Category: ideas

“In the era when it is proposed that computers translating machines will soon be able to perform most translating tasks, what we call literary translation perpetuates the traditional sense of what translation entails. The new view is that translation is the finding of equivalents; or, to vary the metaphor, that a translation is a problem, for which solutions can be devised. In contrast, the old understanding is that translation is the making of choices, conscious choices, choices not simply between the stark dichotomies of good and bad, correct and incorrect, but among a more complex dispersion of alternatives, such as good versus better and better versus best, not to mention such impure alternatives as old-fashioned versus trendy, vulgar versus pretentious, and abbreviated versus wordy.”

There was a time in mid-20th Century that American historians and critics set American culture in the context of the rest of the world. “In the global contest with Soviet films and ballet companies, America’s most eminent historians and literary critics found themselves writing about the United States from a transnational perspective. They also served as guest lecturers and visiting professors overseas, confronting audiences and points of view different from the ones they were used to at home, even as they tried to spread the word about the virtues of America’s culture and civilization.” But “starting in the 1970s, it was no longer fashionable in academic circles to write about ‘America’ as a community of shared beliefs and values.” And over the next few decades, that sense of transnational perspective was replaced with more provincial perspectives.

“In June 1999, Bhutan became the last nation in the world to turn on television. The Dragon King had lifted a ban on the small screen as part of a radical plan to modernise his country, and those who could afford the £4-a-month subscription signed up in their thousands to a cable service that provided 46 channels of round-the-clock entertainment, much of it from Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV network. Four years on, those same subscribers are beginning to accuse television of smothering their unique culture, of promoting a world that is incompatible with their own, and of threatening to destroy an idyll where time has stood still for half a millennium.”

“Last December, Daccia Bloomstone, a 25-year-old Toronto artist, worked with a friend to set up up a commercial art gallery in downtown Toronto. They called it Virus Arts.” This, of course, was before the SARS epidemic hit, making the whole art-as-infectious-virus notion quite a bit scarier. Still, says Liam Lacey, it may be time to lay aside the old canard that human culture, and indeed humanity itself, is a virus upon the earth. “The life-threatening viruses that have hit this country recently, severe acute respiratory syndrome, mad cow and West Nile, with monkeypox threatening, are a reality check for the pervasiveness and elasticity of the extraordinary widespread viral analogy in popular culture.”

Toronto’s IdeaCity conference, which gets underway this weekend, is an intellectual celebration without direction, and that’s exactly how organizers want it. The hope is that, by bringing together some of Canada’s greatest thinkers for the mental equivalent of a jam session, great ideas will emerge, and walling in such broad-minded folks with a single ‘theme’ would seem to be antithetical to the effort. “But the event is still trying to find its feet conceptually. Some of the participants are genuinely ‘ideas’ people, but others are pop singers and wilderness adventurers.”

“A scientist financed by, say, the tobacco industry, is expected to declare whose wallet is behind his research. But what about a historian? The question may seem odd, but it has suddenly become more urgent as medical historians are becoming witnesses in some of the country’s most important — and expensive — lawsuits. This practice is causing a fierce debate among historians over the ethics of testifying for industries accused of endangering the public’s health.”

What is it with critics pronouncing this or that artist the “greatest” of a generation? Laziness, that’s what, writes Peter Plagens. “A critic’s pronouncing somebody ‘the greatest/most-important sculptor/bassoonist/director/novelist/cheesemaker/whatever of his generation’ says much more about the critic than the anointed artist. It says that the critic has reached a state of fatigue and impatience with taking forward-looking, right-now judgmental chances on quirky 25-year-olds who probably won’t pan out over the long haul, making the critic look misguided. It says that the critic is more comfortable looking backward. It says the critic has reached a plateau of self-importance on which he wants to go around conferring cultural knighthoods on artist-commoners who’ve managed to rise above their making-clever-baubles-for-the-rich stations to become, almost, big thinkers. And it says that the critic wants to get the authoritative-sounding but actually sonorously empty words ‘greatest’ and ‘generation’ together in the same sentence.”

Have we lost our critical distance from the cultural things with which we interact? “American culture as a whole has grown increasingly spellbound by electronic media to the point where now every other person we see wears a headset, has a cell phone to one ear or eyes fixed on some porthole of cyberspace. The critical distance that once appeared to be a virtue, or at least an advantage, now appears to be one more illusion, or perhaps a mere spasm of arrogance on the artist’s or the critic’s part.”

Is voting someone out of the Big Brother reality TV house much different from voting out politicians? “Television has always been a problem for politicians, but never more so than now, when it is questioning their very ethos and raison d’être. Politics is going through the biggest change since the emancipation of women. It is massive, what could happen in the next five to 10 years, in the meshing of direct and representative democracy. It is something new. Television has picked up on interactivity in the telecommunications world. That is driving it.”

“There are hundreds of millions – perhaps more than a billion – websites out there. If the normal distribution applied, then we would expect that most of them would cluster around an average in terms of size and link density. But this is not what is observed: although the web has a huge number of very small sites, the probability of encountering a big site is nevertheless quite high. up to now we have argued that the concentrations of media power and audience share that exist in the real world are the product of capitalist accumulation or inadequate regulatory regimes. But the web and the blogging culture are completely open. Yet, even in those ideal conditions, we see concentrations of power and audience emerging. Deep waters, eh? And is that curious noise the sound of Rupert Murdoch laughing up his sleeve?”