Fashion convergence: don't get pinched

Fashion is always self-referential. And in these self-proclaimed post-times, it's self-consciously self-referential. It just wouldn't be authentic otherwise. Every time in fashion references some other time. It used to be called retro. Now it's taken for granted.

For a long time it was retro to reference the 60s. Then, for not quite as long, the 70s became retro. By the time the 80s rolled around again, one didn't talk about retro. We weren't sure where we were. But we weren't unsure for long. These 80s were only half as long as the first ones. No sooner had we filled our wardrobes with oversized colour, we'd moved on.

Looking around, the 90s are definietly here. The sizes are still over, but the colour is gone, replaced by black, black, navy, white, and black. Things are serious, but not well-cut. Aviator specs, wire and plastic, are favoured. And jewelry.

If the decades are becoming swiftly shorter, how long will the 90s last? It would probably be more precisely counted in months than years. Then it will be the noughties again, and the original noughties will have only just come to a close. If these reworked noughties are shorter still, then sometime around 2014, like two lines crossing on a graph, it will be both the first 2014 and the second 2014 at the same time.

What weirdness will this confluence of real-time and retro-time wreak? Prediction: there will be two utterly different but indistinguishable groups living side by side. One group, unaware of the second 2014, will continue obliviously dressing in the fashion of real-2014. The other group, the fashion conscious, will self-consciously self-referentially wear retro-2014.

These styles will, of course, be entirely indistinguishable. The latter group will be referencing the former group, after all. But the fashionistas will know, beyond doubt, who is is and who is out, and they will despise those without the sense to self-reference. In five years, you will either know who to despise, or you will be despised.

The really interesting thing will be what happens after this. Will 2015 self-reference 2016? Will fashion be ahead of itself for the first time since the 1930s? Will designers be forced to come up with something new? Once the lines have crossed, the graph will be up-side-down. Will fashion, too, be stood on its head?

Photo by Hel Looks

Now at the Unichurch blog

Just thought I'd let you know that I'm now also contributing regularly over at the Unichurch blog. The blog is being updated each day by the Unichurch staff, so there is there is much more new content there than there is here. Some of the stuff is be relevant only to people at Unichurch, but most of it is of wider interest. My contribution will also be far more regular on the Unichurch blog than the patchy effort I barely manage to maintain here. Today I began a series on Jared Diamond's brilliant athropological history, Guns, Germs and Steel. Would be great to hear your thoughts.

Requiem

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

— John Updike

Saw this in the NYT a few days ago, a slightly tongue-in-cheek memorial to a great writer.

The Decemberists live in Boston

Every song. Free, legit, quality recording. Amazing. Here.

Looking forward to the mess

Being a Christian is like being a sentry, posted on duty in an army encampment, wrote John Newton (hymn-writer of "Amazing Grace" fame) in a letter to a friend. It may be hot or cold, it may be exciting or boring, you may get hungry, mosquito-bitten, or even fired upon. It's definitely not where you want to be. Everyone else in the camp is warm and fed and playing cards down in the mess hall. But you've been posted on the wall, and you have a duty to your Commanding Officer to stay there until the job is done.

"To live is Christ," wrote Paul in his letter to the Philippian Christians, "and to die is gain." Paul knew that it's far better to be in the mess with the CO than out on the wall. Why would you want to stay out any longer than he needs you to? Only because the mission is more important than you, and the CO has chosen to put you on active duty. Let's live boldly and fearlessly, as sentries on duty, never forgetting our mission, but looking forward to the time when the job is done, and we are called into the mess, where a hot meal and a warm bed will be waiting.

Photo by army.mil H/T Alan Chapple

The album is dead, long live the music

The core of the music industry will never again be the album. Music piracy has presented an insurmountable problem for recording companies, with album sales dropping year-on-year since 2000. Why would you fork out twenty dollars for that new Pink album when you could rip it from your friend's copy, or easier, download the entire thing in seconds through a file sharing program? Unless they're U2, performers and the companies that represent them can no longer turn a profit from an album release.

But none of this spells the end for the music industry. We shouldn't be scared of a future without a soundtrack, or worse, feel sorry for the record labels. Like any changing market, the onus is on the sellers to adapts. And they are adapting. While album sales have been eroding this decade, the price of a ticket to a live show has been rocketing, reportedly up 82% between 1996 and 2003 (inflation over the same period was about 17%). Unthinkable fifteen years ago, $150 concert tickets are now standard for stadium shows like Justin Timberlake or Madonna.

That means the entire business model of the music industry is reshaping toward concerts. The recording industry is very quickly becoming the live show industry. U2 for instance, one of the bands still able to sell records, grossed $150m on their latest album, "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb". But the associated tour grossed $389m. It used to be that the tour was an extended promotion for the album, but no longer. The album is now just a radio- and download-friendly promotion for the lucrative tour. The promoters, rather than the record executives, are now running the show and making the money.

While the industry is undergoing its most fundamental shift in its 100 year history, the outlook from the music-lovers' perspective is far from gloomy. The demise of the record doesn't mean that music will become less acessible; it actually means the opposite. The shifting centre of gravity toward the live show is affecting out interaction with music in two ways.

First, the internet means that any musician with a computer can record and distribute her music directly from their basement. Blogs and sites like MySpace are everywhere linking musicians with audiences. So the future of music is assured. In fact, it looks brighter, because instead of listening to the boring top-40 that the labels and radio stations decide is popular, the whole spectrum of independent musical vision is available to the listener.

Second, it means that performers are being polarized, with the huge stadium $150-ticket acts at one end, and everyone else at the other. For the majority of small, independent acts, this does mean that it's now more difficult to make a lot of money from their music - there's no intermediate stage of comfortable profits to move into. Instead they will have to rely on the cash they can make from live shows. This doesn't mean that the indie performers are going to stop playing or recording music, though. They will just have to work a day-job.

The best bit is that these two outcomes present the listener with a world of interesting, independent music. Because recordings have become promotions for shows rather than marketable products in their own right, more and more artists and labels are giving their music away for free. This means that there thousands of free songs and albums available to download, free and legal, through blogs, record labels and MySpace. And it makes good business sense - you download a few songs, you like what you hear, and next time the act is in town, you don't mind forking out $30 to see them.

So while it may not be quite so easy to make a buck out of music, recording and distribution have been almost fully democratised by the internet, and the listener is the winner. We have a universe of interesting, independent music available for free. So head to the nearest music blog or indie label, download some songs, and enjoy. And think about supporting the acts next time they arrive in town.

You can find links to some of my favourite free music here, here and here. I have also included some links to good blogs and labels under 'pod' in the sidebar.

Photo of Chris Martin by nrtphotos

The rainbow tyrant

Google completely runs my life. I've used Google for just about everything for the last few years. And when I say everything, I mean just about everything: mail, calendars, documents, rss, news, weather, finance... even this blog. Google's grip hasn't been so tight the last couple of years, since my employer's use of Outlook forced me onto other platforms at least some of the time. But now I have a new job, and everyone uses Google. The stranglehold is complete. I actually spend more time interacting with Google each day than I do with any single person ( perhaps even every person put together).

I spent this morning replying to emails on Gmail, and in between read some blog posts through Google Reader. I added some events to Google Calendar, and was reminded of an appointment later in the day. I converted some currency to work out what a new pair of sunnies would cost, and checked to see if it would be cool enough to go for a cycle later. With, of course, countless Google searches scattered throughout.

But even though I spent the entire morning Googling, I don't resent Google's ubiquity. Rather, I love Google. I've become dependent upon it, but in return Google allows me to do whatever I want, wherever I want. Setting up meetings, editing publications, writing this post, all from my bedroom, or the office, or a park.

There is a scary side, however. Google makes money by advertising. It throws ads up on its services, and hopes you'll click on them. If you don't use Google much, you'll get random ads. But if you use Google a lot, Google know things about you, and it will use this information to target you with ads it thinks you might go for. You searched for ski resorts the other day? Here's an ad for ski gloves. You've got "bible study" in you calendar? Here's an ad for a theological college.

So if you use Google all the time, like me, it knows a huge amount about you. It knows everything you've searched for, all your scheduled events, the content of all your emails, what you blog about, which news stories you read, and so on. I figure that if Google has all this info for me for the past three years, they know more about me than anyone except God.

In fact, I know it knows a lot about me, because in the last few months, Google's ads have become creepily relevant. For a long time, my first couple of years of Googling, say, Google's ads were laughably hit-and-miss. You could tell that they were offering me banana sundaes because that last email asked me to bring the banana lounge to the pool party on Sunday. But recently, Google has been consistently offering me things that I actually want. They have obviously got my profile down pat.

While it feels weird to think a multinational corporation knows you better than your own mother, I'm not too worried about it. I don't think any real person, let alone one with any power, is actually going to access Google's info on me. And if they do, it will be quite a boring read. The most common thing Google offers me is, after all, jobs teaching English overseas.

I'm still excited about Google, though. Their services are useful, easy to use, and make life easier. I'm anticipating with great interest the development of a Google operating system, where all your computing is done through Google. You would turn on your computer, and rather than it booting up Mac OS, it would access an online Google interface. All you documents and photos would be stored on Google Docs, you would listen to your music through GTunes, you would edit your photos in Picasa. Your computer wouldn't even need much hard memory, because Google stores everything for you. If my experience of using Google is anything to go by, Google's impending world domination will be clean and efficient: a utopia of productivity. Google is the benevolent, rainbow-coloured tyrant that you can't resist, even if you want to.

Photo by missha. A taste of the future. The Google logo has been cut into the apple using a laser. A memento from a Google launch.

Wising up

Educational standards have slipped so far they're in free-fall. The curriculum is being dumbed down to cater for the lowest common denominator. Degrees are handed out like paper towlettes at KFC. They aren't even worth the paper they're printed on. Aren't they?

Lamentations of educational apocalypse have been a staple of the op-ed pages for decades. But it's easy to forget that the general population of the English-speaking world is more literate that it has ever been. A hundred years ago, mass literacy was still a dream - most people would have had trouble making sense of a newspaper article. Even fifty years ago it was far from guaranteed that all your employees would be able to fill in their own tax form. Literacy rates have soared over the last few decades.

And that means that things have never been so good for so-called high culture. Museums, literature, independent films, opera and classical music have never had such large or broad audiences. Far from being a shrivelled vestigal apendage on the side of the voracious beast of popular culture, surviving only by the patronage of a wealthy elite, these art forms are enjoying vigorous lives of their own, finding audiences across the social spectrum. And people aren't giving up thier subscriptions to Sports Illustrated in favour of The New Yorker or discovering that Mahler is better than Radiohead: they're consuming each with equal appetite.

Contrary to the doom-sayers, people are not dumbing down. They're wising up. They're better educated and more cultually aware than they've ever been.

Photo by Piet Musterd

A Year with the Institutes

John Calvin turns 500 this year, and to celebrate, the Princeton Theological Seminary is inviting people to read through his entire Institutes of Christian Religion over the course of the year.

The Institutes is one of the most important and influential works of theology ever written, and Princeton's programme includes daily readings, and an audio recording of the readings available as a podcast via iTunes, designed to help you get through it by the end of 2009. Details are here. What better way the mark the 500th birthday of this great reformer.

I'm hoping to follow the readings and the podcast through the year and get my head around this huge volume. I may even let you know how I go, or write some of my thoughts about it here.

H/T Ben Myers

Photo by naezmi

The market draws breath

When a child bumps their chin on the edge of the coffee table, there is that inevitable pause while he draws breath, screws up his face and looks around for an audience, before bursting into tears. That's the point we're at right now, writes Adam Gopnik. Our economy has taken a tumble. Whether we start crying or are distracted by the shiny baubles of bail-outs may determine the scale of the injury.

Music cornucopia

While you may have heard of (or even listened to) NPR’s flagship programme All Things Considered, but you may not have heard of its sister music programme, All Songs Considered. Originally a programme about the music used in ATC, it has become a regular broadcast of live shows from Washington DC’s 9:30 Club. The programme has recorded over a hundred shows from bands like Radiohead, Arcade Fire, The Demberists, Bjork, Iron & Wine, Neko Case, Tom Waits and Okkervil River.

The good news is that the shows can be downloaded from the NPR website, or better, as a podcast. The recording quality is great and the shows are presented unedited. There are some real musical gems here, like Bon Iver’s beautiful and unassuming set and Death Cab’s Ben Gibbard doing a cover of Such Great Heights (no rival to Iron & Wine’s brilliant cover, but pretty nice nonetheless).

While ASC will give you shows from bands you’ve heard of, there are a couple of blogs that are great for discovering bands you haven’t. The Line of Best Fit is London based and offers reviews and downloads from heaps of acts. On the other side of the Atlantic, RCRD LBL does basically the same thing.

Photo by jgarber

Australia and the New York schools experiment

New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein was in Australia last week as the guest of Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard. Klein runs the biggest school district in the US, and in the six years since he was appointed by Mayor Bloomberg has transformed it from one of the worst performing to one of the best performing districts in the country. The interesting thing is that Klein has used simple techniques that every successful business take for granted, but seem to get lost in the education sector – explicit goals, measurable outcomes and transparent analysis of schools’ achievement.

Far from taking education into the cold, elitist territory that would lead unions to decry such techniques, however, Klein’s aim is to achieve parity across all schools, and graduate as many students as possible, both rich and poor. This necessarily means sinking resources, including the best teachers, into the worst schools. But Klein then expects the schools to prove that their students are improving at a rate that justifies the expenditure – and if they don’t, they get shut down and replaced by better schools.

Unsurprisingly, Klein’s techniques are transforming education in New York. A far greater proportion of students are graduating, especially in the most disadvantaged areas. Klein argues that access to quality education is the great social issue facing Western democracies, and in New York his approach seems to be closing the gap.

Julia Gillard met Klein in New York last year and was impressed by his work. His trip to Australia last week coincided with a COAG meeting, where Gillard began a similar process by getting the states to agree to publish data on school performance. No further plans have been announced, but if Gillard follows this path, we could see a real ‘education revolution’ in Australia, rather than the populist and simplistic promise of stacks of computers.

Australia is, admittedly, different to New York – our schools sometimes need to service vast areas and we don’t anything like the levels of poverty in some parts of the US. But the tools that everyone know work in business and science, and seem to be working elsewhere, should be able to produce results in Australia, too. And if there’s anyone to court the education unions on this, it’s the female Deputy Prime Minister from the Left of the ALP.

If you want more info, I enjoyed listening to this interview with Joel Klein on the ABC (you can get the audio by clicking the black box on the left of the page). Or if you have less time, Janet Albrechtsen wrote this for The Australian yesterday.

Photo by Gothamschools

America's "racist belt"

Here's something interesting. The New York Times put together this map of those counties that, compared to 2004, swung Republican in Tuesay's election. The editors at BuzzFeed, where I first saw the map, called the red area "America's racist belt". While I think racism is not necessarily the only or best explanation for the swing, you have to ask yourself, why would voters in these areas, who voted for John Kerry in the last election, go against the general swing and vote for McCain this year?

The map is part of a larger slideshow, which can be viewed here.

UPDATE: The NYT ran a front-page story yesterday arguing that race was a primary factor is the swing away from the Dems in states like Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi.

In praise of the public library

The public library is, along with democracy, railways and refined sugar, one of the greatest innovations of Western civilisation. It has completely democratised access to literature and learning and has contributed far more than is credited to the long held, but only recently realised, dream of mass literacy.

Concerned with popular education from its puritan beginnings, it’s not surprising that the public library is an American invention: the first opened in Boston in the 1840s. School and subscription libraries had been around for centuries, and these evolved into the libraries we know today, so it’s hard to say who invented it. But if there were a librarians’ pantheon, it would definitely include Benjamin Franklin, who started the first subscription library in Philadelphia in 1731, and Andrew Carnegie, who bankrolled 1700 new public libraries, bringing the library to suburbs and towns across America.

In Australia, public libraries were much slower to get started, and, due to a lack of Franklins and Carnegies, less well endowed. In 1932, a Carnegie Corporation report into the state of Australian libraries called them “wretched little institutes”. The State Library of NSW was founded in the 1860s, but wasn’t until after the Second World War that governments began taking seriously the idea of public libraries, and only in the 1960s did local governments start building suburban libraries.

Although it took us a while to realise it, the suburban library is the pinnacle of librarial evolution. University and State libraries are important and grand-looking, but, let’s face it, no one actually visits them. The suburban library, on the other hand, attracts a mash-up of punters from every spot in the social landscape, especially in a suburb like Midland.

As a child, my family visited the Midland Public Library almost as often as we visited the shopping centre. In fact, from the day I was presented with my very own laminated membership card, age eight, until now, there has never been a time when my bedroom has not stored part of its collection. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that the Midland Public Library has been as important to my education as all the schools I’ve ever attended put together. Despite the snotty children and fluorescent glare, I love that place. I love free stuff and I love books, so the place that supplies me with a constant stream of free books is very close to my heart indeed.

I plan to leave Midland next year, and while I won’t miss the town, I will miss its library. It has introduced me to Dickens and Martel, Winterson and Orwell, Hume, Camus, Paul Johnson, Terry Prachett, and everything in between. The ladies know my name, or at least the ones that have worked there for twenty years. And it was all funded by the good rate-payers of the City of Swan.

Although I’ll probably never go, it’s fun to plan a library tour of the world. Where would you visit? The Bodleian and the British Library, of course, the Bibliothèque nationale and the Vatican, then across the ditch to the New York Public Library, Brooklyn (if only for Asher Lev), Yale, Folger, the Library of Congress, and across to that fabulous crystalline building in Seattle. You would discover other libraries along the way, and dig through little second-hand bookshops in between. I may never come home. But I probably will, because not matter how many rarities and columns, no library could ever replace the Midland Public Library.

Photos by andy in nyc and vsz

The glory and the pain: theology with Sufjan

I’m loving the music of Sufjan Stevens right now. He is not only one of the finest composers and songwriters working at the moment, he is also incredibly theologically aware. His lyrics are a beautiful exploration of faith and the divine in the mundane experiences of life. In my book, he’s up there with Bono and Dylan.

When I discovered Sufjan last summer, he played non-stop in my car for about three months. His song ‘Casimir Pulanski Day’ got the most strenuous workout – I often put this one song on a continuous loop (a cardinal album-lover’s sin, I know) as I drove. But after hearing it a thousand times that summer, I still think it’s the pinnacle of Sufjan’s achievement to date. Listen to the song – as she says in Garden State, it will change your life. It’s also worth reading the lyric.

The song is the story of a boy whose girlfriend is suffering from cancer. The teenagers quitely and intimately share their grief. They pray that God will heal her, “but nothing ever happens”, and the girl dies, with the boy at her side. Strangely, however, throughout this tragic story, Sufjan repeatedly reminds us of “all the glory that the Lord has made”.

What does the glory of the Lord have to do with a boy’s grief as he watches his girlfriend dying? Where is God in this story? He isn’t around – they cry out to him, but he does nothing; the girl dies, and her boyfriend is left heartbroken. But as the nurse draws the sheet over her body, the boy looks out the window and catches a glimpse of God’s face:

All the glory that the Lord has made
And the complications when I see His face
In the morning in the window

What kind of God is this, whose glory is evident even in the most tragic of events? This is the “complication” that the boy experiences – the paradox of finding beauty in the midst of death and seeing God in the midst of tragedy. What is the boy to make of this encounter?

The vital clue comes in the last verse of the song. We have seen God’s glory in a death once before, “when he took our place”. Because Christ died in our place, his glory now shines everywhere, even in our grief. Death is no longer hopeless, but filled with promise. The characters in the song will reunite one day, when death finally releases its hold on them, God brings them back to life, and they pick up where they left off. Even after the girl's death, the boy anticipates the imminence of this holy day:

In the morning in the winter shade
On the first of March, on the holiday
I thought I saw you breathing

God is not absent in this story: "He takes and He takes and He takes". He takes our place, and he takes our pain, and he takes our death. Christ’s death and resurrection has radically reshaped the fabric of life and the world. Because God will one day reverse the effects of death and suffering, even our most heartbreaking experiences are no longer truly tragic. The glory of God’s coming kingdom illuminates all of life, recasting it in hope and joy.

Photo by Zach Klein, H/T Ben Myers

A bit rich

In last Saturday’s Weekend Australian Magazine, five families, each with a combined income of over $150,000, bemoan the difficulty of making ends meet. In a country with an average income of around $50,000, and a standard of living amongst the highest in the world, this is an outrageous example of popular delusion.

And popular it is. Nearly two-thirds of Australians believe they can't buy everything they need. The Rudd government rode into office last year on the back of the public perception that the cost of living is too high. Working families can’t make ends meet, we were told ad nauseam. The cost of energy, groceries and credit dominated the news cycle, and continue to do so.

This despite the fact that there has never been a time in history when these commodities have been so accessible to so many. The standard of living in Australia has been rising steadily throughout its history, and is amongst the highest experienced by any group in human history. Earning an average wage in Australia puts you within the top 2% of the world's rich.

The problem is that expectations have outpaced even the abundance the Australian economy provides. A new car, a McMansion filled with new appliances and a yearly holiday are considered a basic standard, and credit is so cheap that it doesn’t matter how much debt you accrue to achieve it. There’s no wonder that people are worried: we are labouring under a grand delusion. No economy in history has provided such a standard of living.

We are victims of a self-fulfilling prophecy of economic ambition. People are greedy and materialistic, and therefore unsatisfied with their current wealth. We aspire to own a newer car, a bigger TV and a house in a better area. Politicians play on this aspiration by telling us that yes, you are poor, it is difficult to make ends meet, you are entitled to more, and we can provide it, if only you vote for us. Journalists repeat our dissatisfaction back to us, because it’s what we want to hear. And so our economic ambition is affirmed and sanctified.

There is no greater god in our pantheon than economic ambition, the Great Australian Dream, and millions are sacrificing their lives on its altar. But the Dream is a fickle god that demands everything and delivers nothing but incessant dissatisfaction and 200 square metres of polished hardwood floors.

Photo by Dean Terry

Unstent NZ eccint

All Australians know how funny (both senses of the word) the New Zealand accent is, and how difficult it is to imitate. Fortunately, help is at hand. After extensive research in the field, consisting primarily of a close viewing of the brilliant TV show Flight of the Conchords, I have developed an easy-to-follow two step pathway to an instant NZ accent. Here it is:

1. Pronounce all consonants, all hard vowels, and the soft vowel ‘o’ (as in ‘pot’) as you would in your usual Australian accent.
2. Shift each remaining soft vowel (‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’ and ‘u’) one place down the alphabet.

So that means you pronounce:

• ‘a’ as ‘e’ (so, for example, ‘hat’ becomes ‘het’)
• ‘e’ as ‘i’ (so ‘leg’ becomes ‘lig’)
• ‘i’ as ‘u’ (so ‘chips’ becomes ‘chups’)
• ‘u’ as ‘a’ (so ‘mug’ becomes ‘mag’)*

Now thet your NZ eccint us pufictid, hev fan umprissung your mates and pussung off the Noo Zilender chuck thet serves you et IGA wuth how crep your ummutation rilly us.

*This last rule isn’t quite true. Really ‘u’ should be pronounced as the indefinite vowel (like the sound at the end of ‘doctor’). Actually, none of these rule are really correct: New Zealanders use a crazy range of vowels that are unknown to the English language in any other corner of Her Majesty’s current and former realms. But the rules are close enough that once you start using them, you should be able to hear the NZ coming through, and adjust the sounds as you git bitter.

Photo by inconstanti

Now hear this

After a long hiatus, it's time to recussitate the blog. And in response to some gentle encouragement, I'm planning to find the time to post regularly again. So here's the first of (hopefully) many.

I few months ago I posted a list of links to free music downloads. Many bands give away songs to promote their work, so there's lots of free, legal music out there to download. Since my last post, I've discovered a few more tracks worth listening to.

Damien Jurado
Band of Horses
Explosions in the Sky (here and full album The Rescue)
The National
TV on the Radio

Damien Jurado's catchy, honest, indie rock has become one of my favourite in-car sounds recently, and I may soon buy one of his albums (the purpose of the give-away, after all). Actually, since writing the previous post on free music, I've gone on to buy two Sufjan albums and one by the Decemberists. If you like what you hear, consider exploring further and supporting these excptional artists.

Photo (of Sufjan in amazing goose wings) by Joe Lecioni

Random thoughts on translation

It seems to me that translating from one language into another… is like viewing Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, when, although one can make out the figures, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and one cannot appreciate the smooth finish on the right side.
- Don Quixote

Cervantes loves to put pithy observations in the mouth of his pathetic hero, and as usual Quixote is right on the money, although he probably doesn’t realize it. His remark applies equally to reading works in translation. It’s such a frustrating task. You squint, trying to make out the figures. They float in front of you in outline, but the fine detail is obscured and they never quite coalesce into something graspable.

Translations never feel right, either. The poesy is buried under approximate meaning, and what must feel like silk in Russian or Spanish becomes course and rigid. You start rewriting passages in your head just to get some rhythm into the text, but you’re no better at it than the translator. That’s why translated poetry is never more than a dismal failure – you can’t get all the allusions, all the rhythms, all the sounds into the text – and it’s exactly the same for novels, especially great ones.

Every time you read a translated novel you tell yourself it will be the last. But it’s an impossible promise to keep. There’s always another must-read novel. A life with frustrating Dostoevsky is better than a life with no Dostoevsky at all.

Maybe you’re asking too much of the translation. A translation, after all, tells you more about the translator than it does the work itself. You aren’t listening to the text, of course, but to the translator, as she describes what she is hearing. The work is second hand, filtered through another pair of ears, and is only ever going to reflect how the translator hears. Hopefully she hears in a similar way to the author.

But the amazing thing is not that translations are so bad, but that they work at all. The quote at the top has itself been translated from the Spanish, but you still get the gist. How can that happen? How could Cervantes, writing all those centuries ago, have had the same frame of reference to you? Perhaps you have a common experience: of tapestries, for instance. If so, then what about texts from completely alien cultures? How can their ideas be expressed in your language? There must be some common ground of human experience that founds all cultures and languages.

The common ground is especially important for Bible translators. Separated by two thousand years and ten thousand miles, the fact that you can make sense of Paul, a first century Jewish scholar, is astonishing. Granted, reading Paul requires a little more thought and contextual understanding than does, say, Hugo, but even the least literate can make some sense of him. We have access to Paul’s gospel because we share something vital with the apostle.

The translator’s task is difficult and thankless. She is asked to speak across cultures and render a community’s thoughts intelligible to those with whom they never speak. Her project is fated to fail, because no translation can be perfect; she can never convey ever reference, nuance and allusion. At best she can only sketch rough outlines. But it is better to see vaguely, as in a mirror, than never at all, and for their service we owe translators our respect and gratitude.

Photo by Kiwanc

Check out CPX

John Dickson and Greg Clarke have a new venture, the Centre for Plublic Christianity. They aim to present the Christian message through a wide range of media including video, print publication and short courses, and have already had some notable successes. The recently lanched CPX website hosts some great vodcast and print resources; they're intelligent, relevant and hold to refeshingly high production values. Well worth bookmarking.

H/T Rory

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Behold your God

We must discard the “god who is there to hold your hand, solve your problems, rescue you from your trials and tribulations, the deus ex machina,” writes Kim Fabricius on F&T. Instead, he proposes that on Good Friday we focus on this image, Holbein’s Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, the pathetic, crushed, vacant carcass of the God who has been defeated. This Friday God is not with us; he has descended into hell. But it is in this very powerlessness, lying cold and rotting in the tomb, that Christ comes to us and identifies with us. Only the despair of Friday could make the hope of Sunday possible.

Sans Comic Sans

As a teacher, I’m daily subjected to the insidious Microsoft font Comic Sans. You wouldn’t believe how pervasive this font has become in the educational world. Everything from text books to memos is typeset in Comic Sans. ‘Educationalists’ use the font in the misguided belief that it’s ‘fun’ and therefore will ‘engage’ students in ways that a more mature font cannot. I’ve come to accept this as one of the lesser evils of public education. But yesterday I received an email that provoked me to action.

The email was from a leading educational body here in Perth and outlined some important changes to the assessment policy for the higher level Year 12 English courses. It was typeset in Comic Sans. Had the email announced a festival or party, the use of Comic Sans may have almost been forgivable. But this email was a very formal, very serious policy statement that directly affects the university entrance of a third of Year 12 students in WA.

The use of Comic Sans is a problem because, like a tone of voice, fonts convey meaning. Comic Sans was first developed by Microsoft for use in comic book style speech bubbles that offered help in its Windows 95 operating system. The font was to be used for short, informal comments, and is therefore designed to convey informality, irreverence and naivety. It is inappropriate to use Comic Sans for any other text type. As the noble crusaders at bancomicsans.com say, it’s “analogous to showing up for a black tie event in a clown costume.”

But the pervasiveness of Comic Sans is not confined to the educational sphere. It seems that everywhere you look the font is being used in the most inappropriate ways. From restaurant menus to software manuals, Comic Sans is taking over. The problem is not just the indiscriminate use of the font, but its sheer popularity. We are in the grip of an epidemic of childish typography.

It is time to call a stop to the indiscriminate and unjustifiable use of Comic Sans. It is a stain on the illustrious history of typography and must be eradicated. You can be part of the solution: refrain from using Comic Sans and spread the good word of appropriate typesetting. Together wa can build a new world sans Comic Sans.

Picture by bancomicsans.com

Free music

Loads of bands and record labels have realised it’s worth giving away a few songs as ‘tasters’. As a result, there’s lots of free, legal music available to be downloaded from the net. You won’t find international super-acts like Coldplay or Pink giving away their song – their huge marketing budgets mean they don’t have to – but virtually everyone else is (and why would you listen to Coldplay or Pink anyway?).

The easiest way to find free legal music is to search for it through Google. It’s best to only download music from the official website of a band or record label, because you know it’s legit. There are loads of other sites that claim to host ‘legal’ downloads; most of them are legitimate, but not all.

A great place to start looking is music.download.com, a slick site where many bands post their free tracks. Another really useful resource is Finger Tips Music, whose Select Artist Guide features direct links to the much of the best free music on the net. I've also put links to some of my favs below.

Some great artists that are giving it away:
Sufjan Stevens (here and here)
The Decemberists
Death Cab For Cutie (here and here)
Television Hill
Sigur Ros
Tom Waits
Iron and Wine
The Shins
Augie March
Spectacular Fantastic

Some fine record labels known for their generosity:
Sub Pop
Asthmatic Kitty
Anti
Epitonic

H/T Jeff Hunt for putting me on to free music.

The authentic bogan, or, Why Dickens makes me think I should don a singlet and chug a choc milk

In his essay on Dickens, George Orwell pings the novelist for being a snob. While Dickens is often called a ‘champion of the oppressed masses’, Orwell argues that he is actually revolted by the poor. His slums are filled with repulsive odours and depraved souls. And his heroes, while often of the most downtrodden extraction, are always gentlemen. Pip, for example, in Great Expectations, speaks with an upper-class accent from the earliest age, even though he’s brought up by a blacksmith.

The reason for this, Orwell argues, is that while Dickens was concerned for the poor, or at least those he saw as the deserving poor, he never wanted to resemble them. In an autobiographical fragment, Dickens admits that the greatest horror of his childhood experience in the blacking factory was not the work but the people he was forced to associate with. Like many of his heroes, Pip is representative of Dickens himself; he can’t allow them to be anything other than gentlemen, even when it’s ridiculous.

In his essay, Orwell compares Dickens to a “modern doctrinaire Socialist contemptuously writing off a huge block of the population as ‘lumpenproletariat’.” He could have equally compared Dickens to the modern Christian. We show the utmost sympathy for the poor and oppressed. We say the gospel is for everyone, that God uses the foolish things to put the wise to shame, that we should be all things to all people in order to win some. All these things are true. But while we show such concern for the poor, are we, like Dickens, revolted by the idea of seeming poor? Are we snobs?

I know I am. While I say the evangelical epithets, the way I speak, the way I dress and things I do, reveal that I’m a snob of Dickensian proportions. If I’m honest, I’m often horrified by bogan culture, and I spend a lot of energy not being one. But there's a lot of bogans in Perth. I work with bogans, shop with bogans and live near bogans. I am surrounded by a huge field of bogans waiting to be harvested. But I refuse to be one of them, and relinquish any chance of relating to them.

Sometimes I think I should change my accent, clothes and pass-times to something more in line with the surrounding culture. If I’m to be all things to all people in Perth, perhaps I should be a bogan. Would that be inauthentic? I don’t think so. It’s inauthentic to claim Christ’s mind, yet remain a snob. It’s inauthentic to claim that the gospel is for everyone, yet withhold it from those that seem foolish. The only way to be authentically Christian is to love. If loving bogans means becoming a bogan, it would be inauthentic to be anything else.

What is it?

The ABC TV show Collectors features a regular segment in which members of the public are presented with a “mystery object” (like the one pictured, used in last week's show) and asked, “What is it?” The object’s use is never apparent and punters speculate wildly, usually without much luck. Then the object is presented to the expert panel, who put their heads together and work out its purpose.

The segment is entertaining enough, but the interesting part is the question. The public and the panel are actually asked “What is it?” but implied questions is “What is it used for?” And this implies another question: “For what purpose did the designer intend it?”

The question “What is it?” doesn’t necessarily imply the question “What is its use?” Asked “What is it?” you could sensibly answer the question by describing the object: it’s made of wood, it’s cylindrical, it has a hollow area on one end. But this never happens. What asked “What is it?” punters invariably speculate on the object’s use. An inkwell? or some kind of bobbin, perhaps?

By assuming the implied question of use, the punters unconsciously recognise that the object’s nature is not defined by its physical attributes, but by its purpose. And when asked “What is it?” no one says “It’s an inkwell, because that is what I would use it for.” They assume that there are right and wrong answers: that it’s the designer that gets to impart purpose, not the user.

The punters and the panel both recognise a truth that often gets lost. Things are not defined by their attributes – a description does not confer meaning. Nor are things defined by their user (or the thing itself) – the thing is designed for a certain purpose, and it is that purpose that confers meaning upon the thing. And things find their meaning in fulfilling their purpose. When this happens, the designer is respected and the object dignified.

Summer days

I've been away over the summer and will be away again this week. Apologies for the lack of posts. Posting will continue once I get back into the swing of normal life on 29 January. Hope your summer has been as relaxing and fun as mine.

Photo by macieklew

He will come

Advent Calendar

He will come like last leaf’s fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud’s folding.

He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

Rowan Williams

Have a wonderful Christmas.

From The Poems of Rowan Willimas, Eerdmans, 2004
Photo by mdumlao98

The Oz says it right

From yesterday's editorial in The Australian:

The Australian's Beijing correspondent, Rowan Callick, watched the election with Chinese officials, and their amazement at what happened on Saturday night is revealing. As Callick reported yesterday, Chinese diplomats were agog at the very idea of a government being turfed out overnight and were fascinated at the civility of the leaders. They were amazed that outgoing prime minister Mr Howard had the dignity to address the people in the face of such a crushing defeat and at the generosity of Kevin Rudd's acceptance speech. Whatever their political views, all Australians should be proud of the exemplary way in which the elections were conducted.

Sometimes we need to be reminded that we're doing something extraordinary. They said it right that time.

A Freudian slip and a fond farewell

About half way through tonight's election coverage, Kerry O'Brien said,
"It seems we're looking at a swing to the ABC of 5.1%."
Gold.

On another note, Mr Howard has not only lost the Prime Ministership, but also his seat. Despite some less-than-compassionate policies on refugees, Iraq, civil liberties and, until recently, indigenous affairs, Mr Howard has faithfully served this country for thirty-three years, and has led Australia through one of its most prosperous eras. He has worked tirelessly to achieve what he saw as in our best interest. Whether Howard-haters or Howard-battlers, we all owe the former PM a debt of gratitude.

Lastly, we thank God that we live in a place where our biggest problem on election day is the queue.

(Kerry also used the word "we" with reference to the ALP. Does he even know he's doing it?)