Dying Breath of the Book…?

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One of this weeks readings was a section from a book, The End of Books — Or Books Without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives, by Douglas, J. Yellowlees. It was quite long, which was rather taxing, but it did make some interesting points about several issues, including the future of the book in the face of e-readers and new technologies.

One interesting passage argued that even though technology has passed the book by, history suggests to us that this does not necessarily mean the end of the book.

“Even if ou became used to reading in this way, it is hardly likely that digital media like hypertext are going to supersede books, regardless of how much critics like Miller or Birkirts fret over the fate of the book and le mot juste. Radio and cinema went foraging for slightly different niches once television debuted on the scene, and ballooning numbers of video rentals, airings on premium cable and satellite channels, and pay-per-view showings have all helped recoup losses for films that were absolute dogs at the box office – and unexpected boom for Hollywood. It is hard to imagine books becoming the horse of the twenty-first century – a possession that has lost so much of it’s utility that only the well-to-do can afford to have one around.”

The article places the discussion in the context of hypertext, and how these kinds of technologies will affect traditional reading experiences. What, for example, would happen if you were never able to read the same book twice? And that by virtue of your past experience, will read a text one way, as opposed to if you reread it again two weeks later?

This question is much less of a hypothetical example and more of a reality once we admit the possibility of the self being as fluid as a choose-your-own-adventure novel. The question then becomes, if we are now being forced to be aware of this fluidity of our own perception in terms of the different texts we consume through specifically built structures like hypertext, will that affect our conscious reading of traditional paper books?

If we become aware of the fact that we never take the same path through Wikipedia twice, even when searching for the same information, then will that awareness extend to when we are reading a hard cover of Jane Austen? Will we begin to consciously realise that our attitudes to a character we may have hates on our last reading, are perfectly able to change on this reading due to a near infinite number of different variables?

The question was summed rather perfectly by Brian, when he compared the discussion to the quote by the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

Lock, Stock and Two Loops of Learning

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After reading the double-loop learning article by Chris Argyris for what must be the fourth or fifth time this morning, I must admit that I still don’t quite get it. I was once told that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else, which has since become a small measure I test myself with every time I am learning a new concept, and I would not be confident at the moment to begin to try and explain the notion of double-loop learning to someone else.

It seems as far as I can deduce, that double-loop learning is essentially a reframing of a situation by adapting your perspective on it in order to embrace the perceived ‘problem’ as a potential ‘solution’ for something else. This may, however, be far from the mark.

In an effort to employ double-loop learning to assist my understanding of double-loop learning based on what I understood so far about the theory, I began to independently research it. The problem being: the reading was not explaining clearly what double-loop learning was exactly. So as I understand it, a response via single-loop learning would have been to repeatedly read the article till it made sense, and if questioned about what it means, I would reply in very broad and general terms so as not to seem stupid or incompetent. Perhaps a double-loop learning response would be to question if or not the article is actually able to communicate the theory to me adequately. Perhaps I learn better via a more varied platform of communication. Perhaps some audio explanation and some visuals are needed to help clarify the dry academic text?

So after a quick Google search of double-loop learning, I came across several pieces of media that have helped me understand the theory better. And while my understanding may not yet be complete, it is more advanced than before I started to look.

I found this flow chart, which seems to explain the theory pretty well. The crux seeming to be that I must get past defensive reasoning when facing the problem. Perhaps my reasoning might be, “I am very good with the English language. My VCE results say so, as have my teachers and most people who read what I write. Similarly, I am able to read complex academic works and understand them. It is unacceptable that I am unable to understand the theory in this article, as surely I am capable of understanding it through reading it alone. I will read it and reread it till the theory makes more clear sense.” For to admit that I am unable to understand it through reading alone would be a reflection of my weak grasp on the English language. Once I move past this, and admit that I have a developing understanding of English rather than a developed understanding of it, I may be able to move forward in my understanding by approaching it via different media mediums.

I also found this video. Apart from what seemed like hours of unnecessary footage of the woman working out, the message was similar to that of the flow chart. The woman had two problems: she couldn’t get any breakfast and a creature was throwing bananas at her. Her solution was to keep running (I assume, till the shop opened) and try and avoid the creature by moving away from it. This solution is single-loop learning, as she accepts that the creature will continue to pester her and that she is hungry. After a “what if…”  break in narrative, she employs double-loop learning, where she changes her perspective on the banana throwing problem in order to transform it into a solution for her other problem: hunger. This way, both problems are solved as she is no longer hungry and the bananas are now welcomed rather than being rejected.

This other video was much more concise, and was more specifically business related. It challenged us to ask the question, “Why?” when faced with a problem that couldn’t be fixed because it “just couldn’t”. If it required a breaking of company policy in order to fix a problem, rather than adapting the solution in order to stay within policy guidelines, the better response would be to question if or not the policy was actually beneficial, rather than to assume it was correct simply because it had been the standard and enduring policy for a number of years.

So in essence and summary, the theory of double-loop learning when opposed to single-loop learning, is that you must take a step back from the parameters of the problem and test if or not those parameters actually have any value in being there. If I receive a a bad coffee, rather than accepting the coffee is bad and fixing it by pouring sugar into it to make it drinkable, I should go to the barista and tell him that the coffee wasn’t great, and perhaps he needed to do something else when making it. Or maybe I even just make my own coffee and bring it from home.

Basically, don’t get stuck in your old ways. Be open to change.

Late Than Never?

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I just read through the article that was set for us to read several weeks ago, As We May Think, by Dr. Vannevar Bush.

I thought the article was quite interesting, especially as it showed what a visionary Bush was, and what he was able to suspect might be possible in the future. Especially his comments on the technology of photography, and about the possibility of, “dry photography”. As he suspected, “often it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and look at the picture immediately”. This is digital photography. And we must not forget that he wrote the article in July of 1945, close to 70 years ago.

Another part that I thought was important was his foresight to notice the possibility of information overload, and that the point would arrive where the content being created was greater than that which was possible to consume. He used the example of Mendel, whose discovery of the laws of genetics, which was lost for a generation as it was not read by the few people who could put his thought into practice and make the discovery public. This is now an even greater concern following the advent of the Internet. What if the key to curing the AIDS virus was stored away on a hard drive in a university somewhere, unread and unappreciated. The idea reminds me of this passage from a letter by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the French author and aviator. (I also find it interesting that Bush published his article only 13 months after the premature death of Saint-Exupery. The fear of too much information was a common worry in those years.)

“I prefer the sale of a hundred copies of a book I don’t have to blush for to the sale of six million copies of a bad book. This is justified egoism, because the hundred copies will carry much greater weight than the six million ever could. The belief in number is one of the fallacies of the age. It is the most select journals that are the most illuminating; the ‘Discourse on Method’, even if it had no more than twenty-five readers in the seventeenth century, would nevertheless have changed the world. ‘Paris-Soir’ with its yearly tons of paper and it’s two million readers has never changed anything.”

Does anything we write have any weight anymore? Is what we are writing pushing the human race forward, or even having any positive or constructive influence on the world around us?

It is also the only ethic that worries me about this subject. The notion of being a content producer. For who is to say that I am only adding to the clutter and chaos of information on the internet by writing here? Does the fact that I can publish my own content mean that I necessarily should? What is really more valuable to be found here than in the angsty ramblings of a 13 year old girl with a Tumblr account? Who am I, really, to say anything?

Lights, Camera, (industrial) Action!

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So, the industrial action has meant the unrunning of the unlecture. Which leaves a slight hole to fill in terms of content for this blog.

“But no!” I can almost hear Adrian yelling. This is less about the contents of the lectures and the tutorials, and more about the self production of content and sharing of knowledge. So what do I have to say that I didn’t last week?

 

I now know that my breaststroke is in fact much worse than I ever had imagined. It’s to the point that it’s a joke at the swimming club how bad it actually is, but I had always thought, if push came to shove, that I could pull out a decent time, even if it wasn’t particularly pretty. I know now that not to be true.

I had three swimming competitions over the weekend. One on Friday night, the final night of a five week relay tournament that finished with us dead last or second last. I’m not too sure, but I don’t really care either way. I did some reasonable times there; 25.54 for 50m free (off a flying start) and 28.99 for 50m fly (without a flying start). As far as I can remember, I’ve never gone as fast as that in the fly, which is strange considering how little I’ve been training lately.

The second competition was on Saturday afternoon, where I swam 100m free, 100m IM, and 50m free, fly and back. The free was quicker than I’ve gone in a year with a 26.14 (no flying start slows things down). But the 100m IM was the most alarming event. All IM events are divided equally between the strokes, so 100m IM is 25m of each stroke and 400m IM is 100m of each stroke. In the IM this Saturday, my split at the 50m mark (fly and back) was 30.58, where I was in second position in the race. As you may know, breaststroke is the third leg, usually the slowest leg compared to the rest, but still done faster than your average doggy paddler. My 25m breast took 23.21 seconds, by which time I was dead last by about 10m. At that point I gave up slightly, coming home in a 16.47 for the free leg.

I wasn’t quite sure how to react to this time, considering how dismally slow it was, except to laugh at it and vow never to do a breaststroke or IM race ever again. Which so far I’ve kept…

The last competition of the weekend was on Sunday night, another tournament, but this one a mix of relays and individual races. This year the club requested to be put down to B grade, so we won all of our event’s fairly comfortably. I raced the individual open 100m free, and just out touched a guy from Eltham swim club, which restored some of the faith I had lost in my swimming from the previous day.

As far as I can tell from my slow decline in swimming ability, is that you never really lose your ability to sprint. Anything to do with your lactic acid energy system (100m, 200m, 400m events) will suffer significantly if you don’t train. But the 50m events don’t slow down all that much, they just hurt a lot more.

 

I also met some of the guys on the RMIT Australian University Games cycling team for the first time. I’m managing the team this year, which has proven to be occasionally more difficult than I had anticipated, but I hadn’t actually met any of the people who had signed up before Sunday morning. The team has four guys (myself included) and a girl, which is significantly better than last year, when there was just the two of us. The two Dylan’s and myself met in Port Melbourne at 8am for a ride with a bunch that one of the Dylan’s usually rides with. Frustratingly enough, due to the wind, they had decided against Beach Road as a route, and instead, we would ride the Yarra Boulevard, which is slightly more protected by trees. This was frustrating as I had ridden 40mins to Port Melbourne to meet them, and the Yarra Boulevard was 5mins from my doorstep, which meant riding another 40mins back to the Boulevard.

The ride itself was good, and both Dylan’s are seem like really nice guys. Dylan Eeles does triathlons as his main sport, just as I do, which provided good topic for conversation. The other Dylan, Dylan Benson, I didn’t get much of a chance to speak to, but he proved himself as probably the strongest rider of the three of us. I wouldn’t want to call it too early, as I haven’t yet ridden with the fourth male member of the team, Richard, but I suspect that we will be riding for Benson in the road race and the criterium at AUG’s.

I was meant to meet Eeles for a ride with a group this morning (a similarly painful experience, as the meeting place was the corner of the Nepean Highway and North Road at 6am, which is another 40min ride from my house. It was an early start to the day, thus the reason that I’m currently sitting in a coffee shop drinking my third cup for the day), but he was slightly late, and missed the group rolling out. If you miss the group, you miss the group. There is no way of catching them once they get started. So there I was, in a bunch of riders that I had never laid eyes on, trying desperately not to get dropped. I managed to stay with the group for 40 mins, before taking a long turn on the front into a headwind, and I went lactic and consequently got dropped. For those 40mins, I checked afterwards, my heartrate averaged 165bpm, which is pretty high considering that no one else around me seemed to be struggling as much as me. But it’s good to train with people who are stronger than you, as they inevitably push you to become better. It would be nice to stay with them for the whole ride next time though.

 

So, those are the things that I’ve done and learned since last week (aside from writing that essay which was the last thing I posted).

Jim’s Jams

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This is an essay I wrote over the last few days for my Media Ethics subject. I wasn’t sure exactly how it would turn out, but I think it is reasonable. If only in that I can’t currently see anything wrong with it. Which may be to do with my sleep deprivation…

 

 

“When dilemmas such as ‘Jim and the Indians’ demand an ethical choice, is deciding by dice throw: better; just as good; or worse than: deciding via Kant’s Categorical Imperative and Bentham’s Hedonistic Calculus? Why?

When faced with a situation such as that in ‘Jim and the Indians’, the ethical choice demanded, is by no means a simple one. The different epistemological elements that come into play confuse even the most morally apt; as it is far from clear what is the best way to respond. Several options are open to us, however correctly making the decision that leads to the least moral ambiguity seems almost impossible due to the potential gravity of each choice.

Upon reading the dilemma outlined by Williams and Smart, there seem to be two potential courses of action that Jim is able to take, which can be separated into the dominant epistemologies that they fall into; that is, to accept, or not to accept the offer of the captain. Does Bentham’s deontology convince us with his Utilitarian ideology of acting in reference to a Hedonistic Calculus, or is Immanuel Kant more persuasive with his teleological notion of acting via a Categorical Imperative?

The first option open to Jim would be to agree with Pedro, the sweat stained military captain, and shoot one of the protesters in order to save the other 19, thus favoring Bentham’s moral framework. This framework can be summed simply in the more commonly used phrasing: “the ends justifies the means”. Or basically, that if the outcome of an action is perceived to be more beneficial than failing to perform the action, then the action used to achieve this outcome is justified. So for Jim, the act of killing one protester would be seen as justifiable as the result is the saving of 19 lives. But more specifically, Bentham argues that any moral question can be answered by establishing what will generate the most pleasure (good) and conversely, the least pain (bad). As, surely, the totality of happiness after the action is more important than the action itself?

In contrast to this, we see Kant favoring motive rather than outcome in order to establish what is the most moral route through an ethical quagmire. To sum his argument more simply: “don’t do bad to produce good”. Kant based his theory on the thought that ethics was too serious a subject to be left up to probability or chance. He means that by justifying the means with the ends, the protagonist is leaving their decision up to what might happen, or what they suspect is the most likely consequence of their action, which is by no means a certain thing. The projection of a probably future was, for Kant, not enough to base a moral groundwork on. What if Jim chose to kill one protester in the hope of saving 19 other lives, but the captain failed to honor his word, and proceeded to kill the remaining 19 as well as Jim? Even if Jim refused the captains offer, and he killed all 20 before executing Jim too, at least the last moral choice Jim made was not one that resulted in him actively ending the life of an innocent stranger. Or so argues Kant. His argument is that an ethical decision must remain “good”, regardless of the eventual empirical consequences. Not only this, but that the ethical decision must apply to both specific situations, and also universally to all situations. He says this most famously in chapter two of his work, Groundwork of Metaphysics of Morals.

 

“Act only on that maxim through which you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” (Smith, 2013)

 

If Jim were to follow a Kantian process of decision-making, and he chose to kill one protester in order to save 19, he must also will a world where he is happy to be killed by someone in order to save 19 others. This is Kant’s test for ethical maxims; that the M-I (maxim applied individually) must match without contradiction to the corresponding M-U (maxim applied universally). Kant would argue that if a contradiction is found between the M-I and M-U, then the maxim cannot be used, as it is seen to be ethically invalid. This is Kant’s adaptation of the Golden Rule, the ancient moral principle that has been seen across both centuries and cultures, which suggests it to be one of humanity’s only common ethics. It is seen to exist in all major religions, from Christianity to Buddhism, Islam to Taoism. It is from these common principles that Kant derives his Law of Non-Contradiction, from which stems his Categorical Imperative, and thus his motive focused method for overcoming ethical dilemmas.

However, supposing that Jim had either a coin or a dice in his pocket? What if there was in fact a third option for deciding how Jim should act in his difficult situation? Could it be ethical for Jim to toss a coin in order to decide if or not he should kill one to save 19, or refuse the offer, and walk away? This broadens the dilemma significantly, as it takes the decision process out of the hands of Rationalism, for which both Kant and Bentham argue (though admittedly from opposing sides), and puts it firmly within the grasp of Chance. As reason through logical deduction has proven to be flawed in significant ways, even when argued from both sides, perhaps it is better to avoid logic and its inherent failures to provide a clear moral path, and it is better instead to remove it as a variable completely when making such a difficult decision. As French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery argues, logic is self-validating, but does not always produce consequences that sit at moral ease.

 

“If your purpose is to understand man and his needs, to know what is most essential about him, you must not set the proof of one man’s truth against another’s. Yes, you are right. Everyone is right. Anything can be demonstrated by logic. The man who blames the ills of this world on hunchbacks is right. Let’s declare war on hunchbacks and all get carried away.” (Saint-Exupery, 1995)

Logic, by its very nature, serves as a finite explanation of the world. Perhaps logic is not equipped to answer all of the problems we might face in life, as Jim has found. The conclusion that the moral action is to kill one in order to save 19 is based on a firm logical foundation, but so it the conclusion that the only moral path is to never kill. Both arguments are valid as they are both logically consistent, however they are derived from different first principles, thus creating their stark opposition. Even Wittgenstein, the maser logician and philosopher admits in the introduction to his first major work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that thought is limited by both language and logic, with anything remaining outside of logic to be purely absurdity.

 

“…the aim of this book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather – not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).

            It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.” (Wittgenstein, 1961)

 

            Perhaps these kinds of logical dilemmas sit outside of what Rationality is capable of overcoming, and instead sits in a realm of absurdity? One example of a clear rejection of morality formulated via logic is in the novel by Cormac McCarthy, No Country For Old Men. The character of Chigurh does not appear to behave consistently with any traditional form or rational morality, instead, preferring to use his own word as his final and absolute truth. When he feels like this may not be adequate, he uses coins to decide if or not he should keep his word (usually in regard to if or not he should kill someone). The catch, however, is that the person who he intends to kill must call the toss of the coin.

 

“None of this was your fault.

            She shook her head, sobbing.

            You didn’t do anything. It was bad luck.

            She nodded.

            He watched her, his chin in his hand. All right, he said. This is the best I can do.

            He straightened out his leg and reached into his pocket and drew out a few coins and took one and held it up. He turned it. For her to see the justice of it. He held it between his thumb and forefinger and weighed it and then flipped it spinning in the air and caught it and slapped it down on his wrist. Call it, he said.

            She looked at him, at his outheld wrist. What? She said.

            Call it.

            I wont do it.

            Yes you will. Call it.

            God would not want me to do that.

            Of course he would. You should try to save yourself. Call it. This is your last chance.

            Heads, she said.

            He lifted his hand away. The coin was tails.

            I’m sorry

            She didn’t answer.” (McCarthy, 2005)

 

This scene is an example of pure chance deciding the result of an ethical decision. Is this morally right? This method purer than anything that human reason is capable of. It is distilled morality, the essence of what we strive to achieve with every decision we make, for human reason creates morality in order to strive for fairness and equality. When a judge sits in his chair at the top of a courtroom, his purpose is to pass a sentence that is the fairest response to whatever the crime may have been. However the very fact that the judge is human, who thinks, feels, worries and gets hungry makes this job impossible to complete to perfection. All of those things detract from the seriousness of the decision that the judge is required to deliver. Albert Camus saw this and highlighted it as an absurdity in his novella, The Stranger.

 

            “The fact that the verdict was read out at eight P.M. rather than at five, the fact that it might have been quite different, that it was given by men who change their underclothes, and was credited to so vague an entity as the “French people”—for that matter, why not to the Chinese or the German people? —All these facts seemed to deprive the court’s decision of much of its gravity.” (Camus, 1946)

 

These fluctuating variables take much away from the seriousness of life and death that these dilemmas commonly deal with, and chance nicely avoids these protean aspects. Chance is unaffected and remains immaculate, unlike Rationality, which is inevitably muddied by the logic of mankind, forever relying on itself to justify its own first principle. It is similar in the differences in scoring places between running and gymnastics at the Olympic Games. While gymnastics is based on a grading system out of 100, with judges scoring the athletes for their performances, running remains forever objective as it is ranked via the incorruptible clock. Time, just like Chance, is an unbiased platform from which to accurately and fairly judge a situation. For these reasons, chance should be used in favour of either Rational Deontology or Teleology as a basis for making ethical decisions as it exists independently of human alteration, allowing for a higher position of objectivity to be taken.

If: The most objective motivation to act in a situation is the most moral motivation to act

And: Chance is the most objective motivation

Then: Chance is the most moral motivation to act”

So what do you think? Agree? Disagree? Anything I messed up as far as reasoning or argument goes? Let me know!

Unlecture No. 4: The First Symposium

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The lecture yesterday was without a doubt the most interesting lecture of the year, probably of university so far.

I think finally, after the first few weeks of talking about it, and waiting for Brian to return from wherever he was (holiday?), the dialogic structure has fallen into place. It needed to happen this week, as people were getting slightly miffed at the fact we were being told about a revolutionary method of teaching that treats us (students) like capable human beings (as opposed to blank but vaguely keen slates that need to be written on in order to make us appear employable), but the ‘unlectures’ had a distinctly lecture-like feel to them. We were still listening to one person speak for at least half an hour (though we were allowed the enormous privilege of asking one question at the start that may or may not have been answered in that half hour).

(forgive the parentheses)

Things I loved about how this unlecture/symposium was run:

  • More that one person spoke. Not only this, but there was less of a sense of hierarchy among the tutors. Brian seems to have balanced the numbers to achieve zen.
  • Students in the audience asked questions when they weren’t necessarily asked to (“So, does anyone have any questions about that…?” *crickets chirp and a dust ball rolls across the front of the room*). This, I think, will give other students the confidence to engage more openly, with less fear of being made seem like an idiot in front of the rest of the cohort.
  • The content was very interesting. Not to say that the last few weeks have been dull, or that what Adrian was saying was things I already knew, but I think having the other tutors to bounce off made what he had to say a lot more fresh, and much less rehearsed. As the tutors have different ideas about the subject, and the material within the subject, they challenged each other when they spoke. Everyone was thinking, rather than reciting.
  • We rehashed over things that we had already talked about from previous weeks. I think this is important in university subjects more generally, as the content that is covered is usually so massive. My friend studying Nursing at La Trobe said they covered the entire content of year 12 psychology in one week. I understand that you are expected to do much of your learning out of university hours, it is still helpful to go over things, just to make sure they were understood, or even to elaborate on them as a segue to the next topic, rather than segmenting each week as a different section of information.

For me, the most interesting part was the last example used by Adrian, about how you intend to get paid in this industry and what you have to do to achieve that. His example was that of a wedding photographer (a past student’s plan for a business).

Why on earth would anyone in their right mind (even if they had cash t throw around) spend $10,000 on hiring a photographer for their wedding when they can just ask Uncle Clive with his digital SLR and iMovie to make it for you. Clive would be keen to do it; then we wouldn’t have to buy a wedding present.

His answer? You must sell the experience, not the product. You must sell the fact that you can film an entire wedding, ceremony and reception, without being noticed by anyone so they feel they are being filmed. You sell your discretion, not your hour of footage. You sell that you will archive the footage of their wedding forever, for free (in case of housefire, flood, loss of the dvd, etc…). That you will send them uncut, additional footage every anniversary to remind them of their special day. You have to do the things that Uncle Clive won’t do.

The industry must not be about selling a thing. Because now, everyone can make these things with software that everyone gets for free on their computers. It must be about selling the experience of the thing. Which I personally, hadn’t thought enough about. It is not enough to just produce great videos, because there are thousands of teenagers with their webcams, with millions of followers, who are able to do the exact same thing, to a much greater audience.

It tied nicely into my conversation this morning with a friend who wants to start up a coffee shop. He was telling me about his connections in the industry and how he would be able to get discounts on the beans, how he has friends who would be willing to invest money into the business to get it started. And while you need these things (a coffee shop without premises or beans wouldn’t be a great coffee shop), you need customers. And you need a reason for customers to come back to your shop, as opposed to the one a block from their house that serves the exact same coffee, for the exact same price.

My answer (thank you Adrian), was the feel of the place. Everything from the decor, to the music playing, the staff that work there, the cups that people will drink from, and the sugar they will stir into their drinks. A customer must feel comfortable and at ease using a product (or buying a cup of coffee) or they won’t use it, because if they are willing to sacrifice comfort, they will find a very cheap solution to whatever the problem they face, or service they need.

The Moat, under the Wheelers Center, is where I go for coffee when I’m at uni. Why? The one on campus is cheaper. Druid’s Cafe is much closer. Mr Tulk serves the exact same stuff. And if I do a quick google search; “coffee shops swanston st”, this is what Google maps tells me.

WHY ON EARTH WOULD I GO TO THE MOAT IF THERE ARE THIS MANY OTHER OPTIONS WITHIN WALKING DISTANCE?!

My answer? The feel of it. I like the place. I feel comfortable there. At home even. I’d be quite happy to spend the day there, just reading or writing. I like that they play quite classical or jazz over the speakers. I like that there is a different kind of spoon with each jar of sugar. I like that I know one of the waiters is called Stewart, and that he plays golf and used to own his own restaurant. I like that he knows I teach children to swim and do triathlons. I like that I don’t even have to talk to them anymore, I just sit down, and within a few minutes, a flat white will appear in front of me. I like them enough that I have brought at least a dozen people there since the beginning of the year, who had never heard of it, and some of them have become regulars too. It is comfortable, and easy, and I will probably keep going there till I finish my degree, spending hundreds of dollars on coffees and snacks, and probably even go there if I get an office job in the city after I finish uni.

Why? Because as Adrian said, I’m not paying for the coffee, I’m paying for the experience.

What Wit!

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Last night I started to read Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (it seems it can only be read at night), the first major work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and I have come across several things that have been pretty interesting so far, including links to Solipsism, which we were discussing in philosophy last week.

Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889, into one of the richest family’s in Europe at the time (holding a monopoly on the steel industry in Austria), with four brothers and four sisters. He was the youngest member of the family. His father, Karl Wittgenstein, was dominating, apparently lacking empathy, and saw only a future in industry for his sons. His mother, Leopoldine Kalmus, was reportedly timid and anxious, unable to stand up to her husband, a harsh perfectionist, focused only on business and the continuation of it through his family.

Ludwig’s brothers displayed evidence of a streak of depression that seems to have run through the family. Three of his four brothers committed suicide, and Ludwig contemplated it regularly, approaching it as though it was a problem of logic that he needed to overcome. In his notebooks he wrote:

“If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin. And when one investigates it it is like investigating mercury vapour in order to comprehend the nature of vapours.”

His eldest brother was a musical prodigy, able to identify the different pitches and keys of music from the age of four. He disappeared on a boat after leaving for a America in 1902. The third eldest brother committed suicide in Berlin at a bar, where he ordered a glass of milk, requested the song “Forsaken, forsaken, forsaken am I” to be played by the pianist, and proceeded to mix potassium cyanide into his glass, before drinking it.

However, intro and gloom aside, I’d like to talk about several passages, the first being what Russell (who was Wittgenstein’s good friend and wrote the 20 odd page introduction to this work, which includes sentences like, “The definition of identity by means of the identity of indiscernible appears to be not a logically necessary principle”) describes as Wittgenstein’s most fundamental thesis.

“The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts. Given the syntax of a language, the meaning of a sentence is determinate as soon as the meaning of the components words is known. In order that a certain sentence should assert a certain fact there must, however the language may be constructed, be something in common between the structure of the structure and the structure of the fact. (…) That which has to be in common between the sentence and the fact cannot, so he contends, be itself in turn said in language.”

This is difficult. And I’ve been reading through it (by the way, he has written his Tractatus in numerical point form, e.g. “1 The world is all the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not things. 1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.“) and I’m struggling to make an enormous amount of sense of it. But basically, what I think he’ saying, is reasonably simple, but the terms he uses are confusing. For example, his sentence that begins, “Given the syntax of a language,” is essentially saying that there is no difference between understanding the words in a sentence, and the persons meaning. It reminds me of the part from Atonement, when Briony is sitting in the nursery contemplating he failing play.

“By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols unravelled. You saw the word castle, and it was there, seen from a distance, with woods in high summer spread before it…”

I’ll let this sit for a little bit, as I have to go off to training, but it is to be continued…

Photojournalism in Conflict

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Again, while scrolling down the infinite wall that is tumblr, I saw a photograph (down the bottom of the linked page) of some hands against the back window of a car. It was a grainy photo, the hands were dirty and the car was several decades old (rust spots showing, paint missing and grime tinging roof green) and it was under the title, “Chechen Hands”, by photographer Stanley Greene.

I googled his name and found the company he was attached to, Noor Images, which contained what I can only assume is his entire body of work. Greene mainly seems to photograph conflict, wars and famines, capturing the different scenes that come with those types of environment. As his profile reads:

“For the last 25 years, Stanley Greene (New York, 1949) bore witness to births of new dawns, rising and falling empires, invasions of countries, liberations of others, mass migrations, deportations, displacements, famines, conflicts, wars and destructions. He worked on the five continents trying to document the human condition. “Sometimes I wonder if societies just lust for tragedies.”

I had a look through some of his works, and his most recent one, “Snipers Life in Aleppo“, reminded me that I has read about Aleppo for the first time only few weeks ago, in an article that I wrote a blog post about.

As coincidence would have it, or perhaps a reflection on how little this is being covered by the more general media, the description of the photographs is written by Francesca Borri, the same freelance journalist and human rights activist who wrote the article I wrote a blog post. She tells chillingly about tells of the level of death present in Aleppo.

“Iyad is 32, a broken expression nestled in strong muscles, he was a carpenter. “My workshop is at the end of the corner,” he tells you, even if at the corner there’s but a slid ceiling, the stump of a wall, and even if he now is a sniper, two hours per day, every day, he sleeps here, a mattress and a blanket next to a door’s skeleton, his brother died his father died, his best friend died, everybody died, his two-year-old daughter died, in his Nokia the photo of her body covered in blood, and now he is a sniper, that’s all, two hours per day shielded by sandbags, you look through the hole where he shoots from and the helmets of the last soldiers he hit are still there, in the street.”

Wishing Wall?

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Trawling through tumblr the other (what charming alliteration) day, I came across this piece of art (DON’T CLICK THE LINK YET! READ ON!), by Kate MccGwire that I thought was quite interesting. Copyright being what it is, and this being my self-confessed (though not by myself) online identity, that will add to building a digital reputation, I won’t post any pictures of the actual exhibition, but click through the link to see it in the back-lit flesh.

In fact, perhaps I shall try to describe it to you. I’ll endeavor to build a picture of it in your mind, and then, only then, click through to the exhibition and you can see how close the picture I created is to the actual piece.

It is a large, grey wall, seven meters long and over five meters tall, painted a neutral grey, not quite as dark as slate, perhaps closer to the colour of the grey on a Commonwealth Bank debit card. And on the wall, is a spiral of 23,000 chicken wish bones, starting from the right of center of the wall. The chicken wishbones are completely clean, and are that off-bonewhite, that is similarly called, cream (the colour you might see on the wall of your house). The wishbones are arranged so they almost fit into each other as the form the spiral, like this; “<<<<<<“, but rather than straight, curved in a lazy arc. The effect when seen from a distance is similar to what one might imagine if you saw an ornamental pebble garden from above.

You may now, I suppose, click the link and see what it actually looks like, as now, class must be attended.

(probably to be continued)