Tag: 2020

An Updated Original Language

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

It was a while ago now but I mentioned I was reading For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. While this was likely over two months ago, I did take a break from it for a bit and read some other stuff in between. As I start reading again though I’m reminded of something I’ve thought previously, and likely mentioned on here already. Books age. Or more precisely styles of language and storyline age. There is little we can do for the storylines. The wild west cowboy books will be of their time in the 1950s, they suffer from fashions, just as modern-day thrillers will one day do similar. This is evident in films of such things too. Pathetic female leads needing rescued by some heroic man is an ideal our sensitivities in 2020 are acutely aware. Perhaps the issue then is not the period but the quality of book. Books like this don’t last the test of time because they were never supposed to yet plenty from the period still make for great reading.

With that, there are plenty of books from the 1850s let alone the 1950s which still feel highly readable. Perhaps they are just so well written that they become ageless. For Whom The Bell Tolls unfortunately doesn’t feel like that. It is a classic of literature, Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I enjoyed The Old Man & The Sea, which is a beautifully written story. There is something with this latest book which I can’t quite shake though. It feels like I’m reading a dated 1950s movie. It feels clunky and old fashioned and I didn’t expect it to. It’s an easy read, and not unenjoyable. The subject matter is one that interests me too but the language and imagery it creates have aged, and it’s aged to it’s detriment unfortunately.

This has got me thinking about a solution which I am aware is unfeasible. When I read books written by foreign authors, if the story is well known enough, it has likely been translated more than once since it’s publication. Recently, let’s say in the last ten years, Faber & Faber produced a new translation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba The Greek. From reviews it is a decent translation, less difficult to get through than the previous apparently but I’m cautious of that idea and it’s entirely subjective. Do some research on the Russian masters and you’ll discover multiple translations, evidently varying in quality enormously. You have to be careful to read the right ones otherwise your experience of one of the greats could be confusingly different to other peoples. When reading the introduction to Knut Hamsun’s Hunger the translator says the first translation was so bad, and he gave examples, that certain parts of the text had completely different meanings to the original. Translations are important.

What then for original versions. If someone translates Hemingway into Spanish, do they attempt to recreate and honour the exact style of the original or do they attempt to make it more accessible for the modern audience. Language evolves and translators are of their time. They can’t take liberties of course but a good translator is in some cases as important as the author. In that case, am I left with the unfortunate realisation that while books originally in foreign languages may evolve for me as language does but those originally in English will be doomed to age like the time they were born in. It could just be this current book, as many from that time don’t give off such an impression, but certainly it won’t be alone, other previously celebrated books and authors will disappear with the times too.

Which leads to the unthinkable, do we need books to be updated in their original languages too? There is no straightforward answer but unless they’re illegible through age the answer is likely no, don’t damage the intellectual property and creation of an artist. Could you imagine them touching up the Mona Lisa, giving her haircut a modern look. Yet it’s done in music with covers in a way. There is something that sits uncomfortably with the idea and I find it reassuring to feel that. Let the greats be greats and if their creation lasts whatever the evolution society hurls at them then great. If not, well so be it. As I said, unthinkable, yet the issue still remains.

Wild Eyed Crazy Bernie

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

It’s good to see Bernie is doing well in the Democratic primaries. He came second to Buttigeig in Iowa by less than a thousand votes but has won the next two in New Hampshire and Nevada. Today sees South Carolina before Super Tuesday on well Tuesday of next week. I don’t care what people people say, for anyone familiar with Sky Sports’ sensationalising of football, Super Tuesday sounds ridiculous and merely highlights through which prism we view the world now. I think I understand how their voting system works although I will admit there is probably bits I miss out on. They get votes in each state which leads to getting delegates and super delegates based on their share of the vote to represent them at the Democratic national convention or whatever it’s called, the one with the most wins will get the pleasure of going up against the big bad wolf Trump. I wonder how may Supers they can fit in that contest especially if it ends up being crazy Bernie the wild eyed Socialist running.

Having recent experience of elections and what turned out to be the inevitable disappointment of losing, Bernie going up against Trump makes me nervous. It is impossible to deny the parallels with British politics of recent times. The populist Socialist Corbyn against the populist right winger Johnson. Despite the fact anyone with any sense could see the folly of voting for Johnson and only three months down the line it’s already seemingly falling to pieces, although the same was said about Trump, the establishment and their media did anything and everything they could to keep Corbyn from coming to power. Better the devil you know who does your bidding than the devil you don’t who wants you to pay some tax. For this reason I am nervous then. Even publications like the Economist who I am finding myself starting to trust are focusing a little too much on unelectable Bernie. I have seen the power of the media in the UK and don’t doubt for a second that despite the partisan nature of American politics they would do anything in their power to prevent Bernie from coming to power, even if that means another four years of Trump and four years of him knowing he doesn’t need to worry about being re-elected. You can even see the parallels within the American Democratic and British Labour parties as those who hold the power try frantically to repeat their success of last time when they got Hillary Clinton in with the self-defeating behaviour of many within Labour who would rather their own party were not elected than one led by Jeremy Corbyn.

Politics and power is dirty. I am not American but their politics affects so much of the world and is covered so much in our own media that it is impossible not to take an interest. I hope I am proved wrong because I would love to see Bernie in The White House and Trump back in the penthouse of one of his failing towers, but we’ve already had a trial run for this exact situation and it didn’t end well. If you repeat enough times how unelectable someone is he may just end up being so. We had turkeys voting for Christmas, will they be voting for Thanksgiving this time around?

An Obsessive Future Fly-By

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A quick look back through the decades will bring up the most fascinating future predictions about the present. A quick look online gives a scary amount of reasonably accurate predictions. These predictions are never exactly spot on of course but the ideas are usually in the right area. The man flying with use of mechanic wings is the jetpack, bubble cars that we don’t need to manually operate are self-drive cars and the ‘correspondence cinema‘ is like a clunky version of Skype. We seem a long way from having our own helicopters, we haven’t mastered telepathy or transportation, machines have still not liberated the workforce, we haven’t made it to Mars in person, not everyone is vegetarian and we’ve certainly not invented time travel. Curiously Nikola Tesla predicted that by now we would have given up stimulants such as tea, coffee and tobacco because of their harmful affects on the human body. You try telling that to the advertising executives and watch them laugh in your face. 2020 is quite often the year many of these predictions were made for, just realise you’re right now living in someone else’s future that they could never possibly have imagined.

Predicting must be fun though. It’s a job which you can’t fail at as long as you make predictions far enough beyond what you imagine will be your lifetime. These end-of-the-world cult leaders could probably learn something from that as their predicted date comes and goes. It is not just the crazy fanatics and the futurists of the past that make predictions though, it is you, me and everyone else on a daily basis. It never seems quite clear why we seem so determined to prophesise prospective future events but we seem to have made such a past time of it that it can often take up a fairly unequal proportion of out time. It is possible that we are living such miserable lives that it is this looking ahead that gives us hope of a brighter future, or we live with our heads in the clouds to the point that we forget that we are unable to actually live in these fantasy worlds we create.

The reality from these past predictions is clearly that while you may be able to imagine something similar to what may happen, at no point will it be possible to accurately predict events to come. Nothing ever works out as you imagine. We forget to live in the actual moment to the point that were the future to happen exactly as we predicted we probably wouldn’t even notice anyway as we would already have moved on to the another future. Failing that we get so obsessed with how we want the future to unfold and become so attached to the image in our heads that we are inevitably disappointed with whatever outcome actually happens. We waste so much time, life passes us by with all this predicting. Then one day you’re old but you never noticed as you were never really there to see it happen.

New Years Resolutions

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Happy New Year, it’s another year and another decade. The imagery of 2020 alone should get people excited. I’m also a day late but I wanted to talk about something else yesterday and prefer doing things my own way anyway. I hope people are more excited about the prospect of a new year than the horror of a new year – are we excited to leave the grim realities of 2019 behind us or terrified of their continuation. It’s been a good year so far politically as Scott from Marketing has been berated and run out of town for his disdain for and inactivity helping victims of the bushfires in Australia. Still no link with or acknowledgment that climate change may be connected or even a real thing as his bosses in the mining industry instructed him. There was a great moment in the video where he tries to shake hands with a woman who refuses so he grabs her hand and shakes it as the cameras start snapping away. We live in a truly corrupt world. I’m looking forward to Boris from Events similarly being run out of town somewhere over here in the next six to twelve months.

My plan for today was to talk about New Year Resolutions but as you can see from above I’ve already digressed and used up half my word count in the process. I had a small rant the other day about this particular topic and while I stand by it, I also stand by the fact this is a grey area and many people find credible benefits from such actions. It’s just a shame there’s so many others out there inspiring vomit instead.

I suspect I will have four resolutions this year. I’m not sure if that is too many or not enough as this is my first time and a new experience. None of them are that ground breaking either but then I’m not unique and I imagine if you break down all resolutions they’re all roughly the same thing.

Firstly like everyone else who feels like shit after Christmas I’m going to get fit. I have been putting it off for a while as I’m still nursing an old jiu jitsu injury. Sounds heroic until I admit I hurt my shoulder doing a forward roll in the warm up of the one class I attended. I will go back to this and also do some yoga. I love telling people I am yoga teacher because I once did a month long training course in India but all that makes me is a cliche. It does mean I am capable of practising on my own though so have little excuse for not especially when I understand it’s benefits. It’s the mornings I struggle with but apparently that gets easier with practise. Perhaps I can use some of the discipline required to do this each day. I’m only thirty-four and feel sore, more than I should at this age.

This links in with resolution number two which is to sort my diet out. I was discussing with a cousin over Christmas about joint pains and she was suggesting that cutting gluten out has reduced these pains in people she knows. I’m not suggesting I’m going to dive into some kind of gluten intolerance hysteria but it does show how important diet can be for overall physical health. How energised we feel, physical recovery, overall health – diet plays a role in all of this, just as exercise does of course. There is no golden rule for all with diet, something people always seem to miss the point of, but it is important to discover what really works for us.

One thing that sometimes prevents me from making the most of my time is that like many people the world over I’m suffering from addictions. In regards diet, certainly consumption of sugar needs addressing but for resolution number three it is time I addressed the procrastinating opportunities social media and constant access to online nonsense through my phone has. In mornings I don’t often do yoga or get started properly with my day because I spend an hour checking out whats going on in the world of football – a soap opera for men – and I apologise for the gender stereotyping but it’s a stereotype for a reason. Phones allow for procrastination and we waste so much time in the day as a result. There have been times in the past that I have intentionally gone the full day without using technology, and by evening I have run out of things to do I have been so busy. Like giving up smoking I will use the approach that when I immediately think of going online for no other reason than habit and addiction, I will give it five minutes and then if I still want to I will. It works with cigarettes, why not with other addictions too.

And finally I resolve to make something decent out of this blog. I doubt I’ve done over sixty posts yet which means I have over three hundred to go. It is daunting but also shows how much opportunity for learning and practise is still ahead. Doing this every day will always give opportunity for fluff days in which I have little time or am hungover but to make the most of it means I really need to be strict and mentally disciplined, try new things and push myself. Today I read an interesting article in the Guardian by Max Rushden on Bobby Madley, just as I had written yesterday about him. It was better researched and partly as a result better written. It was interesting to see and very useful to be able to compare the two, there are always opportunities to learn if we’re willing. I also want to step back to some of my original intentions such as answering philosophical questions from my Philosophy Now magazines which I haven’t even attempted, poetry or something similarly creative which I haven’t even contemplated and I just thought yesterday that maybe I should try a book review, so theres one of those coming when I finish my current book on how to utilise fear. These things are not always possible when limiting yourself to a small word count of four to five hundred, and while that has it’s benefits there is always scope for flexibility. Seeing as this piece is over one thousand words, and the only one over six hundred so far I am clearly happy to break my own rules.

It is clear to say that there was nothing really groundbreaking in any of my resolutions, but then there never are with these kinds of things. I also had to rush through them without any real details but it gives you the gist and the point as previously mentioned is to allow people the opportunity to realise there are many others out there struggling with the same things. Hopefully to know we are not alone gives a certain strength of resolve. I also just realised that resolutions means to find new solutions and resolve to find new ways to solve – in this case how we approach and live our lives. We are forever attempting to solve the riddle of life – these new solutions for a new year.

Mental Corruption

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

My plan yesterday had been to start talking about football and depending how it evolved, hopefully find myself on the topic of corruption. My brain however had a mind of it’s own and certainly was a long way from working. Today, has not been that different, my brain still has a mind of it’s own and I haven’t seen much evidence of it working.

It’s that time of year then when we all start to look at our lives and ask the difficult questions. I haven’t necessarily had a bad 2019, it’s been great in many ways but I’m ready for 2020 too, ready to see what it has to offer. I realised recently, or in the last six months I think, that worrying about how old I am and life passing me by is pointless. It stemmed from attempting to move into what could be considered the normal world and thinking that at my age I was ill equipped. In hindsight it’s clear now that the folly there was to mistake what equipment was required.

Of course these fears come from seeing how much stuff people are doing with their lives and while I know I’ve done some cool things, I know right now I could be doing more. I don’t like the idea that life is passing me by even when I know it’s not. I don’t want to be cheesy but ultimately it is all part of a process, and as long as you have a goal you’re on a journey, even if that journey is to merely achieve the goal of finding a goal to achieve. There are some podcast guys I listen to, specifically Dr Christopher Ryan for the sake of this point, who have achieved some known things in life and probably a lot of unknown things, as well as periods of doing fuck all, but he’s now in his late fifties and still evolving into something cool, achieving things along the way. I mention him not to idolise or replicate him but to highlight that really we get caught up so much with this idea of age and having limits of what it is we can and have to have achieved by certain ages. It is interesting really just to see people still doing things at certain ages when societies and many of our peers tell us we can’t or should be doing something else. Saying that it is also double-edged as I met some memorable people traveling still, who had been been traveling too long, who I felt should have perhaps stopped and done something else by their age. If living the dream has now become ironic then you may have gone too far.

I still haven’t managed to talk about corruption but that is fine. You see I’ll get there, that is a point to achieve and everything relating to it or not is just part of the journey in reaching it. So tomorrow will be the last day of this decade, and who knows what the next will hold, but I’m excited for what it will, and that includes how I’m going to get there. Who knows, if I make it exciting enough there may even be a little corruption on the way.