Category: The Arts
My Conversation with the excellent Paula Byrne
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Paula discuss Virginia Woolf’s surprising impressions of Hardy, why Wessex has lost a sense of its past, what Jude the Obscure reveals about Hardy’s ideas about marriage, why so many Hardy tragedies come in doubles, the best least-read Hardy novels, why Mary Robinson was the most interesting woman of her day, how Georgian theater shaped Jane Austen’s writing, British fastidiousness, Evelyn Waugh’s hidden warmth, Paula’s strange experience with poison pen letters, how American and British couples are different, the mental health crisis among teenagers, the most underrated Beatles songs, the weirdest thing about living in Arizona, and more.
This was one of the most fun — and funny — CWTs of all time. But those parts are best experienced in context, so I’ll give you an excerpt of something else:
COWEN: Your book on Evelyn Waugh, the phrase pops up, and I quote, “naturally fastidious.” Why can it be said that so many British people are naturally fastidious?
BYRNE: Your questions are so crazy. I love it. Did I say that? [laughs]
COWEN: I think Evelyn Waugh said it, not you. It’s in the book.
BYRNE: Give me the context of that.
COWEN: Oh, I’d have to go back and look. It’s just in my memory.
BYRNE: That’s really funny. It’s a great phrase.
COWEN: We can evaluate the claim on its own terms, right?
BYRNE: Yes, we can.
COWEN: I’m not sure they are anymore. It seems maybe they once were, but the stiff-upper-lip tradition seems weaker with time.
BYRNE: The stiff upper lip. Yes, I think Evelyn Waugh would be appalled with the way England has gone. Naturally fastidious, yes, it’s different to reticent, isn’t it? Fastidious — hard to please, it means, doesn’t it? Naturally hard to please. I think that’s quite true, certainly of Evelyn Waugh because he was naturally fastidious. That literally sums him up in a phrase.
COWEN: If I go to Britain as an American, I very much have the feeling that people derive status from having negative opinions more than positive. That’s quite different from this country. Would you agree with that?
Definitely recommended, one of my favorite episodes in some while. And of course we got around to discussing Paul McCartney and Liverpool…
*A Boy’s Own Story*
By Edmund White, I enjoyed this paragraph from the preface:
In A Boy’s Own Story I touched on all the themes of my youth: the exaggerated consolations of the imagination; the sexy but crushing teenage culture of the 1950s; the importance of Buddhism, books and psychoanalysis to my development; my first contacts with bohemianism, the sole milieu where homosexuality was tolerated; and finally my cult of physical beauty. In recent years politically correct gay critics have taken me to task for my *looksism.” I never respond, but if I were to I’d say “Put the blame on Plato, who originated the seductive if unwholesome idea that physical beauty is a promise of Beauty, indistinguishable from Truth and Goodness.” All artists are responsive to beauty in any form it appears.
How did “looksism” get turned into “lookism“?
My excellent Conversation with Stephen Kotkin
It was so much fun we ran over and did about ninety minutes instead of the usual hour. Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler sat down with Stephen to discuss the state of Russian Buddhism today, how shamanism persists in modern Siberia, whether Siberia might ever break away from Russia, what happened to the science city Akademgorodok, why Soviet obsession with cybernetics wasn’t just a mistake, what life was really like in 1980s Magnitogorsk, how modernist urban planning failed there, why Prokofiev returned to the USSR in 1936, what Stalin actually understood about artistic genius, how Stalin’s Georgian background influenced him (or not), what Michel Foucault taught him about power, why he risked his tenure case to study Japanese, how his wife’s work as a curator opened his eyes to Korean folk art, how he’s progressing on the next Stalin volume, and much more.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: What did you learn from Michel Foucault about power, or indeed anything else?
KOTKIN: I was very lucky. I went to Berkeley for a PhD program in 1981. I finished in 1988, and then my first job was at Princeton University in 1989. In the middle of it, I went for French history, and I switched into Habsburg history, and then finally, I switched into Russian Soviet history. I started learning the Russian alphabet my third year of the PhD program when I was supposed to take my PhD exams, so it was a radical shift.
Foucault — I met him because he came to Berkeley in the ’80s, just like Derrida came, just like Habermas came, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist, came through. It was California. They were Europeans, and there was a wow factor for them. Foucault was also openly gay, and San Francisco’s gay culture was extraordinarily attractive to him. It was, unfortunately, the epoch of the AIDS epidemic.
One time, I was at lunch with him, and he said to me, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if somebody applied my theories to Stalinism?” I’m sitting there, okay, I’m 23 years old. Imagine if you had traveled to Switzerland in the late 19th century, and you went up in those Engadin mountains, and you were at some café in the mountain air, and there’s this guy with a huge forehead and hair up in the air sitting there, and you went and introduced yourself. You said, “Hello, I’m Tyler,” and he said, “Hello, I’m Friedrich Nietzsche.” You would say, “Well, geez, this is interesting. I should have more conversations with you.”
So, that’s the experience I had. I had read Foucault in seminar because it was very fashionable to do so, obviously, especially at Berkeley, especially in a culture that tilts one way politically, and I think you’ll guess which way that might be. But I didn’t understand what he said, so I went up to him as a naïf with this book, Madness and Civilization, which we had been forced to read, and I started asking him questions. “What does this mean? What does this mean? What is this passage? This is indecipherable.”
He patiently explained to the moron that I was what he was trying to say. It sounded much more interesting coming from him verbally, sitting just a few feet away, than it had on the page. I was lucky to become the class coordinator for his course at Berkeley. He gave these lectures about the problem of the truth-teller in Ancient Greece.
It was very far removed from . . . I had no classical training. Yes, I had Latin in high school because I went to Catholic school, and it was a required subject. I started as an altar boy with the Latin Mass, which quickly changed because of what happened at Vatican II. But no Greek, so it was completely Greek to me. Forgive me, that wasn’t planned that I was going to say that. It just happened spontaneously.
Anyway, I just kept asking him more questions and invited him to go to things, and so we would have lunches and dinners. I introduced him to this place, Little Joe’s in Little Italy, part of San Francisco, which unfortunately is no longer there. It was quite a landmark back then, and then he would repair after dinner to the bathhouses in San Francisco by himself. I was not part of that. I’m neither openly nor closeted gay, so that was a different part of Foucault that I didn’t partake in, but others did.
Anyway, I would ask him these things, and he would just explain stuff to me. I would say, “What’s happening in Poland?” This is the 1980s, and he would say things to me like, “The idea of civil society is the opiate of the intellectual class.” Everybody was completely enamored of the concept of civil society in the ’80s, especially via the Polish case, and so I would ask him to elucidate more. “What does that mean, and how does that work?”
He told me once that class in France came from disease in Paris — that it wasn’t because of who was a factory worker, who wasn’t a factory worker, but it was your neighborhoods in Paris and who died from cholera and who didn’t die from cholera. A colleague of ours who was another fellow graduate in Berkeley ended up writing a dissertation using that aside, that throwaway line.
I was able to ask him these questions about everything and anything. What he showed me — this is your question — what he showed me was how power works, not in terms of bureaucracy, not in terms of the large mechanisms of governance like a secret police, but how all of that is enforced and acted through daily life. In other words, the micro versions of power. It’s connected to the big structures, but it’s little people doing this. That’s why I said totalitarianism is using your agency to destroy your own agency.
That means denouncing your neighbors, being encouraged to denounce your neighbors for heresies, and participating in that culture of denunciation, which loosens all social trust and social bonds and puts you in a situation of dependency on the state. You’re a gung-ho activist using your agency, and the next thing you know, you have no power whatsoever. So, those are the kinds of things that I could talk to him about.
After he passed away from AIDS in the summer of 1984 — it was the AIDS epidemic, horrific. He passed away, and we had a memorial for him. I was still a PhD student, remember. I didn’t finish until ’88. There was this guy, Michel de Certeau, who wrote a tribute to Foucault in French that he was going to deliver at the event. It was called “The Laughter of Foucault.” I had these conversations with de Certeau about his analysis of Foucault and the pleasure of analytic work, which had been a hallmark of Foucault.
De Certeau taught me a phrase called “the little tactics of the habitat,” which became one of the core ideas of my dissertation and then book, Magnetic Mountain, about this micropower stuff. Even though Foucault was gone, I was able to extend the beginning of the conversations with Foucault through de Certeau.
I learned how power works in everyday life, and how the language that you use, and the practices like denunciation that you enact or partake in, help form those totalitarian structures, because the secret police are not there every minute of every day, so what’s in your head? How are you motivated? What type of behavior are you motivated for?
We say, “Okay, what would Stalin do in this situation?” Many people approach their lives — they’ve never met Stalin; they’ll never meet Stalin — but they imagine what Stalin might do. That gets implanted in their way of thinking; it becomes second nature. I learned to discuss and analyze that through Foucault.
I have to say, I didn’t share his analysis that Western society was imprisoning, that the daily life practices of free societies were a form of imprisonment in its own way. I never shared that view, so it wasn’t for me his analysis of the West that I liked. It was the analytical toolkit that I adapted from him to apply to actual totalitarianism in the Soviet case.
Excellent throughout.
The Nicholas Fox Weber biography of Mondrian
Definitive, this is by far the best biography of Mondrian we have or are likely to get. I am a longstanding Mondrian fan, and have read much about him, but learned new things on virtually every page. The book is also fun, here is one excerpt:
Initially Mondrian did not respond at all [to a question about surrealism]. There was prolonged silence following Breton’s inquiry. Then, in the void, Duchamp added: “What, for example, do you think of the work of our friend Yves Tanguy here?” Mondrian’s reply, after more thoughtful chin stroking, came firmly, but calmly: “I enjoy conversational games as much as you do, but I shall not indulge in them. I have seen Tanguy’s exhibition at Pierre Matisse several times and found it very beautiful but very puzzling. Yves’ work is much too Abstract for me.”
You can order the book here. How is it that Weber — the author of numerous fine books on modernist art — does not have a Wikipedia page of his own?
AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably
That is the title of a new paper in Nature, here is part of the abstract:
We conducted two experiments with non-expert poetry readers and found that participants performed below chance levels in identifying AI-generated poems (46.6% accuracy, χ2(1, N = 16,340) = 75.13, p < 0.0001). Notably, participants were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as human-authored than actual human-authored poems (χ2(2, N = 16,340) = 247.04, p < 0.0001). We found that AI-generated poems were rated more favorably in qualities such as rhythm and beauty, and that this contributed to their mistaken identification as human-authored. Our findings suggest that participants employed shared yet flawed heuristics to differentiate AI from human poetry: the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry and misinterpret the complexity of human poems as incoherence generated by AI.
By Brian Porter and Edouard Machery. I do not think that pointing out the poor quality of human taste much dents the import of this result.
AfD vs. Bauhaus
By their aesthetics shall ye know them:
It shaped modern industrial design and continues to inspire architects and product designers the world over, but to some on Germany’s far right, Bauhaus is nothing to celebrate.
As the East German city of Dessau prepares to celebrate next year’s centenary of the famed design school’s move there, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has urged local legislators not to glorify Bauhaus’ cosmopolitan style ethos, saying it negated regional traditions.
The AfD’s proposal, debated and roundly rejected by the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt earlier this week, sparked a predictable outcry: Bauhaus was part of the interwar flourishing of German avant-garde culture that was stamped out by the Nazis when they came to power in 1933.
There are many losers, so it is a debatable question today which political movement has the best aesthetics…
What should I ask Paula Byrne?
Paula Jayne Byrne, Lady Bate…is a British biographer, novelist, and literary critic.
Byrne has a PhD in English literature from the University of Liverpool, where she also studied for her MA, having completed a BA in English and Theology at West Sussex Institute of Higher Education (now Chichester University).
Byrne is the founder and chief executive of a small charitable foundation, ReLit: The Bibliotherapy Foundation, dedicated to the promotion of literature as a complementary therapy in the toolkit of medical practitioners dealing with stress, anxiety and other mental health conditions. She is also a practicing psychotherapist, specializing in couples and family counseling.
Byrne, who is from a large working-class Roman Catholic family in Birkenhead, is married to Sir Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare scholar and former Provost of Worcester College, Oxford
Her books cover Jane Austen, Mary Robinson, Evelyn Waugh, Barbara Pym, JFK’s sister, two novels, and her latest is a study of Thomas Hardy’s women, both in his life and in his fiction, namely Hardy’s Women: Mother, Sister, Wives, Muses. Here is her home page. Here is Paula on Twitter.
My excellent Conversation with Tom Tugendhat
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tom Tugendhat has served as a Member of Parliament since 2015, holding roles such as Security Minister and chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Before entering Parliament, Tom served in in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also worked for the Foreign Office, helped establish the National Security Council of Afghanistan, and served as military assistant and principal adviser to the Chief of the Defense Staff.
Tyler and Tom examine the evolving landscape of governance and leadership in the UK today, touching on the challenges of managing London under the UK’s centralized system, why England remains economically unbalanced, his most controversial view on London’s architecture, whether YIMBYism in England can succeed, the unique politics and history of Kent, whether the system of private schools needs reform, his pick for the greatest unselected prime minister, whether Brexit revealed a defect in the parliamentary system, whether the House of Lords should be abolished, why the British monarchy continues to captivate the world, devolution in Scotland and Northern Ireland, how learning Arabic in Yemen affected his life trajectory, his read on the Middle East and Russia, the Tom Tugendhat production function, his pitch for why a talented young person should work in the British Civil Service, and more.
And here is an excerpt:
COWEN: Okay. First question, what is your favorite walk around London, and what does it show about the city that outsiders might not understand?
TUGENDHAT: Oh, my favorite walk is down the river. A lot of people walk down the river. One of the best things about walking down the river in London is, first of all, it shows two things. One, that London is actually an incredibly private place. You can be completely on your own in the center of one of the biggest cities in the world within seconds, just by walking down the river. Very often, even in the middle of the day, there’s nobody there. You walk past things that are just extraordinary. You walk past a customs house. It’s not used anymore, but it was the customs house for 300, 400, 500 years. You walk past, obviously, the Tower of London. You walk past Tower Bridge. You walk past many things like that.
Actually, you’re walking past a lot of modern London as well, and you see the reality of London, which is — the truth is, London isn’t a single city. It’s many, many different villages, all cobbled together in various different ways. I think outsiders miss the fact that there’s a real intimacy to London that you miss if all you’re doing is you’re going on the Tube, or if you’re going on the bus. If you walk down that river, you see a very, very different kind of London. You see real communities and real smaller communities.
And:
COWEN: Can the British system of government in its current parliamentary form — how well can that work without broadly liberal individualistic foundations in public opinion?
TUGENDHAT: I think it works extremely well at ensuring that truly liberal foundations are maintained. I mean that not in the American sense; I mean in a genuine, the old liberal tradition that emerges from the UK in the 1700s, 1800s, where freedom of thought, freedom of assembly, the right to own property, and all those principles that then became embedded in various different constitutions around the world, including your own. I think it does very well at doing that because it forces you, our system forces you, into partnership. There are 650 people who you have to work with in some way in Parliament over the next four or five years.
And there’s four of us currently going for leadership at the Conservative Party. There’s one reason why, despite the fact that we’re competing almost in a US primary system, the way in which we are dealing with each other is very different, is because we’re all going to have to work together for the next four years. Whoever wins is going to have to work with the other three, and the idea that you can simply ignore each other isn’t true. There’s only 121 of us Conservative MPs in Parliament, and what this system forces on us is the need to deal with each other in a way that you have to deal with somebody if you’re going to deal with them tomorrow. I think that’s one of the reasons why the British political system has endured because it forces you to remember that there’s a long-term interest, not an immediate one, not just a short-term one.
Recommended, highly intelligent throughout, including on China, Russia, and Yemen.
The case why culture is not stuck
From the excellent Katherine Dee, here is just one excerpt:
TikTok sketch comedy is in the same lineage of theater. It invites a suspension of disbelief from the audience, creators often play multiple characters, rapidly switching between roles with nothing more than a change in voice, facial expression, or camera angle. And importantly, it’s funny. When the whole feed is taken together, it’s almost digital vaudeville: a song, a short sketch, a physical feat, slapstick, animal acts and satire, one after another, in a personalized variety show on your phone.
And:
It’s a spectrum. At one end, we have Internet Personalities, with their cults of devotion. In the middle, we find fan culture, where some fans become prominent figures within their fandoms, stars in their own right. These Big Name Fans occasionally break out to create their own media kingdoms, as was the case with E.L. James, who authored Fifty Shades of Grey, itself originally Twilight fanfiction, and Cassandra Clare, who began in the Harry Potter fan community, before going on to write several popular fantasy series. At the other end of the spectrum are anonymous creators, whose approach to authorship is almost medieval: their projects are not about them as individuals, but the meme, the project, the aesthetic, the vision. They are less like the expressive individualists of Modern art, than the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages.
Much has been said about memes as art and the collective labor and imagination that goes into their creation, but it extends further than that. It’s not just memes. Creating mood boards on Pinterest or curating aesthetics on TikTok are evolving art forms, too. Constructing an atmosphere, or “vibe,” through images and sounds, is itself a form of storytelling, one that’s been woefully misunderstood and even undermined as shallow. Many of these aesthetics have staying power, like “coquette” and “cottagecore.” They’re not passing fads or stand-ins for personalities or subcultures. They are more than ever-evolving vectors for consumerism. They’re a type of immersive art that we don’t yet have the language to fully describe.
But that is the case with so much of what’s new. We won’t understand it until it’s in the rearview mirror.
Interesting throughout. Of course AI-aided creations will be the next step in this process. Maybe you don’t like a lot of these new forms, perhaps because they do not have the nobility and grandeur of say Bach. One simple point is that it is not optimal for every period in culture to focus on exactly what you want from it. This point is rarely recognized. Diversity across time is valuable as well!
Ian Leslie on Olivier Roy and culture
Roy argues that culture in the sense we have understood it is being inexorably eroded. It’s not, as some of his countrymen believe, that one culture is being replaced by another – say, Christianity by Islam. It’s that all culture is being hollowed out by technology, data, globalisation, bureaucracy, and consumerist individualism. Local cultures, in the sense of finely patterned, shared sensibilities, automatically absorbed and deeply felt, are no match for these bulldozing, ‘deculturating’ forces.
We still need shared norms of behaviour in order to function as societies, however. So in place of implicit culture, he says, we have introduced explicit “norms”: rules of behaviour and speech which aren’t felt or intuited but articulated, coded for, and argued over endlessly. Without instinctive standards for behaviour we have to thrash everything out, from the correct use of pronouns to how to behave on public transport or dress for work. “Culture war” implies some kind of profound division between people, but in truth, suggests Roy, our differences are shallow and petty and all the more bad-tempered for it. Scrape away culture and what you’re left with is negotiation. Everything is politics.
Complex, evolved, layered social identities are being replaced by a series of boxes, with freedom consisting of the right to choose your box at any one time (think about the way that sexual identity is coded into an endlessly multiplying series of letters). The oddly shaped flora and fauna of culture have been reduced a series of “tokens” which we buy and display in order to position ourselves versus others. National cuisines, musical genres, styles of dress: these are all just tokens for us to collect and artfully assemble into a personal brand.
Here is the full essay. Here is my earlier post on Roy’s book.
Civil War
I knew Civil War (now streaming on HBO/Max) was going to be good when just a minute or so in you see an explosion in the distance and only later do you hear the sound wave. [Mild spoilers may follow.] Shortly after, we meet war journalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst in a standout performance). I thought, “She looks like Lee Miller,” and seconds later, the name is dropped. In the next shot, Lee is in a bathtub—a clear sign you’re in the hands of a master. It is not without import that Lee Miller photographed Dachau or a little less obviously that she was a pioneer of the surreal. Both will reappear in Civil War.
In a scene where the journalists need to buy gas, they offer $300. The armed attendant scoffs, “$300 will get you a ham sandwich.” “$300 Canadian,” comes the reply, telling you everything you need to know about the state of the economy.
Civil War was written and directed by Alex Garland, who also made Annihilation, Ex Machina, and the underrated Dredd (the 2012 reboot not the Stallone movie). Many viewers expected Civil War to serve some lectures about red state/blue state politics, but it doesn’t. Tyler makes astute comments about the hidden politics (and reviews the movie here).
My interest was more on how the film portrays war—war is hell but it’s also fucking amazing. The photojournalists at the heart of the story justify their actions as serving a higher purpose, but in reality, they have become addicted to the adrenaline. Civil War shares themes with Nightcrawler. The journalists also share more than they think with the sick fucks who also love war because it gives them a chance to torture and kill.
A great scene at the climax incarnates the “when one dies, another is born” trope. The lead character starts to feel and gain a moral code, only to be killed for it, while the apprentice simultaneously sheds hers, emerging as a new, amoral hero. And it’s all caught on film. Karma is a bitch. The transition isn’t surprising given the logic of the setup but it is handled with originality and grace.
Recommended, given the obvious strictures about violence and serious themes.
How weird will AI culture get?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is one excerpt:
To the extent there is a lot of slack [with cost and energy], AIs themselves will create wild products of the imagination, especially as they improve in computing power and skill. AIs will sing to each other, write for each other, talk to each other — as they already do — trade with each other, and come up with further alternatives we humans have not yet pondered. Evolutionary pressures within AI’s cultural worlds will determine which of these practices spread.
If you own some rights flows to AI usage, you might just turn them on and let them “do their thing.” Many people may give their AIs initial instructions for their culture-building: “Take your inspiration from 1960s hippies,” for example, or “try some Victorian poetry.” But most of the work will be done by the AIs themselves. It is easy to imagine how these productions might quickly become far more numerous than human-directed ones.
With a lot of slack, expect more movies and video, which consume a lot of computational energy. With less slack, text and poetry will be relatively cheaper and thus more plentiful.
In other words: In the not-too-distant future, what kind of culture the world produces could depend on the price of electricity.
It remains to be seen how much humans will be interested in these AI cultural productions. Perhaps some of them will fascinate us, but most are likely to bore us, just as few people sit around listening to whale songs. But even if the AI culture skeptics are largely correct, the sheer volume will make an impact, especially when combined with evolutionary refinement and more human-directed efforts. Humans may even like some of these productions, which will then be sold for a profit. That money could then be used to finance more AI cultural production, pushing the evolutionary process in a more popular direction.
With high energy prices, AI production will more likely fit into popular culture modes, if only to pay the bills. With lower energy prices, there will be more room for the avant-garde, for better or worse. Perhaps we would learn a lot more about the possibilities for 12-tone rows in music.
A weirder scenario is that AIs bid for the cultural products of humans, perhaps paying with crypto. But will they be able to tolerate our incessant noodling and narcissism? There might even be a columnist or two who makes a living writing for AIs, if only to give them a better idea what we humans are thinking.
The possibilities are limitless, and we are just beginning to wrap our minds around them. The truth is, we are on the verge of one of the most significant cultural revolutions the world has ever seen.
I urge the skeptics to wait and see. Of course most of it is going to be junk!
The French Olympic opening ceremony
I’ve only seen excerpts, but many people are upset. I can vouch “this is not what I would have done,” but perhaps the over the top, deviance-drenched modes of presentation are reflecting some longer-running strands in French culture. La Cage aux Folles? Le Bal des Folles? The whole Moulin Rouge direction? How about Gustave Moreau, not to mention his lower-quality followers? Jean Paul Gaultier? (NYT, “Fashion Freak Show”) Pierre et Gilles?
Zaza Fournier? Even Rabelais.
In my view, these styles work best on the painted canvas, thus Moreau is the one creator on the list I truly like. But please note these Olympics may be less of a break from traditional French culture — or some of its strands — than you may think at first.
My excellent Conversation with Brian Winter
Here is the video, audio, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
It’s not just the churrasco that made him fall in love with Brazil. Brian Winter has been studying and writing about Latin America for over 20 years. He’s been tracking the struggles and triumphs of the region as it’s dealt with decades of coups, violence, and shifting economics. His work offers a nuanced perspective on Latin America’s persistent challenges and remarkable resilience.
Together Brian and Tyler discuss the politics and economics of nearly every country from the equator down. They cover the future of migration into Brazil, what it’s doing right in agriculture, the cultural shift in race politics, crime in Rio and São Paulo, the effectiveness and future consequences of Bukele’s police state in El Salvador, the economic growth of Colombia despite continued violence, the prevalence of startups and psychoanalysis in Argentina, Uruguay’s reduction in poverty levels, the beautiful ugliness of Sao Paulo, where Brian will explore next, and more.
And here is one excerpt;
COWEN: What’s the economic geography of Brazil going to look like? All the wealth near Mato Grosso and the north just very, very poor? Or the north empties out? How’s that going to work? There used to be some modest degree of balance.
WINTER: That’s true. Most of the population in Brazil and the economic center, for sure, was in the southeast. That means, really, São Paulo state, which is about a quarter of Brazil’s population but roughly a third of its GDP. Rio as well, and the state of Minas Gerais, which has a name that tells its history. That means “general mines” in Portuguese. That’s the area where a lot of the gold came out of in the 18th and 19th centuries. That’s gone now, so it’s not as much of an economic pull.
You’re right, Tyler, though, that a lot of the real boom right now, the action, is in places like Mato Grosso, which is in the region of Brazil called the Central West. That’s soy country. I’m from Texas, and Mato Grosso is virtually indistinguishable from Texas these days. It’s hot. It’s flat. The crop, like I said, is soy. There’s cattle ranching as well.
Even the music — Brazil, as others have noted, has gone from being the country of bossa nova and the samba in the 1970s to being the country of sertanejo today. Sertanejo is a Brazilian cousin of country music with accordions, but it’s sung by people — men mostly — in jeans, big belt buckles, and cowboy hats. They’re importing that — not only that economic model but that lifestyle as well.
COWEN: What is the great Brazilian music of today? MPB is dead, right? So, what should someone listen to?
Recommended, interesting throughout.
*Emergency Money*
The author is Tom Wilkinson, and the subtitle is Notgeld in the Image Economy of the German Inflation, 1914-1923. Notgeld, or emergency money, typically was privately issued to make up for the deficiencies of government money during that period.
It is hard to think of a book that is more “for me.” The book covers history, monetary economics, private currency issuance, and the artistic renderings put on the private notes. You can see plenty of desperation in those visuals, and clearly the 19th century seems like a long time ago. I read this one right away upon arrival.
You can buy it here. Here is a good short piece on the art.