Books

Wow am I excited! Anyone having difficultly coming up with a decent Christmas present for me (or possibly a belated birthday gift) could do much worse than this...

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John Reader - Cities

Forget Madonna. I don't just love New York, I just love cities. They are incredible manifestations of collective human life and energy on the scale of millions. To see them from afar the physical architectural form or to experience them from within, they are beautiful things (or they can be). To think about the millions of lives that intersect through these comparatively tiny regions is mind-blowing.

So when I spied this book on the shelves in the local Gleebooks I just had to flick through it's pages. It reminded me of all the times I played Civilization. Indeed, playing Civilization can sometimes feel like a history lesson, whereby ensuring the survival of your settlements requires you to know and implement all the things that cities have required to grow and prosper. So reading about how important the technology of Pottery was to the growth of the first cities was a familiar idea because it's certainly a Civilization technology that a player wants to discover early in the game. The book, though, gives a much more complete explanation of why it was such an important technology - that by helping women to boil a milk substitute for their babies they were able to wean them earlier thus allowing them to have babies at a faster rate thus accelerating population growth. At least now there is a real appreciation of the technology, beyond the thought that Pottery is important just because the structure of the game says it is.

There are some points of difference between the book and the game concerning the causes of the establishment of the first cities. The game suggests that cities are established because of favourable environmental conditions that enable settlers to have surplus food harvests. While the author doesn't argue against the importance of the environment, he writes that cities were established because they were gathering points for craft specialists; food surpluses came afterwards, necessarily, to ensure the survivial of the population. Instead, in the game, you begin with a Settler unit (that, later on, can be disbanded and exchanged for food) and quickly try to find the best spot to found a city.

In any case, the experience of playing the game and of reading the book are both enjoyable in distinct ways. Haven't finished the book, I'm up to the part where trade and commerce become important developments in cities in fourteenth century Europe.

Tags: Cities, John Reader, Book, Civilization, game.

I haven’t finished this book yet but I’m so intrigued by what it says that I just had to write about it. (Also, at the moment, we’re in Sale and it is so boring I had nothing else to write about!)

Malcolm Gladwell – The Tipping Point

Like the previous book I read, James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, this book draws from many different perspectives to illustrate a simple point: that little things can have a big effect. Obviously this isn’t true all of the time, there are special conditions that allows this to happen. When it does occur, Gladwell likens the effect to an epidemic – a change that has a seemingly insignificant beginning but spreads like a contagious virus.

To illustrate this point, Gladwell goes from talking about Sesame Street to The American Revolution (specifically, how Paul Revere rode through the night to alert the local American militias to the coming of the British Regulars). To explain the former, Gladwell talks of the intricate connections of people, and how these networks are centred on special people, and the subtle forms of persuasion that some people have to incite people to action. For Sesame Street, Gladwell points out how it’s creators were able to grab the attention of young TV viewers for educational purposes, in a sense making the action of learning contagious. Further, there is one more condition, which is basically about the environment or the context that allows the epidemic to occur.

The subject of this book is basically about psychology but it’s the way that this information is presented that makes it interesting. In the words of Gladwell, this book is sticky. As Sesame Street uses fantasy and advertising techniques to be addictive viewing, this book reads like a blockbuster thriller: it begins with a sensational mystery and then introduces characters and situations in an attempt to solve the puzzle. Though I’m only halfway through I presume from the Table of Contents that there are two climactic conflicts before the puzzle is completed. In solving the puzzle, Gladwell himself becomes a Connector, Maven and Salesman; he collects and aggregates the information from all sorts of people that he connects with, and then writes about it in a very persuasive way.

As I was reading this book I started to think about how this relates to me as a dancer. When Gladwell describes a Salesman, it sounded to me like a good performer: his power is his ability to establish an emotional connection with the audience and to be persuasive in telling the story or the idea of the dance. A dancer goes through a lot of training and explores a wide range of movement disciplines and draws from these experiences to dance well which, in a sense is what a Maven does but with “dance information”. And the best dancers have worked with a wide range of people (consider Narelle Benjamin, who has worked with just about every major contemporary dance company in the country and even with the Australian Ballet).

Anyway, back to the book. I’m flying through it at a pretty rapid rate. It’s such a fascinating read and definitely recommended. (Damn if that was a really crap conclusion but I just ran out of words. Just read it!)

Tags: Book, The Tipping Point, Dance.

Was having a nice coffee down at Sappho Books, with live Jazz music in the background, a fabulously warm winter afternoon, only to find myself blowing blood out of my nose. Pretty.

Anyway, after the craziness of last night, the final performance and the subsequent partying and excess consumption of alcohol at various locations around Sydney, I just wanted a nice relaxing afternoon of nothing. Picked up the latest Dance Australia with the review of The Show though unfortunately from Melbourne, the show had grown alot since then. Then wandered down to Gleebooks and bought Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, having finished James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds a couple of days ago. I would have spent more time at Sappho Books but the nose bleed and the dizziness, not to mention the coffee that I spilt on myself, forced me to go home and have a lie down.

Meanwhile, Sappho Books on a lazy Sunday afternoon might end up being a regular thing. It's quite nice out there.

Apologies for the boring post. I could talk about last night's drinking, the random guy, ST's b/f punching someone in the mouth at Stonewall. But I'm not in the mood at the moment.

Tag: Sappho Books, Gleebooks.

James Surowiecki - The Wisdom Of Crowds

I was planning to write about Steven Johnson's book and, while I thought that was a good read, this one is utterly amazing. I only bought it on Sunday and, while I haven't finished it, I getting through it quite quickly. The scope of the book is staggering, covering all manner of things from the mundane like pedestrians in downtown Manhattan and hanging out at bars to the complex and significant like intelligence agencies predicting terrorist activity (not to mention the Challenger Space Shuttle, speaking of which the Space Shuttle Discovery just took off from Cape Canaveral - bon voyage!). Like Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You, this book is based on an idea that goes against popularly held beliefs. but in this instance there are far-reaching consequences of Surowiecki's idea that stirs the mind and it's exciting to think about how it relates to other things in my life.

Like working as a team in a dance company. I've always been a firm believer that it is in the best interest of the group to take care of one's own responsibilities in a self-centred kind of way, a belief that gets challenged by my more conventional notion of being considerate, reinforced by the actions of some of the other dancers. But it's good to be presented with possibility that there is a general and rational explanation as to why this is the most rational thing to do. Sure, the general workings of a conventional dance company is top-down but there are situations like the traditional fire dance, where pathways aren't specifically set but the endpoints are, where this is absolutely relevant and there must be other such situations that require decisions to be made.

That was a slight digression. What about the tipping competition? Why am I beating the collective group (and thus earning the general mistrust from the other tippers)? I've always thought that the general discussion about how people are going to tip is detrimental and this book suggests that this may be an explanation. I don't talk about tipping until the first kick-off (or however they start the match) but maybe if we all did the group would probably fare better. I guess, too, that some of the other tipper are what I call emotionally involved, tipping Queensland in the Origin and going against their better judgement purely because of loyalty. Maybe it's just because the group is not all that big and I'm just a really lucky guy.

Anyway, back to the book. It fires up the brain. So much so that the first night I had the book I simply couldn't get to sleep, my brain just couldn't stop thinking about it. It discusses many questions like "what's the best way to find a sunken submarine?", "Should I phone a friend or should I ask the audience?", "Who was responsible for the Challenger explosion?", "Should we place bets on when Al Qaeda is going to strike next?" I do read predominantly non-fiction books so I'm a bit biased but it's such an intriguing page-turner, it's a must-read.

Tags: The Wisdom Of Crowds, Book, James Surowiecki.

Lots of little things this week.

- Boomerang. Not only does it go there and back, it also goes up and down. And boy did we hit a low this week! Thankfully it bounced right back and the last few performances this week felt pretty good.
- Pain. With alot of the traditional dances, the idea of "do it on the left" isn't really relevant. Suffice to say that I'm feeling rather lopsided and the left side of my lower back is quite tight. Carrying a canoe on your back five nights a week really doesn't help either. Also, my left wrist is sore. Not to mention the foot injury from Japan.
- Steven Johnson - Everything Bad Is Good For You. Super-fast read, extremely interesting and yet it sounded so commonsensical it didn't seem as significant as I was expecting. Of course playing computer games is good for you, how can you possibly think otherwise?
- Lunch Date. How long has it been since I've been on a date??? This time around it was pub grub and wine, a get to know you, a friend of a friend's boyfriend. We've already locked in our next date which has been postponed slightly (for good reason) which brings me to my next point...
- Disappointment. The last three sets of tickets that I've bought for *friends* have ended up being no-shows. That's seven non-refundable tickets too many. And let it be said that tickets are usually non-refundable. Three of those tickets I had to book through the company because the show has been selling so well. Luckily the last two I was able to pass onto one of the backstage crew's friend but that still leaves five tickets I have to account for. I am NEVER buying tickets for people ever again (unless they're for family). Not to mention several cancelled engagements with friends this week.
- Feast. Because it was DM's last performance day with the company, a friend of the company cooked up a Saturday post-matinee feast TSI-style for us which was very tasty. A bit too tasty, I went back for fourths, had to have a post-feast nap and felt extremely heavy and fat for the Saturday night show. Twenty four hours later, I still don't feel hungry. It's interesting, too, the similarity between TSI food and Filipino food, the only thing missing was the pig but I guess that would have been too difficult to fit into a Sydney Opera House board room. There was a spectacular harbour view from the board room, one wonders how anyone here gets any work done with such a distraction.
- Mars Lounge. Happy belated birthday ST. Name-on-the-door situation. Smokey, despite the new anti-smoking laws. Pop dance music with occasional live instruments over the top. Expensive but tasty cocktails.

Tags: Jhuny ('cos I couldn't really tag it any other way!).