Sofka Zinovieff's The House on Paradise Street describes the Greek malaise better than many Greeks could have put it down. An aside: the book is set in the neighborhood where I grew up (Mets); even my high school (13^th High School of Athens) is mentioned, although it is not actually there any more. Here it goes:

What hat previously been exotic became annoying, starting with the details of daily life. What sort of country expects people to put their shitty toilet paper in baskets instead of down the drains? Why couldn't they install normal drain pipes like everywhere else? Why is it considered normal to have power cuts on end during summer heatwaves and winter storms, as though we were living in Gaza and not twenty-first century Europe? Why are seatbelts seen as an infringement of liberty (even for children), when they know that the roads are the most dangerous in Europe? Why is the Greek's idea of freedom interpreted as the freedom to park across the pavement, blocking women with pushchairs and pensioners, or the freedom to smoke incessantly, everywhere? Of course, once I started down this slippery slope, the questions came faster and more furiously. Why was it considered normal when we handed the surgeon a “small envelope” containing 3,000 euros cash when Nikitas had a minor operation in a state hospital? [...]

Above all, the thing I had tired of was the Greeks' obsession with themselves, with the nature of Greekness, with how they are viewed and how unfairly they are judged. Beware of saying even the slighted critical thing about Greece to a Greek as they will take it as though you have said their mother is a whore and their father her pimp. [...]

Looking back on my disillusionment with Greece, I realise that I had forgotten to place it alongside the extremes that mark so much of life there–a ratcheting up of intensity so that each experience takes you further than it might elsewhere. It starts with the senses. Colours, sounds, smells and tastes are richer in Greece (the tang of lemons off the tree or spearmint in salad, tomatoes or figs that taste of the sun). But these extremes continue so that emotions are stretched to breaking point in all directions. The lack of safety precautions is all part of the thrill; political correctness will never catch on.

On Bad Times, Courtesy of Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)

As the heatwave we are going through draws to an end, one could think of the blessing of bad times—not just weather—on us, as put in Out of Africa:

Sometimes a cool, colourless day in the months after the rainy season calls back the time of the marka mbaya, the bad year, the time of drought. In those days the Kikuyu used to graze their cows round my house, and a boy amongst them who had a flute from time to time played a short tune on it. When I have heard this tune again, it has recalled in one single moment all our anguish and despair of the past. It has got the salt taste of tears in it. But at the same time I found in the tune, unexpectedly, surprisingly, a vigour, a curious sweetness, a song. Had those hard times really had all these in them? There was youth in us then, a wild hope. It was during those long days that we were all of us merged into a unity, so that on another planet we shall recognize one another, and the things cry out to each other, the cuckoo clock and my books to the lean-fleshed cows on the lawn and the sorrowful old Kikuyus: ‘You also were there. You also were part of the Ngong farm.’ That bad time blessed us and went away.

The State of Greece, courtesy of Haruki Murakami

In the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami provides the most accurate description of the state of Greece at this point in time:

“Somewhere, far, far away, there’s a shitty island. An island without a name. An island not worth giving a name. A shitty island with a shitty shape. On this shitty island grow palm trees that also have shitty shapes. And the palm trees produce coconuts that give off a shitty smell. Shitty monkeys live in the trees, and they love to eat these shitty-smelling coconuts, after which they shit the world’s foulest shit. The shit falls on the ground and builds up shitty mounds, making the shitty palm trees that grow on them even shittier. It’s an endless cycle.”

I drank the rest of my coffee. “As I sat here looking at you,” I continued, “I suddenly remembered the story of this shitty island. What I’m trying to say is this: A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propagating itself with its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it-even if the person himself wants to stop it.”

Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin

Nations Tightness Scores

In this week's Science, a remarkable paper (DOI: 10.1126/science.1197754) compared 33 nations on their tightness vs. looseness. Cultures that are tight are those that have strong norms and low tolerance of deviant behavior; cultures that are loose have weak social norms and a high tolerance of deviant behavior. I was intrigued by the results, especially as Greece figures among the countries surveyed. A table with the Nations Tightness Scores may be of interest in today's soul-searching in this country.

From Centralia to Athens

As the financial crisis continues to unfold, both in Greece and in other countries in Europe, a seemingly common response, especially among young people, is to leave their country and move to greener pastures. The lead article of a national newspaper on Sunday, November 21, splashed across the first page the main reasons to leave Greece. The BBC Magazine also ran this week an article on Irish leaving, or wishing to leave, their country.

Why should then somebody stay?

People do move around. A few years back I visited Bodie in California. Bodie was founded in 1876 to exploit a deposit of gold-bearing ore, boomed from 1877 to the late 1880s, and then started declining; in 1915 it was labelled a ghost town. Today it is a tourist attraction. People did not stay. It looks like having been taken out of a Western movie. But it may be exactly because it looks like it is putting on a show that I cannot take it seriously as the stage of any human drama.

A more recent example of a ghost town is the story of Centralia in Pennsylvania.Centralia was deserted by a mine fire that probably started in 1962 and still burns today in tunnels beneath the town. The attempts to extinguish it were unsuccessful. In the 1960s and 1970s people complained of health problems related to fire byproducts, such as carbon monoxide and dioxide; yet residents were unaware of the magnitude of the problem until in 1979 the then mayor of the town and gas-station owner "inserted a stick into one of his underground tanks to check the fuel level. When he withdrew it, it seemed hot, so he lowered a thermometer down on a string and was shocked to discover that the temperature of the gasoline in the tank was 172 °F (77.8 °C). Statewide attention to the fire began to increase, culminating in 1981 when 12-year-old resident Todd Domboski fell into a sinkhole four feet wide by 150 feet (46 m) deep that suddenly opened beneath his feet in a backyard. Only the quick work of his cousin Eric Wolfgang in pulling Todd out of the hole saved Todd's life, as the plume of hot steam billowing from the hole was measured as containing a lethal level of carbon monoxide".

In the 1980s people started relocating with financial support from the U.S. Congress. In 2009, formal evictions began. The departure was not without acrimony. People were divided in two camps, those wanting to move and those insisting to stay, even ignoring the fire's existence, as narrated by journalist Joan Quigley in her book The Day the Earth Caved In. In a recent podcast interviewees relate how ugly it turned: families were split; a molotov cocktail was thrown through an apartment window at 4 a.m.; a woman was stabbed and killed by her husband.

Remarkably, a handfull of people have stayed in Centralia, living there, and refusing to leave their homes. In the podcast, eleven people were found still in the town, living literally on top of a fire.

Which reminded me of Julio Llamazares's novel La Lluvia Amarilla, a monologue of the last inhabitant of a village called Ainielle in Huesca, Spain, reminiscing about his, and the village's past, and preparing for his, and the village's death.

For what should then somebody, we, stay?

Perhaps because it is more difficult than giving up. Perhaps because it is more interesting to stick it out instead of throwing in the towel, because it is the decent thing to do, as some of the citizens of Oran did. So that, paraphrasing Gabo's, Colonel, after seventy-five years, or whatever the length of our life may be, minute by minute, we will be able to feel pure, explicit, invincible, and ready to reply: Shit.

A Review of Engineering Play

[A Review of Mizuko Ito's Engineering Play for ACM Computing Reviews ]

As many young parents, I watch children's software with a mix of opportunity and trepidation. Studies show that video games may benefit cognitive functions [1], but at the same time violence can he disconcerting. Moreover, children are increasingly spending more time on digital media creating, communicating, even building identities, so that the discussion about children's interaction with computers is getting wider and wider.

Mizuko Ito's Engineering Play is a welcome addition to the discussion, putting children's software into perspective. Ito, a cultural anthropologist, observes that such software already has a history of some decades. Putting on a historian's hat she shows how digital products targeting children have evolved from the 1970s to our day, and how these products interact with existing institutions and, intriguingly, how children themselves appropriate them, often in ways that stand in direct contrast to the expectations of grown ups.

Ito distinguishes three types of children's software. Academic software aims squarely at improving a particular academic skill taught at school. Entertainment software (also called edutainment) consists of games with a wholesome kids-friendly appeal—a Walt Disney version of the digital world—but without any pretense other than providing fun. Construction software builds on the ideas of Seymour Papert that the best way to use a computer is for allowing kids to build things with it; in a sense, passing the hacker ethic to kids. The LOGO programming language was a prime exemplar, but SimCity and related titles are also in this category.

The evolution of these genres makes clear, however, that the intentions of the pioneers in each of them notwithstanding, the path they eventually took was heavily influenced by the institutional and corporate frameworks in which they were adopted and produced respectively. Simply put, they did not change schooling, but rather adapted to it; and they did not change the software and media industry, but rather became an integral part of them.

In the concluding section of the book, Ito notes that if she where to place her bets on which genre has the potential to transform childhood learning, it would be construction, a position that will be close to the heart of many computer scientists. Rebecca Mead, in a recent article in The New Yorker [2], points out that the design of children playgrounds has been following two different tacks: on the one hand we have playgrounds with the four "S"'s—the swing, the sandbox, the seesaw, and the slide. On the other hand, we have playgrounds where children are provided with stuff like wood and metal and various tools for kids to do whatever they want with it. Construction software may be the digital equivalent of such imagination play spaces.

The book is good reading as it is. If it could benefit from something, it would primarily be some better editing—the prose gets heavy sometimes, although readers accustomed to social studies may find the style familiar (I wondered at the number of times "contestation" appeared). While there are plenty of references, there are two endnotes for the whole book, which raises the question why there are there in the first place. The anthropological research related in the book took place in the late 1990s, but it does not seem out of date. Overall the book deserves a wider readership than anxious parents.

[1] C. Shawn Green Alexandre Pouget and Daphne Bavelier. Improved Probabilistic Inference as a General Learning Mechanism with Action Video Games, Current Biology, Volume 20, Issue 17, pp. 1573–1579, 14 September 2010.

[2] Rebecca Mead, State of Play, The New Yorker, July 5, 2010, pp. 32–37.

From Dürer to Walton Ford

Episode 75 of BBC Radio 4's excellent A History of the World in 100 Objects series was about Albrecht Dürer's "Rhinoceros" print. The print was very successful: "Using wood-block allowed him [Dürer] to print around four to five thousand copies of this image during his lifetime, and nobody knows how many millions have sold in other forms since. This image stuck. In works of natural history, above all, Dürer's rhino turned out to be unshiftable, even when more accurate depictions of the animal were available. In the seventeenth century, copies of this print could be seen on the doors of Pisa Cathedral and in a church fresco in Colombia in South America. It's appeared on ceramics everywhere from Meissen to Liverpool, and it's now a popular T-shirt and a fridge magnet."

Dürer, however, had never seen a live rhinoceros, which may explain why the depicted beast differs from the real one. It has an extra horn, and it is"covered with armour plating, not really skin, and that armour plating is worked just like metal armour - with swirls and scales and spirals, which manage to look military and decorative all at the same time".

The rhinoceros was inspired by a real one. In 1514 the Portuguese nobleman Alfonso d' Albuquerque, who established the Portuguese colonial empire in India, received the rhinoceros from the Sultan of Gujarat, and, probably not knowing what to do with it, sent it over to Portugal to his king. It created a sensation in Lisbon, and then the Portuguese king forwarded it as a present to the Pope in Rome. Unfortunately, it never made it there. "The ship carrying it was hit by a storm off La Spezia, and sank with all hands. Although rhinos are competent swimmers, since this one was chained to the deck, it also drowned."

In our own time Dürer's rhino has been reincarnated in a painting by Walton Ford, an american artist that paints watercolors of animals in the tradition of John Jay Audubon. Ford straddles the boundary between illustration and painting, as his work, although deeply naturalistic, is frequently disconcerting. There is something in a painting that enables a second reading. One can see that in his excellent Pancha Tantra, which by the way has become a favorite reading of my toddler children.

One of Ford's most striking paintings is The Loss of the Lisbon Rhinoceros, a retake of the Dürer masterpiece, where the rhino is shown dramatically at the moment the water comes gushing over the ship, on his legs. Chained on the mast, the rhino is meeting death.

Apart from the wrenching imagery and the vivid colors, it is the different conception of nature in the two works, Dürer's and Ford's that struck me. In Dürer's print, nature is powerful, to be admired, its strength resembling that of human manufacture (so witness the rhino's armor), but transcending it. In Ford's painting, nature is drowning, victim of human vanity and incompetence. The difference five hundred years have made.