I have just learnt of the death last month of Sol Encel, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of New South Wales, and a leading Australian sociologist, scenario planner, and futures thinker. I took a course on futurology with him two decades ago, and it was one of the most interesting courses I ever studied. This was not due to Encel himself, at least not directly, who appeared in human form only at the first lecture.
He told us he was a very busy and important man, and would certainly not have the time to spare to attend any of the subsequent lectures in the course. Instead, he had arranged a series of guest lectures for us, on a variety of topics related to futures studies, futurology, and forecasting. Because he was genuinely important, his professional network was immense and impressive, and so the guest speakers he had invited were a diverse group of prominent people, from different industries, academic disciplines, professions, politics and organizations, each with interesting perspectives or experiences on the topic of futures and prognosis. The talks they gave were absolutely fascinating.
To accommodate the guest speakers, the lectures were held in the early evening, after normal working hours. Because of this unusual timing, and because the course assessment comprised only an essay, student attendance at the lectures soon fell sharply. Often I turned up to find I was the only student present. These small classes presented superb opportunities to meet and talk with the guest speakers, conversations that usually adjourned to a cafe or a bar nearby. I learnt a great deal about the subject of forecasting, futures, strategic planning, and prognosis, particularly in real organizations with real stakeholders, from these interactions. Since he chose these guests, I thus sincerely count Sol Encel as one of the important influences on my thinking about futures.
Here, in a tribute from the Australian Broadcasting Commission, is a radio broadcast Encel made in 1981 about Andrei Sakharov. It is interesting that there appears to have been speculation in the West then has to how the so-called father of the Soviet nuclear bomb could have become a supporter of dissidents. This question worried, too, the KGB, whose answer was one Vadim Delone, poet. And here, almost a month after Solomon Encel’s death, is his obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald. One wonders why this took so long to be published.
Author Archive for peter
Page 54 of 83
Crowd-sourcing for scientific research
Computers are much better than most humans at some tasks (eg, remembering large amounts of information, tedious and routine processing of large amounts of data), but worse than many humans at others (eg, generating new ideas, spatial pattern matching, strategic thinking). Progress may come from combining both types of machine (humans, computers) in ways which make use of their specific skills. The journal Nature yesterday carried a report of a good example of this: video-game players are able to assist computer programs tasked with predicting protein structures. The abstract:
People exert large amounts of problem-solving effort playing computer games. Simple image- and text-recognition tasks have been successfully ‘crowd-sourced’ through games, but it is not clear if more complex scientific problems can be solved with human-directed computing. Protein structure prediction is one such problem: locating the biologically relevant native conformation of a protein is a formidable computational challenge given the very large size of the search space. Here we describe Foldit, a multiplayer online game that engages non-scientists in solving hard prediction problems. Foldit players interact with protein structures using direct manipulation tools and user-friendly versions of algorithms from the Rosetta structure prediction methodology, while they compete and collaborate to optimize the computed energy. We show that top-ranked Foldit players excel at solving challenging structure refinement problems in which substantial backbone rearrangements are necessary to achieve the burial of hydrophobic residues. Players working collaboratively develop a rich assortment of new strategies and algorithms; unlike computational approaches, they explore not only the conformational space but also the space of possible search strategies. The integration of human visual problem-solving and strategy development capabilities with traditional computational algorithms through interactive multiplayer games is a powerful new approach to solving computationally-limited scientific problems.”
References:
Seth Cooper et al. [2010]: Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game. Nature, 466: 756–760. Published: 2010-08-05.
Eric Hand [2010]: Citizen science: people power. Nature 466, 685-687. Published 2010-08-04.
The Foldit game is here.
Railtrack and the Joint-Action Society
For some time, I have been writing on these pages that the currently-fashionable paradigm of the Information Society is inadequate to describe what most of us do at work and play, or to describe how computing technologies support those activities (see, for example, recently here, with a collection of posts here). Most work for most people in the developed world is about coordinating their actions with those of others – colleagues, partners, underlings, bosses, customers, distributors, suppliers, publicists, regulators, und so weiter. Information collection and transfer, while often important and sometimes essential to the co-ordination of actions, is not usually itself the main game.
Given the extent to which computing technologies already support and enable human activities (landing our large aircraft automatically when there is fog, for example), the InfoSoc paradigm, although it may describe well the transmission of zeros and ones between machines, is of little value in understanding what these transmissions mean. Indeed, the ur-text of the Information Society, Shannon’s mathematical theory of communications (Shannon 1948) explicitly ignores the semantics of messages! In place of the InfoSoc metaphor, we need another new paradigm, a new way to construe what we are all doing. For now, let me call it the Joint-Action Society, although this does not quite capture all that is intended.
I am pleased to learn that I am not alone in my views about InfoSoc. I recently came across an article by the late Peter Martin, journalist, editor and e-businessman, about the lessons from that great disaster of privatization of Railtrack in the UK. (In the 1980s and 90s, the French had grand projets while the British had great project management disasters.) Here is Martin, writing in the FT in October 2001 (the article does not seem to be available online):
Railtrack had about a dozen prime contractors, which in turn farmed out the work to about 2,000 subcontractors. Getting this web of relationships to work was a daunting task. Gaps in communication, and the consequent “blame culture” are thought to be important causes of the track problems that led to the Hatfield crash which undermined Railtrack’s credibility.
. . .
These practical advantages of wholesale outsourcing rely, however, on unexamined assumptions. It is these that the Railtrack episode comprehensively demolishes.
The first belief holds that properly specified contracts can replicate the operations of an integrated business. Indeed, on this view, they may be better than integration because everyone understands what their responsibilities are, and their incentives are clear and tightly defined.
This approach had a particular appeal to governments, as they attempted to step back from the minutiae of delivering public services. British Conservative governments used the approach to break up monolithic nationalised industries into individual entities, such as power generators and distributors.
They put this approach into effect at the top level of the railway system by splitting the task of running the track and the signalling (Railtrack’s job) from the role of operating the trains. It is not surprising that Railtrack, born into this environment, carried the approach to its logical conclusion in its internal operation.
. . .
In 1937, the Nobel prize-winning economist Ronald Coase had explained that companies perform internally those tasks for which the transactional costs of outsourcing are too high.
What fuelled the outsourcing boom of the 1990s was the second unexamined assumption – that the cost of negotiating, monitoring and maintaining contractual relationships with outsourcing partners had dropped sharply, thanks to the revolution in electronic communications. The management of a much bigger web of contractors – indeed, the creation of a “virtual company” – became feasible.
In practice, of course, the real costs of establishing and maintaining contracts are not those of information exchange but of establishing trust, alignment of interests and a common purpose. Speedy and cheap electronic communications have only a minor role to play in this process, as Coase himself pointed out in 1997.
. . .
And perhaps that is the most useful lesson from the Railtrack story: it is essential to decide what tasks are vital to your corporate purpose and to devote serious resources to achieving them. Maintaining thousands of miles of steel tracks and stone chippings may be a dull, 19th century kind of task. But as Railtrack found, if you can’t keep the railway running safely, you haven’t got a business.”
Reference:
Peter Martin [2001]: Lessons from Railtrack. The collapse has demolished some untested assumptions about outsourcing. Financial Times, 2001-10-09, page 21.
Claude E. Shannon [1948/1963]: The mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal, October and November 1948. Reprinted in: C. E. Shannon and W. Weaver [1963]: The Mathematical Theory of Communication. pp. 29-125. Chicago, IL, USA: University of Illinois Press.
Symphonic Form
Composer and musicologist Kyle Gann has an interesting post citing David Fanning’s quotation of Russian musicologist Mark Aranovsky’s classification of the movements of the typical symphony, a classification which runs as follows:
- Movement #1: Homo agens: man acting, or in conflict (Allegro)
- Movement #2: Homo sapiens: man thinking (Adagio)
- Movement #3: Homo ludens: man playing (Scherzo), and
- Movement #4: Homo communis: man in the community (Allegro)
This makes immense sense, and provides a neat explanation of the structure of symphonic form. Many of my long-standing questions are answered with this classification. Why normally 4 movements? Why is the first one normally louder and faster and more serious than the next two? And why does the first movement often seem more like an ending movement than a beginning one? In other words, why is the climax to the first movement so often more impressive and more compelling than that for the other movements? Why is there usually a middle movement that is noticeably less serious than the outer movements? Why is the last movement often in rondo form? Why do some composers (eg, Mozart, Mendelssohn) include a fugue in their last movements? Why do some composers include a song to brotherly love (Beethoven) or a hymn (Mendelssohn) in their last movements?
Of great relevance here is that the German word for movement (of a musical work) is Satz, meaning “sentence”. In the German art-musical tradition, a musical work first makes some claim or states some musical position, and then (in Sonata form) argues the case for that claim by exploring the musical consequences of the theme (or themes), or of its component musical parts, before returning to a re-statement of the initial claim (theme) at the end of the movement. In this tradition, the theme, being a claim which is developed, does not have to be very interesting or melodious in itself, since its purpose is not to please the ear but to announce a position. Beethoven, for example, was notorious for not writing good melodies: his most famous theme, that of the first movement of the 5th Symphony, has just 4 notes, of which 3 are identical and are repeated together. But he was a superb developer, perhaps one of the best, of themes, even of such apparently insignificant ones as this one.
The distinction between writing good melodies and developing them well strikes me as very similar to that between problem-solving and theory-building mathematicians – both these cases essentially involve a difference between exploring and exploiting.
Death under communism
Reflecting on the previous post and why the Slansky show-trial accused (and those similarly accused elsewhere in Eastern Europe at the time) were mostly executed, I remembered a chilling statement by Igal Halfin in his superb book about life under Soviet dictatorship:
In the Bolshevik tradition, death linked the individual in a final embrace with the brotherhood of the elect. Death could be a sublime, highly positive experience of self-sacrifice, or a negative experience, in which one’s expulsion from the society of men was rendered eternal. The unidirectional structure of the official autobiography takes us nearer the meaning of death in Communism. If in order to realize one’s true self one had to become a Party member, failure to do so meant cutting the story short. A life lost to the Party was a life aborted, an unfinished life, and it could be narrated as such. But nothing short of conversion to Communism fully satisfied the demands of the genre. This seemingly innocuous feature of Communist poetics inspired a morbid conclusion: the individual who was absolutely unable to see the light of Communism – human dross at best, a menace to universal salvation at worst – had to disappear; whereas at first Communist misfits were given a second and a third chance to reform, properly to complete their life’s journey and become good Communists, from 1936 onward they were shot.” (p. 274)
Reference:
Igal Halfin [2003]: Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial. Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard University Press.
Stalinist justice
The Guardian recently carried a brief obituary of Marian Fagan, widow of Otto Sling (1912-1952), one of the accused in the show trials that took place in the CzechoSlovak Republic (CSR) in 1950-1952 while under Communist rule. The obituary is written by their son, Karel Schling. Sling had been a communist party official, and was one of the 11 (of the 14) defendants executed. Fagan and her sons also spent time in prison as part of the investigations. The show trials were arranged at Stalin’s behest and took place throughout Eastern Europe, with the partial exception of Poland. The lead defendant in the Czech trials was Rudolf Slánsky, a Deputy Prime Minister who until shortly before his arrest had been Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC).
Apparently, the CSR President Clement Gottwald had initially resisted Soviet pressure to arrest Slánsky, especially because the two men were personally very close from their time in exile in Moscow. Only when threatened with arrest and deposition himself did Gottwald agree to order Slánsky’s arrest, while still delaying the execution of the arrest warrent. Sadly, an attempt by Czech emigre anti-communist intelligence organization Okapi to smear leading communist party officials by falsely associating them with western intelligence agencies resulted in an unsolicited letter being sent to Slánsky offering to help him to flee westwards (Lukes 1999), and this letter was then used as evidence for the Soviet allegations of treason against Slansky, forcing Gottwald’s hand. This false letter appears to have been sent without prior knowledge or consent of western intelligence agencies.
The dialogue of the show trial was scripted beforehand by Soviet advisors to the Czech intelligence agency, the StB. At least some of the accused had been promised lenient sentences if they followed the scripts provided to them, but these promises were broken. To ensure that none of the accused spoke off-script (as had happened, for instance, in similar trials in Hungary), the trials were even rehearsed. However, due either to independence of spirit or to memory lapses (the accused had been held in solitary confinement and tortured in other ways), not all the accused always followed their scripts: at times, defendants answered questions that had yet to be asked, for example. Because the trials were being broadcast live to the nation, the judges of the court – unable or unwilling to improvise responses – adjourned the trial proceedings immediately these off-script statements occurred.
Among those falsely arrested and convicted were some who were not even communists or ones not of long standing, including the economist Rudolf Margolius, Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade at the time of his arrest. Margolius only met his alleged fellow-conspirator, Rudolf Slánsky, at the trial itself. Despite a promise of a lenient sentence in exchange for following the trial script, Margolius was executed, along with 10 of his 13 co-accused. Three were sentenced to life imprisonment.
The injustice of this trial and the sentences imposed are not lessened by the observation that Rudolf Slánsky may also have ordered the trial if his and Gottwald’s positions had been reversed, or that others, such as Sling, had been brutal Stalinists when in power themselves. An innocent victim is still innocent even if he may, in some alternative universe, not be a victim. According to Lukes (1999), Czech StB agents were appalled by the torture used by their counterparts in Hungary and Poland. However, what strikes me as very interesting is that the Polish communist party leadership managed to mostly resist Stalin’s pressure to hold show trials and executions in this period, a subject deserving of another post.
Last month also saw the death of Sir Charles Mackerras, US-born, Australian-educated, British conductor and leading champion of Czech music.
UPDATE (2011-09-11): An explanation for Polish recalcitrance is provided by Stewart Steven, who argued that the post-war Eastern European show trials were the result of a sophisticated and cunning US intelligence operation, called Splinter Factor and using a Polish double-agent, to create suspicions between pro-Moscow and nationalist communists across the region. As with any writings on intelligence, the truth is hard to determine: there may or may not have been such a US intelligence operation with this goal prior to the trials; if it had existed, it may or may not have been important or catalytic in the creation of the trials; indeed, the publication of a claim of the existence of such an operation 20 years after the trials themselves may itself have been part of some later intelligence operation, and unconnected with the earlier events.
References:
An interesting obituary of Marian Sling in The Independent is here. If nothing else, it shows that the petty vindictiveness of the stalinists who ran the CSR in the 1950s was not shared by ordinary citizens.
My prior salute to Czech reform communist Zdenek Mlynar is here. Other posts in this series of heroes are here.
Igor Lukes [1999]: The Rudolf Slánsky affair: new evidence. Slavic Review, 58 (1): 160-187.
Heda Margolius Kovaly [1997]: Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968. New York, USA: Holmes and Meier.
Ivan Margolius [2006]: Reflections of Prague: Journeys Through the 20th Century. Chichester, England: Wiley. The Margolius family website is here.
Stewart Steven [1974]: Operation Splinter Factor. Panther (Granada, edition published 1976).
Poem: Mendelssohn Concerto
Following this salute to the Moscow Seven, a poem by one of the seven, Vadim Delone (1947-1983, pictured in Paris in 1982), written in 1965, presumably following a performance of Mendelssohn’s E minor violin concerto (translation my own, with help from a Russian-English dictionary, a strong coffee, and Google Translate):
Mendelssohn Concerto
Outside indefinite and sleepy
Autumn rain rustled monotone.
The wind howled and rushed in with a groan
At the sound of a violin, a concerto of Mendelssohn.
I have long been used so painfully,
How long I have not sat sleepless,
So tired and so passive,
Since escaping to a concerto of Mendelssohn.
Running a telephone wire,
Voice of my pain betrayed involuntarily,
You asked me nervously –
What happened to you, what is it?
I could not have answered in monosyllables,
If you even thus groan,
What sounded in the night anxiously
The tempestuous strings of Mendelssohn.
Moscow 1965
Notes and References (Updated 2010-08-08):
All poetry loses in translation. Working on this poem, I learn that the Russian word for violin, skripka, is close to the word for creak or squeak or rasp, skrip. In an earlier version, I translated the last line of the poem as “Fiddling passionate Mendelssohn”, but this does not capture the original’s double meaning of violin-playing and rasping. I am very grateful to violist Lev Zhurbin for suggesting what is now the last line. With no folk violin tradition in Russia (unlike in Moldova or the Ukraine), there is no equivalent Russian word to the English word “fiddle”.
Websites (in Russian) devoted to Delone are here and here.
Another poem about a violin, Joe Stickney’s This is the Violin, is here. Other posts in this series are here.
Five minutes of freedom
Jane Gregory, speaking in 2004, on the necessary conditions for a public sphere:
To qualify as a public, a group of people needs four characteristics. First, it should be open to all and any: there are no entry qualifications. Secondly, the people must come together freely. But it is not enough to simply hang out – sheep do that. The third characteristic is common action. Sheep sometimes all point in the same direction and eat grass, but they still do not qualify as a public, because they lack the fourth characteristic, which is speech. To qualify as a public, a group must be made up of people who have come together freely, and their common action is determined through speech: that is, through discussion, the group determines a course of action which it then follows. When this happens, it creates a public sphere.
There is no public sphere in a totalitarian regime – for there, there is insufficient freedom of action; and difference is not tolerated. So there are strong links between the idea of a public sphere and democracy.”
I would add that most totalitarian states often force their citizens to participate in public events, thus violating two basic human rights: the right not to associate and the right not to listen.
I am reminded of a moment of courage on 25 August 1968, when seven Soviet citizens, shestidesiatniki (people of the 60s), staged a brave public protest at Lobnoye Mesto in Red Square, Moscow, at the military invasion of Czechoslovakia by forces of the Warsaw Pact. The seven (and one baby) were: Konstantin Babitsky (mathematician and linguist), Larisa Bogoraz (linguist, then married to Yuli Daniel), Vadim Delone (also written “Delaunay”, language student and poet), Vladimir Dremlyuga (construction worker), Victor Fainberg (mathematician), Natalia Gorbanevskaya (poet, with baby), and Pavel Litvinov (mathematics teacher, and grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov). The protest lasted only long enough for the 7 adults to unwrap banners and to surprise onlookers. The protesters were soon set-upon and beaten by “bystanders” – plain clothes police, male and female – who then bundled them into vehicles of the state security organs. Ms Gorbanevskaya and baby were later released, and Fainberg declared insane and sent to an asylum.
The other five faced trial later in 1968, and were each found guilty. They were sent either to internal exile or to prison (Delone and Dremlyuga) for 1-3 years; Dremlyuga was given additional time while in prison, and ended up serving 6 years. At his trial, Delone said that the prison sentence of almost three years was worth the “five minutes of freedom” he had experienced during the protest.
Delone (born 1947) was a member of a prominent intellectual family, great-great-great-grandson of a French doctor, Pierre Delaunay, who had resettled in Russia after Napoleon’s defeat. Delone was the great-grandson of a professor of physics, Nikolai Borisovich Delone (grandson of Pierre Delaunay), and grandson of a more prominent mathematician, Boris Nikolaevich Delaunay (1890-1980), and son of physicist Nikolai Delone (1926-2008). In 1907, at the age of 17, Boris N. Delaunay organized the first gliding circle in Kiev, with his friend Igor Sikorski, who was later famous for his helicopters. B. N. Delaunay was also a composer and artist as a young man, of sufficient talent that he could easily have pursued these careers. In addition, he was one of the outstanding mountaineers of the USSR, and a mountain and other features near Mount Belukha in the Altai range are named for him.
Boris N. Delaunay was primarily a geometer – although he also contributed to number theory and to algebra – and invented Delaunay triangulation. He was a co-organizer of the first Soviet Mathematics Olympiad, a mathematics competition for high-school students, in 1934. One of his students was Aleksandr D. Alexandrov (1912-1999), founder of the Leningrad School of Geometry (which studies the differential geometry of curvature in manifolds, and the geometry of space-time). Vadim Delone also showed mathematical promise and was selected to attend Moskovskaya Srednyaya Fiz Mat Shkola #2, Moscow Central Special High School No. 2 for Physics and Mathematics (now the Lyceum “Second School”). This school, established in 1958 for mathematically-gifted teenagers, was famously liberal and tolerant of dissent. (Indeed, so much so that in 1971-72, well after Delone had left, the school was purged by the CPSU. See Hedrick Smith’s 1975 account here. Other special schools in Moscow focused on mathematics are #57 and #179. In London, in 2014, King’s College London established a free school, King’s Maths School, modelled on FizMatShkola #2.) Vadim Delone lived with Alexandrov when, serving out a one-year suspended sentence which required him to leave Moscow, he studied at university in Novosibirsk, Siberia. At some risk to his own academic career, Alexandrov twice bravely visited Vadim Delone while he was in prison.
Delone’s wife, Irina Belgorodkaya, was also active in dissident circles, being arrested both in 1969 and again in 1973, and was sentenced to prison terms each time. She was the daughter of a senior KGB official. After his release in 1971 and hers in 1975, Delone and his wife emigrated to France in 1975, and he continued to write poetry. In 1983, at the age of just 35, he died of cardiac arrest. Given his youth, and the long lives of his father and grandfather, one has to wonder if this event was the dark work of an organ of Soviet state security. According to then-KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov’s report to the Central Committee of the CPSU on the Moscow Seven’s protest in September 1968, Delone was the key link between the community of dissident poets and writers on the one hand, and that of mathematicians and physicists on the other. Andropov even alleges that physicist Andrei Sakharov’s support for dissident activities was due to Delone’s personal persuasion, and that Delone lived from a so-called private fund, money from voluntary tithes paid by writers and scientists to support dissidents. (Sharing of incomes in this way sounds suspiciously like socialism, which the state in the USSR always determined to maintain a monopoly of.) That Andropov reported on this protest to the Central Committee, and less than a month after the event, indicates the seriousness with which this particular group of dissidents was viewed by the authorities. That the childen of the nomenklatura, the intelligentsia, and even the KGB should be involved in these activities no doubt added to the concern. If the KGB actually believed the statements Andropov made about Delone to the Central Committee, they would certainly have strong motivation to arrange his early death.
Several of the Moscow Seven were honoured in August 2008 by the Government of the Czech Republic, but as far as I am aware, no honour or recognition has yet been given them by the Soviet or Russian Governments. Although my gesture will likely have little impact on the world, I salute their courage here.
I have translated a poem of Delone’s here. An index to posts on The Matherati is here.
References:
M. V. Ammosov [2009]: Nikolai Borisovich Delone in my Life. Laser Physics, 19 (8): 1488-1490.
Yuri Andropov [1968]: The Demonstration in Red Square Against the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia. Report to the Central Committee of the CPSU, 1968-09-20. See below.
N. P. Dolbilin [2011]: Boris Nikolaevich Delone (Delaunay): Life and Work. Proceedings of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, 275: 1-14. Published in Russian in Trudy Matematicheskogo Instituta imeni V. A. Steklov, 2011, 275: 7-21. Pre-print here.
Jane Gregory [2004]: Subtle signs that divide the public from the private. The Independent, 2004-05-20.
Hedrick Smith [1975]: The Russians. Crown. pp. 211-213.
APPENDIX
Andropov Reoport to the Central Committee of the CPSU on the protests in Red Square. (20 September 1968)
In characterizing the political views of the participants of the group, in particular DELONE, our source notes that the latter, “calling himself a bitter opponent of Soviet authority, fiercely detests communists, the communist ideology, and is entirely in agreement with the views of Djilas. In analyzing the activities . . . of the group, he (DELONE) explained that they do not have a definite program or charter, as in a formally organized political opposition, but they are all of the common opinion that our society is not developing normally, that it lacks freedom of speech and press, that a harsh censorship is operating, that it is impossible to express one’s opinions and thoughts, that democratic liberties are repressed. The activity of this group and its propaganda have developed mainly within a circle of writers, poets, but it is also enveloping a broad circle of people working in the sphere of mathematics and physics. They have conducted agitation among many scholars with the objective of inducing them to sign letters, protests, and declarations that have been compiled by the more active participants in this kind of activity, Petr IAKIR and Pavel LITVINOV. These people are the core around which the above group has been formed . . .. IAKIR and LITVINOV were the most active agents in the so-called “samizdat.”
This same source, in noting the condition of the arrested DELONE in this group, declared: “DELONE . . . has access to a circle of prominent scientists, academicians, who regarded him as one of their own, and in that way he served . . . to link the group with the scientific community, having influence on the latter and conducting active propaganda among them. Among his acquaintances he named academician Sakharov, who was initially cautious and distrustful of the activities of IAKIR, LITVINOV, and their group; he wavered in his position and judgments, but gradually, under the influence of DELONE’s explanations, he began to sign various documents of the group. . . ; [he also named] LEONTOVICH, whose views coincide with those of the group. In DELONE’s words, many of the educated community share their views, but are cautious, fearful of losing their jobs and being expelled from the party.” . . . [more details on DELONE]
Agents’ reports indicate that the participants of the group, LITVINOV, DREMLIUGA, AND DELONE, have not been engaged in useful labor for an extended period, and have used the means of the so-called “private fund,” which their group created from the contributions of individual representatives in the creative intelligentsia and scientists.
The prisoner DELONE told our source: “We are assisted by monetary funds from the intelligentsia, highly paid academicians, writers, who share the views of the Iakir-Litvinov group . . . [Sic] We have the right to demand money, [because] we are the functionaries, while they share our views, [but] fear for their skins, so let them support us with money.”
Spy vs. Spy
The only convincing explanation I have heard of the recent USA-Russian Federation espionage scandal, where Russian sleeper agents were living underground in the USA this last decade, deeply embedded in American suburbia, and regularly sending useless (and mostly already-public) information back to Moscow Center is this: That this was an elaborate financial scam with the sleeper agents being children of the KGB nomenklatura, and that embedding them in the USA as “spies” was a way to transfer state funds to them, in hard currency, legally. Of all the explanations I have heard, this is the only one which explains how the operation could have continued so long without people at the Center raising objections to the poor quality and low frequency of the information being transmitted. This explanation also perhaps explains the relatively muted reactions of both administrations – the USA and the RF – over the case: If these people weren’t real spies, Moscow would not be upset at them losing their cover. If Washington also knew that they weren’t real spies, and knew that Moscow believed them not to be real spies, then Washington would not be too upset at learning of their long undercover presence.
Art: Katie Allen at Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno
At the fine Mostyn Gallery in Llandudno, Wales, there is currently an exhibition of various contemporary artists, We Have the Mirrors, We Have the Plans/Gennym Ni Mae’r Drychau, Gennym Ni Mae’r Cynlluniau. By far the most interesting works there, and the reason for my visit, are some paintings by Katie Allen.
Allen paints intricate landscapes with acrylics, making use of the key features of these paints: that they are water-resistant when dry, and dry quickly, so can be over-painted on one another. Her paintings involve intricate borders and highlights, each flower and leaf bordered, with little dots of colour inside every one, an effect which must take hours of tedious, careful, mind-numbing (although also possibly spiritually-uplifting) work to produce. A reproduction of her Autumnal Arboretum (2009, Acrylic on Board, 153 x 122 cm) is shown here (courtesy of the artist’s website), although no reproduction can do justice to the intricacy of the actual painted work:
I find Allen’s work reminiscent of that of Peter Doig in its intricate representation of a landscape; I am reminded of paintings such as Doig’s White Canoe (1991), with its detailed lake-surface reflections of scrub and trees. Both are modern-day descendants of the carefully-observed landscapes of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. As with Doig’s work, I feel Allen’s efforts and skill are wasted on representational art. With such facility, intelligent imagination, and obvious energy, she could produce very fine abstractions.
Of course, all art is abstract, even fully representational art, since art is a manifestation of what is in the artist’s mind, of what the artist sees, not what exists in the world outside his or her mind. Clearly what is in Allen’s mind is a distortion – to me, a very attractive and compelling distortion – of the real landscapes that the paintings point to. Despite being representational, her work is much closer to the abstract end of the spectrum than to the realistic, pictorial end. By being very nearly, but not actually, abstract, her work unsettles me. In other words, her methods and technique are highly abstract yet still the paintings point to some real-world landscapes, and these two – the methods and the semantic signified – are in conflict.
How much stronger and more compelling Allen’s work would be if her paintings did not point to anything ostensibly real and external, but were pure abstractions. As with all purely abstract art (for example, music, islamic tilings), the paintings could well still point somewhere, but precisely where would only emerge with the act of painting and the act of viewing. Allowing the meaning of the work to emerge rather than pre-defining it, however, is so contrary to what most of us moderns think artists are doing (that they are communicating a message to us, and that message is pre-existing in themselves) that doing this requires some courage. The strength of Allen’s existing work shows that she has this quality.
POSTSCRIPT (2010-08-23): More on the abstract nature of all art, and the relationship between object, eye, mind, and hand, here.
Reference:
Anon [2010]: We Have the Mirrors, We Have the Plans/Gennym Ni Mae’r Drychau, Gennym Ni Mae’r Cynlluniau. Exhibition Catalog, Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno, Wales. 2010-05-22 to 2010-09-04.