Five Inconsistencies of London

(as they seemed to me)

Very Historical / VeRY_mOdERn
...Anthill-like... / D e s e r t e d
Gaudy / Conservative
Friendly / Unfriendly
Rich / Poor
Here should be the 6th / No five is enough

Books

The cover of the latest Time issue contains a photo of Jonathan Franzen accompanied with the following message:

Great American Novelist. He's not the richest or most famous. His characters don't solve mysteries, have magical powers or live in the future. But in his new novel, Freedom, Jonathan Franzen shows us the way we live now.


The fact that the person placed on the Time's cover is a living novel writer was so surprising, that a number of other media sources dedicated a news entry for it. It appeared that Jonathan Franzen is the first writer for 10 years to get to the cover of this magazine (the previous one was Stephen King in 2000).

In my opinion, this fact is not a worse illustration of the way we live now than the mentioned book. For 50 years (1951-2000) as many as 42 living writers were honoured to get to the Time's cover, ~8 authors per decade. The first decade of 2000's was not that rich. However, I cannot say that the shelves of bookstores have become smaller. Conversely, they obviously have become much larger than ten years ago. And the books have become much more colourful and pretty than before (right now I'm looking at my good old Catcher in the Rye, 1975 edition, and I'm sure it would have never been sold in today's bookstore due to its ugly cover).

The abundance on the bookshelves hides the scarcity of modern literature. It is the same entropy loss problem I wrote about some time ago. The problem is that we produce a lot of form, while forgetting about the sense. A typical book available in a store today is nothing more than a coloured pack of printed paper whose life is limited by a trip from New York to San Francisco. What a difference to my Catcher, the Catcher I've bought at bibliopole's, whose pages become yellow with time, who has some wrested pages pasted back in wrong order, who spent his best years being read by a dozen of my friends (and their friends), and who is still alive and carefully dusted once a week on a dedicated bookcase shelf, waiting for succeeding readers.

A major difference between USSR and western rock music of 60-80's is that most of the Russian bands never really cared about the music (yes, I know that USSR != Russia, but as the majority of the bands sang songs in Russian, I will use that term). There were many reasons for that. There were no money, there were no good instruments, there were no good recording equipment. There were no sponsors. There were no local musical heritage, and getting discs with western music was a challenge.

However, even though the music was recorded on handicraft hardware built from spare parts of three different machines, even though the guitars and processors sounded as a mix of Nirvana, Chuck Berry and Bach, even though a drum machine beat the same boring 4/4 far-from-reality rhythm through entire song, even though guitar solos were as simple as in guitar beginner's guide, even though the rehearsals were performed at someone's apartments or (in better case) in underground studios, even though in many cases there were no official discs available, so the listeners had to use their tape recorders to spread records, even though... Despite all of that, Russian bands played the rockest rock I've ever listened to. Every single song was an inexhaustible source of energy, love, truth and wisdom. It may sound oddly, but probably the poor quality of the music was one of the compartments of the inspiration made by the songs... Good enough music would just have prevented the listener from feeling the spirit they carried.

One of the common ways of spending summer vacation for me, as for a typical resident of humid continental climate, is a trip to "somewhere where is sunny and hot". However, I am completely stuck this year. It appears that every place that I'd considered as a good summer choice in past years is much cooler and less sunny than my hometown this year :).


A wonderful consequence of a hot (what? I said "hot"? I must have said "hoooooot"!) summer this year in Kyiv are the chestnuts that have blossomed a second time this August (usually the chestnuts blossom on Spring).

No wrong no right,
I'm gonna tell you there's no black and no white.
Queen, "One Vision"

A small addition to the previous post.

Dividing people (and other things) into black and white on the basis of some particular feature of them is one of the biggest mistakes one can make. Unfortunately, our mind is lazy. It is much easier for us to sort a hundred elements out into two (three, four, ten) groups by some common criteria and operate with those N groups, than to put each one to a separate personal group and deal with 100 groups instead. Sometimes this is called abstracting. Naturally, abstracting is good when used in maths or biology, but it distorts our vision when applied to real-world or social stuff.

Sometimes this feature of our mind is exploited by unfair people. The teams of candidates of presidential/governmental races often try to blacken the opposite candidate by showing them as adulterer, a person of doubtful character and so on. Well, it is difficult for me to understand the relation between PM's sexual temperament and their economical and manager's skills (needed for the state to prosper).

I try to classify the things as vectors of different essential properties. For instance, a typical vector of a person is (name, sex, age, sense of humour (1-10), kindness (1-10), intellectual level (-1-10), positiveness (1-10), honesty, appearance, physical skills, risk-ability, ..., smoking (yes/no), ...). This relates to all people, not only to friends (politics have some of the properties grayed, e.g. honesty ;)). The properties are mostly orthogonal, and thus such classification helps not to sort people into black and white, stupid and clever, or honest and dishonest. Really, there are quite a few properties to consider, and the presence of negative ones does not mean the absence of positive ones.