20-26March2011 :: This Week

28Mar2011 [weekly]

• imdb:tt1588337
• book:isbn=9780099448570

• Watched Of Gods and Men (Des Hommes et Des Dieux) (imdb) at the French Film Festival; it's a beautiful film, of the understated rather than boring variety, very slow and studied, emphasising the pace and rhythm of life within a monastery; it's about a group of monks living in a nominally Muslim town; they help the locals and live closely with them, but when xenophobic radicals start threatening the countryside, they have to decide whether to stay or go; it delicately portrays religious life, and it wonderfully captures faith and doubt, while offering a reasonably nuanced view of the west's interaction with Islamic populations; as a film, the camera-work is low-budget digital, but wishes it were film, meaning there are a few meandering tracking shots that don't really work, including one unfortunate scene towards the end that moves between the faces of the monks as they listen to some classical piece (I forget what it was, but it was overly portentous); it is, though, well-told, and features some great performances, especially capturing the characters of the monks amidst what are mostly psychological and spiritual struggles.

• Read Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle; a reminder that Atwood's strength is in human interactions; she takes a slightly silly scenario (woman fakes her death and flees to Italy) and runs with it brilliantly, with reality and fiction becoming more and more intertwined as the story goes on; her commentary on identity and liberation is fascinating.

• Finished reading Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline (An Ecopragmatist Manifesto); Brand argues for the ecological value of cities, nuclear power^[1], and genetic engineering, three things traditionally rejected by environmentalists; then more generally he argues for the environmental movement to embrace science, guiding it and using it to solve immediate environmental problems rather than rejecting it out-of-hand and losing any opportunity to act as a scientific conscience; towards the end he even argues we should be fervently studying and experimenting to do large-scale geoengineering, and he has me looking at that in a new light; I was already partial to cities, nuclear, and GE, but it was great to dig into the science and the ecological arguments for those; all told it was a great read too, Brand's an excellent writer, able to tell a story while imparting a huge amount of science and data, and making a convincing argument — a fine example of both environmental and scientific writing. A choice quote:

  There is a common sentiment among environmentalists that everything made by nature is good and everything made by man is bad. ... What "nature" are we talking about, exactly? You can't do anything against nature, if your idea of nature includes physics, chemistry, and mechanics. Abominations can be imagined but cannot be performed. Anything you can do you can only do because nature allows it. Nuclear fission is so natural it occurs geologically. Horizontal gene flow is so natural it is the norm among microbes. Apparently what people mean when they say "against Nature" is "against my understanding of Darwinian inheritance and traditional breeding agriculture." Or maybe it's not so cosmic, and what people mean by "against Nature" is "something I'm not used to yet."^[2]

  (This latter is, of course, not a sentiment limited to environmentalists. Get a conservative talking about "natural law" and that's all it seems to boil down to.)

• Listened to LCD Soundsystem's This Is Happening for the first time since leaving France; the album had served as my running soundtrack, and it's become inexorably linked in my memory to running through the Tuileries and along the Seine; since returning home I've had to find a different running soundtrack; was very strange listening to it again while riding the bus into the city, but it is a great album.

• Started reading Nick Hornby's The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, a collection of essays written over a few years; ostensibly it's simply about the books he's reading, but it becomes as much a study and exploration of the act of reading (and even of writing); it's so far fascinating, inspiring, and full of great recommendations.

• Planning on picking up an iPad 2, and I want to switch to reading on there, if only because I don't have the physical space to keep buying books; I'm torn though; (a) I don't like the idea of DRM on my books, even though I trust both Amazon and Apple to continue supporting their formats for long enough, and more than that I figure someone would crack the DRM if it ever became unsupported; (b) I like paper, and I'm not sure about looking at a screen for even more of my day; (c) I'm discouraged by the pricing of digital books, many more expensive than getting the paperbacks that are regularly discounted (at least outside of Australia), which feels wrong; I went into a Dymocks the other day because they cleverly sent me a 30%-off voucher because I hadn't been back for a while; I picked up a thin little Murakami and with the discount still paid $18 for it, even though I could pick it up for $13 from Book Depository; all up the price differences between buying books locally or from the UK or electronically are absurd enough that I'm not sure I can compare them; the real question is whether the electronic prices are, on their own, worth the convenience of getting immediate access to the book, and of being able to carry it around on that one device; (d) the Kindle libraries are still too limited anyway, eg, with none of the Murakamis available.

• Been hunting for Monocle magazine, but I've so far only found it in a couple of newsagents here, both two issues behind (for a monthly!), so not sure what I need to do there; this is one of those cases where digital distribution would solve the problem!

Footnotes