just idle questions, it would have been just a waste of time. But for every question, there is specific research to back it up. And it's Michael Moore who's asking them.
Someone said that he is a Noam Chomsky for children; the language of the book (simple, direct) seems to support such thesis. The fact is that Moore is far more popular than Chomsky, the journalist reaches much more people than the linguistic, and common people need common words. The American media predicted that Moore would be put in some kind of black list after all the things he was about to say in Bowling for Columbine. But reality expressed itself with a very different face: his books sold out, the movie won an Oscar and was seen by millions in all the world, and now he has power enough to ignore any blacklisting and pull out a book against the establishment. As an example of what kind of "black list" we are talking about, his previous book, "Stupid White Men", was in the New York Times bestseller list for 59 weeks. They never reviewed it. The editor of the book, before publishing it, asked Moore to rewrite half of it (naturally he declined the invitation). But the public is an irresistible force: the book was published several months after unchanged, and Moore received a 13 minutes standing ovation at Cannes for "Bowling for Columbine".
On Friday I mentioned a few dissidents from the American intellectual class who dared to speak against the official canon, while the rest applaud or censure, determining what kind of message reaches the American society. Fortunately, there's Michael Moore outside that circle.
1) Is it true that the Bin Ladens have had business relations with you and your family off and on for the past 25 years?
2) What is the 'special relationship' between the Bushes and the Saudi royal family?
3) Who attacked the US on September 11 - a guy on dialysis from a cave in Afghanistan, or your friend, Saudi Arabia?
4) Why did you allow a private Saudi jet to fly around the US in the days after September 11 and pick up members of the Bin Laden family and fly them out of the country without a proper investigation by the FBI?
5) Why are you protecting the Second Amendment rights of potential terrorists?
6) Were you aware that, while you were governor of Texas, the Taliban travelled to Texas to meet with your oil and gas company friends?
7) What exactly was that look on your face in the Florida classroom on the morning of September 11 when your chief of staff told you, 'America is under attack'?
If those were just idle questions, it would have been just a waste of time. But for every question, there is specific research to back it up. And it's Michael Moore who's asking them.
Someone said that he is a Noam Chomsky for children; the language of the book (simple, direct) seems to support such thesis. The fact is that Moore is far more popular than Chomsky, the journalist reaches much more people than the linguistic, and common people need common words. The American media predicted that Moore would be put in some kind of black list after all the things he was about to say in Bowling for Columbine. But reality expressed itself with a very different face: his books sold out, the movie won an Oscar and was seen by millions in all the world, and now he has power enough to ignore any blacklisting and pull out a book against the establishment. As an example of what kind of "black list" we are talking about, his previous book, "Stupid White Men", was in the New York Times bestseller list for 59 weeks. They never reviewed it. The editor of the book, before publishing it, asked Moore to rewrite half of it (naturally he declined the invitation). But the public is an irresistible force: the book was published several months after unchanged, and Moore received a 13 minutes standing ovation at Cannes for "Bowling for Columbine".
On Friday I mentioned a few dissidents from the American intellectual class who dared to speak against the official canon, while the rest applaud or censure, determining what kind of message reaches the American society. Fortunately, there's Michael Moore outside that circle.
Today the Minister of Education from Argentina proposed in the general meeting of the Unesco to change external debt for education. Together with Argentina there are 41 countries. It would involve some 752 million dollars, about 3% of the whole debt.
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