Wu Wei

Twin cities

Did you know that Ljubljana is twinned with Tbilisi?  No, neither did I. 

You can see all the other places Tbilisi is twinned with here   and here is the equivalent in that wonderful script that the Georgians have:

Ljubljana,  Slovenia (1979) ლიუბლიანა, სლოვენია

It seems Tbilisi is also twinned with Bristol, though I can't think what they have in common.

  Bristol, United Kingdom (1988) ბრისტოლი, გაერთიანებული სამეფო

Technorati tags: twin cities, Tbilisi, Bristol, Ljubljana

Two Concerts (update)

My concert reviews are going to be a bit of a joke, I'm afraid, to anyone seriously musical.  I have that level of knowledge that says, I don't know much about music but I know what I like.  I have a very good memory for the tunes but am useless at the names of pieces of music.  I like most classical music but not much really modern stuff, though I go back a long way liking early music.  The only exception on the modern front the minimalist, repetitive stuff, which I find strangely soothing, though I haven't really listened to much of it.

Tonight I went to a concert in the Philharmonia Hall, a special occasion as it was two Lithuanians playing: David Geringas (cello) and his wife Tatiana (strange to see the surname as Geringas not Geringiene, but it seems she is Russian anyway), on piano.  I found Geringas looked a little like Donald Rumsfeld, though much less sinister.  It was rather distracting, and no doubt very unfair to him, as when he smiled he looked like a normal person.

The hall was smaller that the Philharmonia in Vilnius, but similar design, with the balcony just at the back, not all the way round.  The programme started with a modern piece from each of the Baltic countries. First, Arvo Part's Spiegel in Spiegel (rather slow and gloomy). Then Vytautas  Barkauskas's Suite de Concert, op 38, which had lots of sawing, banging and scraping up and down the scale.  By then I was wishing for the interval.  Then came Peteris Vasks' Gramata Cellam (The Book of Cello).  The first movement "fortissimo" seemed like a corrupted mp3 file of Shostokovich's Cello Concerto without the orchestra, bits seemed familiar and then weren't, and it was hard to concentrate.  But then the second movement "pianissimo" woke me up.  Suddenly it seemed there was a contralto voice coming from somewhere. It sounded like one of those modern pieces where they have a tape recorder playing something along  with the live performance.  I was very puzzled by this.  The programme notes were only in Slovene so no clues there.  However, then there was a soprano voice, which clearly was coming from the cello, so I thought I had imagined the contralto voice as a recording.  But right at the end it came back (again sounding like a recording).  So maybe the movement should be called "cello and two voices".  I enjoyed that part, anyway.

The second half was Brahms' Sonata for cello and piano no 1, op 38.  That was an old friend which I hadn't heard for a long time. I must have had a recording of it at sometime, as I remember listening to it a lot, but it's long lost now, as it's not on my iPod.  All this changing of media from vinyl to cassettes to cds and now mp3s, means you never replace exactly what you had before, and stuff you like is always disappearing. The music seemed to have gone down well, as there were three encores (no more modern stuff) all enjoyable. 

The other concert (a couple of weeks ago) was in the big Cankarjev dom (Gallusova dvorana), very modern and boring.  The tickets were quite expensive, I paid 20 Euros to sit up in the gods with the students.   No translation of the programme and no lady announcer to tell you what you were going to hear or who was substituting.  Slovenians also don't do the slow coordinated clapping for encores, that audiences in the former Soviet Union do.

The programme started with a piece by a Slovene composer Blaz Arnic, titled Memento Mori.  It was slow and gloomy (as you might expect from the title) and I was glad when it finished, so I could cough.  The conductor of the Slovene Philharmonic Orchestra was George Pehlivanian, presumably an Armenian.  He wasn't so much fun to watch as Gintaras Rinkevicius. I should explain that most of my concert going in the last 10 years had been in Lithuania, and as I had just been there, that's where my comparisons are coming from.  And the guy on the kettle drums also wasn't much of a show performer like we are used to with Pasha, (I forget his real name*, but no doubt someone who reads this will give him a proper credit) who plays percussion like a jazz drummer, with feeling and facial expressions and no doubt humming as well, if you were close enough.  He's great. 

Then there was Beethoven's Piano Concerto No 4.  The soloist was Dubravka Tomsic Srebotnjak.  Clearly I should have heard of her, but I hadn't. She appeared in a red and gold tent, with big hair, you know the style.  She played well, but nothing stunning.  The audience loved her (she is their local star made good internationally) and cheered and clapped until she finally did an encore.  It was Chopin  (I think) but it was amazing. Suddenly I could see the brilliance, and understood why the audience was so keen. 

The second half was Richard Strauss's Symphonic Poem Ein Heldenleben Op.40 which called for a huge orchestra.  To fit it all in, the 8 double basses and cellos were on the "wrong side", as the harps and other extra strings had taken their place.  3 of the brass got up early and went out for a smoke before coming back again for the finale.  At least that's what it looked like.  Perhaps that's all normal for this work.  Anyway, the audience were not nearly so impressed with this half, and the flowers were not so lavish as for Dubravka.

So that's the end of my first foray into concert reviews.  I don't know how many more there will be.

*Update: his name is Pavelas Giunteris.

Technorati tags: concert, review, ljubljana

A Taste of Spice

Lotus reads has reviewed an Indian film all about spices (The Mistress of Spices), but she says it is not a recommended film.

Here's a better one about spices, Greek this time. Called Politiki Kouzina or A Touch of Spice in English, it is about a Greek family living in Constantinople (as the Greeks still call Istanbul), where the Grandfather keeps a spice shop. The shop serves Greeks and Turks alike. The grandson becomes a good cook even when he is only 10, and much of the film revolves around family cooking and which spices to use. The boy has a friend who is a Turkish girl. But the family is forced to leave Istanbul for Athens in the late 50s, leaving the grandfather behind.

Eventually the grown son returns to Istanbul and meets the grown Turkish girl who now has a husband and a daughter. I won't spoil the end for you. It's a sad story about exile but vivid about life and food in Constantinople. It's was very popular in Greece while we were there.

There's a DVD. It has English subtitles when they spoke Greek but later in the film the Turkish dialogue is rendered in English without subtitles.

Collapse by Jared Diamond

Eventually I finished this book, with more than a sigh of relief.  I had the same trouble with his other book, Guns, Germs and Steel: the fate of human societies.  I don't why his books are hard to read.  They are not full of "isms", footnotes and long words that you need to look up on the internet. 

It's rather that the book is like a sandwich, in that the filling is full of interesting stuff that you don't know, which keeps you reading, but the bread is rather stodgy and takes a lot of digesting.  Which is odd, because the problem is that Diamond structures the book like those American school text books that my kids had in their international school.  Each chapter started: now you are going to learn this, this and this, and it will help you understand that.  In the middle there is a box making sure you know the main points of what you are learning.  At the end there is a list of what you have learnt and what you will move on to.  Although I didn't study from predigested pap like that, my kids did fine on it, so I don't knock it for school books.  But it makes for rather repetitive reading as an adult, and if you disagree or want to ask questions, or discuss something, you can't.  Come to think of it, aren't powerpoint slides, with all those bullet points stating the obvious, a continuation of this style? Let's all move over to the Edmund Tufte website, or wikipaedia.

Back to the book.  Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive,  started as a course of lectures for undergraduates.  However, they seem to be the sort of pure science undergrads who have never read any politics, economics, geography, ecology or anthropology. Maybe at that stage and given the normal state of knowledge in America about the non-American world, it is a valid assumption. Some American examples are given lest the message is missed at home.

Here is what you learn at the beginning of the book.  Societies collapse because of five threats (memorise them for your multiple choice exam question): damage to the environment, climate change, hostile neighbours, loss of friendly trade partners and societal response to the problems the other factors cause. This even happens in Montana.   Then follow some interesting examples: Easter Island, Pitcairn and Henderson Islands (in the Pacific), the Anasazi (in the US near the border with Mexico), the Mayas, the Vikings and Iceland, and Norse Greenland. The later examples have writing and can document their collapses.  The reasons for the earlier collapses are developed by archeologists using a variety of methods and materials (carbon-dating, tree rings, ice cores, muck-middens etc).

At this stage, Diamond suggests that there are two possible societal responses which prove successful:  top down, in large communities where rules are created by the appropriate power structure which is capable of enforcing them, or bottom up, in smaller communities, where the consequences of certain actions are obvious to the whole community, so can be communally agreed on and self-policed.  Of course, these responses apply mainly to preventing environmental damage.  But they are also applicable to the other threats. 

He then goes on to discuss more modern societies and their problems: Rwanda (genocide caused by overpopulation), Dominican Republic and Haiti (different responses to similar problems on the same island), China (a mess of everything), and Australia (trapped by a "British" mentality, mining the wealth out of everything). The problem with a short chapter on such big problems, is that explanations become simplistic, but nevertheless they are new takes on old problems.  I personally had never understood that overpopulation was a source of the genocide in  Rwanda.  And to suggest that war is an inevitable outcome of conflicts over food resources is heading down a slippery slope to justifying it.

Finally comes a section called Practical Lessons.  This starts with a chapter on decision-making, taken from management literature, rather than political science, where you might expect it to come from, given the context and the title of the book.  Here he lists five reasons why societal decisions may lead to collapse: failure to anticipate there being a problem (we didn't realise it mattered), failure to try to solve the problem (he calls it rational "bad" behaviour, on the assumption that people are rational, even in their bad behaviour), irrational behaviour (admitting that people are not rational, now), and lastly, that the solution to the problem may be beyond current capabilities (he suggests this where technology does not yet exist, or the solution is too costly).  By far the most interesting (to me at least) is the part on "irrational behaviour", because it covers most of the real world cases: the clashes of values inherent in most political struggles; the influence of religion or conservatism, and the ability of society to change; the different access to resources that different political groups have, making the struggles unequal; the different perspectives of long and short term benefits; the motivation of capitalism; as well as psychological reasons: denial and group think.

But by now the book has forgotten about the other threats and concentrates on environmental damage. He then analyses the response of different industrial sectors (oil and gas companies, hard rock mining, logging, and fishing) to consumer pressure, showing how the big international oil companies are not the villains we thought they were.  This title is awarded to third world oil companies (based on a sample of one).  Mining companies become the new villains, as do rape and run logging companies in the third world.  He identifies that consumer pressure (and employee pressure in the first world) is an effective change mechanism in demanding products produced in a sustainable way.

In the final chapter, he discusses life in Los Angeles, where he admits that transport is a major form of pollution as well as overpopulation.  After debunking some excuses for doing nothing he exhorts consumers to get involved.  But he doesn't really say how, except to buy properly labelled products, and not to blame big business which is just motivated by capitalism (which has made America great).

So in the end, the book isn't really credible as a wake up call to Americans (or others) to change their ways before imminent societal collapse, due to environmental damage.  And it hardly confronts any of the other threats the author identifies as possible reasons for collapse.

Using the earlier parts of the book as examples, we could suggest  

• pick the biggest, most urgent problem to solve (climate change perhaps, or keeping those trading partners with oil and gas friendly)
• confront psychological denial with regime change (or is this only recommended abroad?) using legitimate political means, not war
• learn to live with less (non-essential products, space, convenience) like the rest of the world already does
• (and even) too much food can be a killer as well as too little.

But somehow that's not what you expect in a textbook on the environment.

Technorati tags: Collapse, Jared Diamond, book review

Broken April

Update
This review of the novel by Ismail Kadare seems always to be in demand. Don't miss the post about Kadare himself. More book reviews are here. Sometimes I write about music and films too.

I had to write this review of Ismail Kadare's book, but first I had to reread it, as ViolainVilnius had such a different view of it from me.  I was incensed by the fact she called it barbaric, when I remembered it being about the bessa (the honour and blood feud of the traditional society in the mountains of North Albania) and a sort of feminism, which so far I haven't found elsewhere in Kadare's books.  I've written this review from memory, without the book, so there may be a few inaccuracies.

So what is it really about?  The action takes place in the 1920s or 30s.  There are three stories intertwined.  The first story is about a young man, bound up in a blood feud for an earlier killing.  Over the month of April, in turn he must kill, pay the dues for the killing and prepare to be killed in turn. He is afraid, and totally human, but nonetheless, obedient to his family and the bessa (honour code of the Kanun).  The feud chosen by Kadare to explain the workings of the Kanun is actually a quite unjustifiable one, (an insult caused by a third party). It is explained that attempts (by a female relative) were made to buy off the need for a death, but this had been prevented by an obscure but stubborn old man who had the right of veto. Kadare seems to be trying on the one hand to point out the indefensible cases which the Kanun defends, yet to point out the logical system behind the Kanun.

The second story is about a young pair of city-dwellers, a writer who decides to take his young wife on their honeymoon to the countryside of the bessa, as a sort of romantic adventure for them both.  They drive about the bleak countryside in a rather smart horse-drawn carriage, at first visiting acquaintenances in traditional homes, where men and women sleep separately (not a lot of fun on your honeymoon).  The writer husband spends most of the time explaining the Kanun traditions to the wife.  This is a useful explanatory device from the author's point of view, but could have been rather boring for the wife.  Both of them take a romantic view of the traditions, without thinking much about the human results.  In all this, the wife is fairly compliant, but obviously someone who thinks for herself.

The third story has two characters.  The first is the Chief Steward of the Blood, who works on behalf of the Prince (Duke?), to whom tribute is payable in the whole region.  Whenever a revenge killing takes place, the avenger must pay the blood dues to the Prince, and attend in person at the castle to pay them.  The Chief Steward is a sort of tax collector who also does inspections in the region to make sure he knows what is going on, and records in the history records the state of each blood feud in each district.  His musings in the book are a sort of economic forecast of the state of the blood feuds (declining) and what he can do about it, (to revive some old feuds that people have forgotten about).  The other character is an arbitrator, a local expert on the Kanun, who spends his time settling disputes about land ownership and boundaries.  This allows some more explanations about how the Kanun works in practice, in areas not involving any need for killing. 

Gradually all three stories become intertwined, as the young couple journey about the region.  The writer points out to his wife, the blood feud killer who wears the appropriate armband.  While they travel about, often watching the arbitrator make his judgements, the wife becomes increasing detached from her husband and moves into a reverie about the young killer, with whom one senses she is imagining some sort of romantic attachment.  At one level this is understandable. She has come with her husband on her homeymoon, and all she gets is lectures on the Kanun.  In turn he wonders why she is so detached. 

Two stories end in tragedy.  The young man hopes to reach home during the period of the truce, while he pays the dues, but just fails and is shot.  In the other story, the young couple visit a village where towers which protect men from revenge are located.  It is forbidden for other people to enter the towers.   The wife disappears and then it appears she has entered a tower.  The implications of this are not made clear.  I thought that perhaps she would meet the young killer, but he is elsewhere.  The result, nonetheless, is the end of the marriage.  For whatever reason, she is not the same when she came out as when she went in.  One could say that she has chosen a more romantic and fanciful life.  Or maybe she has got rid of a rather boring husband.  It' was all left very unclear to me anyway.  Maybe I missed something really important.

As for the third story, the implication from the shooting is that the revenge will continue repeating itself in the region as long as there are people there willing to live by the Kanun.    It's interesting that the Kanun itself was first written down by a priest in the late 19th century. It's hard to think of this revenge killing being part of a Christian society.  Yet the Kanun incorporates a role for the Church and acknowledges its existence.  I managed to get hold of a copy of the English translation, but haven't yet had time to have more than a quick flick through.  It is written rather like a law, in numbered paragraphs, with the first chapter being about the church, and how people on church ground are safe from the bessa. The writer (in the book) claims that attempts to impose normal justice and policing have been attempted but were rejected by the people themselves, who preferred the Kanun, which after all had been around since before the Turks. 

Somewhere else I have read that wherever it is difficult to achieve normal policing and justice, eg in mountainous areas, where access is difficult and society is split into different clans or family structures, these sort of honour rules are required to form some sort of ethical structure by which people should live their lives and by which disputes can be settled. The implication seems to be that Christian or Moslem religions are not enough.  And disputes there always are, as there is not enough agricultural land to go round and the land is overpopulated for the amount of food it can provide in most years.  This means that the disputes need to be resolved in a way that reduces the population.  Perhaps you can tell I have just been reading Jared Diamond's book Collapse, about this sort of thing (review will follow).

Which reminds me about Patrick Leigh Fermor's book about the Mani, the people who lived in tower houses in the southern tip of the Pelopponese in Greece.  They had similar revenge codes, hiding in the tower houses and building them higher as they got richer and could withstand more attacks. Yet truces had to be organised so they could grow food. Or maybe the men stayed in the towers and the women did the farming, I can't remember. The conflicts there must have been also about overpopulation with very limited agricultural land in a remote and mountainous country.  And one could also think about the mountainous tribes of the Caucasus, especially Georgia where even today, honour is important.

So what is barbaric, the situation itself of overpopulation leading to conflict, or the method of settling the conflict?  Why do people choose to live in mountainous regions where life is hard?  And what sort of rules should they have when there isn't enough food for everyone?  And how do you make the rules stick with no judges and policemen available, and when religion itself doesn't seem enough?

And what did really happen to the wife in the tower?

 

Technorati tags: Ismail Kadare, Broken April, Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Mani, Jared Diamond, Collapse, Kanun, Albania

A Day Off or the dangers of the eclectic mind

I wrote this in January and forgot all about it. So its title was rather apt. In the end, I got totally hooked on Library Thing and never finished the review.

Having done nearly all of my filing (3 months worth), paid the bills, rung to complain about the lack of shower (ending with a discussion of the merits of the Polish plumber), tidied my desk and made a to do list for next week (rather than finishing the one for this week), I felt it was time for a day off.  So I started a book review of Ismail Kadare's Broken April, which I had been promising myself to reread for a long time.  I needed to reread it, and some other books as well.  I'm only a third of the way through the reread, but I decided to be disciplined and make some notes for the review as I went along, rather than rush something out at the end.

But when I looked to see what ViolainVilnius had written about the book, I found a new comment on the review.  This led me to a new website Stepping Stones based in Tirana and some really interesting photos, so I needed to look at those, her photo blog, her food blog and then her list of books.  I spotted she was using a book program I had never heard of, LibraryThing, so I had to investigate that (justified by my new year resolutions, which I realised I had forgotten to post, so another diversion). While there I spotted an article entitled "Ontology is over-rated".  I am always a sucker for articles debunking the use of long words whose meaning I don't understand, so off I went.   It's a fascinating read, starting with classifications such as the periodic table, and moving on to library classification systems (did you know that the Balkan Peninsula, Africa and Asia are all on the same level in the Dewey system to optimise shelf space in the library at the time, and nothing has been changed since?) The article promised to show how

that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies. I also want to convince you that what we're seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies

Then it goes on to talk about classifications which have traditionally been made  relying on definitions of what is important set up by experts in advance, which is quite the opposite of what happens on the web, where searches are made "on the fly" by users who are definitely not expert.  Most searches on Google must be by people wanting expertise about something they don't know.  Tags and links are the new future classifications.  But they suffer from signal loss problems:

Some people say they're interested in movies. Some people say they're interested in film. Some people say they're interested in cinema. The cataloguers' first reaction to that is, "Oh my God, that means you won't be introducing the movies people to the cinema people!" To which the obvious answer is "Good. The movie people don't want to hang out with the cinema people."

The article is really interesting about social networks and people's tagging strategies in del.icio.us.  What?  You don't tag things?  How do you live?  That green book on death somewhere on the right on the top shelf? (Oh it's really blue!)

Lost the plot already?   So have I.  What happened to Kadare? Time for lunch.

Back to the library software.  I don't care about the software but I do like to get book recommendations and I hate not knowing what books I already have.  I used to have a pda with a Bookbag list, to consult in bookshops but the pda died and Bookbag now uses ISDNs for American editions which made it hard to quickly enter them. So let's see if this LibraryThing is any good.  It promises a list on a mobile phone and offers a book scanner. 

Rubbish recycling

Before I left the UK in 1997, I lived in Taunton.  It was simple to recycle stuff.  You took bottles, cans, paper and plastics  to the local big supermarkets (which also recycled their plastic bags) and clothes, books, usable junk to the charity shops.  Garden waste could be taken to the recycling centre and exchanged for bags of compost.   I assumed everywhere else in the UK worked the same way.

So it was a bit of a downgrade when we arrived in Lithuania.  The arrangement for our flat was that we put the rubbish in a bag in a cupboard outside the front door and it magically disappeared within two days.  Eventually we discovered we were paying the mentally handicapped "boy" downstairs a few litas for delivering it to the refuse truck which came at 3pm most afternoons, which we never saw, as we were never home.  This arranged lapsed one day when we were having a party, when the "boy" came to the door with an axe and told us to be quiet.  It disrupted the party a bit, but not a lot.  Luckily the following week, rubbish skips were installed just down the road and we could take out our own rubbish, in a civilised fashion, whenever we wanted to.  Eventually we found some places where bottles and paper could be recycled, eg in the international school car park.  I forgot to check how far recycling has got in Lithuania recently, but the plastic bag problem is still solved by making you pay for every single one in the supermarkets.

In Athens, recycling was non-existent when we arrived.  This is what you would expect for a city with a horrendous landfill problem (I wrote about it here, I don't suppose it has improved) and a country with an EU Commissioner for the Environment! One of our pet hates was the supermarket bags, which were free, small and not very strong.  This encouraged you to use hundreds with every shopping trip. Anyway, recycling started with little canvas bags for each household for your bottles and paper and cans, which you were supposed to put (all mixed up) into a separate skip from the usual one.  But as the usual ones were normally full, people just filled up the ones for recycling with ordinary refuse.  Eventually our local supermarket got big containers for cans and paper and bottles, but these were usually full or blocked.  I suppose this proved recycling worked.  

In both Lithuania and Greece, we found that when we moved, it was easy to recycle the stuff which would have gone to the charity shops.  You just left it out by the skip and it was gone as soon as you turned your back. 

When we came back to Oxford, I found things appeared to have gone backwards.  None of the big supermarkets in Oxford seem to recycle stuff.  There are no skips for private houses, (probably because there is no common land to put them on).  Refuse collectors come round once a week to empty our house bins.  They won't take cardboard which has to be recycled.  Bottles, paper, cardboard but not plastics have to be left in a green bin ready for the recycling truck, which is separate from the ordinary rubbish truck.  More recently we were given green sacks into which we could put garden refuse and cardboard, but this had to be collected by a separate truck again. 

As if this arrangement was not complicated enough, we are now being issued with "green wheelie bins" and blue boxes (to complement the green boxes).  Ordinary rubbish in the wheelie bins will be collected one week and recycling from the green box, the green sack and the blue box on the next week.  New green wheelie bins have to be issued to each household because of the extra rubbish to be stored to compensate for collections being only every two weeks. 

In our household we find it hard enough to remember to put the rubbish out once a week, without having to remember which week is what, and which materials can be recycled in which box.

Which brings me to Slovenia, where all is simple.  Outside in the street are skips:

The green one is for glass, the blue one for paper, the yellow one for all manner of plastic packaging.  The small ones on the right are for so-called biological waste, stuff for composting.  Everything else goes into the big skips on the left. 

Collection is available every day, so there is none of that confusion about which day the rubbish is collected.  It must be cheaper to buy containers on this scale than for every house.

Oh why can't the English learn to ............. be like the Slovenians.

 

Technorati tags: recycling, lithuania, greece, slovenia, uk

Lake Bohinj

I'm busy adding to my list of Slovenian blogs, thanks to Technorati and Flickr.

I haven't been to Lake Bohinj yet, but no doubt I shall soon.  Here's an amazing photo:

Thanks to Piran cafe for the photo and the link to gadling, a travellers' website.

 

Technorati tags: travel blogs, slovenia, bohinj

EU priorities

We all know that donors have different (perhaps more long term) agendas from normal people, but who knows, maybe these are really important short term needs in Lebanon. From my jobs newsletter:

LEBANON "Improvement of Ice Cream Quality"
Key experts Ice Cream

LEBANON Formulating part of the range of a Natural Body Care Products"
Key expert: Product Development

Clearly rebuilding can wait a little longer.

More (or Less) Colour in Tirana

First the good news. Here are some more photos of housing blocks in Tirana which have been painted colourfully.

 

But the bad news according to Stepping Stones, is that the Opposition mayoral candidate has threatened to paint them out, if he gets in.  It seems that the locals don't like them as much as the foreigners.

 

Technorati tags: Tirana, Albania, painted housing blocks