International – Page 3 – For the fainthearted . . .

Chaos in the studio

A friend talks with enthusiasm about his visit to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, particularly the gallery’s re-creation of the studio of the Francis Bacon.

Bacon once commented of his studio, ‘I feel at home here in this chaos because chaos suggests images to me.’

Inch by inch, the gallery created an exact rebuilding of the place in which Bacon produced his work and Bacon’s idea of chaos is truly chaotic. His studio is not merely untidy, it is a confined space completely filled with mess. While some need …

The life and death of privacy

‘Privacy has been extinguished. It is now a zombie,’ says Professor Shoshana Zuboff in an interview in the Financial Times.

If privacy has died, how long had it survived? Perhaps not as long as imagined.

When did our ideas of privacy develop? Was it with the emergence of an urban society where the sheer size of the population made anonymity possible? Was it with the growth of affluence, affording people the opportunity to close the front door of their own home and in so doing enter a private and …

Sat around the telly

Not watching enough television to make an investment in Sky worthwhile, I instead pay €10 a month to have something called iBox. Via an Internet connection, it adds the range of terrestrial British channels to the Irish channels available with Saorview.

There are dozens of channels and nothing to watch. The dross combines into The Strictly Masked Ice Singer Factor, or something else as horrible as a circle of Dante’s Inferno or Orwell’s Room 101. Audiences are tiny, advertising budgets are splintered, nothing other than air filler can be …

And what are you thinking?

‘What’s on your mind, Ian?’ asks the ‘status’ box on Facebook. It is a question they have asked for the past decade or so.

It seems an odd question, even a silly one, how many people are going to sit and type into a public web page the stuff that is going through their mind? It’s not that thoughts are unrepeatable in polite company, it’s that they are just boring. Does anyone really want to know about the stuff that fills the waking hours of most people’s lives? Wouldn’t a …

Triskaidekaphobia and other pieces of silliness

‘Friday the Thirteenth tomorrow, sir.’

‘Yes. Never mind the date, it’s Friday.’

Of course, were I to have dismissed as nonsensical the notion that 13 was somehow an unlucky number, I would have been guilty of imposing my worldview on the student. A post-modern word is one where the views of everyone are treated as equal, even if those views are not evidence-based

The post-modern approach in which every viewpoint is treated as being of equal validity can lead to unlikely ideas gaining currency. Esoteric theories abound in every corner …

Missing a battle

It was in reading Sebastian Faulks’ Snow Country at the weekend that first heard of the Brusilov Offensive. The protagonist of the story talks of the First World War conflict on the Eastern Front that had cost one million lives. A Internet search revealed that the three month long battle in Galicia had drawn in 1.7 million soldiers from the Russian Empire and 1,060,000 from the Central Powers, the majority of them from the Empire of Austria-Hungary.

The offensive was a major omission from the history I learned. Having studied …